Chapter 27
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
RICH
Being friends with Slim did something to my brain, but I can’t figure out what.
Something just feels…different. Questions I’d never entertain in the past dance around up there now.
They pop up while I do all the boring shit she says she likes for me to do until I answer them with my own stupid assumptions.
Like sometimes, I wonder how she feels about Vegas while Ozark plays in the background.
Then I assume she’s probably been more times than she can count.
Sometimes when I’m cooking I wonder how she might feel about us living there in the hot ass desert in a cheap ass apartment while I chase a boxing career I never entertained before all this shit happened with Arnez.
She’ll probably hate it. She’s used to living in nice places.
Last night, I even wondered if the half a mill Ms. Beaufort convinced me to save over the years and the money I’d get from selling the house would be enough to throw at Melo to get us away from here.
Shit, how would she feel if she knew none of this crazy shit I’m fantasizing about can never happen?
All I know is whatever she did to my brain makes me do corny shit like pop up at Worthing Gym’s 10th Annual Family Fun Day when I’ve never been to the last nine because she’s that solace Smitty told me to find.
“How do you do it, man?” Donovan asks from beside me on the back of my truck’s tailgate.
“Do what?”
“Get girls to do stuff like that for you.” He nods toward Slim ambling our way, holding a full paper plate like it’s fine china. “I bet she didn’t even laugh in your face when you asked her to fix your food, did she?”
I snort. “Why the fuck would she laugh in my face?”
Redness spreads across his cheeks as he shrugs and looks down. “I don’t know. Girls can be…difficult sometimes.”
“Women are only as difficult as you make ‘em. You looking at it all wrong.”
“How so?”
“You a man, ain’t you?”
He nods. “Yeah, and Dad says as a man I should be more assertive with women. He says I’m too passive.”
I laugh. “I respect Lucky, but I disagree. As a man, you gotta understand that women are born soft, and it’s your job to keep them that way.
You ain’t got to walk around holdin your nuts or no shit like that, you know what I’m saying?
But you gotta take care of your woman—open doors for her wherever y’all go.
If you only got twenty dollars to your name, then you give her fifteen and watch her hold shit down while you go hustle and get that shit back.
You hold her when she needs to be held and listen when she’s telling you all the bad shit she went through before she found you.
As long as you take care of a woman, you ain’t got to worry about her laughing in your face when you tell her to fix you a plate of food, and you don’t have to change nothing about yourself to make that happen. ”
“Wow…” He sighs, staring at Slim as she gets closer to us. “So that’s the cheat code, huh?”
“Yup…that’s it. It’s simple.”
Donovan likes my baby.
He likes her bad. I see it in his eyes.
They’re low and slanted like he took a toke of the dankest weed, but all he’s doing is staring at Slim strut around in a yellow sundress that clings to her ass and waist in a way that I ain’t okay with.
She even straightened her hair and pulled it into a half-up, half-down style I’ve never seen her wear, and I think she has on makeup.
Her nails and toes are the pale pink color she sent me a picture of from the nail shop this morning because she thinks I care about what she spends my money on.
She looks exactly like a woman I shouldn’t have the privilege of touching.
I grab the cup of Jack Lucky poured me at the domino table and take a sip. It’s the only thing that keeps me from telling Donovan to keep his eyes off Slim’s perky nipples that push against her dress while she walks around bra-less.
“You guys aren’t…” He looks away from her nipples to his swinging legs. “You know?”
My stomach cramps at the thought of telling another person me and Slim’s business.
“Nah…we just friends.”
“Cool.”
He looks back at her, then back at his black and white Dunks. “What do you think she’ll say if I ask her out for drinks?”
I take another sip of the Jack. “I don’t know, man. I never asked a woman out.”
He laughs. “See what I mean? How do I even get to that point? Like what do you mean you’ve never even asked a woman out, but they still do stuff for you?”
“It ain’t what you think. Asking a woman out and planning a date is a luxury—not some lame shit. Real players know that.”
He glances over at me like he can see I’ve spent most of my life training for a lifelong war that happens every Sunday in the garage bays at his daddy’s gas station instead of living a normal life where I ask out women that look and talk like Slim.
He wouldn’t understand that there’s no reason for me to plan a date for a woman when I can’t even see past Sunday most weeks.
He kicks his legs back and forth while a sad silence sits between us.
“You know, me and Pops pray for you,” he mutters. “He says you did what you had to do.”
“‘Preciate it, D.”
“And it’s not like he wanted to give up the place to Mr. Barnes, but…”
“It’s politics. I know.”
He sighs. “Yeah, it was either his family or the business, and Mom would die without him, so…”
I take another sip, letting the burn soothe the fiery ache in my chest while we stare at Slim pointing one of the boys toward the bathroom.
“So if it were you, how would you do it?” Donovan asks.
“Do what?”
“How would you ask her out? I know you said you’ve never asked a woman out, but…all of my friends suck at this kind of stuff and Pops thinks romance is taking Mom to the Coushatta.”
We laugh together as my body finally absorbs the Jack.
It mixes with the weed I smoked on my way here after dropping Smitty off and makes my shoulders droop.
If I wasn’t such a heathen like Faye used to say when I ain’t wanna go to church, I’d drop to my knees and thank God for the weed and whiskey because there was no way Senior did this shit while sober.
There’s no way he told Faye to run off with Kenny Fairchild without drowning in a bottle of something first.
I swipe my eye with the back of my hand as Slim gets closer. “You don’t even ask a woman like her out. You just fuck around and commit to her as soon as you get her attention.”
“Commit?” he squeaks. “She barely even looks at me.”
“Well, I guess you gotta change that, partna. You got time. I’ll try to put you down.”
As soon as I get ready to tell him to sit up straight, Slim glides up to us, frowning.
“They ran out of peach cobbler.” She huffs, walking right between my open legs. “But I think Faye hid some inside the cooler on the back of Uncle Kenny’s truck. I can go look when you finish eating.”
Her eyes zero in on me, and I feel the heat simmering between us, or it could just be the weed and whiskey.
Both of them were supposed to stop those questions from forming and hanging out in my head, but they just made them worse because now I wanna know if Slim would hate me if I asked her why she was walking around showing everybody what was mine?
“Lovie…” I rasp, pulling the plate from her fingers. “You see D right here?”
“Yeah, I saw him earlier—just didn’t have time to speak,” she chirps, looking over at him with an empty smile. “Good to see you again, D.”
He gives her a quick wave, then looks away like he can’t trust himself to not stare at her while she stares at me.
“You gonna chill with us?” I ask, sitting the plate behind me and reaching for her.
I pick her up by her waist before she can answer and plop her next to me. Afterward, I pick the plate back up and scan it. No ribs, three wings, baked beans, and a dollop of potato salad because I ain’t know who made it. It’s perfect.
She shuffles closer to me, watching me pick up a wing.
“Thanks,” she mutters.
I take a bite out of the wing and drop it back onto the plate. “For what?”
She thrusts her chin toward the opposite side of the park, and I follow it with my eyes until they stop on Terrica and that other girl that stared me down like we fucked before.
They’re talking and laughing with Kenny at his barbecue pit.
I never had any friends to fall out with, but I think I feel that pang in Slim’s chest that can only come from watching your old life from the outside.
“Thanks for rescuing me,” she says under her breath, so only I can hear.
Terrica looks over and narrows her eyes at us as soon as the words come out of Slim’s mouth like she can sense we’re talking about them. Afterward, Kenny looks up and follows her eyes. He stares at us, shaking his head.
I swallow the piece of chicken I’m chewing and stare back at him. “Ain’t no need to thank me.”
If only she knew she was on my mind as soon as I woke up.
She sat on my shoulders while me and Smitty put Arnez’s bed together.
She squeezed my heart while I nudged Beatrice’s hand off my dick when she caught me leaving out of Senior’s room.
She even controlled my mouth when I explained to Beatrice why I couldn’t fuck her to make her headache go away.
And the longer the day wore on, the more a quiet panic exploded inside my chest at the thought of her here with all these people without me.
I couldn’t let my baby bird fly solo today because I ain’t trust these people to catch her if she fell.
She scoots closer to me until our legs touch. “And…and thanks for that talk you had with Faye.”
I side-eye her. “What talk?”
She glances over at Donovan, then shakes her head.
Something happened between yesterday and today. It floats between her words, and it’s more than just the silly shit that went down between her and her homegirls. I see it on her, just like I see everything else.
“We’ll talk about it later. How was Senior?” she asks.