Chapter 29
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
LOVIE
For the first time in my life, I feel like I’ve been split in half after opening my legs for a man, then carefully sewn back together to be more whole than I was before.
Beads of sweat trickle between the hard lines of Rich’s abs and over the jagged scar on his ribs. They land in his lap where the mess we made sits in a milky puddle around his soft dick.
He blinks up at me with red-rimmed eyes, and I see the terror in them that always creeps up after I nudge him out of that safe space he stays in with other women. But he should know by now that I won’t hurt him.
I reach out, dragging a finger across one of the little flesh-colored scars on his chin while his stomach rises and falls in quick spurts.
We made love.
He even cried while inside me, and I tasted his tears. I felt his dick in every crevice that AJ wished his could touch. When Rich came, I swallowed his future and tried to hold it inside of me, even though it was futile.
God, we made terrifyingly good love.
He reaches over, opening his middle console where that shiny gold Magnum I saw the first time I rode in his truck peeks from underneath a pile of napkins.
He looks at it, then drags his eyes across my stomach.
“I’m…I’m still on birth control,” I stammer. “But even if I wasn’t…”
My words trail off as he peels a napkin from the pile.
The loud bass from outside trickles inside the truck and fills the space where his response was supposed to go.
He nudges me back against the steering wheel, swiping the napkin between my legs in a soft front-to-back motion, scooping up our mess.
“Even if you wasn’t…what?” he rasps, eyeing me through his long lashes.
“Even if I wasn’t on it. It’d be okay. I’d be okay if anything happened.”
He snorts out a laugh, and my stomach drops. “You want your nerdy babies to have a man like me for a daddy?”
“Yes…” I blurt. “And I won’t let you make him a man at seven.”
“Him?”
“We both know you’re gonna be a boy-dad. God wouldn’t bless you with anything else.”
He closes his eyes, shaking his head. “What I’mma do with you?”
I cover his hand with mine. “Keep holding me…keep letting me make love to you…keep protecting me. Let me go wherever you’re going. Just let me have you.”
“You supposed to…to be putting yourself back together. I’m supposed to be—fuck.”
“You’re supposed to be what?”
He opens his eyes. “Slim, you don’t make them type of plans with a man like me.”
His terrified eyes are wild now. They’re no longer sleepy slits coated with long lashes. They’re so wide the whites above his pupils show.
God, I’ve really gone and done it.
I poked, prodded, and twisted until I finagled the tiniest crack in his brain big enough for me to squeeze through.
“You need to be out in the ‘burbs in some big-ass house or back in school getting another degree. You need to live life for you right now—not for another stupid man,” he says.
“Damn, this isn’t the type of pillow talk I always fantasize about us having.”
He bangs his head against the headrest with a sad smile. “Why would you even fantasize about us pillow talking?”
I scoff. “How else am I supposed to put myself to sleep at night?”
“Oh, baby…” he coos softly, balling the napkin in his hand. “What I tell you about me and that forever shit, huh? I…I ain’t for—”
He shakes his head instead of saying it.
“Why not?” I gulp down my impending tears. “Why can’t I have you?”
He drops the soiled napkin in the cupholder and wraps his hand around my cheeks. “Let me finish cleaning you up. You want me to bring you back home and put you in bed before Kenny and Faye get there? I think I been stupid enough tonight—”
“Tell me.”
“Lovie.”
My breathing grows shallow as that crack in his brain closes, forcing me out.
“We just made love, Rich. I just promised you I’ll never look at another man the way I look at you while you came inside of me, and now you’re pushing me out again.
” I ball my fist up, dropping it on his chest and gasping for air.
“What the fuck? What the fuck do I have to do to get Senior’s voice out of your head? Huh?”
It grows silent until somebody bumps the side of his truck and makes his eyes veer toward his dark passenger window. They hiss out a “shit” then stumble off and his eyes roam back to me.
“I never even been on a plane before,” he mumbles.
“Ri—”
“I never been out of Texas. I don’t know what it feels like to wanna be something other than what I am. I can’t close my eyes and picture myself living in some other place. I…I don’t even know what the fuck is out there for me…or for us. All I know is survival, and you don’t want that in a man.”
A lump forms in my throat. “You sound like Senior.”
“Because that’s who I came from. That’s…that’s what I am. I don’t know nothing else. I don’t know how to be anything else but what he taught me to be. I’m his legacy.”
I pick up his limp hands and drop them on my naked waist.
“But you can be more than just his legacy,” I murmur, pulling his head into my chest like he does to mine. “And the funny thing about family legacies is that they can always be rewritten. Did you know that?”
“I never thought about it.”
That crack in his brain sneaks back open just enough for me to ease back through it.
“Apparently there’s a lot you never thought about before I became your best friend, but that’s okay,” I whisper. “I wouldn’t be a good friend if I didn’t challenge you to see yourself and the world differently.”
“Which teacher told you that?”
I sputter out a giggle. “My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Johnson.”
“You and those damn teachers at those fancy schools.”
I giggle harder while the fireworks Aunt Faye had me dig out of our garage light up the sky and shake his truck.
I reach up and rake my fingers through his hair, following the calm pattern of his waves.
I nudge his head back, savoring this freedom I have when his brain is open, and he’s ready to accept whatever I give him during my short time inside it.
“Can I tell you another secret?” I ask, pushing my nose against his and stealing a soft kiss from his moist lips.
His pupils grow into dark disks that make my breathing shallow, and I think he unlocked a part of my brain too. It’s the part AJ always pounded on but could never get into.
His eyes veer toward my right hand that’s balled into a fist on his shoulder. “You balling your fist up, baby?”
I smirk. “Maybe…yes.”
“Well, what you waiting for? You supposed to just hit me with it. Tell me your secret. You know I don’t judge.”
I laugh as a gaggle of butterflies flutter around in my stomach, tickling all the emotions that oozed out while we made love.
“Do you know I’ve been on hundreds of planes and to so many states I’ve lost count…but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like I’ve been nowhere at all. What do you think about that, stupid man?”
“I think…that’s sad,” he whispers. “Thinking about you being in those places all alone, far away from me and not enjoying any of them because of some stupid man makes me sick to my stomach. I want you to be happy anywhere you are in this world.”
I drop my chin on top of his head and snort out a low laugh. “Congratulations, Mr. Lovelace. I think you’ve finally mastered empathy.”
His silky laugh fills the truck. “What about New York? How you felt living there without me?”
I bury my nose in his hair, inhaling that rosemary scent with a smile. “Sad…lonely. It felt like being on an island in the middle of the ocean while ships full of people passed by, living their best lives while I lived my worst one. I needed you, Rich. I needed you so much.”
He sucks in a breath, digging his fingers into my skin and squeezing me tighter.
“He watched my every move through the security cameras, the concierge, the cleaner, the chef. I couldn’t go anywhere without telling him why I needed to go and for how long.
He wanted to pay a driver to chauffeur me around and I fought so hard against it until he gave up.
Then, after a while, maintenance days were my only days outside—the nail salon, the hair salon, and the spa.
That was it. Those were my default locations, and he knew how long I stayed at each place.
If I was just a minute late walking through the door, I had better have a damn good excuse.
I had to constantly share my location because he swore I’d meet some other man…
or woman…or thing that would take me away from him.
And I coddled his insecurities. Pathetic, huh? ”
“Nah…you were doing what you had to do to survive. Keep goin. I’m listening.”
I take another whiff of his hair, smiling to myself.
“I realized that even though he was tracking my location, he could never tell how I got to and from the places I went, so I walked and took the subway everywhere because I learned that nothing in New York is predictable except people’s commutes.
The sidewalks and the subway were the only places in the city where I could see the same people over and over again at the same time, Monday through Friday. ”
“Why’d you wanna see the same folks?”
“I don’t know. There was something comforting about seeing the same bleach-bottled blonde run down into the subway entrance on our street and seeing the same Dominican girl sipping her Starbucks in front of the doors on the M train.
” I snort. “I accidentally spilled her coffee on her one morning, and then she became the closest thing I had to a friend there. Her name was Yesenia. It took five sneaky train rides for her to ask me about the black eye I kept hiding under my makeup.”
“Hm. So Yesenia saw you too?”
“Mhmm, but not like you do. She saw me in a way that only other women like us can see each other.”
He hums back as if he understands exactly what I mean, and there’s a part of me that’s convinced he just might.