Chapter 31
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
LOVIE
“Enjoy your eveni—”
I slam the door to my Uber and stare at the setting sun sitting in a haze over Rich’s house. I walked three blocks from Chantilly and typed his address into the Uber app in a daze before the rest of Aunt Faye’s words finally caught up with me.
“It’s Sunday,” I mutter to myself, sliding my phone into the pocket of my hoodie.
The neighborhood dog pokes his head out from under one of the metal folding chairs on the porch, letting out a high-pitched yawn, and Rich’s back gate is shut.
The heat that filled my body while listening to Blake’s lies drains from me in a slow crawl until there’s nothing left to keep me warm and steady on my feet. I teeter around in my UGGs while the wind blows a cluster of leaves across Rich’s pristine, empty driveway.
I look up at the darkening sky. “Fuck.”
I can walk to Lucky’s from here, but Rich’s chastising about wandering around the Bottoms alone keeps me from walking south down Joliet, and even if I made it to Lucky’s I wouldn’t know how to get inside the garage bays.
My phone vibrates in my hand.
I look down at “Aunt Faye” flashing across the screen.
I ignore the call and amble towards the porch, climbing up the steps.
Before I can sit in one of the chairs, the loud crunching of gravel makes me whip my head toward the street.
A red Nissan Altima creeps toward the house and pulls into Rich’s driveway.
There’s a girl behind the wheel who doesn’t look familiar.
I curl my hand around my phone as she kills the engine and gets out of the car. Her wavy ponytail blows in the wind as she stares at me with a twinkle of familiarity in her honey-brown eyes while walking through Rich’s grass. I try to pinpoint a time when I might’ve come across her, but I can’t.
She climbs up the porch, brushing past me and leaving the dank smell of cigarettes and musk floating behind her.
“Rich ain’t here,” she mumbles, shoving a key into the front door.
“I…I know.”
“Then why’re you here?” She twists the key and pushes the front door open in a way that screams “I live here!” and now I’m more nauseous than I was before.
“I’m sorry. Who are you?” I ask.
“You’re standing on my brother’s porch like a lost puppy and have the nerve to ask who I am?” She chuckles, stepping inside and letting the door swing behind her.
I push my hand out and catch it before it slams in my face. She doesn’t even look behind her as she waltzes through the foyer and into the house.
This is Arnez.
This is the big sister who used to beat up Rich and swaddle him while it rained.
This is Senior’s Tootsie Pop.
And her and Rich look and feel nothing alike.
She didn’t embrace me, and the potential of our relationship didn’t glow in her eyes when she looked at me. She’s cold.
I scrape my fingernails against the door, and Rich’s scent floats out of the house, beckoning me inside. So I step into the foyer and close the front door behind me. I follow the sounds of her opening and closing cabinets in the kitchen.
“You’re not good at taking hints, are you, Lovie?” she asks, squatting in front of the cabinets below the kitchen sink.
“You know my name?”
“Not because I want to. Believe me, I don’t keep up with every pussy that Pup sticks his dick in.”
I jerk my head back. “Excuse me?”
She yanks the cabinet doors open by their gold handles. “Look, we’re all grownups here. No need to play coy.”
Her casual description of me and Rich’s friendship makes the hair on my arms stand.
This is really Arnez.
She’s no longer the jumble of stories I heard from Rich and Aunt Faye. She’s a real person with cold eyes that burned every part of my body she looked at.
She sticks her arm under the sink, pulling out a roll of tape. “What do you want? You can’t stay here. Pup doesn’t like folks in his house when he’s not here.”
After all the accusations Blake hurled at me, Arnez’s bitter words that equate me to a stranger are the ones that make my knees knock and hot tears cloud my vision. Or maybe it’s just the pinnacle of all the fucked-up things that’s happened to me today.
“I’m not some random person,” I rasp, grabbing the edge of the island.
“You seem random to me. If you weren’t, you would’ve had a key, don’t you think?”
I gulp down the ball in my throat. “I need to talk to Rich.”
She scoffs. “Yeah…you and everybody else around this shitty place. If you know him like you claim you do, then you should know you can’t talk to him right now. He fights today.”
“I…I understand. I just got caught up in my head and before I knew it, I was here and…”
“And you need to go back to Faye’s. There’s nothing here for you.” She slams the cabinet and stands up.
I glance at the tape in her hand. “Are you going to Lucky’s?”
“Yep, and you’re going back home.” She rolls her eyes as if I’m asking her for her last dollar, and her nostrils flare as if I’m just another woman to Rich when somehow my name came up between them.
“I can’t,” I reply.
“You can.”
“No…you don’t understand. I ca—”
“Lovie, the same way you wandered over here is the same way you can wander back home. It’s simple. Don’t make this complicated.” She balls her keys in her hands and starts walking toward the foyer, but I don’t move. I can’t move.
I know this address by heart now.
I’ve been sprawled on this island I’m grasping.
I’ve been rocked on the back porch while my deepest secrets poured out of me.
“I am home,” I mutter.
She stops. “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘I am home.’ Rich wouldn’t let you put me out.”
She twirls around in a flurry with a ghoulish frown that makes me shiver. “You tell AJ Boyd that bullshit before you ran over here? You tell him this is your new address? Because that’s why you’re here, right? He’s in town, huh?”
My chest tightens. “How…how do you know about AJ?”
“I’ve been Pup’s sister for thirty years and you’ve been his…” She looks me up and down. “Friend, for a few seconds. I’ll always know what’s going on in his life.”
I curl my nails into the granite and try to hold on to that feeling that consumed me after me and Rich made love.
He was supposed to walk out of Lucky’s, get in his truck, and drive to Chantilly to tell Uncle Kenny that he wants a boxing career no matter how terrified he looked every time I told him he was making the right choice last night.
“I’ll see you tomorrow night, baby,” he murmured, planting a kiss in the crook of my neck while I shoved my key inside Uncle Kenny and Aunt Faye’s front door.
“If you know his life, then you should know that he wants me in it. He planned to talk to Kenny about his boxing career and about his plans…for…for us when he left Lucky’s tonight.”
She yelps out a hearty laugh, dropping the tape on the island. “And this was after he fucked you, right? Because that’s all this is—just silly pillow talk. You don’t really know shit about Pup.”
“Stop saying that,” I grit out. “I know him.”
“Sweetie…you don’t.”
“I do.”
“No. You know this pretend man he created to keep you up in the clouds because there’s something in you he found and liked, but you don’t know shit about Pup Lovelace.”
My chest tightens as I glance down at my pale pink nails he kissed last night when he asked if I was scared of him. I still feel his mouth on mine, and I smell him every time I take a breath. I hear his voice and all the secrets he whispered to me in the time we spent together.
“I know about Jamari,” I murmur.
Her tiny red nostrils flare. “Yeah, you and every gossiping motherfucka around here knows about Jamari.”
“No. I…I know what he is. I know what he did to you.”
Her head lolls to the side, and she squints her eyes at me. “What?”
“You’re just like me.”
“I ain’t shit like you.”
“He was perfect at first, huh?” I step around the island, walking closer to her. “Like…like the guy of your dreams—like the one you used to fantasize about when you were little and first learned about how good boys can make you feel.”
Her throat jumps as she swallows.
“Then one day it flips all of a sudden—at least it seems like it does, even though when you think about it, there were so many red flags you overlooked because he made you feel so alive.” I take another step toward her. “Did you feel like it was your fault the first time he did it?”
“Did…what?”
“Hit you.”
She lets out a quiet breath, then pinches her eyes shut. “Get out.”
“No.”
“Get out of my brother’s house.”
My fingers curl into the palm of my hand.
“Answer the question. Did you feel like it was your fault the first time Jamari hit you? Because you’re no better than me, no matter how much you’re trying to make it seem as if you are.
You’re just like me. You fell for a wolf in sheep’s clothing too. It’s okay to adm—”
“Shut up!” Her eyes fly open. “Stop saying his name!”
Her soft face contorts into a ravaged mask while the tape slips from her fingers, landing on the floor with a thud.
For some weird reason, I see myself in her pained expression—not the new me—but the old me. The one who used to breathe for AJ. The one who used to lie for him and twist every wrong thing he did to make it right.
“You still love him,” I whisper. “You’re still in love with Jamari, huh?”
She swipes her hand across her red face. “Go home, Lovie.”
I shake my head. “I told you I can’t. I understand you still love Jamari and I’m not judging you for it because I’ve been there, but I don’t love AJ anymore and I just really need to talk to Ri—”
“So you think you love my brother, then?”
That one feeling I can’t pinpoint pushes out of the clusterfuck in my stomach, thrashing itself against my insides. It jolts me forward and forces me to grab hold of the island with my other hand.
“You can love a man like Pup, Lovie?” she rasps. “Because AJ and Jamari ain’t shit like Pup.”
“I know. He’s nothing like them. He…he would never hit a wom—”