Juliet

Chapter 33

CHAPTER

THIRTY-THREE

RICH

I chase the back of Slim’s ponytail as she barrels through the crowd with her hand over her mouth.

“Lovie!” I yell, shrugging folks’ hands off my shoulder as they try to pull me back.

Blood trickles down my forehead and leaks over my eye. I swipe it away, keeping my eyes on the purple Worthing Boxing logo on the back of her sweatshirt. The further she runs, the sparser the crowd gets until she ends up at the very back of the garage.

She pushes between two dudes and takes a sharp left, making a beeline toward the door that leads to the cashier’s window.

“Stop!” I holler.

She shakes her head and yanks the handle, and I stick my hand between the crack and catch it.

“Lovie!”

She power-walks past the cashier’s window.

“Hey, you can’t be back here during fightin hours!” Ms. Kathy hollers, dragging her finger across her phone.

Slim ignores her and charges down the narrow hallway toward the side door while the happy Candy Crush noises ding from Ms. Kathy’s phone.

“Pup, she can’t be back here during fightin hours,” she grunts.

“Yeah…I know.” I huff. “I’m…I’m tryna catch her—”

“Mhmm. Well, you ain’t trying hard enough…and don’t track no blood back here either. We ran out of bleach—”

Her voice trails off behind me as Slim throws her upper body against the side door and stumbles outside.

I swipe another trail of blood from my face and run faster.

I feel her slipping through my fingers the further away she gets.

Something happened between now and last night.

I felt it as soon as I stepped into the pit, just like I felt it when I got to the park yesterday, but I should’ve known something was coming because I know better.

I know making love and pillow talk won’t change the course of my life, but I’m weak, so I let my mind get muddled by the warmth of her pussy and the hope in her voice when she talked about rewriting legacies.

I ram my sore body against the side door and push it open. As soon as I step outside, I find her falling against the side of the building, gurgling up a mouthful of pale throw-up. It splatters on the ground while her nails dig into the concrete wall.

I take a cautious step forward, like I’m back in my kitchen, finding her for the first time.

“Lovie…” I mutter, reaching out to touch her. “You okay, mama?”

She shakes her head and heaves up another mouthful of whatever she ate before she came looking for me. Her back curls, and she lets out another desperate gag.

“C’mere,” I rasp. “Lemme take a look at you.”

She turns toward me with those soft whiskey-colored eyes and a wet mouth. The sickeningly sweet and sour smell of her throw-up floats between us.

“What you doing here?” I ask. “I…I told you to wait for me at Kenny and Faye’s and I’d be by there. You know better than to be down here.”

Her eyes jolt down, grazing my busted knuckles where Primo’s blood had dried over the bits of my exposed flesh.

I step over her throw-up, and she steps back—pushing her body into the side of the building.

I crook my finger. “Come let me clean you up.”

She shakes her head again.

“Lovie…you need to let me look at you—”

“You lied to me,” she whispers.

“Lied to you about what? You ain’t give me a chance to get to you.” I gesture toward the building. “I still have bills to pay in the meantime, baby. I…I still have to take care of my family and of…of you—”

“I know what happened with Jamari.”

My stomach turns in a way that makes my body jerk. There this stupid nigga goes again—haunting me—haunting us.

“What you talking about?” I mutter.

Her eyes dart around us, then behind my head where a group of folks wander into the back parking lot, laughing and yelling.

She sniffles. “Don’t…don’t play stupid right now. I know what happened in your backyard with you and Jamari. I know you owe Melo Barnes money and why you owe it. I know it all.”

I take another step forward, and she holds out her arm to keep me from taking another.

A hard hiccup rocks her body. “Rich…don’t.”

“But, baby…”

My words trail off, and all our conversations play on a loop in my head. All the different words I strung together to soften her up and keep her from running away from me pound against my skull while Jamari laughs from somewhere in the shadows.

Senior never told me that the epitome of all my pussy problems would make me feel so superhuman that I believe I can outrun everything that haunts me, and I guess Arnez was right when she told me Jamari will never go away no matter how hard I try to make him.

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” she asks.

“How could I tell you that, Lovie? How the fuck could I tell you that? Especially after what you told me about your mama and daddy. How…how could I?”

“You could’ve told me just like you tell me everything else…”

I shake my head. “No…I…no.”

“Do you regret it?” she whispers. “Are you sorry for what you did to him?”

“No, because I’m supposed to protect her, just like I’m supposed to protect you. I told you I was just a—”

“Stupid ass man…I know.” She pinches her eyes shut, shaking her head.

I let out a bitter snort. “Ain’t no such thing as an inherently good man. I don’t know why you don’t get that.”

The lampposts in the parking lot flicker while she glances at my hands like she can see the way they landed against Jamari’s body. Her mouth falls open as her eyes trace my bloody knuckles, then the veins in my forearms.

“You finally hate me?” I ask.

Her fingers tremble against the wall while she studies my body like she’s seeing it for the first time again. “I told you I can never hate you.”

The color drains from her brown face, and I think it drains from mine. She looks up at the black sky while angry sirens pierce the night air as the city moves around us.

“I came to your house to find you…but I found Arnez instead, and it was clear she was happy I did. She knew who I was before I even realized who she was.”

“Slim—”

“I stayed quiet while she berated me in your kitchen and tried to make me hate you. I took her insults. I let her take her anger and frustration out on me, and I…I tried to empathize with Jamari. I tried, Rich. I tried to feel sorry for this dude she loves, but I…I can’t.

I can’t feel sorry for men like him anymore.

I can only feel sorry for her because I know what it’s like to love a man who only equates love with pain, even in death. ”

“That…that ain’t how I wanted y’all to meet. I didn’t…she shouldn’t have said none of that to you.”

She shrugs with her lips turned down. “It doesn’t matter because now all I can focus on is how bad I feel for you, how he potentially ruined the possibility of you having a normal life.

You’re everywhere in my head because I still want you.

I want you so bad that I…I feel things that God wouldn’t like.

I know what you were trying to tell me when we made love.

I know exactly where you’re going when you leave this Earth because of what you did, and I’ll go with you. ”

“Don’t say that. Don’t say no shit like that. You don’t mean that, Lovie.”

Her lips tremble, and I swear I feel her tears before they even fall because I’ve inhaled them so many times. I feel their warmth and heaviness.

“I don’t care that you don’t regret what you did because if he was anything like AJ, then he deserved it.

” Her voice cracks. “I just want us to go home and eat dinner together. I…I wanna lay on you while you watch Ozark and then I wanna make love in our bed. I just want some sort of normalcy for once in my life. Please take me home with you, Rich. Please. We can figure it all out tomorrow. We can figure this out together.”

I don’t know what this feeling is swirling inside of me, but it feels like a giant boulder sitting in my stomach while she begs for me…for us.

She reaches out, swiping her hand across my cheeks. “I don’t have to go back to Uncle Kenny’s. I don’t care what he thinks or what Arnez thinks. They can’t control us.”

“C’mere. Let me see you,” I mumble, backing her against the building. “Let me…let me clean you up.”

“Rich…do you hear me? Take me home with you.”

Warmth buzzes off her body as I reach out and swipe my forearm across her mouth. Our eyes dance together while I wipe the remnants of her throw-up across my shorts.

“C’mere, baby,” I mutter, hooking my hands under her armpits and lifting her light body off the ground.

“Take me home…” she rasps breathlessly, curling her legs around my waist.

She buries her head in my neck and takes a deep breath before letting out a sob that makes my ears ring. “I…I know I didn’t listen. I’m supposed to be putting myself back together. But…but then I found you in your kitchen. You didn’t find me. I found you. It was meant to happen.”

I rock her back and forth, and up and down, and side to side, even though Primo had punched the feeling out of my body. “Shhh…what you doing here, baby? Why’d you come here? Why didn’t you listen to me? I…I need you to start listening—”

“He came back like you said he would…” she mumbles between sobs. “He sent his agent to Uncle Kenny and Aunt Faye’s to get me—to hurt me again. So I left to find you because you said you would protect me.”

It pours out of her like she had been waiting to crawl into my arms before she could tell any of it, and I don’t even have to ask who “he” is.

“Because I will,” I rasp blinking away the wetness in my eyes. “What I always tell you?”

“That…that I belong to you.”

I spin in a circle with her in my arms. “Uh-huh.”

I don’t even know where to take us.

I step over her throw-up and into the parking lot. I can’t even see what’s in front of me because AJ Boyd is in my head—running around and pointing out that he stepped foot back in my city and weaseled his way back in my baby’s life.

“You straight, Pup?” somebody yells from across the parking lot.

I glide through the rows of parked cars, ignoring the strange voices I hear.

“Pup!” Arnez yells from somewhere behind us.