Chapter 35
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
LOVIE
Teddy’s back.
His haunting voice sneaks under Ms. Vera’s bathroom door along with a skunky smoke smell, but he isn’t musing about being beaten down by love today, though. Today he just wants to know how to mend a broken heart, and I get it because I want to know too.
Ms. Vera’s tabby, Ginger, rubs her back against my numb legs dangling from the side of the bathtub. I brush my hands against her soft fur, reveling in her low purring.
“Lovie…” Aunt Faye rasps, coughing and knocking on the door.
“Ma’am?”
“When you finish up in the bathroom, get the towels out the dryer.” She clears her throat as if she has more to say, but instead of saying it, she shuffles away from the door.
I’ve been waiting for a lecture or even an “I told you so” since Sunday, but so far there’s been nothing but a painful quietness that lingers between us when we’re alone together.
I can’t even remember the drive home from Lucky’s on Sunday or how I made it from the car to inside the house.
All I remember is crawling into my bed where I fell into a torturous sleep that finally ended this morning.
Her and Uncle Kenny are fighting again, and I don’t know if they’ll make up this time.
Their strained voices crawled under my bedroom door on Sunday night and Monday morning until they finally fizzled out on Tuesday evening when he went back to work.
They yelled back and forth about me, that NDA, and Rich, of course.
Uncle Kenny wanted to know why I couldn’t just sign the NDA and why Aunt Faye couldn’t just let Rich go.
He wasn’t her son, and AJ wasn’t my fiancé anymore. Both choices should be easy for us.
“We can all just move on,” he said.
When Aunt Faye didn’t agree, he finally blurted out what I think he’s been wanting to say since me and him sat in his truck outside of H-E-B. This is all too much for him—Aunt Faye and all of her problems she brought with her from the Bottoms are just too much.
Ms. Vera says some of it is Aunt Faye’s fault.
“You’ve been carrying another man and his problems in your heart for twenty years,” she said while I eavesdropped outside the sunroom.
“The cracks in you and Kenny’s relationship were gonna appear eventually whether Lovie showed up and shook things up or not.
The brain can’t override the heart. You can’t train yourself to love someone else. That isn’t how love works, Faye.”
It really isn’t.
And now I think I know what Aunt Faye wanted to say before she walked off from me at the park on Family Fun Day. Those Lovelace men aren’t made for casual flings because they’re meant to be experienced for a lifetime. It’s why she can’t tear her heart from Senior’s.
I swipe a stray tear from my cheek and stare at Paco’s chubby baby face on my phone.
This waiting game I’m playing is silly—futile even. There’s no call coming from Rich, and all of my calls to him go unanswered. The endless rings linger in my head while I try to run from the sadness in Aunt Faye’s eyes when she looks at me.
I tried to hate him to make this easier.
I tried to put myself in his backyard on the day that he did what he did to Jamari.
I tried to feel what Jamari probably felt before everything went black.
I tried to tell myself that even though Rich doesn’t have Tony’s eyes, he still has a part of him—maybe even the worst part.
But none of it matters because all I keep hearing is him begging me to turn around and look at him.
“I should’ve looked at you, Rich. God, I should’ve looked at you…” I murmur, reaching into my shirt and fingering his necklace that I tied around my neck when I finally got the strength to pull myself out of bed this morning.
It’s the only solace I have—the only physical reminder I have of our short time together. The rough grooves of the diamonds dig into my skin, and sometimes I stare into them hoping to catch a glimpse of his reflection.
“God, why?” I suck in a deep breath, dropping the pendant and running my hand across my face.
That bone-chilling feeling I brought from New York is back. It slithered its way back around my limbs, and it’s so heavy that it steals my breath throughout the day.
Another soft knock on the door makes me gasp and straighten my back.
“Lovie—the towels,” Aunt Faye says. “You know what, I’ll just get—”
“No. I…I didn’t forget. I just needed to make a call.”
My words get lost somewhere between the music playing and Ms. Vera’s coughs, and Aunt Faye’s shadow disappears from the crack under the door. I don’t think she even heard what I said.
I sigh, glancing down at my phone and unlocking it. I go to its contact list where only three people exist—Rich, Aunt Faye, and Yessenia. My finger hovers over “Rich.”
His name floods my recent calls despite what he decided for us on Sunday because I’m delusional enough to think that I need one more conversation with him where I can stare into his eyes while I convince him we can do life together.
I scroll past his name despite my muscle memory egging me on to call him one more time just in case he woke up and changed his mind about us today, but I’ve called and texted enough.
I’ve sent him enough voice messages to last a week.
I’ve begged him and God so hard that my voice has a rasp to it now.
My finger lands over “Yessi” and that bone-chilling feeling clings to me even tighter.
I’m back to square one—back to how things were when I landed at Bush with nothing but a broken heart.
I press Yessenia’s name and put the phone to my ear. It rings…and rings…and rings.
“Your call has been forwarded to voicemail. The person you are trying to reach is una—”
I hang up and squeeze the side buttons to turn the phone off, but she calls right back despite my sorry attempt at running away.
I stare at her name on the screen, rifling through all the different ways I can pour sugar over the embarrassing pile of shit I need to tell her about. Finally, I press “accept” with a shaky hand and put the phone to my ear, but nothing comes out.
“Lovie?”
Her voice feels more familiar than home does right now. The sounds of the city sneak through the speaker and fill me with this weird nostalgia that’s more regret than wistfulness.
“Yessi…” I croak back.
“Where are you?”
“Still…still in Houston. I know you’re headed into the office around this time, but…”
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Yessi…”
“Please tell me you’re okay.”
I’m not.
I can’t.
It’s the first time somebody’s asked me that since Sunday, and I can’t breathe or even make the words come out of my mouth.
“I’ve been so worried. I promise I didn’t tell that bastard agent of his anything.
He came to the office, swinging his dick around—throwing his status and title around and asking folks if they’d seen a girl up here with a Chanel bag.
Thankfully Jodie was here and not Sarah.
He told me if I tried to warn you or tell you about him coming up here, he’d go to Sarah and tell her what I did behind her back to get you out of New York. You know I need my job for Paco…”
The mountain of words she spits out makes me grab the side of the bathtub. “I’m sorry.”
They’re the only words I can get out without collapsing from the weight of everything I’m running to and from.
“No, I’m sorry,” she says. “I wanted to call, but I didn’t know if AJ had that phone or not. I didn’t want to get you…get you hurt or ki—”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not okay. This is not okay. He came to Houston, didn’t he?”
“He did…”
“Fuck. Fuck, Lovie. Do you know his agent waltzed his arrogant ass into my cubicle and pointed his finger in my face saying I’m trying to sabotage his abusive piece of shit client?
The client that broke you down into nothing.
That dude had you so scared that it was literally in your voice when you finally told me his name that one morning on the train.
” Her voice cracks. “He tried to make me sign some document.”
“The NDA…” I mutter, burying my face in my hands. “God, I’m sorry.”
“He tossed that shit on my desk and Jodie flung her white privilege around and told him it was against the law for him to coerce us to sign anything. I thought she was just calling his bluff, but it got his ass out of there. I’ve been paranoid all week about him reporting me to Sarah.”
“He won’t do it. They found me, so you don’t have to worry about that or him anymore.”
“Ay Dios…” She sighs. “What the hell is an NDA, and please tell me I did the right thing by not signing it?”
I drag my hand down my face. “It’s a ‘shut up’ document. An agreement that says, ‘You can’t repeat anything that Lovie Sinclair said to you as it pertains to AJ Boyd.’ Especially not about all the different ways he beat her ass. They want me to sign one too.”
She huffs out a choke. “Ramiro was a piece of work, but he didn’t have millions of dollars and a whole team on payroll to perpetuate his abuse.
When I left him, all I had was my story and my voice.
If he would’ve had the power to take that away, I wouldn’t have shit.
Not even my dignity. How the fuck did you deal with this for so long? ”
“The same way you dealt with Ramiro—by being tough.”
Rich’s constant reminder lingers in my head: “You tough. You know that, right?”
I close my eyes and try to find him in the darkness while I nod in agreement.
Yeah, Rich. I am.
“Yessi?” I murmur.
“What?”
“I fucked up.”
Sirens wail in the background while her heavy breaths tickle my ears. “What you mean you fucked up?”
“Remember what you told me before I left New York?”
“About how stupid it was to go back to Houston?”
“No.” I scoff. “About putting myself back together.”
“Oh…yeah. I do.”
“Yeah. I don’t think I actually even got a chance to do that.”
The silence between us is deafening. I lean forward, grabbing my forehead, and Ginger tilts her head, letting out a concerned “meow.”