17. Omar
Omar
Itexted her at nine in the morning. Same place. Noon.
She replied twenty minutes later. I'll be there.
I spent the next three hours at APEX going through territory reports with Devon that I couldn't concentrate on. He caught me checking my phone twice but didn't say anything. At eleven I told him I had somewhere to be and he nodded and kept working.
I drove to the building on Kingston Ave where Cee dropped her off for the home visits.
Parked half a block down and waited. At twelve-fifteen Cee's sedan pulled up and Asha got out.
She said something to him through the window, he nodded, and she walked into the building.
A minute later she came around the side entrance and I flashed my headlights once.
She got in the car and closed the door. Her hair was pulled back and she was wearing jeans and a sweater and she looked at me with an expression I couldn't read.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey."
"Where are we going?"
"My place."
She didn't ask anything else. I pulled into traffic and drove to Bed-Stuy.
The apartment was fifteen minutes away. Neither of us talked on the drive.
She sat with her hands in her lap, her eyes on the street, and I kept mine on the road and tried not to think about what was going to happen when we got there because if I thought about it too much I'd run a red light.
I parked outside the building and checked the street before we got out. Nobody on the block who looked like they belonged to Supreme. We went up quickly, third floor, end of the hall. I unlocked the door and stepped aside to let her in first.
She walked into the apartment slowly, looking at everything.
It wasn't much. A couch, a table, a kitchen that I used maybe twice a week.
The bedroom through a door on the left. Clean because I kept it clean, not because I'd cleaned it for her.
She ran her hand along the kitchen counter, looked out the window at the street below, then turned to face me.
I was still standing by the door. She was six feet away from me across the apartment and the fourteen years between that distance were louder than anything either of us had said in the car.
"You live here?" she asked.
"Sometimes. It's more of a..."
"A work thing."
"Yeah."
She nodded. Her eyes moved over the room one more time, then came back to me. "It's clean."
"I'm a clean person."
"You always were." She smiled, and it was the smile from when we were sixteen, the one that used to make me forget whatever I was supposed to be doing. "You used to make your bed before school. What sixteen-year-old boy makes his bed?"
"One whose mama would slap him if he didn't."
She laughed. The sound filled up the apartment and something in my chest unlocked.
"Come here," I said.
She crossed the room and I met her halfway. My hands went to her waist and hers came up to my chest, fingers pressing into the fabric of my shirt. We stood there for a second, close enough that the warmth coming off her body hit my skin, her breath against my neck.
"We doing this?" she asked quietly.
"Yeah. We're doing this."
"Okay." She looked up at me. Her eyes were steady. "Then do it."
I kissed her. Not like the park, not like the coffee shop.
This was the one I'd been holding for fourteen years.
My hand went to the back of her neck and I pulled her into me and her mouth opened under mine and the sound she made went straight through me.
Her hands grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled and I walked her backward until her back hit the wall beside the kitchen.
I pressed into her and her leg came up around my hip and I caught it, held it there, my hand gripping her thigh through the denim.
She was pulling at my shirt, trying to get it over my head without breaking the kiss, and I helped her, one hand leaving her thigh long enough to drag it off and drop it on the floor.
Her hands went to my chest, my shoulders, my arms. She was touching me like she was trying to memorize the shape of me, like if she didn't touch every part of me right now she'd forget what I was made of.
I kissed her neck and she tilted her head back against the wall and said "Oh shit" in a voice that didn't sound like anything she'd ever say in front of anyone else.
"Fourteen years," I said against her skin.
"Don't." She pulled my face back up to hers. "Don't count. Just be here."
I was here. Every part of me was here.
I pulled her sweater over her head. She wore a plain black bra underneath and her skin was smooth and warm and I put my mouth on her collarbone and kissed down to the edge of the fabric.
She unhooked it herself, reached behind and undid it and let it fall, and I looked at her for a second before I put my hands on her because I needed to see her properly. All of her.
"Stop staring," she whispered.
"Nah." I shook my head. "I ain't never stopping."
She grabbed the back of my neck and kissed me hard and I picked her up off the wall, her legs wrapping around my waist, and carried her to the bedroom.
I set her down on the bed and she pulled me down on top of her and we were all hands and mouths and breathing, her fingers at my belt, mine at the button of her jeans, both of us rushing because we'd waited long enough.
I got her jeans off and she kicked them to the floor. She pulled at my belt and I helped her, shoving everything down and off until there was nothing between us.
"Omar," she said, and the way she said my name made something crack open inside me that I'd been keeping sealed since I was sixteen years old.
"Yeah?"
"I need you. Right now. Please."
I slid into her and she gasped and her nails dug into my shoulders and I held still for a second because the feeling of being inside her was so overwhelming that if I moved too fast I'd nut right there.
She was warm and tight and her body fit against mine like we'd been built for this, like fourteen years apart hadn't changed the way we locked together.
I thrust into her. Slow at first, finding the rhythm, watching her face change with every stroke. Her lips parted and her eyes closed and her hands gripped my arms hard enough that her nails left half-moons in my skin.
"Faster," she whispered.
I gave her faster. Her hips rose to meet mine, matching the rhythm, and the bed creaked under us with every push. That pussy of hers was warm, wet and tight and every time I went deeper she made a sound that went straight to the base of my spine.
"That feel good?" I asked against her ear.
"You know it does." She grabbed the back of my neck and pulled my mouth to hers and kissed me while I fucked her, her tongue against mine, her breath hot on my face. "Keep going. Give me all of it."
I shifted my angle, lifted her hips higher, and she cried out so loud that if anyone was in the apartment next door they heard her name for this man.
Her legs locked around my waist and her back arched off the bed and I braced one arm beside her head and used the other to pull her tighter against me.
"Right there," she gasped. "Right there, oh shit, right there."
The headboard knocked against the wall and neither of us cared.
I was sweating and she was sweating and the sheets were twisted underneath us and the sound of our bodies meeting on every stroke filled the room, the wet slap of skin on skin.
She reached between us and touched herself while I moved inside her and the sight of her hand working between her legs while I fucked her was almost enough to finish me right there.
"Look at me," I told her.
She opened her eyes. Brown, wide and full of something I'd been waiting fourteen years to see again.
"I missed you," I said. "Every fucking day."
"Show me," she whispered back. "Show me how much."
I showed her. I put everything into it, every year apart, every night alone, every time I'd thought about her and stopped myself and thought about her anyway. She took all of it. She took it and gave it back and her hands went to my face and held me there while I moved inside her.
She came first, her whole body tightening around me, her mouth open, my name breaking apart on her lips.
Her fingers dug into my arms hard enough to leave marks and her legs shook and she held onto me like I was the only solid thing in the room.
I followed her thirty seconds later, deep inside her, my face buried in her neck, everything I'd been holding for fourteen years releasing at once.
My whole body shuddered and I said her name into her skin.
She wrapped her arms around me and held me through it.
We lay there afterward. Her head was on my chest, her fingers tracing patterns on my skin.
My hand was in her hair, moving slowly through it, feeling the weight of it.
The apartment was quiet except for our breathing, which was still heavier than normal.
The ceiling had a crack in it I'd never noticed before and I stared at it while my heartbeat came back down.
Her leg was hooked over mine. Her body was warm against my side. Her heartbeat came through her ribs, steady now, slowing down with mine.
She didn't say anything. Neither did I. There wasn't anything to say that our bodies hadn't already said. The room was different with her in it. The apartment was different. I was different.
"You good?" I asked eventually.
She pressed her lips against my chest. "Yeah. I'm good."
"You sure?"
She lifted her head and looked at me. Her eyes were soft, softer than I'd seen from her since we were kids. "I'm sure. Are you?"
"Better than I've been in fourteen years."
She put her head back on my chest and I tightened my arm around her. We stayed like that until the light in the room changed and her body started shifting, her mind going to the time.
"I gotta go," she said quietly.
"Yeah."
She sat up and looked around the room for her clothes. They were scattered between the bedroom and the hallway, a trail from the wall to the bed. She got up and I lay there and let myself look at her moving through my apartment naked, bending to pick up her jeans, pulling her sweater back on.
She came back to the bedroom door fully dressed, her hair redone, her face composed. She looked like a woman coming back from a client appointment. Nobody would know.
"Same time?" she asked.
"Whenever you can."
I started getting dressed to drive her back but she shook her head. "I'll get Cee to pick me up round the corner. Tell him I wandered a bit far talking with the client." She checked her phone. "If you drop me it's harder to explain."
She was right. She'd been thinking about this longer than I had.
She kissed me once more at the door, then straightened up and walked out.
"Asha."
She turned to face me.
"Be careful going back."
She nodded. "Always am."
The door closed behind her. I stood in the hallway and didn't move. The apartment was quiet. The street noise came in through the window. Somewhere in Brooklyn Asha was texting Cee and walking to a corner where he'd pick her up and drive her home to Supreme.
I showered, got dressed and drove back to APEX. Devon had new data on the TK vehicle patterns. I went through it with him for two hours. I made notes, asked questions, did the work.
But the whole time I could still feel her hands on my face and hear her voice saying my name.
The whole damn time.