CHAPTER TWELVE
Sierra
“Stop it Sierra. You’re a grown woman: smart, intelligent, strong of body…”
But I can’t breathe?
She leaned her head back against the door and closed her eyes.
She’d been trying to forget the marker he’d made since they’d left the woods, but all she could see was how carefully and purposefully he’d created the place to memorialize their first intimate moment. All she could feel were emotions that threatened to choke her.
It was the sweetest gesture a man had ever made toward her and it broke something, freed something, and she was terrified of examining what that something was. But it demanded she give it context, give it a name, take action, but fear told her to run as far away from it as she could.
Chupa squirmed against her chest and Sierra lifted the sling over her head and placed the kit on the floor.
“We’re not even dating. We just met,” she argued, resting her hands on her knees and taking deep breaths.
But her heart, it didn’t care about the value of time with the same linear rigidity her mind demanded; it didn’t care about any of that shit! Not when it felt like the answer to her soul’s fulfillment was just down the road.
All these overwhelming feelings were signaling that she might be falling in love for the very first time.
“You’re spiraling, Si. You just need to eat, and rest, and hydrate, and…” Her shoulders dropped in defeat. “He stole my heart in that one moment, Chupa,” she admitted. How could she not love him?
Straightening her spine, she picked up the kit again and walked to the kitchen.
She quickly and quietly prepared Chupa’s dinner and gave her her meds.
The distraction was brief, but in that time her body had calmed and her emotions had regulated as she slowly began to accept what felt like the truth.
Sitting at the kitchen table she watched Chupa eat then reached for her phone.
“Well if it isn’t my Little Row! You know, if I didn’t hear from you before my bedtime I was calling the FBI.”
She smiled. “Not the FBI, Daddy. We spoke yesterday during my lunch break.”
“That was over twenty-four hours ago; more than a day is too long. Did you know your new city was a sundown town? Your auntie Temmi found that out on the internet.”
“Yeah, I learned it when I told a couple of my coworkers where I lived. You know what’s really gonna freak you out?”
“Lord Little Row, are you trying to send me home to glory?”
She laughed, missing her daddy more now than she had yesterday.
“You love history so I thought you’d like to know that there’s a section of the city known as the East Quarter. But until last year, it was called the Colored Quarters.”
“Well, I’ll be.”
“Right! History is now, daddy.”
They talked about everything and nothing for nearly twenty minutes.
“So you ready to tell me what’s really going on with you?”
“I met my landlord this morning.”
“And?”
“And it shouldn’t be possible to feel, with all your heart, that someone was meant to be yours within a few hours, but I do.”
“Me and your mama knew the moment we met. Same with Mama Ruby and your pop-pop. Guess it’s in our DNA.”
She frowned. “But you and Mama dated for three years before you married.”
“Before we married legally,” he clarified.
“The day I met your mother in the mountains, I was on my way to…I can’t even remember where.
By the time the full moon was high in the sky, we were standing in a clearing surrounded by trees, pledging ourselves to each other for the rest of our lives.
” Her heart stuttered. “It was the story of our love we planned to share at our firstborn child’s wedding.
” She’d ended up being their only child.
“If what you feel is meant to be, I’ll be sharing that story in full at yours. ”
Sierra wiped tears off her face.
Was there ever going to be a time where she wouldn’t grieve not having her mother? Where she wouldn’t crave the stories of her parents that her father hoarded and doled out like priceless diamonds?
“I know you got the kind of mind that needs to quantify things, but your soul was born wild, Little Row. It’ll always seek its kindred flame, and maybe you’ve found it. You got to be bigger than fear and doubt to know. And like Dalinda says, don’t be scared now. Trust yourself.”
“It’d be a lot easier if the man hadn’t pulled a gun on me within five minutes of us meeting each other.”
“Aw, fuck that nigga! I’m on my way out there.”
The line went dead.
Sierra fell out of her chair laughing and Chupa danced on and over her, sitting on her stomach as Sierra lay on the kitchen floor with knees bent looking up at the ceiling.
“All right Chupa,” she said, stroking the kit’s back. “I guess it’s time for me to get dressed and discover if Ezekiel Evers is an insatiable itch that needs to be scratched, or if he—and you— are the reason destiny brought me to this place.”
In under an hour, she’d showered, washed, conditioned, and styled her hair in an afro puff with two long twists bracketing each side of her face.
She’d wrapped a wispy necklace of small crystals and silver around the base of her afro puff.
The necklace was a piece that had been given to her by her mother before she’d passed.
If ever there was a night she needed a piece of her mother, it was tonight.
After moisturizing her skin to the point of gleaming, she put on a tan suede halter top with black stitching at the edges and a rust colored asymmetrical skirt that flowed and rippled around her legs.
With most of her torso exposed, and the air caressing her legs and thighs clear up to her cream lace bikini panties, she felt bare. Open.
Putting on her gold framed glasses, she turned and twirled in front of the oval floor-length mirror.
She felt very bohemian. Her look aligned with the song she would sing tonight, and that song would either bring Ezekiel Evers closer to her or put enough distance between them that not even a drive from his place to hers would close the gap.