I got up and checked the bathroom anyway looking for Ivy since she was no longer in bed with me. Door was open, light off, nobody in it. I brushed my teeth and threw my clothes on, then looked out the window.
Her truck was gone.
I stood there for a second just looking at the empty space in the lot where that pink Bronco had been sitting, and I felt something move through me that I didn’t want to call what it was, but I’ve felt this shit before.
I walked back to the main room and that’s when I saw it. Folded on the dresser.
A note.
I picked it up and read it. She wrote about how she hadn’t expected the night to go the way it did. Said I was everything she ever dreamed of, and she meant that literally. Said she wished the timing was different. Said she hoped last night was exactly what we both needed, and that she wanted me to never forget her.
I stood there holding the paper for a second.
Then I crushed it in my fist.
Because I had been here before. Different woman. Different city. Same feeling in my chest when I woke up to nothing but a note and a memory. Cherish had done the exact same thing and look at what that had cost me. Look at where that had landed everybody
Now, Ivy was saying that she hoped I wouldn’t forget her. How could I? I wasn’t about to go no fuckin where!
I wasn’t about to let history repeat itself. Not like this.
Ivy had put that mouth on me, had given me hours of herself, had laid up with me talking until we fell asleep, and then slipped out before the sun was all the way up like she owed me nothing.
Nah.
She was going to see me again whether she planned for it or not. That much I decided, standing right there in that hotel room holding a crumpled piece of paper.
She didn’t get to do all of that and just disappear.
—
I grabbed my jacket off the chair and checked my pockets out of habit. Phone, keys, wallet. Everything was there except my peace of mind, but that was already gone before I walked into that bar last night.
I ran my hand down my face and laughed to myself. A real one, low and quiet, just standing there in that hotel room looking at nothing, hell I was beyond in shock. Because Ivy really thought she had done something. Thought she could slide out before the sun got all the way up and that was going to be the end of it. No number, no way to reach her, just a folded note and a memory of all the freaky ass shit we did to each other last night.
She didn’t know me as well as she thought she did.
I stood there for another second thinking about how for years, since Cherish had played me, I hadn’t even looked at a woman sideways. Didn’t want to. Didn’t need to. I had prided myself on being the type of nigga who didn’t chase women or get caught up in all that back and forth. I was a picky ass nigga, and hadn’t met a bitch that I wanted to pick. Having bitches around had never been my thing. Money turned me on. Building something turned me on. Watching an operation run clean and profitable while everybody around me ate well, that was the shit that kept me going. Women were a distraction I had decided I didn’t have room for, and I had kept that promise to myself without much effort.
Then Ivy walked back into my life on a random night in a Dallas bar and dismantled all of that in about four hours.
And what made it worse was that whatever I thought I had felt for Cherish, whatever that had been, it didn’t compare. Not even close. Cherish had been heat and manipulation. What I felt sitting next to Ivy at that bar, before anything even happened, was something different. Something older. Something that hadalready had roots in me before I even knew what to do with it. One night with her and I already knew I wasn’t letting her walk back out of my life again. I didn’t care what I had going on. I didn’t care about the timing.
I wasn’t built for this feeling and that was exactly why I needed to get in front of it before it got in front of me.
I left the room, took the elevator down, and walked through the lobby without looking at anybody. As soon as I pushed through the front door and the morning air hit me, I pulled out my phone and made a call I should have made before I even left the parking lot last night.
My investigator picked up on the second ring.
“I need you to find somebody for me,” I said, walking toward my car. “Her name is Ivy Rae Richardson.” I gave him everything I knew. I spoke it slow so he caught it right the first time. “She runs a bail bonds company, two locations in the DFW area. Also got a tax company, offices in Shreveport, Houston, and the main location here in Dallas. I need everything. Home address, business addresses, every phone number attached to her name. Personal, business, all of it.”
“How soon?”
“Soon as you breathe,” I said and hung up.
I got in the car and sat there for a second. Then I did something I hadn’t done in so long, I had to think about where the app even was on my phone. I got on Facebook.
I sat there going through it like a nigga who had never used social media in his life, which was basically accurate. I searched her name and got nothing useful at first, a bunch of people I didn’t know, old inactive pages, none of it her. I sat back andthought for a second, then went a different route and pulled up her oldest brother’s page. I remembered enough about her family to know where to start looking.
