Afterward I sat on the edge of the bed with a towel in my hands that I had just used to clean her up. I shook my head at myself.
She was watching me from the pillow with something on her face that wasn’t quite a smile but was close enough. She knew she’d just fucked my head up. She knew the sex she gave me was nothing like I’ve ever had.
“What you over there thinking about? You want some more?” she asked, with her freaky ass. I was tired as hell now.
I looked over at her. “Stop playing before I do something to you we can’t take back, like I fuck around and keep yo nasty ass for myself.”
“Maybe I don’t want to take it back.” She laughed.
I stood up and got the zip ties and looked at her and she held my gaze without flinching. I secured her back to the headboard and she let me do it without fighting it and that said everything about how this situation had shifted in the last hour.
“This is still business,” I told her.
“I know what it is.” she dryly said, but I knew that was a lie.
I grabbed my clothes, went to shower and stood under the hot water for a long time thinking about what I had just done and whether I felt any kind of way about it. The answer was complicated in ways I wasn’t going to unpack tonight. Tavarushad put his hands on my family. His wife was a grown woman who had made her own choices in that bathroom. I had done what I had done and the money was still coming tomorrow. After that everybody was going home, back to their lame ass lives.
I got out and dried off and went to the couch and got comfortable.
My phone lit up and it was Simone calling me.
I looked at the ceiling for a second and then picked up.
“Hey you,” she said.
“You still up? That shit is surprising.” I said.
“Couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about tonight.”
“What about it.” I asked, wanting to hear her say it.
“You. The kiss. All of it.” She was quiet for a second. “I don’t know Gutta. You know I’ve been guarded with you because I know how you are.”
“You don’t know how I am. You know what you think I am,”
“Is there a difference?”
“With me there is.” I shifted on the couch and put my arm behind my head. “Give me a real chance Simone. That’s all I’m asking.”
She laughed soft. “You say that now.”
“I mean it now. Man I been wanting yo ass since forever.”
We talked for another hour, her voice getting slower as she got tired, me selling her every dream I had to my name until she was damn near sleep on the phone. When she finally said goodnightI held the phone for a second after she hung up and almost felt something about what I had done an hour ago in that bathroom.
Almost.
But Simone wasn’t my girl yet and she had been playing games for years and a man had needs and Tavarus had brought all of this on himself by playing with people who were connected to me.
I put the phone on the cushion beside me and stared at the ceiling in the dark.
Grown men out here building picture perfect lives. Nice house, gated community, wife and kids tucked away from the dirt they moved in. Acting like having all that made them untouchable. Like the rules of the street didn’t apply to them once they got a certain level up.
Tavarus had thought Street was alone.
Tomorrow morning he was going to find out exactly how wrong he was about that.
I closed my eyes and let the apartment stay quiet around me and was sleep in ten minutes.
