I grin around the sucker, slurping his taste off and biting into it while he puts the truck in park. He pushes out and rounds it while I crunch on the last piece.
As soon as he pulls my door open, he takes me by the hand and tugs me out. We walk side by side toward the building and I’m so wrapped up in him I reach for the door handle.
“What I tell you about that?” he rumbles from behind me.
My hand slides off like it did each time he slapped it off a handle back at the gala. I grow warm as he yokes me into him.
He tugs the door open. “Act right for me tonight.”
I didn’t plan on it.
Walking into The Toyota Center is like hopping on a time machine and heading back to a time when Angie was still living, Coach Williams ran the league from The Staples Center, and Ace wasThe Kidwithout a salacious reputation. It’s full of basketball lovers like me and Marcus.
“AWII—mynigga!” a staff member bumps fists with Ace as he pulls me under his arm. “Welcome home, dawg.”
“’Preciate it, brodie.” Ace smiles, darting his eyes away and pulling me toward an elevator.
We take an isolated route where there’s only staff idling around and shuffling important looking people past us. Each time we come across somebody new, I’m reminded why I’m so obsessed with Ace.
“How you doing tonight, Charese?” he asks the elevator attendant after glancing at her name tag when we walk inside.
She can’t talk because she’s too busy blushing and smashing her fingers against the button to take us up to the three-hundred level suites.
She eyes Ace’s arm around my waist, but he’s too busy fussing over my nails to notice her. She reminds me of myself back before I knew about life on Planet Ace. She has my complexion, my build, and my curiosity about a boy that’s nothing like I imagined him to be.
“New clawz on deck.” He laughs, pushing his lips against the tips of them and kissing each one Sunny took her time shaping while he talked on the phone.
“It ain’t the same.” I roll my eyes. “I need to show Twitter.”
“Fuck Twitter. They didn’t watch you choose between Passionately Plum and Purple Power for thirty minutes.Idid that.”
The girl giggles, and he whips his head over to her, smiling. “You see what I have to deal with? Spoiled ass.”
He winks at her, and I see the familiar twinkle in his eyes. It’s what was missing when I thought I knew everything about him and Brandy that day in the bookstore. Chelsea spent all that time bumping her gums about Brandy being his pretty little redemption arc when it was girls like me who were his weakness all along.
The night is young and feels good, so I let my chin fall onto his chest while the elevator shoots us up into suite-land.
“First of all, it took two minutes for you to watch me pick a color and then you went outside to talk on the phone some more.” I frown. “Don’t cap.”
“A’ight, we’ll go back tomorrow and I’ll leave my phone in the car.”
“No. I’m not bothering Sunny again.” I whine until he covers my lips with his.
Charese’s eyes widen as soon as mine droop and I forget about life outside the Toyota Center, where I’m too afraid to do shit like this.
He grips me harder around the waist and my stomach drops as the elevator bobs and comes to a stop on level three-hundred. Our tongues brush right as the elevator dings and the doors slide open.
He pulls away, yanking me out. “We’ll chop it up with you later, Charese. I’ll send my girl to give you the score at halftime.”
That shit makes my insides fumble and I think it makes Charese’s too, because her cheeks lift like he called herhisgirl. I think it’s the excitement of him being wilder than our minds could ever imagine because he’s existing back on Earth like he did before folks ran him up to Planet Ace and left him there for me to find.
Our pointer fingers tangle together in a loop as we stroll toward another wide-eyed attendant.
“Why we watching the game from a suite again?”
“Suites are for business and courtside is for appearances,” he rumbles in my ear while the attendant escorts us to our new home for the next three hours.
“You’re here to do business?”
