“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what, babygirl?”
“How fucking easy it is for a man to rip my heart out and hold it hostage like this? How I’m supposed to get it back after dealing with him and his grown-man problems?”
She doesn’t respond to the jumble of words I vomited in her doorway. Instead, she pats the space next to her and I climb onto her bed. When she rakes her fingers through my braids, I hold my breath for her to give me the answers I’m searching for.
I want her to give me the blueprint for navigating life with a man I can never seem to catch up to, no matter how hard I try. I want her to fix it even though she didn’t even do anything wrong. She didn’t get so drunk on a yacht that she couldn’t defend herself to the world. She didn’t harbor secrets that confused me.
“Do you trust him to fix whatever’s wrong?” she asks.
I close my eyes. It’s a simple question for my heart, but a complicated one for my brain.
“I—I don’t know,” I stutter.
“Well…the only way to get your heart back is to trust him to meet you halfway and give him the chance to give it to you,” she whispers. “If he took care of it while he had it, let him keep it. If not, you gotta take it back.”
* * *
Ace
Little ladies are tricky creatures.
Apparently, making love doesn’t suddenly make them full-fledged ladies like I was dumb enough to think and they don’t keep standing the first time they’re tested—they fold.
“The world is a scary place for a lady that don’t know herself yet, but you’ll be patient when the perfect one come along.”Mom laughed, curling her toes around the rails of the iron surrounding her balcony.“Do your job as a man and lay the right foundation and she’ll find herself and realize that all she needs to do is trust you. Believe me, as a former little lady, I’m an expert at this shit.”
I watch those same rails from Gus’ backseat until he pulls away from the stop sign outside my building and turns onto the next street.
“Since when meh haffi drive yuh tuh de first game of de season?” he rumbles from behind the steering wheel.
“Ask Pops. He’s the one that sent you—not me.”
“Probably ‘cause he smell that stinking tequila on yuh all the way from campus.” He laughs, sucking his teeth. “What poison yuh pick today?”
I swallow, leaning into the door and the warmth from that poison Gus is talking about. “Nothing too crazy. Something that still let me see straight enough to call Mom.”
The tequila made me lose count of the number of times I did it. Pressing her name and obsessing over the gnawing anticipation of what might happen had turned into an obsession overnight.
“And how dat ah go fi yuh?”
“It didn’t.”
“Meh thought yuh knew dem nah use phones up in de sky by now?”
“Right, my dumbass woke up thinking Mom was gon' answer my FaceTime call and explain how to hide from all those takers she was always trying to protect me from or to tell me how to handle this dream girl she was always telling me I’d marry before I die.”
My knuckles still ached from Blake’s face landing against it somehow, and Phatstillwasn’t answering my calls. I had no choice but to try Mom. She always answered when I strayed away from home and was trying to get back.
He laughs hard, slapping the steering wheel. “How’s de likkle lady? I miss her in my backseat.”
“Hiding.”
“From you or the world?”
“Does it matter?”
“Don’t catch nuh attitude wit me ‘cause she have yuh balls inna her likkle hands.”
