He makes it sound like he took a sabbatical from playing ball and not a forced leave and that married people lived in separate houses all the time.
I swallow a choke at the tiny pieces of his and Angie’s history he keeps feeding me. “Was you a mama’s boy?”
“Hell yeah. For an eternity.”
The way his words sound make me lose the half-frown and now it’s a full-blown grin. He sounds like he did when he was talking to Mama.
“What you smiling like that for?” He scoots closer and squints at Hahn, shaping the acrylic on my pointer finger.
“‘Cause you sound like LA.”
“And you sound like Houston.” He chuckles. “Talking about, ‘was you?’ Country ass.”
He’s floating and I want him even closer.
I hold my breath at the sight of his little curls lined up around the perimeter of his head. There’s another tattoo peeking from behind his ear in uppercase italics—THE KID.
“You ready to bust these pedis down for this expensive ass fill and pedicure you getting?”
My insides flutter and my mouth runs. “Jokes on you. Refill’s forty, I got the basic ass pedi, and I got twenty bucks stuck in the bottom of my wristlet for Sunny and Hahn’s tip. Marcus gave mejustenough.”
He’s still leaning over my lap in a daze while Hahn swipes the brush down the length of another one of my nails. I hold my breath again for him to push up so I can see the tipsy smirk that’s always there while he’s sipping onwhateverhe’s found to fixwhateverhe’s running from.
When his face meets mine, the smirk isn’t there though.
Instead, he pushes his lips forward like he’s thinking hard about something. His eyes cast a trail from the roots of my knotless braids, to my lips, and over the tank top I’ve been squirming in since Sunny made me sit in the pedicure chair. It’s different from the glowering flared nostril look.This lookis nothing like the looks Bryson gives me.
“You forgot the rules to follow the leader already, Lourdes?” he asks.
His tone is the same as it was in Mama’s driveway back when “can you” came before his favorite thing for me to do. It’s a nice, warm cadence that doesn’t match the words billowing out of his mouth and that look tells me he knows the answer to his question.
“No…” I reply with a swallow.
Afterward, my stomach folds as if I gave him the wrong answer, and I know it’s what he intended when he taught me about following the leader on Planet Ace. The problem is that he’s never told me what happens when I don’t follow the leader.
He twists his lips to the side and shakes his head in a disappointed gaze that makes a fiery welt pop up between my legs. I have this stupid urge to hook my arms around his neck and explain myself, but I wouldn’t even know what I’d be explaining.
He pushes himself from over my legs and picks up the bottle of Veuve by its neck again.
“I ever tell you how bad of a girl Lourdes is, Sunny?” He tips the champagne into the pedicure bowl. “She rolls her eyes at me, talks back, and tries to be a passenger seat driver in our car, but I still give her whatever she wants. I think I’m creating a lil’ monster.”
It splashes on top of my feet and legs and I can’t believe he’s wasting the rest of an expensive bottle of champagne—yes; I looked up its price.
Sunny and Hahn giggle while that same white lady from before rolls her eyes at us from beneath her readers. Sunny’s fingers stroke the champagne fizz against my legs and she swipes a cylinder bucket from the cart sitting next to her. She takes out a piece of rose-shaped soap and tosses it in the water. It fizzes and makes the water feel like vibrating silk against my toes.
I shut my eyes.
I’m so preoccupied with Sunny, the bath bomb, and Ace’s champagne bath that I don’t feel his forearm land on my upper thigh until his scent wafts toward my nose.
“Answer my question,” he mutters.
“What question?” I hiss as Sunny’s fingers trail between my toes under the water.
“You always got a nail appointment when Mom goes to the doctor?”
“No… only when Marcus has the extra money. When he don’t, I just sit at the house until she gets back.”
“Why?”
