“Don’t,” he murmurs against them. “Tell me you won’t.”
“I…I won’t.”
“Even if I’m being stupid and ask for you again, right?”
I nod, accepting another moist peck from him. “Ye…yeah.”
“Don’t lie to me,” he whispers, laying another kiss against my lips.
“But—”
His lips smash into mine again.
“Ri—”
They come again and leave so fast that I clamber against him to catch at least one and keep it, but he still has his hand around my throat, and I’m so dizzy from his smell, taste, and control that I feel drunk.
“Rich,” I whine, clawing at his chest. “Wait. But you said?—”
He pulls me to him, plunging his tongue inside my mouth. As soon as I wrap my lips around it, he pulls away, and Imustbe drunk for real. It’s the only way I can explain the frustrated tears coating my eyes. I just want one last taste of him—just one.
“Listen, you the tough one out of us, a’ight?” he whispers. “Not me. I’m the weak one. You came home to put yourself back together, so that’s what you need to do—not follow me around or…or try to be friends with me. Friends get you in trouble, remember?”
Before I can argue back, he pulls me to him and presses his lips against my cheek. “No more crying. Ain’t nothing for you to be crying about.”
I nod, choking out a huff. “Happy birthday,Pup.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
RICH
The only thingSenior likes about my pussy problems is that he knows they’ll never be permanent. I’ll never be the husband Rasheeda wants, the daddy Ky needs, or the cure to Beatrice’s broken heart because he always taught me I couldn’t be.
“You might live to be thirty or you might live to be fifty. Who knows? There’s so many things that can go wrong for us.” He shrugged one day while we sat in the backyard watching Arnez do cartwheels. “Best thing you can do is make sure you don’t let no woman or babies get attached to you, ‘cause they love hard. They love so goddamn hard they gon’ wanna go to hell right along with you when that time comes. Believe me, I know. You think you got the balls to ruin an innocent life, Pup?”
But out of all of my pussy problems, there’s one that keeps poking at me despite what Senior taught me, and all I’ve tasted is her mouth. I couldn’t even get rid of her after I dropped her off last night then picked up Red after her shift ended at Whole Foods. I even saw her behind my closed eyes as soon as Red swallowed my dick in the parking lot. She liked to float around inthe darkness and bounce around in my head where she pressed her soft lips against mine and fussed over silly shit like my birthday. But worst of all, she gives me that same itch I got when Arnez told me she thought she loved Jamari.
“The Knightsreallyneed to call a timeout to regroup unless they want this game to get away from them,” the sportscaster rambles from my phone sitting on the bed of my truck.
“Wanna hear a joke?” Arnez asks right when the game cuts to a commercial.
She swings her legs back and forth from my truck’s tailgate, gnawing on the banana Laffy Taffy she found in my cupholder. It’s the first one she’s had in months.
I lean next to her, staring at my hand as the bright afternoon sun stings my bare back and hovers over Lucky’s. A rough scab coats the parts of my knuckles where the skin ripped while I tussled with Wendell.
“Hello?” Arnez pushes her finger into the side of my head, digging it into the tender skin until I swat her hand away. “I asked if you wanted to hear a joke.”
“Man, what’s the joke?”
“Why did the banana go to the doctor?”
I curl my fingers into my palm then stretch them out, cutting my eyes between them and the GEICO commercial playing.
My middle finger is big—even bigger than it was this morning when I woke up with a frown while I thought about the way I gripped Slim’s thigh on the drive to Kenny and Faye’s after we left Beatrice’s last night. She didn’t even try to move my hand when I pulled in front of their house.
“Nigga…” Arnez huffs. “I said, ‘Why di?—’”
