He wasn’t actually mine, but the words danced in my head at odd times, like when thunder clapped outside, when I saw a black pickup truck on the highway, or the first time I plunged my fingers inside myself after remembering the passionate way he sucked my tongue into his mouth. I haven’t even touched myself in over a year, but I’m doing it for him now.
I gulp and try to picture him in our space, but I can’t. He’s like a myth—always existing in people’s mouths and minds but hardly ever around in the flesh.
Uncle Kenny snorts. “If you believe this dude wants to be a boxer, I got a bridge to sell ya’, Faye.”
“Don’t be condescending!”
He waves his hand and picks up his glass of whiskey from the end table next to his chair. “Ain’t nobody being condescending. That dude don’t want nothing outside the Bottoms. Seems like you the one that can’t accept that. Maybe it’s you that wants it for him since you brought him to this house, but he sure don’t.”
She brought him here?
I side-eye her as she blows a breath out of her nose, glancing at me. “We’re just talking, Lovebug. Ain’t nobody arguing.”
“Yeah…I know,” I mutter.
The excited murmurs from the sportscasters on TV cut into the silence as Uncle Kenny shrugs.
“Ever since you brought him over here we been going at it. I told you I was done after Zaire got killed. I don’t wanna beinvolved in nothing with no goddamn Melo Barnes. I got enough shit to worry about. I can’t be stressing over my gym and the safety of those boys.” He looks over at me afterward like he went too far, but I pretend I didn’t hear it.
“Rich ain’t gonna bring problems to your gym,” Aunt Faye replies. “He’d never do that with all those boys there.”
I hold in a huff this time.
He absolutely wouldn’t just like he wouldn’t let Ky get caught up in fighting or let Tamryn stay in a house with Wendell.
“If it wasn’t safe for him to be there, you’d know that,” she adds.
“McCall just threw a perfect pass to Boyd, and Boyd dropped the ballagain. What the heck is going on?!” the sportscaster on TV yells. “If the Knights are gonna take this, they’re gonna need Boyd to make these plays in the final stretch. Looks like his lackluster performance from last week is still lingering on.”
“Dammit, AJ!” Uncle Kenny sucks his teeth.
This morning when I passed their bedroom door, I realized there’s been a secret alliance forming in the house since I didn’t get on a plane to head back to New York. There were murmurs of a breakup and questions being asked about who caused it. Was it me or AJ? And did this mysterious ending mean AJ had to disappear from Uncle Kenny’s life too?
“Just ‘cause they supposedly broke up don’t mean I have to stop supporting him, right? He said he’d get me tickets when they come down to play the Texans. The Knights ain’t played the Texans in four years,” he said. “I told Chico I’d bring him with me and…and the boys really need that AC unit he promised me.”
“We bickered when you offered to pay for Zaire’s funeral and when I warned you that EJ was getting desperate,” Aunt Faye mutters under her breath. “But I guess it doesn’t count ‘causeyou brought them into the fold, right? When it’s somebody I know, you’re quick to toss them out like trash, huh?”
“Faye…” he warns. “My boy’s team is playing. I can’t talk to you about this and watch.”
See what I mean?
His boy?
“C’mon, AJ, get your head out your ass,” he grunts to himself.
A wet cough rattles the inside of my chest because Rich’s breezy instructions replay in my head at least once a day. I close my eyes, riding the wave of discomfort that flows through my body afterward.
When I open them, Uncle Kenny’s frowning at me over the rim of his glass. “You sick?”
“Allergies.”
“I got some Claritin in there.” He hooks his thumb toward the kitchen without asking anything else because “Rich questions” don’t exist in this house, just like Rich didn’t exist online when I went looking for him all because I needed to ask him how was I supposed to just forget him…and his taste…and his voice? And what was going to happen between him and Melo because of what he did to Wendell? You can’t just assault your boss’s brother without consequence.
But Rich isn’t a TikToker or an Instagrammer, and I couldn’t find any trace of his face on Facebook after logging into my decrepit account. There were only so many variations of “Rich Lovelace” and pretend nicknames I could type in before I fell asleep with “Rich Love” in the search.
He was gone…again.
He carried me through Beatrice’s side gate, drove the ten blocks back to Chantilly with his hand on my thigh and dropped me off right on our doorstep an hour before Uncle Kenny and Aunt Faye made it home.
