There’s no passcode, so I swipe up.
His phone is as impersonal as his house. The wallpaper is still set to the trippy blue default one. There’s hardly any apps downloaded besides the ones that came pre-installed, but there are conversations happening.
Red (Whole Foods)
Knotless boho braids? You like those on me. Shelly said she’d do them for $300.
Red (Whole Foods)
?
Rasheeda
I need the money to pay the fees for that basketball league. Jarell won’t send it and Ky’s the only one that ain’t paid yet. Now he crying about it. He thinks he won’t get to play.
My stomach turns.
I can’t believe I was silly enough to think Rasheeda and Beatrice were the only ones, or maybe I was too caught up to realize that men like Rich are kryptonite to women—especially fragile, broken ones.
My thumb hovers over the screen until he nudges it out of the way to do what he said grown-ass men like him did. He sends an Apple Pay to “Red” for her stupid knotless boho braids, then he sends another to Rasheeda for Ky’s basketball fees while I covertly read their texts. His nickname for me is sandwiched in the middle of a long paragraph Rasheeda sent. She wants to know if he fucks me when they’re not together. He didn’t even respond to the question.
He swipes out of their text thread before I can read all of it and my palm sweats underneath the phone while he peers down at me.
“What?” I rasp with a frown.
“You said you wanna keep up with me, right?”
That wetness comes back, soaking my mouth and panties.
“And I told you I’ll always give you what you want as long as you open your mouth and tell me what it is…” he murmurs.
As soon as his voice drifts off, a text from “Red” pops up. It’s bold and I don’t know how to compete with it.
“Red said ‘thank you for the braids…Daddy,’” I blurt, lifting his phone in front of his face.
He chuckles. “Okay?”
“Who is she?”
He raises his eyebrow, pushing the phone down. “She somebody that ain’t tell me ‘happy birthday,’ get me a gift, or run over here ‘cause she knows I’m scared of the rain. She ain’t nobody for you to worry about.”
My face heats as Smitty blows a cloud of smoke out into the rain, staring up at the wet sky as if we don’t exist.
“Take my phone in the house and get us right. I’ll be in there after I clean this mess up.”
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
LOVIE
“Faye ‘nem feedyou dinner before you ran off?” Rich asks, glancing down at the blunt he’s rolling on his kitchen counter next to the stove.
His cool granite island soothes my ass while I sit in the same spot he plopped me in before he went to take a shower. There were no explicit instructions as he picked me up from his couch and carried me to the kitchen. There was just a tiny grunt that escaped his mouth, followed by a firm “stay.” So I did it, with my legs swinging back and forth, and my eyes set on his closed bedroom door until he reappeared in more clothes that I’ll have to talk to Rasheeda about one day.
Did she know he looked the best barefoot with sweats hanging off his tapered waist? He wasn’t even wearing a pair of boxer briefs to keep them from falling, so every so often he tugged them up. Did she know about that ragged, barely stapled-together cut that stretched across his stomach?
I sigh, staring at it.
