Uncle Kenny just didn’t get it.
I stare at the puckered, stapled cut on his gorgeous rectus abdominis that I missed staring at. “Does it hurt?”
He follows my eyes, then smirks. “Shit, ain’t nothing gonna hurt in about ten minutes, nosy ass.”
“I’m not being nosy.”
The microwave dings.
He pulls the door open and takes the steaming plate out. “Oh yeah. I forgot you curious.”
“Mhmm. It’s healthy.”
“I’d like to disagree. What’d I tell you about all the curious cats I knew?” He sits the steaming plate of food next to me.
I choke out a loud guffaw. “My Textiles professor used to tell us that as long as we stay curious about the world, we’ll always create our best work. He’d always end every lecture with, ‘Stay curious. It’s healthy.’”
“That must’ve been how New York got lucky, huh? You must’ve been curious about football players at Lockwood instead of learning. Is that what happened?”
I chuckle to myself. “But I’m always the nosy, lame one?”
“I got Lovie Sinclair sitting on my kitchen counter wearing her first design of sophomore year and some no-name stilettos that make her ass sit up perfect while New York somewhere fumbling footballs.”
He looks at me, smirking. “Fuck I look like?”
I toss my head back, holding in another groan and staring up at his stark white ceiling. “I’m not answering that.”
“Yeah, you just don’t wanna stutter out a lie. You already know—I’m daddy bird. We don’t gotta be nosy. We know everything,” he coos.
We howl out laughs until mine simmers into a snort. “Actually, I wasn’t curious about football players at all…until he smiled at me on the quad while I was rushing to the cafe for Taco Tuesday.”
“And then you tried to stab him like you did me, right?”
I giggle as his smell dances up my nose, intermingling with the mouthwatering scent of our dinner. I feel him now. His body heat hovers between my legs.
“No,Rich. I smiled back because it was the polite thing to do, and the next time he saw me, he asked me for my number. He said I made him like Texas.”
“And you fell for that corny shit?” He digs his fingers into my side, then drags them down and pulls me to the edge of the island by my belt loops. “You gon’ get enough of smiling at corny men.”
“And you’re gonna get enough of sleeping with selfish women who don’t think about you as much as they should.”
He doesn’t blurt out a comeback. Instead, a comfortable silence lingers between us, and his body heat disappears from between my legs. The soft sounds of drawers sliding open and silverware clanking fills the lull.
“A couple months back, B said she wanted a constant,” he says, slamming a drawer closed. “She said she wanted somebody her age—not some young fighting nigga who wasn’t gon’ live long enough to see love through. So she said she wanted to make shit work with Wendell after he got out the pen because she’sknown him for so long, and as a man I know what that means. It ain’t hurt me none, though. It’s her life.”
“And what did it mean?”
He huffs out a quiet laugh. “She was limiting my access?—”
“But you can still fuck her if you want to, right?”
He howls out a loud laugh this time. “Man, what the hell was they teaching you at them schools?”
“Life taught me that, not school.” I smirk.
“Mhmm. Anyways…she figured it was gonna be easy with Wendell because he was familiar.”
“Hm, but she didn’t consider all the subtle pedophilic red flags he gave off that she probably ignored, huh?”
