Forty-eight hours later and her answer is still the same—even while she’s annoyed and craving nasty ass overpriced coffee. This time she even put more bass behind her answer.
I close my eyes as my heart starts that stuttering again. “When I’m done talking to you, you can go back and get your drink.”
“‘Kay…”
Her heavy breaths tickle my ears while I try to calm my wild ass heart and make my stiff dick stand down.
Tact, Pup.
Use tact.
“Remember when I taught you how to get what you want from me?” I ask.
“Yea…yeah.”
“So how you do it then?”
“I open my mouth and tell you what I want, and you’ll give it to me.”
“So do it. Tell me what you want from me.”
The line grows quiet, and that long line of people she described yaps in the background.
“Slim…”
“I don’t want you to touch Beatrice…or Rasheeda…or that other girl anymore,” she blurts. “And I don’t want them to touch you either.”
My dick jumps.
“Then I won’t, but I can’t control what another person does. All I can control is me and my response.”
“So what will your response be if they try to touch you, Rich?”
“That I got a friend now and she don’t want me fucking other women. Go get your drink and keep sending me those voice messages so I can keep up with you today. I don’t have no problem following your rules.” I sit forward, pressing the button to kill my truck’s engine. “You see how easy it is to control a man?”
I hang up while my chest rises and falls like I just finished running a marathon when all I did was bicker with Slim on the phone about some shit that shouldn’t even matter. I even have a runner’s high, and I ain’t even run anywhere.
Getting rid of a hard dick that Slim caused ain’t the same as getting rid of one from any other woman. Hers still hung around after I hung up the phone and got out of my truck.
On my walk up to Beatrice’s front porch, I have to concentrate on silly shit like her coneflowers that need pruning and the loud sputtering from DeRay’s lawnmower until my dick finally realizes that Slim is across town in some coffee shop instead of at home, in my bed, where I want her.
As soon as I climb the steps to the porch, Tamryn grins from her seat.
“It’s Tuesday,” she chirps, chewing the straw from her Capri-Sun.
“I know what day it is.”
“Just making sure. I know how y’all brains be. Sometimes Mr. Joe thinks it’s 2008, and he needs to go out to get gas for the generator before the storm hits.”
I snort out a laugh while she kicks her feet onto a box of adult diapers.
“Why you ain’t at school?”
She shrugs, staring out into the yard. “Ain’t wanna go.”
“B let you stay home?”
“After what happened with you and Wendell, she ain’t trippin about a lot. She said I don’t even have to go see my daddy this weekend if I don’t want to.”
