“So if it were you, how would you do it?” Donovan asks.
“Do what?”
“How would you ask her out? I know you said you’ve never asked a woman out, but…all of my friends suck at this kind of stuff and Pops thinks romance is taking Mom to the Coushatta.”
We laugh together as my body finally absorbs the Jack. It mixes with the weed I smoked on my way here after dropping Smitty off and makes my shoulders droop. If I wasn’t such a heathen like Faye used to say when I ain’t wanna go to church, I’d drop to my knees and thank God for the weed and whiskey because there was no way Senior did this shit while sober. There’s no way he told Faye to run off with Kenny Fairchild without drowning in a bottle of something first.
I swipe my eye with the back of my hand as Slim gets closer. “You don’t even ask a woman like her out. You just fuck around and commit to her as soon as you get her attention.”
“Commit?” he squeaks. “She barely even looks at me.”
“Well, I guess you gotta change that, partna. You got time. I’ll try to put you down.”
As soon as I get ready to tell him to sit up straight, Slim glides up to us, frowning.
“They ran out of peach cobbler.” She huffs, walking right between my open legs. “But I think Faye hid some inside the cooler on the back of Uncle Kenny’s truck. I can go look when you finish eating.”
Her eyes zero in on me, and I feel the heat simmering between us, or it could just be the weed and whiskey. Both of them were supposed to stop those questions from forming and hanging out in my head, but they just made them worse because now I wanna know if Slim would hate me if I asked her why she was walking around showing everybody what was mine?
“Lovie…” I rasp, pulling the plate from her fingers. “You see D right here?”
“Yeah, I saw him earlier—just didn’t have time to speak,” she chirps, looking over at him with an empty smile. “Good to see you again, D.”
He gives her a quick wave, then looks away like he can’t trust himself tonotstare at her while she stares at me.
“You gonna chill with us?” I ask, sitting the plate behind me and reaching for her.
I pick her up by her waist before she can answer and plop her next to me. Afterward, I pick the plate back up and scan it. No ribs, three wings, baked beans, and a dollop of potato salad because I ain’t know who made it. It’s perfect.
She shuffles closer to me, watching me pick up a wing.
“Thanks,” she mutters.
I take a bite out of the wing and drop it back onto the plate. “For what?”
She thrusts her chin toward the opposite side of the park, and I follow it with my eyes until they stop on Terrica and that other girl that stared me down like we fucked before. They’re talking and laughing with Kenny at his barbecue pit. I never had any friends to fall out with, but I think I feel that pang in Slim’s chest that can only come from watching your old life from the outside.
“Thanks for rescuing me,” she says under her breath, so only I can hear.
Terrica looks over and narrows her eyes at us as soon as the words come out of Slim’s mouth like she can sense we’re talking about them. Afterward, Kenny looks up and follows her eyes. He stares at us, shaking his head.
I swallow the piece of chicken I’m chewing and stare back at him. “Ain’t no need to thank me.”
If only she knew she was on my mind as soon as I woke up. She sat on my shoulders while me and Smitty put Arnez’s bed together. She squeezed my heart while I nudged Beatrice’s hand off my dick when she caught me leaving out of Senior’s room. She even controlled my mouth when I explained to Beatrice why I couldn’t fuck her to make her headache go away. And the longer the day wore on, the more a quiet panic exploded inside my chest at the thought of her here with all these people without me. I couldn’t let my baby bird fly solo today because I ain’t trust these people to catch her if she fell.
She scoots closer to me until our legs touch. “And…and thanks for that talk you had with Faye.”
I side-eye her. “What talk?”
She glances over at Donovan, then shakes her head.
Something happened between yesterday and today. It floats between her words, and it’s more than just the silly shit that went down between her and her homegirls. I see it on her, just like I see everything else.
“We’ll talk about it later. How was Senior?” she asks.
“He was good—just sleeping on and off.”
“Oh…and Beatrice?”
