I ease my hand onto the driver’s side door, pressing the lock.
I grab her dress off the middle console and reach for her. “C’mere, baby. Let me put your dress back on you.”
“No,” she hisses.
“What you mean ‘no?’ Huh? I ain’t fuckin you here. Not here.”
I don’t even recognize my voice, but I didn’t recognize Senior’s the last time him and Faye fought either. You ever heard a grown man’s voice quiver? Yeah…it ain’t pretty.
I push my hand outagain,but she nudges it away.
“Did…did you eat enough before you started drinking? You know you don’t drink whiskey.”
“I’m not drunk!” Tears race down her soft face and roll onto her chest.
“Lovie…don’t do this. You know…you know how I feel when you cry.”
“No, I don’t.”
I swallow the ball in my throat and the vomit easing up behind it. “Baby…I hurt when you cry.”
There I go, sounding like a dummy again.
She swipes her wet face against her shoulder.
“Stop this shit and come here. Let me put your clothes back on you and hold you until you feel better. Kenny ain’t but a yard away from us. I don’t want no problems with him?—”
“Fuck Kenny! He doesn’t care about me! You know what he cares about? Huh?”
“Lov—”
“He cares about AJ Boyd! He thinks I’ll ruin AJ’s life if people find out what he did to me. I listened to you and I ran to the thing that scared me! I did it! I told somebody in my life who’s supposed to matter. I told him what AJ did to me, thinking it would change how he saw him and it didn’t! He didn’t even care.” She gasps. “So stop this fucking facade. Stop trying to coddle my feelings. I don’t have a dad or…or a husband who’d move mountains to protect me from all those stupid ass men you’re always going on about. I only have you, so why won’t you just let me be okay with that? I thought I belonged to you?”
“You do?—”
“Well, prove it—make me feel like I do.” She pushes up from the seat, flinging herself over the middle console.
I should stop her, but I can’t because I finally found the one pussy problem Senior said I better stay my ass away from.
“You keep flirting with them pussy problems and you gon’ find the killer, boy.” He laughed. “She ain’t gon’ give a fuck about you tryna get off that line after you answer. Shit, she ain’t gon’ let you hang up. You think a punch to the gut hurts? Wait ‘til her ass is crying and staring at you like you the one that created her.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
RICH
“I saiddon’t,”Slim grits out, staring at my hands hanging in the space between our bodies.
I ain’t allowed to touch her.
She won’t even let me put my hands on her hips to keep her still on my lap. When she swallows, I hear the loud gulp from the back of her throat over the music playing and the loud voices floating through the park.
I curl my fingers into my palms and ease my arms behind my headrest while she glares at me. My hard dick stands at attention between us for the third time in our lives, but this time her soft eyes tell me she’s not letting me take it away from her again.
She sniffles, glancing at it, then at me. “Did you ever make love to them?”
I can see in her eyes she ain’t just talking about Beatrice and Rasheeda. She’s talking about every woman I ever touched before her—even the ones that had fallen into that dark part of my brain.
