“And you need to go back to Faye’s. There’s nothing here for you.” She slams the cabinet and stands up.
I glance at the tape in her hand. “Are you going to Lucky’s?”
“Yep, and you’re going back home.” She rolls her eyes as if I’m asking her for her last dollar, and her nostrils flare as if I’m just another woman to Rich when somehow my name came up between them.
“I can’t,” I reply.
“You can.”
“No…you don’t understand. I ca?—”
“Lovie, the same way you wandered over here is the same way you can wander back home. It’s simple. Don’t make this complicated.” She balls her keys in her hands and starts walking toward the foyer, but I don’t move. I can’t move.
I know this address by heart now.
I’ve been sprawled on this island I’m grasping.
I’ve been rocked on the back porch while my deepest secrets poured out of me.
“I am home,” I mutter.
She stops. “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘I am home.’ Rich wouldn’t let you put me out.”
She twirls around in a flurry with a ghoulish frown that makes me shiver. “You tell AJ Boyd that bullshit before you ran over here? You tell him this is your new address? Because that’s why you’re here, right? He’s in town, huh?”
My chest tightens. “How…how do you know about AJ?”
“I’ve been Pup’s sister for thirty years and you’ve been his…” She looks me up and down. “Friend,for a few seconds. I’ll always know what’s going on in his life.”
I curl my nails into the granite and try to hold on to that feeling that consumed me after me and Rich made love. He was supposed to walk out of Lucky’s, get in his truck, and drive to Chantilly to tell Uncle Kenny that he wants a boxing career no matter how terrified he looked every time I told him he was making the right choice last night.
“I’ll see you tomorrow night, baby,” he murmured, planting a kiss in the crook of my neck while I shoved my key inside Uncle Kenny and Aunt Faye’s front door.
“If you know his life, then you should know that he wants me in it. He planned to talk to Kenny about his boxing career and about his plans…for…for us when he left Lucky’s tonight.”
She yelps out a hearty laugh, dropping the tape on the island. “And this was after he fucked you, right? Because that’s all this is—just silly pillow talk. You don’t really know shit about Pup.”
“Stop saying that,” I grit out. “I know him.”
“Sweetie…you don’t.”
“Ido.”
“No. You know this pretend man he created to keep you up in the clouds because there’s something in you he found and liked, but you don’t know shit about Pup Lovelace.”
My chest tightens as I glance down at my pale pink nails he kissed last night when he asked if I was scared of him. I still feel his mouth on mine, and I smell him every time I take a breath. I hear his voice and all the secrets he whispered to me in the time we spent together.
“I know about Jamari,” I murmur.
Her tiny red nostrils flare. “Yeah, you and every gossiping motherfucka around here knows about Jamari.”
“No. I…I know what he is. I know what he did to you.”
Her head lolls to the side, and she squints her eyes at me. “What?”
“You’re just like me.”
