She didn’t know that Wendell really couldn’t do anythingIdid at Beatrice’s unless I told Beatrice I was okay with it. He couldn’t paint her kitchen evergreen fog then fuck her in it, and he almost didn’t get to move in because I ain’t know how I felt about him roaming around her house. But Beatrice said she wanted him. Who was I to tell her she couldn’t have what she wanted? She wasn’t mine.
Running water purrs from the half bath behind the front door as we round the corner of the kitchen threshold.
“Beatrice! I know you hear me!” Wendell’s voice trails off as we walk down the hallway where pictures of Aisha stare down at us in a way that makes the hairs on my arm stand up.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
LOVIE
I thinkTeddy Pendergrass is haunting me.
Last week he made fun of me in Rich’s kitchen for losing my last fight with AJ. Now he’s just playing in a wistful loop in one of the rooms along Beatrice’s hallway while I try to figure out how Rich forces me to wade through my clusterfuck of emotions and pinpoint each one. First it was shock, then it was loneliness, and now there’s a new one percolating from my chest to the pit of my stomach after meeting Beatrice.
It sat inside of me like a heavy bowling ball while she talked about Mama and Tony and laid her hand against Rich like she owned him when Rasheeda didn’t. Her fixation was written in her smoky grey eyes when she turned around and saw me standing next to him in her kitchen, or it could just be that strange feeling spreading throughout my body and making me believe things that aren’t really true.
Rich tightens his calloused hand around the back of my neck, forcing us to a stop in front of one of the closed doors in the hallway before murmuring out, “You gon’ let my ole’ man take care of you for a few minutes?”
My nipples pucker against my bra.
He’s not my type.
He’s not my type.
He’s not my type.
Rich Lovelace isreallynot my type.
God, I shouldn’t even have a type right now. I’m supposed to be putting myself back together.
It’s like a mantra I have to keep telling myself ever since he walked over to his truck at Worthing and yanked the passenger door open after I told him I didn’t want to go home.
“Where’re you going?” I choke out in a low whisper.
“To chop it up with B’s friend real quick,” he coos back in a natural rhythm. “You gon’ sit tight with my ole’ man while I do that?”
“Yeah…yeah,” I pant out in a voice that I don’t recognize as my own.
It’s dripping with piping hot heat that singed my vocal cords as I pushed the words out, and I’m not too sure why.
He wrinkles his thick eyebrows, tilting his head. “You not tryna leave me, are you?”
“No…no. I’m…I’m gonna sit with your dad while you go talk.”
There’s no more fun banter about him taking me back to Chantilly. It’s like he knows my body wants to curl itself around his but my mind wants me to run.
I should’ve gone home like he kept telling me to. I should’ve dropped that cake off to him and gone to Terrica’s to apologize. Truthfully, I can run out of Beatrice’s house right now and forget all of this—forget her, Wendell, and the fact other women thought Tony was perfect before he did what he did. I can even forget Rich and what he’s about to go do, but my body says I really don’t want to.
He reaches out, scraping his rough thumb along my bottom lip, pulling it from beneath my teeth even though I don’tremember tucking it there. “Your stutter gets worse when you lie.”
It does?
“And then afterward you suck your bottom lip.” He swipes the center of it. “Your mama and daddy knew that?”
I shrug, glancing down at his bare chest and fighting the urge to sneak my tongue out to taste his thumb that’s still lingering on my lip.
“My mama put me in speech therapy a few months before she…before she died because of a little stutter that came out when I talked sometimes,” I whisper. “She didn’t even live long enough to bring me to my first session…”
