Rhyme & Reason

by Nia Forrester

  Her story unfolded in the halting, incomplete sentences of someone who was, or would be, in shock.

  “Regan, where are you?” Deuce said, standing up again, hearing the chatter of teeth between the sobs and gulps. “Where are you now?”

  “At the … at the … at … police station. They took … We all had to … I thought they were going to … They had guns! I thought they would shoot all of us, and they … they pointed the …”

  “Regan,” Deuce said, keeping his voice slow and deliberate. “Which one? Which police station, baby?”

  “I don’t know which one!” Her voice rose to a hysterical crescendo. “How would I know?”

  Deuce held the phone away from his ear for a moment. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll find you. Just … wait for me, okay? I’m coming. I’m coming right now.”

  “Where were you?” she moaned. Then she was crying again, but this time softly, the sound muffled. “Where were you?”

  “I’m here now,” Deuce said. “And I’m coming. I’m going to hang up, okay? I’m going to hang up so I can find out where you are and get to you. Is that okay? If I hang up?”

  “Okay,” Regan said, suddenly meek.

  Deuce listened for a moment to make sure she wasn’t going to say anything else then ended the call. He sat on the edge of the toilet.

  Zora was asleep in the next room, it was after three a.m. and unless he woke her, she wasn’t coming out of it anytime soon. He would have been down for the count himself if his bladder hadn’t woken him. He would have slept right on through to morning, not thinking for one single second about Regan and how she had to have been looking for him, wondering where he was.

  While he was on top of Zee, and she was on top of him, and they were kissing and grinding and forgetting the world, Regan was being robbed at gunpoint.

  Elsewhere in the apartment he heard a sound, the unmistakable sound of keys in a lock, and then a door being opened and shut.

  Shit.

  ~~~

  He looked at Deuce the way Deuce knew he himself would probably look at anyone emerging unexpectedly from his bathroom just a couple of hours before dawn—warily, and with an alert stance, prepared to fight. Then when he realized who Deuce was, and that they had met before, the expression on Zora’s cousin’s face became cynical.

  “Hey, man,” Asif said.

  He took in Deuce’s attire, or lack thereof, then glanced toward Zora’s bedroom door, which was slightly ajar.

  Deuce didn’t look. He hoped that Zora wasn’t still lying the way he had left her—facedown, sheets only partly covering her, her butt fully exposed, and her hair in a state of semi-dishevelment.

  “Hey,” Deuce said. “I was just … I have to …” He hooked a thumb in the direction of Zee’s room.

  “Yeah,” the cousin said with a twist of his lips. “Whatever.”

  He moved around Deuce and went into the bathroom, shutting the door hard behind him.

  Muttering an expletive, Deuce shook his head.

  If he was to ever get in the good graces of this Asif cat, this was not the best impression to leave him with.

  In the bedroom, Zora was still deeply asleep. Her breaths came evenly, her back rising and falling in time with each one. She had twin dimples just above each buttock where she was ticklish and squirmed out of reach, and giggled, whenever Deuce touched her there.

  Reaching for his jeans and shirt, he then thought better of it. He didn’t want her to open her eyes to the sight of him already dressed, like he was rushing. Like she was some one-night-stand.

  He sat on the bed next to her.

  “Zee.” He touched her shoulder. “Wake up.”

  She made a cute mewing noise, then turned toward him, her eyes opening partway. It took them a moment to focus, those milk-chocolatey-brown eyes with the curled eyelashes. She smiled, and despite the circumstances, Deuce smiled back.

  “Hey,” she said. She reached for him, and moved closer, resting her cheek on his bare thigh.

  Her hair brushed against his skin and Deuce felt his dick twitch a little. It was involuntary, a reaction to having her face this close to it. But it made him feel like an asshole all the same.

  “I gotta ... I have to go,” he said.

  In his head he was counting the minutes it had been since he hung up from Regan, estimating the amount of time it would take before she called him back. Not very long was his guess. And when she did, he had to answer, or she would be even more frantic than she already was.

  Zora’s eyes opened fully, and she sat up.

  The sheets fell to her waist, baring her perfectly-sized, perfectly-shaped breasts, with the dusky, smooth nipples. She stretched, arms above her head, back arched. Just watching her, her motion momentarily lengthening her body, was a little mesmerizing.

  Deuce dropped his gaze, no longer feeling fully entitled to the view.

  “You have to go?” She yawned.

  “Yeah. I got a … Regan called and …”

  Zora’s face shut tight, and her arms dropped to her sides.

  “She was … Her restaurant was robbed tonight,” he continued.

  At that, Zora sat up a little straighter. And there was a flash of something in her eyes. Doubt. Just as quickly it was gone. As crappy as this announcement had to make her feel, she knew he wouldn’t lie to her.

  “Oh,” she said, shaking her head as if to clear it. “Shit. Then you have to go. Is she … is she alright?”

  “I think so. She’s at the police station, but she sounded pretty shaken up, so …”

  Zora nodded, now looking resigned. “You have to go.”

  “Yeah, but we should …”

  She turned away from him and reached for something at the edge of the bed. A t-shirt, which she pulled over her head, her movement decisive. For the first time this evening, they were confronting a reality neither of them had brought up before—he was in a relationship with someone else. Someone who had the right to call him at three a.m. if she was in distress and expect that he would come.

  They heard a flush and Zee stilled for a moment.

  “I ran into your cousin, when I was coming out of the bathroom,” Deuce explained.

  Zora glanced up at the ceiling, looked at him again with pursed lips and nodded. She shoved the sheets aside and lowered her feet to the floor.

  “You should get dressed,” she said, indicating his jeans on the floor nearby.

  Deuce pulled his clothes on, while Zora inspected herself in her dresser mirror, wiping the corners of her eyes and using her fingers to restore some semblance of order to her hair.

  When he was fully dressed, and shoes on, she looked at him. Her expression was impassive.

  “I hope everything’s okay,” she said. “With … with Regan.”

  “Yeah. Okay. I’ll call …”

  “You should go,” she said, cutting him off. Then she sighed, and there was a tremble behind it. She squinted a little, and bit into her lower lip.

  “Zee. Don’t. I …”

  “Deuce,” she said, her tone warning. “Just … You have to go.”

  “I’m going to call you,” he said, craning his neck and trying to make eye contact. “Soon as I can.”

  She went to her bedroom door and opening it, stood aside.

  “You have to go,” she said yet again.

  She walked him to the front door. Asif was in the kitchen, moving around, noisily cleaning up the things Deuce and Zora had left out after their steak dinner, his disapproval palpable.

  “Zee, I’m going to call you,” Deuce said, this time firmly, this time louder because it wasn’t just for Zora’s benefit. “We need to … I’m going to call you later.”

  She nodded and looked like she believed him; but then she turned her head to one side so that when he tried to kiss her on the lips, it landed instead on her cheek.

  ~~~

  It took him only a few minutes of searching on the web while in the cab to find out where Regan was likely
to be, but once he got there, almost an hour passed before Deuce saw her. He gave her name to the cop behind the bulletproof reception station, and sat on a filthy, hard plastic chair near the door to wait.

  Nearby, a woman nodded in and out, obviously under the influence of something, and mumbled to herself. An intermittent parade of cops walked by, most of them glancing in his direction and that of the woman, giving them both a quick, assessing once-over.

  When eventually Regan emerged, she was wearing a black mini skirt, super-high black platform heels and a crimson blouse. Her makeup was smudged, so she had raccoon eyes, and her lipstick was smeared to almost nothing. Her long, dark hair had been loosened from what looked to have been a bun at the nape of her neck and was now a sloppy, tangled mass. Her sheer dark stockings were nicked and torn in a few places.

  Escorted by a female officer in plainclothes, Regan looked almost dazed when she came through the door and into the waiting area. She blinked against the light and then finally, her eyes settled on Deuce and she broke out into loud sobs, stumbling toward him, and collapsing against his chest.

  Beneath her familiar perfume, Deuce smelled perspiration. It was sour, the kind that the body exudes out of agitation, or fear.

  “You her boyfriend?” the female officer asked. She had a thick Bronx accent, so ‘her’ came out ‘huh’.

  “Yeah.” Deuce held Regan against him, letting her bury her face in the area between his neck and shoulder.

  Even in the moment, even with everything that was going on, he thought about what it meant that he still answered ‘yes’ to that question; and he wondered whether Regan could smell Zee on him. But she was crying so loudly, giving herself so completely over to her tears, he doubted she had the presence of mind to notice anything other than her own distress.

  “She had a pretty bad scare tonight,” the officer said. “Seems they took her purse and everything, so … not sure you can take her someplace else? If you can that’d be good. We’re recommending she get her locks changed before going home.”

  At that, Regan’s cries became markedly louder.

  “It’s not likely they’ll do much more than toss her stuff once they’ve taken out anything of value,” the cop said, speaking more loudly over the soundtrack of sobs. “But as a precaution, she might want to stay someplace else till those locks get taken care of.”

  The officer handed Deuce a business card, which he glanced at. She was a detective, and her last name was Wortham. She only used her first initial ‘S’.

  “We might need her to come back down, if something breaks but …” She lowered her voice. “I doubt it. These guys were wearing masks, so …”

  She shrugged and looked bored. Another day, another robbery.

  “Call me if you have any questions, or if she remembers anything else she’d like to tell me,” Detective Wortham said. Then she reached out and touched Regan lightly on the shoulder, offering a cursory attempt at comfort. “You take care, miss.”

  Before she had even completely turned away, Deuce could tell her focus had shifted to her next thing, whatever that might be. This case, like the dozens of robberies that occurred in the city every day, was probably unsolvable.

  “Hey.” Deuce held Regan, still crying, away from him and cupped her face in his hands. “It’s okay. You’re okay. I’m here now.”

  She blinked and seemed to come back into herself, wiping the back of a hand across her nose, which was slightly pink, and a little runny.

  “They … they … they …” She was speaking between gulps, trying to get something out.

  “They what, Regan?”

  “Th ...threat … threatened to … r… ra… rape me.”

  A surge of anger ripped through Deuce and he pulled her against him again.

  “But they didn’t, right? They didn’t …”

  Regan shook her head emphatically from side to side.

  “Are you … you would tell me, right? If something like that …”

  “They didn’t,” she managed, taking a deep trembling breath. “But one of them, I …he wanted to. I could tell he wanted to. He grabbed me by the hair, and …” She pressed her face into his chest and the tears started anew.

  Deuce stood there with her for a long while, just letting her cry, and holding her as she did.

  ~~~

  Regan woke up whimpering, and then after a moment moaning and finally, screaming.

  Next to her, Deuce sat up, his heart pounding at the sudden sound of her voice raised in alarm. When he turned toward her, Regan was awash in perspiration, breathing heavily and dissolving into tears again.

  “Baby,” he said. “Baby. It’s okay. You’re safe.”

  She looked at him, her eyes wild for a moment, and then gradually regaining awareness of where she was. Reaching for him, Regan moved closer, wrapping her arms around his torso. Deuce felt her heart against him, skipping in an irregular beat, and she was shaking as though cold.

  Earlier, when they got to his place, Deuce had helped her into the shower. As he did, she clutched his arm and asked him to get in with her. Hesitating, and for a moment doing a mental scan of his body, Deuce relented. He remembered Zora’s mouth on his neck, biting into his shoulder; her nails raking across his back. There would be marks.

  But Regan barely even opened her eyes. She turned her face up toward the rainwater showerhead, dousing her face and hair. And Deuce swallowed the guilt, not even sure whether it was for being with Regan now, or for being with Zora earlier.

  “What if they know where I live?” Regan whispered in the dark now. “What if …?”

  “Shh. It’s okay. They don’t know where you live. You heard what the detective said. And anyway, we’ll change the locks. Tomorrow, we’ll …”

  “Okay,” she exhaled, and moved even closer. “Okay. Okay.”

  She repeated it like a mantra for comfort.

  Deuce leaned back against the headboard, holding her against his chest, stroking her still-damp hair until her breaths grew even and she fell asleep.

  When he woke up the next morning, it was to find that he had moved all the way to the edge of his side of the bed. Regan had followed him, and was burrowed into his back, which was turned away from her.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Mommy!”

  Calling to her mother, Zora shoved the kitchen door open and walked through the open sliding glass doors to the backyard. She found her squatting in front of a bush of white tea roses wearing gardening gloves and holding pruning shears.

  Glancing over her shoulder and seeing Zora, she stood and smiled.

  “This is a surprise.” She peeled off the gloves.

  Zora embraced her, holding her tight for a moment longer than she normally might have. Her mother pulled back, hands on Zora’s arms, her expression bemused.

  “What’s all this?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” Zora said, avoiding her eyes. “Just missed you, that’s all.”

  “We’re not that far away. And you know you can come home whenever you want to.”

  “I know. I keep forgetting I’m not in California anymore.” Taking the shears from her mother, Zora went to kneel in front of the bush herself. “What’s the mission here?”

  “Cutting back those stragglers there.” Her mother pointed out a few spindly branches, ruining the otherwise well-defined shape of the shrubbery. She handed Zora the gloves and brushed her palms on her thighs.

  “I’ll take care of it. You go sit down a minute.” Zora indicated the white loungers set under the mature tree nearby.

  Her mother didn’t protest, and Zora heard her relieved groan when she sat.

  “How’s things with Asif?”

  “Good. No complaints,” Zora lied.

  No complaints if you didn’t count damp washcloths sitting in a soapy clump in a corner of the tub each morning, the strange panties that sometimes showed up in their shared laundry basket and the almost empty refrigerator just twenty-four hours after Zor
a went grocery shopping.

  “I can’t get over how much of a man he’s turned into. How’s he taking to New York?”

  “Like a duck to water.” That at least was true.

  “Your father wants to know why he doesn’t come to Jersey for Jumu’ah,” her mother said referring to the Friday congregational prayer for Muslims.

  “I don’t know, Mommy. He’d have to ask him.”

  “What about you? Do you go to …”

  “Mom.”

  “Zora.”

  “It should be enough to know that I honor my parents, and love God.”

  “Enough for whom?”

  “You. And Daddy.”

  Her mother gave a short laugh. “Well. You know your father.”

  That was the thing; she didn’t know her father. Never had. Her entire life she had been on an unsuccessful quest to figure him out and had suffered through his own unsuccessful quest to figure her out.

  “I saw Deuce.” She let the words spill from her, and when her mother said nothing, turned to check her expression. It was impassive.

  “I imagined that might happen sooner or later.”

  “Well it did.” Zora returned her attention to the rosebush.

  “And how was it?”

  “Awful. And then … he came over.”

  “Oh. And …?”

  “And then it was … less awful. But now it’s awful again.”

  Her mother had always been the more pragmatic of her parents. She knew Zora was sexually-active. Or, maybe it was more accurate to say that she seemed to assume it, though they only ever spoke of it obtusely. To speak of it directly might implicate her mother, Zora thought, and make her complicit in the omission of this detail about their daughter when she spoke to her husband about how their children were doing.

  Zora often wondered whether there was anything about her brother that her mother artfully pretended not to know. She couldn’t imagine it. Ousmane was the perfect son. He had been academically-gifted, culturally competent by Senegalese-American standards, and scrupulously respectful, if not completely observant of their faith. And now that he was in France, he would remain perfect, because his imperfections—if he had developed any—would remain conveniently out of view.