Tanya said, “You’d be advised to treat my sister like a guest, Corey. Do not fall into the trap of becoming too familiar with my family, now. If you can’t make my toes curl, you’d better not even consider trying to make Dawn’s.”
I stopped chewing my chicken. I was dumbfounded and speechless. I couldn’t believe Mrs. Conservative-Reserved went there. Couldn’t believe she’d showed some passion, for once. Maybe that was a reincarnation of Jo Min, as well. I braced myself for the possibility.
“Acting as if you’ve never eaten a meal in your entire life,” Tanya continued. “Moaning and what have you.” She smirked. “Well, at least one of us is moaning.”
Corey didn’t respond. He looked at me, briefly, and I could see embarrassment paint his beautiful face. His clean-shaven jawline trembled. I envisioned the goatee that wasn’t there. I was embarrassed, too. Embarrassed to be in the midst of all that. Tanya was being hateful and vindictive. I thought of our mother for the hundredth time, of Jo Min and how hateful she became on the last evening she and my father spent together. The thought was a scary one. I rose from the table and took my plate and a few other dishes to the kitchen.
Corey finally spoke. I could hear them arguing.
“Totally uncalled for,” Corey barked. “And why? Because I mentioned our lovemaking was lacking something earlier?”
“Not our, Corey. Me. You made it a me thing,” my sister replied, “Frigid and uninspiring Tanya.”
“I did not.”
If he did, I thought, it’s true. I’d stood outside their bedroom on many occasions. Many nights I stole the sounds of them making love. Corey was vocal, animated, a grunter. Tanya barely made a sound, held on to her passion with a white-knuckled grip. I couldn’t imagine making love to her.
When I let Corey inside me, I’d reward him with words of lust and greed.
Fuck me, baby.
Harder, baby, harder.
God, you are tearing this pussy up, baby.
I’m going to cum so fucking hard.
A man needed to hear those things. A woman wanted to say them.
A woman wanted them to be real words inspired by some real hot and heavy action, and not faked. Wanted to get it given to her so good she couldn’t keep her mouth closed. I’d seen Corey naked so I knew he could bring that out of me. Walked in on him in the shower, pretended I hadn’t heard the water running. His penis, even flaccid, was long and thick. It looked like a damn dinosaur’s neck. I wanted to get Jurassic with him in the worse way. He was my sister’s husband, but she didn’t value him. Therefore, she didn’t deserve him. I deserved him, though. After all I’d been through, I was due some happiness.
I opened the dishwasher and loaded my plate on the bottom rack. Loaded the other things I grabbed, as well.
Corey said, “I wouldn’t have mentioned anything if I didn’t care, Tanya.”
“Dawn is a beautiful woman,” Tanya said.
I perked up, listened closely.
“She is that,” Corey admitted. “As are you, Tanya. Y’all are practically twins. So what’s your point?”
I edged closer to the kitchen door.
“How do you think it makes me feel, Corey, having you analyze me so negatively with her hot ass walking around our home?”
Hot ass?
“What are you saying, Tanya?”
“Dawn has never been very discriminating when it comes to men. If you think for one minute getting up inside her would make you special, it wouldn’t. Many have been there before.”
I couldn’t believe my sister. If I hadn’t needed her so desperately, I’d have told her how much I hated her.
Corey said, “Careful. Dawn is right in the kitchen, baby. She might hear.”
“And?”
“I’m saying…”
Tanya continued, “That husband of hers ran up in that overused coochie and decided he’d rather have the money from her CDs and checking account. I think he was probably smart to cut and run. Sorry I never got to meet him.”
I hated her.
“That’s horrible, Tanya.”
“That bitch is a nappy-headed ho,” Tanya spat. “That’s what’s terrible.”
“You sound like Don Imus.”
“Don’t I, though.”
“What happened between you two? It’s sad to see two sisters so…”
Tanya said, “Jo Min happened, Corey. Jo Min happened.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. I hoped she wasn’t going there. We’d promised ourselves to bury that phase of our lives. Promised each other we’d take everything that happened during that time and bury it. Bury it with Jo Min and Clarence. Tanya was disturbing the dirt. It made me hate her even more.
Tanya said, “She’s vulnerable, Corey. And as I so painfully found out today, so are you. I can see this arrangement going very badly. I think she might need to leave.”
What? My heartbeat quickened. Hate or not, I had nowhere to go.
“Overreacting, Tanya,” Corey said. “Getting involved with my wife’s sister is the furthest thing from my mind.”
“You have a dick. They’ve been known to have a mind of their own.”
“Hypnotize this dick, baby. Make it do what you, only you, want it to do.”
It sickened me to hear Corey sexy-talking her, trying to mend fences.
“Dawn has got to be beating herself up,” Tanya said. “And when she does that, she transfers the hate she feels for herself on to me. She’s betrayed me before. More than once, in fact. She’d do it again. In a heartbeat.”
I didn’t believe she heard a word Corey said. It was tear-down-Dawn time for my sister. Always had been that way between us. She never could understand that I was human. That I made mistakes. That I wasn’t perfect. Never could allow herself the notion that maybe, just maybe, life hadn’t been kind to Dawn. No, in Tanya’s eyes, everything that happened to me, to us, was brought on by my failures. Fitting, I guess. Jo Min felt the same way. I was my father’s daughter.
“Her husband ran off with everything, Corey. She’s got to be feeling so upset…vulnerable…for being so stupid…and blind. So damn blind.”
Corey cautioned her, “Watch what you say.”
She said, “What?” so innocently it made my stomach drop. Totally oblivious to her words and their power. Consumed with self, and nothing more.
Stupid and blind, blind, blind rang in my ears.
Those words chased after me.
I stumbled to the back door and fumbled with the knob. Somehow I was able to open it. The pitch blackness of night greeted me. I moved in the direction of the driveway by feeling along the side of the house. It had a rough stucco siding, tan in the daylight, unrecognizable to me in the darkness of night. I was comforted that it smelled like Corey outside. Woodsy. I heard loud rap music, some guy hollering words I can’t make out.
It was difficult to see in the darkness of the night, but I knew I was headed in the right direction. The rap music got louder. That was the neighbor’s boy blasting his stereo. I reached the end of the house, the end of the wall, and paused. I could hear my sister’s voice. She was ranting and raving. I couldn’t hear Corey. I knew he was talking to her in a calm tone, trying to squelch her fire. Again, I thought of Jo Min. Fear blanketed me like the dark of the night. But I moved on.
Suddenly, I wasn’t sure where I was. I’d lost my bearings. Was I traveling down the driveway? Where was the neighbor’s dog? How come I didn’t hear him barking and panting? Was he lying in wait, drool falling from his opened mouth, his jagged sharp teeth ready to carve a chunk out of my leg? Did the crew of men working on the neighbor’s deck extension put away the tools and lumber normally scattered in the driveway the houses shared? Was I about to stumble into a deep hole? Fall on a sharp saw? Was I about to meet my death in a deep trench? Would Jo Min and Clarence be there to greet me with open arms?
I heard Tanya, even louder. I moved on through the pitch blackness of the night. My mouth salted over. I felt as if I was goin
g to vomit. I was scared but determined to move away from Tanya’s raised voice, move away from thoughts of Jo Min. From stupid and blind, blind, blind.
Then I heard it: the low growl of the neighbor’s dog.
I realized then that the neighbor boy had turned off his music. That diversion no longer existed. It was just me and the sound of that angry dog.
I tried to turn back. But I bumped something. I didn’t know what. I attempted to move to my left, bumped something else. Moving to my right, I stepped on something and twisted my ankle. My world was a world of somethings impeding my every move.
I righted myself somehow and limped a few feet forward. Something touched my leg. Something warm and wet. I imagined it was the dog’s tongue. His jagged sharp teeth weren’t far behind. My leg was exposed from under the short skirt I’d worn.
I screamed. And screamed. And screamed some more. I was paralyzed with fear, stuck in place, my leg ripe for the taking.
I heard chairs scraping across the hardwood floor inside Corey and Tanya’s home. I heard the back screen door burst open. I heard scampering footsteps, then quieter footsteps. I heard Corey call my name. Then I heard him call it a second time. I never once heard Tanya’s voice.
“Here,” I managed. “Over here.”
He was by my side in a moment. Corey grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me close to him. He smelled woodsy. He gave me great comfort.
“Are you all right, Dawn?”
I couldn’t speak. My tongue was too full in my mouth, my heart was pulsing too loudly in my ears, in my chest.
“What are you doing out here in the dark, Dawn?” my sister asked. She sounded perturbed. No doubt embarrassed that the neighbors might have heard her sister howling to the moon.
“Are you all right?” Corey repeated.
I nodded finally and said, “Yes” in my sexy, breathless tone. I felt his arms tighten around me. He was woodsy scented, perfect even though my sister didn’t seem to realize it.
Fuck me, baby.
Harder, baby, harder.
God, you are tearing this pussy up, baby.
I’m going to cum so fucking hard.
I’d give Corey all of that and more.
Tanya interrupted my thoughts with, “I asked what you were doing out here in the dark, Dawn.”
I answered, “Stupid…and blind, I guess, Tanya.”
She said nothing. She finally got it. Finally understood how thoughtless and insensitive her earlier remark had been.
Corey’s hold on me tightened even more. He was sensitive to all I’d lost, all I still stood to lose. I fell into his embrace like a helpless woman.
I had retinitis pigmentosa.
I was slowly losing my sight. I was slowly going blind.
CHAPTER 4
NIKKI
It’d been a minute since I’d done it.
I hadn’t stole shit in, like, two or three years. Maybe more. I used to boost my ass off back in the day. Nikki wasn’t trying to be that pitiful woman working her fingers to the bone to get some shoes. Hell to the naw. I seen some shit I wanted, I just took it. Ripped the tags off and put the shit right up under my shirt, or sometimes in the waist of my jeans, and I walked my ass out of the store with my nose in the air like some stuck-up bitch that grew up in Beverly Hills 90210 or some shit. I’d be just daring someone to search me. I never even came close to getting caught, though. I hardly looked like a thief. Big Mama and Hot Mama did teach me how to carry myself. After all the shit I’d been through, all I’d lost, that’s the one thing that remained. Big Mama called it “acting like you got some sense.” My husband, that ass, he gassed my head big time, said I had “poise.”
However you call it, it kept me from ever getting caught boosting shit.
This day, I was crazy tempted to see if my game was still tight, though. I needed something to lift my spirits. Something to make me forget my tender boobs, cravings that were off the chain and a coochie that was oozing out all kinds of nasty shit. Not to mention, something to make me stop thinking about my husband, and where he was, who he was with, what he was doing, how he was spending my money, and, and…if he was missing me in the least.
Yeah, I still loved him like cooked food. Yeah, I missed him.
I couldn’t even deny it if I tried. I mean, I had part of him growing inside me. I told myself if he knew about the baby he’d come back. With an apology, love, and the money he stole from me. I had to tell myself that just to make it through the pregnancy. Alone. Otherwise, I’d be at the abortion clinic in a minute. Sucked that baby right out of me. I know that shit sounds kind of foul, but fuck it. If you’d come from what I come from, been through the shit I’d been through, talking like that would be second nature. I have a mouth like a gutter bitch. And I know it. Matter of fact, I embrace the shit. If you don’t know where you’re from you can’t appreciate where you’re going.
“Those are Bandolino slingback pumps,” the Macy’s saleswoman told me. “We also have them in a medium green and black.”
I looked at her. She was a middle-aged, brown-skinned black woman with trusting eyes and a smile that was warm and soothing like chicken soup. She was the perfect mark. I could Bandolino-slingback-pump my ass right on by her without one hitch. I rolled the shoe over in my hand like I was really considering putting some commission in her pocket.
“You remind me of my daughter,” she said. “Same pretty eyes. Same glow.” She leaned in toward me and whispered, “She’s pregnant. I’m finally going to be a grandmother. And don’t you tell a soul, either, because I want to go on thinking I don’t look old enough to be anyone’s grandmother. My son-in-law says I’m still ‘all that,’ so maybe—”
I cut her off, said, “I hope your daughter and son-in-law don’t have a joint bank account,” and handed her the shoe. I didn’t give a shit about her daughter’s glow or her lying, ass-kissing son-in-law. She screwed my flow all up with that Huxtable bullshit.
She looked confused, but didn’t press the issue.
“Keep looking,” she said. “I’ll let you be. Holler if you need me.”
“I will,” I said. “I’ll holla.”
At ease again suddenly, she flashed that chicken soup smile. “Sound just like my Brenda. Holla. Instead of holler.”
Brenda could kiss my ass. Twice.
I moved over to some other shoes I could only afford with a five-finger discount. They were also slingbacks, silver with jewels along the straps, a heel I wouldn’t be able to walk in for long. My skinny ass was actually gonna spread.
Stretch marks, a loose coochie, dayum.
“I bet they’d look wonderful on your pretty feet,” a deep, masculine voice called out from over my shoulder in the same tone as my husband. I turned quickly, expecting to see a ghost from my past, like the dead father on Six Feet Under.
Whoever the nigga was, he got my heart beating crazy.
“Well, hello,” he said. “Even more beautiful from the front.”
He was fine as frog hair, too. Bald with a thick beard that was perfectly trimmed. Sparkling diamond studs in each ear. A slight gap in his teeth that made his smile come to life. Brown skin that blended perfectly with his black shirt and light tan slacks. He was tall as hell, and broad through the shoulders. His shoes were tight to death. He smelled good. Dude looked like an NBA baller.
He wasn’t my husband, but my coochie did not give one shit.
She wanted to be introduced.
“What was that?” I asked him.
He moved closer. Dayum, he smelled good. I didn’t back up. I let him in my space. I actually leaned in some, hoping he could understand what my body language was telling him. Most men didn’t get the subtle hint. You had to pull your boobs out and smack them in the face to get them to know you were interested.
“Even more beautiful from the front,” he repeated. “And the back was looking mighty fine, so that’s saying something.”
“Look at you,” I said.
“I’d rather
look at you.”
“Are you some kind of player?”
He shook his head, smiled again. “Far from it,” he said, then, “The shoes…my treat.”
“What’s the catch?”
“Wear them to Vu tomorrow evening.”
“Who’s Vu?”
Again, he smiled. And dayum, dude had dimples, too. Just like my husband.
“Vu isn’t a who,” he explained. “It’s a what. Romantic restaurant in Jersey City. If you get the right table you can see the Manhattan skyline.” He narrowed his eyes, licked his lips. “And if you accompany me, I’ll get the right table, I assure you.”
Smart, polished, accomplished. Just like my husband. I didn’t know what to say. I’d been down this road before. I kept my mouth shut.
“Three reasons,” he said when I didn’t say anything.
He was a puzzle. That scared me. My husband was a puzzle. I’d been convinced I could solve him, but…
My husband was tougher than a Rubik’s Cube. Tougher than suduko.
I should’ve known better but I asked, “Three reasons what?”
That smile again. He had plenty of game, I could tell. He knew if I was accepting a conversation, he was still in the hunt. A man who understood the subtleties of a woman. Good, saved me from pulling out my boobs and smacking him in the face with them. I was about to do just that, if I had to. I mean he looked so good I’d have smacked his mama with them.
He cleared his throat and said, “If you can give me three reasons why you shouldn’t honor me with a dinner date I’ll step away. I have to tell you, though. The food at Vu is incredible. And I’m good company. You’d be making a mistake if you come up with three excuses not to let me love you down.”
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