“You don’t need her pecans. You can buy as many as you can use.”
“Of course I can, but I also appreciate her neighborliness, and I wish you would. How about going out to Moe Robinson’s place for some pizza and beer? I want something different.”
“I’m dressed up like this to eat pizza and drink beer?” she asked him, looking aghast.
“You’re always dressed up, sweetheart. Tonight, you’re just a bit more so. Let’s go.” He knew he’d gotten to her, for she prided herself in always looking as perfect as possible. He pressed his finger against her right nipple and made a rotating motion. “You blush beautifully, and you look good, too,” he said, ensuring for himself an hour of good loving when they returned home.
“Do you think she’s better-looking than I am?”
So that was it. “Who? You mean Susan Pettiford? Baby, you’ve got to be joking.”
Cassie couldn’t know that Jay Weeks’s sexual preferences were of no interest to Susan. She needed a date, and Jay was an acceptable man who she knew. “Let’s take my car,” Jay said to Susan as they walked away from the Shepherd residence. “If it wasn’t Kix’s night off, we could go to Gourmet Corner.”
“I’ve heard so much about that place,” Susan said. “Let’s plan to go there.”
“It’s definitely not overrated,” Jay said.
They went to Sam’s Gourmet Burger Castle after Jay said that, in view of Cassie’s estimation of herself, it was unlikely that they would encounter her and Kix at a hamburger restaurant, gourmet or not. Instead, they met Lucas and Willis, who appeared to be having a “working” dinner. Susan waved to them and, although she couldn’t figure out why, it annoyed her that Jay pretended not to see them.
“You could have said hello to my friends,” she said to Jay.
“That’s right. I could have,” he replied.
This man can be bitchy, Susan thought. He and Cassie would make a fine pair. She decided then that she shouldn’t spend too much time in Jay Weeks’s company. Lucas has been more than nice to me, she thought, recalling his Christmas greeting and his thoughtfulness the night the snow storm caused a power outage.
“What was that all about?” Willis asked Lucas. “I thought she’d at least come over to say hi.”
Lucas rapped the table lightly with his pen. “Unless she wanted to make a scene, how could she? Weeks continued walking when she tried to get his attention. I never did cotton to that guy.”
“Me neither,” Willis said. “I could do without that dude forever. Don’t tell me that something’s going on between those two.”
“All right. I won’t. She couldn’t be that stupid.”
In spite of her reservations about Cassie, the woman’s invitation to cocktails provided an opportunity for socializing, for doing something other than working and sleeping, and Susan supposed she should be thankful for that. In New York, she’d enjoyed an active social life, although she couldn’t claim many women friends.
She usually shunned women who were insecure about their men, as Cassie was about Kix. Nonetheless, she phoned Cassie the following morning and asked her to tell Kix to come for the pecans.
“Thanks, I’ll let him know,” Cassie said, and added, “Darling, you looked smashing last night, much too lovely to be in the company of a man who has no interest in women.”
Stunned by the woman’s temerity, Susan stammered, temporarily at a loss for words. “Wh—what did you say?”
“You’re wasting precious time with Jay, darling.”
Best to ignore that. If I give her a taste of my razor tongue, we’ll never be friends. “Let me know when Kix is coming over for these nuts,” she said. “I’ve got to get to my shop. See you.”
Tuesday afternoon at the end of the tutoring session, Susan walked with Rudy and Nathan down the corridor toward the front door. She noticed that Rudy’s coat was not properly buttoned and stopped.
“Wait a second, Rudy. I’ll button your coat.” She knelt in front of the child and was securing the bottom button when Lucas entered the front door. Rudy opened both arms to Susan, who hugged the child, relishing the feel of that warm little body in her arms. As she released Rudy, she looked up into Lucas’s censoring gaze.
“May I see you in my office, Ms. Pettiford, after you excuse the children?” His words, and especially his tone, brought to her mind a tongue-lashing she received from her third-grade teacher for having spread her arms and embraced a heavy spring rain.
“Uh . . . of course,” she said, wondering what had displeased him this time. “I’ll be there in . . . uh . . . five minutes.”
“The door isn’t locked,” he said. “They can let themselves out of the building.”
Didn’t he understand that someone meets the other children and takes them home, and that Rudy has to walk that distance alone in the winter twilight?
Without responding verbally, she grasped the children’s hands and walked out of the building with them. “Wait a minute, Rudy,” Nathan said. He climbed into his grandmother’s car, spoke with her and got out of the car. “Miss Pettiford, you don’t have to worry about Rudy. My nana and I will take her home.”
Susan went around to the driver’s side of the car and spoke with Ann Price. “Thank you so much for taking Rudy home. It’s dangerous for her to be alone in the streets after dark.”
“No problem, Miss Pettiford. Somebody doesn’t care about her, and it’s a pity.”
Susan walked back inside, preparing herself for what she expected would be Lucas’s fury. He waited for her a few steps from where she had left him. With his fists at his hips, and in a voice so quiet and calm as to be frightening, he said, “What do you think you’re doing?”
“What do you mean?” He starting walking toward his office, so she stepped in stride with him.
“You’re making that child dependent on you, and that little boy, too. They always leave with you, holding your hands.”
“You need a course in humanness,” she said as they entered his office. “I told you how these children treat Rudy. Nathan is the only one who doesn’t, and he seemed to empathize with her, so I put them together in the front row. They have become friends, and Nathan is protective of her. She is the only one of these children who has no one to meet her and take her home. Imagine that six-year-old little girl walking from here to Salem Court and Market Street in the dark. I’ve been driving her home but, thanks to you, I couldn’t do that tonight, so Nathan asked his grandmother if they could drive her home.”
“I don’t need a course in humaneness, Susan. I’m trying to do this job according to the rules. Even so, she will become too attached to you. I saw her hug you after you buttoned her coat.”
“You can hardly call that rag a coat. It’s almost threadbare, and two of the buttons are missing.”
“I suppose you’re planning to buy her another one.”
She’d thought about it, and by damn, she’d do it. “Come to think of it, that wouldn’t be a bad idea.” His gaze softened, and his eyes took on that same haze that she saw for the first time when he released himself into her. A feeling of dizziness unbalanced her, like a sudden attack of vertigo, and she closed her eyes and grasped the arms of the chair.
“Susan, are you all right?” His voice had that same huskiness, that same loss-of-control tremor that she heard the first time he had her in his arms. Why was this happening to her, now that she had no right to embrace it? She reached down, picked up her pocketbook and briefcase and stood, praying that she could make it as far as the corridor.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked. But even as the words left his lips, he bounded out of his chair and rounded the desk.
“Don’t. Please don’t touch me. I . . . I have to go. I’m in a hurry.”
“Don’t lie to me. You’re afraid of the way you’ll feel in my arms. Aren’t you? Tell me you’ve never remembered the way I made you feel. Say you don’t ever think of the way you went wild beneath me. Tell me you don’t want to h
ave me buried to the hilt inside you. Tell me that, and you’ll be a liar.”
“Please. Let me go.”
“Not until you tell me you haven’t thought about it once since that night. Tell me, and you may go with my blessings!”
“All right. Damn you! I think about it all the time. But that’s all I’m ever going to do about it. Think. Now—”
His hands gripped her shoulders, and seemingly of its own volition, her body moved to him, and she was tight in his arms. He stared down at her, and she couldn’t stop the trembling of her lips and chin. Would he never . . .
“What are you waiting for?” Susan said in a voice she didn’t recognize.
His mouth was on her then, hard and strong. And so sweet. She parted her lips, and he possessed her with one thrust of his tongue deep into her mouth, anointing every centimeter, testing and thrusting, simulating lovemaking, until her nerve ends seemed to ignite and hot blood raced to her loins. Suddenly, he moved away from her, though he didn’t release her.
Annoyed and ashamed of the way she kissed and caressed him, she broke away, grabbed her bag and briefcase and ran to the door, but when she would have opened it, his hand closed over the knob.
“There’s no point in running, Susan. This dance is not over.”
She brushed a few strands of hair away from her face, an act that she knew betrayed her nervousness. “What you don’t know, Lucas, is that it never started.”
A half smile flashed across his face. “You’re fooling yourself, and I just proved it.”
Chapter Five
Lucas sat with Willis in his mother’s living room after having consumed one of his favorite meals. He knew his mother pampered him, and he knew she did it not just because he’d built a beautiful, modern home for her and contributed to her support, although she worked at the post office as she had for years. Love overflowed from Noreen Hamilton, and apart from himself and Willis, who she had embraced when Lucas brought him home from college the Thanksgiving weekend of their freshman year, she had no one on which to lavish it. He had stopped hinting that she should find someone who loved her and who she loved and marry or affect another suitable arrangement, for he had come to realize that his mother still loved Calvin Jackson, and would never commit to another man.
Willis went into the kitchen, returned with two mugs of coffee and placed one in front of Noreen. “The coffeepot’s on the counter,” he said to Lucas. “I don’t have but two hands.”
Lucas got the coffee and returned as Willis flipped on the television and tuned in the evening news. “Stay tuned for today’s financial tips,” droned the blonde female with pale pink lips, flawless makeup and hair in stiff strands framing her face with its ends meeting under her chin. “Good evening, Mr. Jackson,” she said minutes later. “Welcome to Piedmont News.” She turned to face the camera. “We’re delighted to have with us this evening Forsyth County’s own success story. As a black American who made it big, what advice would you give to young blacks who want to follow in your footsteps?”
Lucas sat forward, as alert as a bulldog who’d caught a stranger’s scent. He’d seen the man on television and his picture in newspapers and magazines a number of times, and always that tenor of resentment surfaced in him. Yet, he had an unexplainable sense of pride in the quality of his origins, in knowing that he had probably inherited from Calvin Jackson the skills and the mother wit that propelled him to success as an architect at the young age of thirty-five.
The condescending smile on Calvin Jackson’s face and what he was sure it portended reminded Lucas of himself when he was about to put someone in his place. He watched, transfixed, as Jackson leaned back in his chair and appeared to get comfortable. It was a trait he recognized in himself. “As a plain old American who fought his way to the top in spite of the social obstacles in my way,” Jackson said, “I advise any young person to get an education, adopt high moral values, especially integrity, and work hard. If society, or any of its members, puts a stone in your path, move it, and keep going. Avoid alcohol, except for modest amounts on social occasions, and don’t use drugs. They’ll eventually kill you.”
Lucas laughed aloud. The red-faced woman obviously didn’t want to hear that. When he would have commented to his mother, he became aware that she had left the room.
“Something wrong with her, Lucas?” Willis asked him. “I mean, does your father still get to her, or is she mad at him?”
“Both.”
“That’s too bad. You’d think that after all these years, they could at least be friends,” Willis said.
“Not a chance, man. She loves him, and she hates him.”
Willis went to the bar and helped himself to a snifter of cognac. “That’s tough. You look so much like him, that she must have been miserable whenever she looked at you.”
“That’s what I thought, but she said holding me was like holding him.”
“Damn! I don’t want any part of that love business.”
Lucas flipped off the television and prepared to leave. “I wouldn’t say that. It’s hell when it goes sour, but when it swings right, there’s nothing like it.”
Willis put an arm on Lucas’s shoulder. “Would it hurt you to give your old man a call and have a drink with him? He must be at least seventy years old by now.”
“Would it hurt him to do the same? He’s seventy-one, and that day will come as soon as we complete Hamilton Village. I want to meet him as an equal.”
“You may be his equal now.”
Lucas kicked at the carpet. “Not yet. I keep tabs on every step he takes, and I’ve done it for years. I’d better find Mama and tell her good-bye so we can go.”
“Willis and I are leaving, Mom,” he said to Noreen when he found her in her bedroom, sitting on the edge of her bed with her back to the door. “Say, what’s going on here? Seeing him on the air didn’t upset you, did it?”
“You’re so much like him. You stand, sit and walk like him. I don’t want you to ruin some girl’s life like . . .”
She didn’t finish it and she needn’t have. He sat beside her. “I’m as much a part of this and as much a victim of it as you are. I see the results maybe more clearly than either you or he, and I have no intention of fathering a child that I don’t raise. Unless death intervened, it would never happen. Period. So don’t let that enter your head. Now, cheer up. I’ll call you.” He kissed her cheek and loped down the stairs where Willis waited.
“Is she upset?”
“A little, but she’ll snap out of it.”
“Do you think it’s a good time for us to leave?” Willis asked Lucas. “Right now, when she’s upset?”
“She’s not that distraught. Go tell her good-bye.”
Later, sitting in the comfort of his own home, Lucas couldn’t help focusing upon Susan and their strange relationship. When the weather warmed up and she didn’t wear a coat or a suit, would he see her belly protruding? And what if he did?
“Hell! I don’t even want to think about that possibility. I’d hate to take her to court, but that’s where we’d go.”
It occurred to Lucas that he could ask Susan if pregnancy was a possibility, since the passing of three months following their sexual romp was sufficient to verify the presence or absence of conception. His opportunity to do so came sooner than he expected.
One Sunday morning in late January, believing that pools would be empty or nearly so at that time, Susan decided to swim at one of the local hotels. She prided herself on being an excellent swimmer and enjoyed the water, but she had low tolerance for crowded pools. She adjusted the straps of her red bikini swim suit, threw the white terry cloth robe on the white-slatted chaise longue and prepared to dive when she glimpsed Lucas, who was about to do the same.
Like a stalking Adonis, he walked over to her, cataloguing her assets, his gaze ablaze with unmistakable desire. She struggled to shake off the effect of his unexpected presence. Surely the fact that he’d made mind-boggling love to her just once shouldn’
t send shivers throughout her body every time he came near her. She swung around, grabbed her robe and started for the exit, but he placed a heavy hand on her arm.
“Don’t let my presence deprive you of an enjoyable swim. What do you say we dive in together? I’ll race you one length.”
Susan loved a challenge as much as she loved to swim. She threw the robe back on the chaise longue. “Let’s go.”
She didn’t beat him to the end of the pool, but she arrived there only a few strokes behind him. “You’re first class,” she said.
“So are you. Coffee’s pretty good in that coffee shop over there. Want to?”
She was out of breath and didn’t pretend not to be. “All right. I guess I have enough air to walk fifty feet.”
“You’d better. Otherwise, I’ll carry you.”
It occurred to her that they hadn’t previously bantered with each other. Maybe less seriousness would make them less sexually aware. But Lord, looking at him almost bulging out of those bathing trunks wasn’t doing a thing to cool off her libido. At the coffee shop, she sat down quickly, knowing that he would sit and take temptation away from her eyes. Instead, he strolled over to the counter and alerted the waiter.
“I’m glad I ran into you,” Lucas said. “I’ve got something I want to ask you, and I should have asked you some time ago.”
Her antenna shot up. He had already asked her at least twice why she went to bed with him. What could he have in mind? “What’s the question?” she asked him.
He shifted in his chair a little, as if he were preparing himself for a long session. And maybe he was. She realized that, in spite of their intimacies, she knew almost nothing about him, and when his gaze penetrated her with dagger-like sharpness, she began to feel uncomfortable, sliding deeper into his orbit than was good for her.
“What’s the question?” she asked again.
“Is there a likelihood that you could be pregnant?”
Getting Some Of Her Own Page 9
