“Zee,” he groaned. “Damn …”
“I know,” she said. “I know …”
He felt her coming, even before she cried out and her fingers dug into his shoulders. Wanting to see her face, Deuce opened his eyes again and looked up just in time to see her grimace and throw her head back. A shard of moonlight entered the car and illuminated her long, slender and exposed throat.
Her dark skin was, in that moment, golden.
Deuce’s friend, Pat, was giving a terrible rendition of The Delfonics’ ‘Didn’t I Blow Your Mind?’ and the two girls who had been hanging on him all evening were attempting to sing back-up. Zora laughed, stretching her legs out in front of her, reclining between Deuce’s widespread knees and against his chest. Maybe it was the weed, or more likely the interlude in his car, but she felt comfortable there. She even felt comfortable in the bedroom of this guy she didn’t know from a can of paint, listening to him sing karaoke to songs she would never have imagined he knew about in the first place.
Occasionally, Deuce shifted and she thought she felt his semi-turgid dick against her butt. And because he kept shifting, she was inclined to believe that that was precisely what it was. She couldn’t even believe she had done it—just screwed him in his car outside of a party.
It wasn’t the kind of thing she did, habitually. Rashad took complete charge of their sex-life, and would have balked at anything that risqué. He was hyper-attentive to this idea he had in his head that she should never be treated with anything other than complete respect. It was a value Zora appreciated, but sometimes it didn’t leave room for spontaneity of the type she’d indulged in tonight with Deuce.
And why the hell was she thinking of Rashad now, anyway? They were done, and she was having fun. She was … what was that phrase Deuce used? She was shedding expectations. Just for now. In a week and a half, they would be back in school and Zora would resume the strictures imposed on her by her position on campus. But for now, this was good.
Deuce was laughing as Pat messed up a high-note, and Zora felt his chest rumbling against her back as he did.
“You think you can do better, nigga?”
She tensed, waiting for Deuce’s reaction to his unmistakably non-Black friend calling him by a name that was reserved only for those of the darker hue. But there was none. Instead, he only laughed louder.
“Put on some Teddy P,” he said. “I’ll sing the hell outta some Teddy Pendergrass.”
“Who?” one of the other girls asked, wrinkling her brow. She was a blonde, almost painfully skinny but undeniably very pretty, who had been giving Deuce the eye all night. She didn’t do it directly, but with her peripheral vision, occasionally using her hair-toss as an excuse to turn her head in his direction. Her interest in Deuce made Zora feel possessive, not just on her own behalf, but on behalf of all Black women. But Deuce’s hands, even now on her shoulders and her waist, and sliding along the length of her thighs couldn’t seem to stay still. So Zora knew that despite what happened back in his car, he still wanted her. If she was reading his body correctly, there was nothing further from his mind than the skinny blonde chick giving him the eye.
Black girl magic, bitch, she thought smugly.
And then she felt badly for thinking anything like that, because the poor girl couldn’t help it if Deuce was fine as hell, could she? Damn, she had to be drunk. Because why else would she be looking to start a race war up in this boy’s house?
“Here’s some Teddy P for yo’ ass,” Pat said, cuing something up on the karaoke machine. His face was florid and sweaty from all the drinking he’d been doing, his eyes bloodshot from all the weed he smoked.
Zora moved so that Deuce could get up and take control of the mic. Clearing his throat, he looked at the monitor.
“Yeah,” he said. “This is my shit right here …”
The strains that signaled the start of Teddy Pendergrass’ ‘You’re My Latest, My Greatest Inspiration’ began. Prepared to be amused, Zora leaned back on her extended arms smiling as she watched Deuce circle his neck as though loosening up for a title boxing match. Pat came and collapsed on the floor next to her, and Deuce began to sing.
Almost immediately, the smile melted from her face.
Deuce had a rich and deep speaking voice, but his singing … Zora would have been floored, if she wasn’t already sitting on one. He was good. Even Pat, who had been poised to ridicule him seemed to be struck silent.
“Oh. My. God,” one of the other girls said.
But Zora was too riveted to take her eyes off Deuce who similarly, seemed not to be able to take his eyes off her. Zora’s stomach tightened, and when he got to the lyrics ‘And I'm thankful, yes, I'm blessed just to know you …’ she thought she might pass out.
“Goddamn,” Pat whispered next to her. “This shit is rigged.”
One of the girls laughed. “You can’t rig karaoke!”
“He’s from a musical family!” Pat protested.
Everyone held their breath when he got to the end of the song and hit that last note. And damned if he didn’t pull it off. Zora stared, feeling the start of a tiny pulse between her legs.
When the music faded to silence, Deuce tore his gaze from Zora’s and looked instead at Pat. Holding up the mic, he opened his fingers and let it drop.
“How ya like me now?” he asked, his face deathly serious. “Nigga.”
Zora’s eyes widened. Hearing the steely irony in his voice, she realized that what she’d assumed earlier could not have been further from the truth. Deuce did notice Pat’s use of the word. And he hadn’t liked it any more than she had.
By the time Deuce felt he was sobered up enough to drive, it was after three in the morning and Zora knew there was no way she would be able to go rolling up to her house and stumbling in with marijuana-face. So instead she texted her brother and told him she was crashing with one of her high school friends, and that he should smooth things over with their parents. For himself, Deuce had to text his mother, and then together, they headed back to his father’s house.
They didn’t speak for the first few minutes after they settled on that solution. As he drove, heavy in the air was the knowledge that she and Deuce would be for-real ‘spending the night together.’ Zora felt her heart beating in her chest as fast and hard as though they hadn’t already turned each other out a few times now.
“That was fun,” she said, her voice hoarse with nerves.
“Yeah. Pat’s always good for that.”
“And y’know what?” She turned in her seat as much as the seatbelt allowed. “You can like, really sing. I mean, no kidding around …”
“Thank you,” he said easily.
“Seriously,” Zora said, hand on his thigh. “I mean, you can sing.”
He glanced over at her. “Thank you,” he said again.
She shook her head. “You think I’m just saying it because you didn’t completely butcher Teddy P.”
“No, I hear you,” he said. “I just don’t … care about performing.”
Zora nodded, watching him.
In profile, he was even more handsome. The lines and sureness of his jaw were emphasized, as was the strong, solid column of his neck. He was clean-shaven, so looking at him straight-on, he was almost pretty. But from this vantage point, she could see the man he was, and the man he would become. He would only grow better-looking with age. His nose had a high and narrow ridge, and his lips were full and sensual while still masculine. It was difficult to look at them without wanting to kiss him.
“So, you’re not going to be looking for a record deal with your father’s company, huh?” she teased.
“Nope,” he said, his tone a little short.
The car fell silent again and Zora touched his thigh. Deuce looked at her, and shrugged.
“The entertainment business,” he began. “It’s not … it’s not what people think it’s like. All that stuff you see on TV, that’s not even … It’s different than you think.”
&nb
sp; “Okay, so what’s it really like?”
“Lots of fake shit,” Deuce said, almost scornfully. “It brings out the worst in some people.”
“No plans to work in the family business then?”
He looked at her. “I didn’t say all that.”
“So, you will work in the fake-ass entertainment business after all?” she asked laughing.
“Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.”
“No. Tell me.” She touched his arm.
“There’s the music entertainment business and then there’s the music business. They don’t have to be the same. They’re not always.”
“Okay …”
“The way the entertainment business is set up, they intertwine a lot. Sometimes too much,” Deuce explained. “So, the music part of it gets lost. Overshadowed. And the real artists sometimes get overshadowed as well.”
Turning a little in her seat so she could keep her eyes on him, Zora nodded, prompting him to continue.
“So yeah, I’d want to work in my father’s company but what I’d want to do is curate. Y’know what I mean? Find the artists who’re advancing the art, not just selling a lot of records. I mean, something like that would probably mean a loss, maybe even a big loss at least at first, but the trick would be to gain a following. Small to begin with, but …”
“Wait. Something like what?”
He was talking faster, because it was obviously a subject that excited him, something he cared about.
“A label. A small, specialty label, that looks for the real deal. Not just the folks we can package and sell because they have good hair and a passable voice.”
Zora smiled at the phrase “good hair.”
“That sounds amazing,” she said truthfully.
Deuce glanced away from the road and at her. “Yeah, but the part where it would take a loss? That’s the tricky part. I’d have to sell that one real hard to my father. He doesn’t like to lose. At anything.”
Shrugging, Zora reached out and touched his arm again. “But the good news is that he’s your father. So you have to have some inside knowledge about what he would find persuasive.”
“Hard work. That’s it. He respects hard work. He came up with and from nothing, and made a multi-million-dollar company. All he respects is blood, sweat and tears.”
“Then I guess you’ll have to find a way to demonstrate some of that.”
Deuce looked at her again, and Zora shrugged again. “Right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Right.”
“So …” she said after a few moments. “How do you plan to sneak me into your room?”
Turned out, sneaking wasn’t necessary. The large house was as quiet as a tomb when they pulled through the front gates and up to the front door. But once Deuce shut off the engine and got out of the SUV, motion-sensing lights activated nearby.
“Shit,” he mumbled. “Forgot about those.”
Holding her hand, he led her along the side of the house, toward the back and through another entrance. Moments later, they were treading quietly and carefully up the wide and imposing staircase. Once they were in his room—if it could be called that—at the end of the hall, Deuce shut the door and leaned against it. Then he tugged Zora toward him, and looped an arm around her waist.
“I want you again,” he breathed against the shell of her ear, the tip of his nose brushing her skin.
Turning her head, Zora answered by sweeping her lips across his. “Then have me.”
Chapter 5
Zora removed her shoes and put her bare feet up on the dashboard, humming along to the low and mournful strains of Joni Mitchell. The heated seats in Deuce’s SUV made her eyelids and limbs heavy, and her thoughts sluggish. She was still tired, having gotten very little sleep the night before. His fault. She glanced at Deuce out of the corner of her eye and wondered whether she should have declined the invitation to drive with him to Bedford, New York where his mother lived.
She’s pissed, Deuce confided. Said I haven’t spent enough time at home this Break.
And when Zora told him that probably wasn’t the time to bring some girl along, he insisted that his mother wouldn’t care that much; that she just needed to know he was close by, and then would basically leave them to do their own thing.
Zora still shouldn’t have agreed to come. But she was getting used to it now—the routine where she kept telling herself not to spend this much time with Deuce and then being unable to follow through.
“How much longer?”
“Just enjoy the ride, Zee. We’re almost there.”
“You said that like thirty minutes ago.”
“I’m drivin’ slow, that’s all. It’s not that much farther.”
“Why are you driving so slow?”
“You never heard of black ice? And take your smelly-ass feet off my dashboard.”
“You kissed these smelly feet night before last,” she reminded him in a sing-song voice. “I think you even sucked these smelly-ass toes.”
“I was drunk,” he said. “Really drunk.”
Zora laughed and nudged him in the arm. “You were not. You were completely coherent. You told me I tasted like honey … and that you …”
“Yeah, yeah. Shut up.”
Zora looked at him, and he was looking back at her, biting his lower lip to smother a grin.
“You always this silly?” he asked.
Zora shook her head. “No. Actually, I’m never this silly,” she said truthfully. “Only with you for some reason.”
“That’s right. You and your crew walk around campus like Black Panthers … all serious like this …” Deuce mimicked a scowl.
Zora tried to smile, but she didn’t want to think about campus, and she didn’t want to think about her “crew.”
She could only imagine what they would all think of her being with someone like Deuce, even casually, even temporarily.
“Prepare me for your mother,” she said sitting up. “What’s she like? How did she and your Dad meet?”
She let her feet drop to the floor and Deuce reached over, placing a hand on her thigh, high on her leg. So close … and yet so far.
“She can be tough sometimes,” he said. His hand on her leg was moving back and forth, stealing toward her inner thigh, and then away again. “But she’s pretty cool.”
“And how’d she and your father meet?”
At that question, Deuce gave her one of the looks he sometimes gave her, where she could tell he was wondering whether he should answer, or be more guarded about family details. It was probably one of the hazards of having a famous parent.
“Sorry. That sounds like I’m prying. I always like to hear those stories … love stories. I guess because my parents met through an arranged marriage.”
“For real?” Deuce sounded skeptical.
“Yup.” Zora nodded. “Not like her parents sold her for a hundred cows kind of thing, but yeah, it was arranged.”
“How’d that happen?”
“My mom grew up in Chicago. She was NOI…”
“NOI?”
“Nation of Islam.”
“Oh. Right.”
“And then when she came to New York for college, she learned more about mainstream Islam, and became a Sunni and started going to a local mosque. After she’d been there a while, the imam approached her, and told her about a young man he met, who he said he thought would be a good husband for her. A devout man, who was walking the right path.”
“And so just like that, she married him?”
“No. She said she wasn’t into it at first because after all, she’s still a modern American girl, right? And then she said one night she had a dream where someone was talking to her. She said she didn’t even remember what he said, but the voice stuck with her because it was so … stirring, so compelling.”
“Okay …”
“And then three weeks later, when she had just about forgotten the dream, she was eating in a restaurant with a girlfriend and the
waiter came over to take their order. She said when he said good evening, she immediately recognized it as the voice from her dream. So she became curious about him, asked his name, and talked to him a little while they were there in the restaurant. Turned out he was Muslim too. And worshipped at the same mosque as her.
“They agreed to stay in touch. Just to keep talking. And a few days after that, she found out he was the young man the imam spoke to her about. The young man he said should be her husband. So my mom decided that there were too many signs, too many coincidences, and that Allah had put this man in her path, to be her husband. And a month later, they got married.” Zora shrugged when she was done.
“You’re making that up,” Deuce said.
“Nope. Totally true story.”
“Well I hate to disappoint you, but my parents don’t have anything like that. Theirs is about as far from a love story as you can get,” he added.
“They don’t get along?”
Deuce made a scoffing sound. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“My parents’ story isn’t much of a love story either,” Zora said, shaking her head. “They’ve been separated for years, pretty much. My father’s from Senegal, very conservative, wanted a submissive wife, had all these ideas about marriage that my mother, I don’t think could buy into. They kind of live together, I guess … they share the same house and bed when my father’s in the country. But they’re separate. They don’t understand each other, and they’ve basically stopped trying.” She shrugged again. “But anyway, that’s why I like hearing love stories about other people’s parents. The opposite of everything I saw at home when I was growing up.”
“Did they fight a lot?”
“Not at all, actually. My father would never raise his voice at my mom. Would never disrespect her. He’s a devout man, just like that imam said. But the distance … I think that’s just as painful, probably. My parents, they’re both … they seem so … lonely when they’re together.”
Young, Rich & Black Page 6
