I laughed. I mean, I cracked the hell up. My babies? Me…kids? Parenthood for me wouldn’t be for another ten to fifteen years. I thought I’d be the type of father that would be rolled into my child’s high school graduation in a wheelchair because that’s how far off in the distance it would be for me.
“What? What’s so funny?” Zoey frowned. “See, you don’t know the other side of it. You just dribble the ball, smile every once in a while, and show off your fancy tattoos, but there are actually some women…and young girls, who take to that and they include you in their dreams.”
Hmmmm…
“Well…we have no perfect idea of anything but of a perception,” I say under my breath, not intending for her to catch it, per se. No one knows me. They all swore to have wanted to. “People just know what they want to know.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
I glanced over at her. “It means that’s all your cousin told you about me because that’s basically all she wants to know.”
And the fact that I’m paid out the ass.
“No. She knows about your tattoos. She knows what the ones on your arms mean, at least.”
“Yeah,” I said dismissively. “But that’s not the totality of me. She doesn’t know the essence of them. She doesn’t know what ideas they were born out of, the significance of them, where they came from. She has no idea the state of mind I was in when I got them.”
“She knows you’re from Newark,” she argued.
“Yeah, because those are easily obtained facts. But what about truly knowing people for who they are…through conversation and really getting to know them?”
“Well, people don’t have the luxury of opportunity to do that with folks like you. You can only get what’s accessible through Mr. Google. Besides, it’s not like you’re willing to give every interested person the opportunity to get to know you. You’re a celebrity for crying out loud.”
“I can’t be too inaccessible if you’re here, having lunch with me.”
“Yeah,” she rolled her eyes. “But that’s because your bestie over there—”
“I don’t have a bestie,” I cut her off to clarify.
“But you and Alton are always together from what I see.”
“That’s because Alton is a good friend. We’re teammates…partners in many respects, but I don’t have a best friend.”
“Well, that makes two of us,” she uttered with her chin slightly in the air, appearing stubborn, and cute as hell.
“Angela isn’t your best friend?”
She shrugged, still not facing me. “Angela has been my partner for years, but we’re not the same people, we just have the same goal.”
“Which is?” My interest was piqued.
There was a long pause. “I don’t want to get into that.” She picked up her fork. “Let’s just eat.” Then, with her head still toward her plate, her eyes coyly rolled up to me. “Oh, and I won’t be using Google to get to know you.”
Amused, I chuckled at that one as she ate her food. Did that mean she’d be trying to get to know me?
So fucking cute…
~~~~~~~~~~