“You ain’t even answered my question.”
He smells like eggnog even though it’s past Christmas and I’m not sure if I like it or not. Tony’s had a thing for me for months, ever since he and Marcus became friends, and he’s the only guy who has ever asked me a question and wanted to hear my answer. I let him try to hold my hand when he comes over, but I still don’t understand him, why he can’t seem to let me go when I’ve never given him a reason to hold on.
“I don’t know if I’m busy, Tony, I got other shit to worry about.”
I gaze into my lap, stare at my hands. Even with Marcus’s belts gaining volume and Tony’s stare carving into my face, his fingers tracing my arm, I can’t seem to think about anything but my fingers. I used to keep my nails real long, pointed. I’d gnaw on them to make sure the tip was just right, like talons.
Now I’m itching to hide my hands or maybe sit on them, but I know that would make Tony nervous, make him think I was hiding from him, so instead I keep them in my lap. The nails are jagged, ripped along the edges. They look naked, defenseless, like the kind of nails six-year-olds have when they too busy playing cops and robbers to remember they gotta be ready for all the real cops and robbers.
“Okay,” Tony says, his mouth close enough to my cheek that I can feel his breath. “I’ll talk to Marcus if you come over tonight.”
I tilt my head to look at Tony and his eyes are doe-like, hopeful. He is a hulk of something subtle and soft and I don’t think nobody else in this room has ever listened to my breath like he does.
“I guess,” I say, dipping out from under his arm. Cole opens his eyes at my movement and lifts his headphones from his ears.
“Where you goin’, Ki? You tired of us already?” Cole shows his whole grill.
“You know I’m never tired of you.” I smile at him. “Saw the baby, she real cute.”
Cole sits up straighter against the couch, stops smiling and replaces the expression with a mellow kind of wonder, dreaming with his eyes open.
“Yeah, she beautiful.”
Marcus comes back out from the recording booth to grab another beer, snickers, his eyebrows springing up. “If only yo girl could get it together and stop complaining.”
Shauna’s face flashes in my mind, her eye hunger and her moans. Cole emerges from his daze and lets out a noise, not a sound of agreement, but not a defense either. Marcus’s tattoo is squirming again, trying to spring out of his skin. He looks toward me, the two of us the only ones standing.
“You leaving?” I’m not used to him all eyes on me like this, his lips puffing like a pre-tantrum child, like he don’t want me to leave.
“Thinkin’ about it,” I tell him.
He tilts the can back and empties it into his throat. “Come here.” He leads me back into the recording booth, turning to look at me. I watch him, my arms growing bumps, hair standing up, like they just remembered how bare they are behind the glass, without Tony’s body heat.
“You don’t gotta leave,” he says.
“Why you care?” Sometimes, when I’m with Marcus, I revert to my ten-year-old little-sister self staring up at my big brother, to who I was before all our shit got messy, before my fingernails started ripping and Marcus decided he needed a beat more than he needed my hand to hold.
Marcus grimaces, his jaw winding up so it can unleash itself and suddenly my fingerprint is moving, roaring on his neck. “What you mean? I gotta care, Ki. I’m doing this ’cause I’m gonna get us a whole different life, like Uncle Ty. You just gotta trust me, aight? Give me one month to drop the album. You can handle one month, yeah?”
Marcus is better at talking than he’s ever been at rapping and this is no different. My fingerprint has found legs and is moving quicker than his breath.
“One month.”
I let him pull me into a hug that feels more like a choke than a goodbye.
On the other side of the glass, Tony and Cole are chuckling about something, punching each other and acting like they ain’t been listening to us. Tony sees me and lights up.
“I gotta go,” I say.
“You coming over later, though?” His height contrasts with the childlike demeanor, the boy waiting for his reward. I know it ain’t right to let him keep doing this, hoping I’m ever going to lean into his chest for anything more than warmth. I start walking toward the door that leads back to Shauna, the stairs, the city.
“Maybe,” I tell him, pausing to watch Marcus inside the glass for one last verse.
He’s standing there, tilting side to side, beginning to rhyme, and I catch only one thing before I exit: My bitches don’t know nothing, don’t know nothing. I am trying to decipher the fallacies in that, the torn edges of memories that may belong to his words, but all I find is nothing, don’t know nothing. Nothing.
Shauna is still moaning in the basement, leaning over to grab a breast pump from the floor. I don’t say anything, but I bend over to pick up a pair of soiled boxers, making a pile for Cole’s dirty clothes and moving the pillows from the floor back to the sinking couch. Shauna looks up at me and we make eye contact. There is something in her face that makes me think she’s lonely, but I don’t know what it is; maybe the way her forehead creases like she don’t trust my hands. Maybe the way she stops moaning when I begin to help, like the only thing trying to push its way out of her body was stale breath.
“You don’t gotta help,” she says, her voice a steady monotone, only breaking with a slight drawl. I knew Shauna when we were more girls than women, shortly after she came out here from Memphis to live with her sister and her aunt, and I almost forgot the sweet homesound that creeps out her lips.
“Don’t got nothing else to do.” I glance inside the crib, a small mound of cloth holding the infant. “How old?”
“She about to be two months.”
I nod, not really sure what else there is to say about the baby’s smallness. I think about the photo from the funeral home and wonder if Shauna ever thinks about how easy it is to stop breathing, to be something and then be gone, to love someone and disappear.
Shauna moves to pick up her child and walks to the couch, her sweatpants rolled down around her hips with her belly bulging. She sits, sinking in deeper until she’s cocooned in the couch’s soft red, like her baby is cocooned in her breasts. Shauna swiftly pulls her bra to the side and the child latches, sucking in deep like she was starving and is relearning how to be alive, how to feed. I think about looking away, but it doesn’t seem like Shauna minds and the infant’s lips are fascinating, the way they pulse. Shauna’s eyes are still on her girl, sucking so hard I wonder how she isn’t out of breath. Shauna’s free nipple is dry and scabbed, but there is no evidence of this pain on her face, no worry of being cracked open.
“Kiara.” I don’t remember the last time she said my full name. I look at her, the lumps beneath her eyes heavy. “Don’t get caught up in their shit.”
She’s still staring at her child, like the baby will choke if she looks away, so I’m not sure what she’s talking about until the beat picks up and vibrates through my feet.
“You didn’t have to have no baby.”
Her head whips toward me. “You don’t know nothing about what I’ve had to do. I’m just doing you a favor by telling you now not to give it all up for them.” Her child stops suckling and begins to scream, and Shauna is on her feet, returning to her moaning, waiting for someone to ask, for one of the men to look at her, to wonder what’s wrong.
Mama used to tell me that blood is everything, but I think we’re all out here unlearning that sentiment, scraping our knees and asking strangers to patch us back up. I don’t say goodbye to Shauna and she doesn’t even turn around to watch me leave, to head back out to a sky that sunk into deep blue while my brother asked me to do the one thing I know I shouldn’t, the one thing Shauna cared enough to warn me about: hollow myself out for another person who ain’t gonna give a shit when I’m empty.