“Come on over here,” he said. “Let me see you.”
She inched a little bit closer but stopped midway at the computer desk and leaned over to check her email.
He told himself to calm down. He had waited this long, he could go a few minutes longer.
“What?” he said, her back to him. “You nervous?”
She giggled, then turned around, twirling the ends of her long black hair. He looked at her, really looked at her, the smooth chestnut skin, the straight white teeth, the big lips. He’d like to get those lips around his—
“No, I’m not nervous,” she said. She had such a sweet voice. Alicia’s, on the other hand, was so low she got mistaken for a man on the telephone sometimes. Alicia carried herself like a grown woman was the thing, and her voice was just a part of that.
“Come over here,” he repeated, stretching out his long thin fingers.
She came but with reluctance and sat on the bed beside him, not on his lap where he had wanted her.
“Let’s just talk for a little bit,” she said.
“We been talking though,” T.C. said. If it had been any other day, he would have bit his tongue, but the truth was all they had done was talk. He called her more than he called his own MawMaw, and more times than not she would answer. Sometimes when they’d run the distance of their normal topics, her classes at UNO, how they would touch each other when the time came, she would just sit on the phone and breathe. That had been plenty for him then, but now—
“What you wanna talk about?” he asked, sighing.
“I don’t know. How was your day?”
He laughed. He couldn’t help it. “How was my day? You know I just got home from jail, right?”
She nodded.
“You know that then? So my day was nothing. I woke up, ate breakfast, stood up for roll call, I got processed out, now I’m here with you.”
“You glad to see me then?” She smiled. She was teasing him now, seeming more comfortable.
“Hell, yeah, I’m glad to see you.”
She started tracing her fingers along his chest. He wanted more than anything to move her hand down, but he restrained himself.
“Tell me again how glad you are to see me,” she said.
He felt himself relax inside. This was the girl he knew, the girl who’d let him sneak his hand inside her jeans but wouldn’t let him see what he was feeling. From what she’d been saying on the phone though, she was ready for the real thing.
She got on her knees and straddled him. It was on now. He pulled her down, closer to him, kissing her, his hands fumbling with her clothes in an awkward fever. It wasn’t his style. Alicia used to tell him that he made love like a woman. He didn’t like to hear it that way, but he knew what she meant, that he took his time, that he used his mouth, that he treated her body like it was holy ground, but this was a different story and one he would have to make up for later.
He flipped her on her back and climbed on top. He was startled by how slender her waist was, her titties round as buttermilk drops from McKenzie’s before they closed down. He put them in his mouth one by one, alternating back and forth, feeling finally as if he was at home in his body, as if God had put her here with him now as an apology, and He was forgiven, for the half-crazy mother, the runaway father, the learning disability, the deferred basketball dreams. Sometimes in his early-morning thoughts he believed that God was condoning his drug activity. Where else would such pure inspiration have come from, the carefully laid-out plans? And he’d become angry with his Maker when he was caught, as if he’d been betrayed by the true author of the crime, but now all was forgiven. In this world, even if he hadn’t come in as a completed man, he had been made one now.
“My turn,” she said, and she eased her face down, down, down. His dick was throbbing now with the weight of the urge inside him. Ordinarily this was his favorite part, but there was something about this girl’s titties that wouldn’t let him go, that seemed to contain the whole of existence inside them, and if he could just stay connected—
She didn’t have to pick his dick up to slide it in her mouth, it was already upright. She wrapped her big lips around it and bobbed her head up and down, up and down. She had done this before. He didn’t have many more bobs left in him. After that, he would put his mouth between her legs. That wasn’t his thang. He didn’t love the smell of pussy and it seemed to always be there, lurking, no matter how clean the girl was, but she was earning it right now. She was giving him life and any minute a fraction of that very force was going to burst inside her.
He was so enshrined in the world of her bedroom he didn’t hear the knocks, and it wasn’t until Bon Bon yanked her mouth from him that he realized they had been sounding for some time. It must have been her goddamn mama, but Bon Bon would know what to shout to send her off, and in a minute they could get back to business.
Sure enough, Bon Bon yelled through the door, “Not now,” but she darted around the room for her clothes too, sliding into her panties and some shorts. Before she could slip her top over her head, the door burst open and a man as big as T.C. was tall busted in. T.C. froze; he was still acclimating to the knocks let alone this new disruption, and he didn’t know enough to search for his boxers, pull them over his dick, which was straight as an arrow despite everything.
“What the fuck is going on here?” the man shouted. He reached over to her desk and slammed her computer off it. T.C. heard it land with a crack. Then the man walked over to her drawers, pulled the top one out, turned it over, and emptied her socks, panties, and bras onto the floor. A receipt floated out too, drifted to the carpet. T.C. eyed it; whatever it had been for cost only $13.10, but for some reason Bon Bon had kept it.
Finally T.C. snapped back to attention, repeating the man almost verbatim. “What the fuck is going on?”
Bon Bon didn’t say anything. She had managed to slide her shirt on. She tossed T.C. his pants, and he stepped into them, his eyes on the maniac in front of him, whose green eyes lit up as if they were electric.
“It’s not what it looks like, baby,” Bon Bon said, but T.C. wasn’t sure which one of them she was talking to. He had decided once he got his clothes on, he was going to bolt for the door. Tiger would have just made it back to the Ninth Ward, but this was an emergency. This mothafucka was crazy, there was no doubt about that, and Bon Bon, just watching him ransack the place as if he came over every Saturday to throw her shit around, must have been nuts too.