To all of the folks who are curious about my latest release, here is the entire 1st chapter of the novella. Enjoy and feel free to leave comments.
1
Round Peg,
Square Hole
G
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avin pulled his father’s old revolver with the duct tape wrapped around
the handle from underneath the futon’s run-down mattress. He had been sound
asleep until the racket at his front door abruptly ripped him away from dreams
he couldn’t remember now. He listened with the pistol in his hand as
“You really need to
fix this damn lock,” Angela said as she finally forced the door open. “SHIT!”
she screamed, ducking, holding her head and dropping her schoolbag when she saw
Gavin’s gun aimed at her.
“What the…I nearly
shot you! Why didn’t you knock?” Gavin yelled and quickly stashed the gun back
in its hiding place.
“Because I have a key, remember? You know, the
one you gave me as a symbol of our love, along with permission to show up
anytime I want?” she answered, gathering the books that had slipped out of her
bag and lay scattered all over the apartment floor. Her heart was beating so fast
that she could feel it pounding in her chest.
“Next time, knock
first,” he told her, still shaken up over nearly blowing a hole in his
girlfriend.
“Fix the damn
lock!” she told him again as she stepped inside and closed the door behind her.
“And I told you to get rid of that friggin’ thing! You see how you nearly shot
me?”
“I’m sorry. Now fix
your face. I hate when you pout like that,” he told her as he sat up to the
chorus of crinkling papers.
All over the futon
that served as his bed, loose sheets of lined paper torn from notebooks lay
scattered about with his scribbled chapters all over them. It was a sure sign
that he had a lot on his mind. More and more, writing down his thoughts had
become his only form of therapy whenever the weight of his world threatened to
break his back. Angela put her bag down in the corner and sighed as she looked around
at the chaos. The apartment was as messy as she'd ever seen it. She never
understood how he couldn't keep such a tiny place neat. It wasn't like he lived
in a mansion. She put her hands on her curvy hips while she tried to decide if
she should wash the pile of dirty dishes in the sink or tackle the tangle of
papers first.
“What a mess,” she
said, pulling her long, wild, curly, frizzy natural hair into a puffy ponytail
as she prepared to clear up the loose paper situation first. She hated doing
dishes anyway.
“Like the mess on
your face?” Gavin asked, noticing the black and purple bruise on the side of
her face once her hair was swept back. “If your stepfather…” he started to say.
Angela’s stepdad
had a bad habit of using his hands to talk whenever he felt that words weren’t
enough to get his point across. Her mom didn’t know because Angela refused to
tell her but she had told Gavin about the times she had been backhanded.
“Oh this?” she
asked, pointing to the spot on her cheek that had caught his attention. “Yeah,
it wasn’t him this time. I just made a new best friend in school today is all,”
Angela answered sarcastically.
She had been having
such a horrible week at school that she really didn't want to revisit her most
recent ugly incident. She tried to avoid going into details as she started to
gather the scattered pages before Gavin stopped her.
“Don’t worry about
that. What happened to your face?” he asked.
She pretended to
ignore him until he gripped her by the arm firmly to get her attention.
“I got jumped by
Kiki Weston and her debutante goon-ettes,” Angela answered as Gavin pulled her
to sit down next to him.
“Why’d they jump
you? For what?” he asked, touching the discolored blotch on her face with his
finger.
She winced in pain
as he poked at the tender spot.
“Well, I was
minding my own business after gym class, getting dressed in the locker room and
I overheard Kiki tellin’ her little bitch squad that I was a lesbian,” she
started to explain.
“And then?” he asked,
pressing for more details.
He knew his
girlfriend well enough to know that there was a whole lot more to the story.
“And then, I walked
over to Kiki, grabbed her left tit and squeezed her ass. She’s got a nice one
too by the way. It’s much softer than it looks in her three hundred-dollar
jeans. Anyway, she gets all upset and starts swinging, and then I fought back,
and then I start winning, and then I got jumped,” she continued nonchalantly.
“Looks like you
caught the worst of it,” he joked.
“Oh no sweetie. I
took down her whole punk-ass crew. This only looks bad because I’m so pale. You
should have seen what they looked like when I was done with ‘em. If Mrs.
Schwartz hadn’t stopped it, I think I would have put at least one of ‘em in the
hospital,” she said with a satisfied smile and a gleam in her eyes.
“I can’t believe
I’m in love with a damn goon. You fight too much. You know that that’s very
un-ladylike right?” he laughed.
“Whatever. You love
it though,” she giggled playfully. “With the amount of times I’ve had to fight
my scumbag step-daddy, I better be or I’d be in trouble. AND, I wouldn’t fight
if people didn’t pick on me. All I wanna do is paint and mind my own business.
Anyhow, my goon-ish behavior got me suspended from school for a week.”
“Your mom is gonna
scream your ear off when she finds out you were in another fight,” Gavin warned.
“No, she won’t
because she’ll never find out. The cable and the house phone is off because her
awesome husband hasn’t paid the bill. I’m surprised that bum hasn’t let
the lights get cut off yet. Lazy ass, video-game-all-day-playin’-ass,
grown-ass, can’t-keep-a-job, derelict-ass, piece-of-shit. Anyway, it doesn’t
matter. I’m lookin’ forward to the days off…speaking of which, why haven’t you
shown up to class for two days mister?” she asked as she punched him in the
chest playfully.
“Eh, I just didn’t
feel like goin’. I caught a nice flow with this story I’ve been working on so I
stayed home to work on it,” he explained, picking up one of the loose pages to
show her.
She pushed it away.
“Are you trying to
get yourself in trouble? You’re gonna keep cuttin’ class until they send a
social worker over here. What do you think is gonna happen when they find out
that your dad isn’t around and that you’re here all on your own?” she asked.
“Doesn’t matter.
I’m almost old enough to be on my own legally anyway,” he answered.
“Keyword: ALMOST! I
don’t know why you just don’t call your mom to let her know what’s going on,”
she asked.
“Why would I do
that? The last time we heard from her was when she called to rub it in my dad’s
face that she was pregnant with twin girls for her new man. That was almost
four years ago. Naw, I’m good. I’ll manage on my own,” he answered.
The hurt and
disgust on his face made Angela feel guilty. The pain in his voice hurt her as
well and she was sorry that she had mentioned his mother. She already knew how
Gavin felt about her and cursed herself for speaking without thinking. The
slightest mention of the woman who had given birth to him and then eventually
abandoned him brought about nothing but grief. She knew it was possible that
she might have triggered a dangerous bout of depression for the man she loved.
Sometimes his melancholy moods lasted for days at a time and at their worst,
for weeks. At that moment, she wished that she could have crawled under a rock
and died for being so thoughtless. To make things worse, she knew that he was
deeply missing his father who had died just the month before from a heart
attack. His dad had raised him as a single parent since he was a small boy and
had been the only parent he had ever really known. In a way, she even envied
him because her own father had been killed when she was just a child so she
didn’t know what it was like to have a real dad growing up. Her abusive
stepfather certainly didn’t count and neither did the sick bastard her mother
had been with before him. The closest thing she could equate to Gavin’s loss
was what the living nightmare her life would surely be without her mom.
“I miss your dad
too. He was always kind to me,” she told him, knowing his soul and exactly what
was causing it to ache. He was the one human being that she felt totally in
tune with. “I wish your dad could’ve met my mom instead of my stepfather.”
“I don’t,” he
answered with a smirk.
“Your dad was a
good guy that deserved a good lady so why not? Something wrong with my mom?”
she asked.
“Nothing at all.
Your mom’s pretty hot too but if our parents had hooked up that would have made
us brother and sister and we couldn’t do this!” Gavin answered, grabbing Angela
by the waist.
Before she could
say a word, he had pulled her on top of him.
“Ouch, not so
rough,” she told him as he started to aggressively strip off her clothes.
Her body still
ached in certain places from where she’d taken a beating from Team Weston.
Once her bra was off, she put her breast in his eager mouth. She made a mental
note to remind him to get a shave as his scruffy beard tickled her skin. His
fingers wrestled with the drawstring on her tight grey sweatpants. Once he had
them loose and pulled down to her ankles, his hands found their way to her
plump rear which he proceeded to squeeze. He loved how juicy she was. Her butt
was so big that no matter what size panties she wore, they always seemed a size
too small. She loved the way his hands felt on her body. Angela quickly slipped
out of her underwear while he stepped out of his jeans.
Copyright © 2012 Keith Kareem Williams
All rights reserved
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