“Tyler ,”
he answered. He felt like a kid who
waited for his first kiss from his sweetheart after school. His stomach twisted uncontrollably like some
gnarled, mishap tree from a twisted forest.
He had no idea what to expect once the door opened.
“I almost thought you wasn’t comin’,” she
told him as she unlocked her apartment door.
“I wouldn’t do that to you,” he said and
tried to look everywhere else but at the feminine figure that held the door
open for him. At first the door had hid
half of her from him but now he could see how little her tight jeans shorts
covered. As he stepped inside, from the
corner of his eye he followed her body, from her bare feet, up her tan, creamy
thighs to where the short-shorts stopped.
Her hair was out and brushed against her shoulders just enough to tickle. He believed that she must have heard his
heart as it drummed heavily, methodically, rapidly in his chest.
“I was about to go to sleep,” she said
and gently closed the door. Now, Tyler was confused and
wondered if she was wearing what she was wearing because she was expecting his
company or because she was really on her way to bed. Her brown nipples showed through the short,
white T-shirt that barely covered them and completely exposed her tummy. He stared at her and whether it was her
intention or not, Tracy
had succeeded in pushing Deborah just a little farther back in his mind.
“So what happened with your father?” she
asked as she sat close to him and wrapped her arm around his shoulder. The long hours since that meeting with his
father had given him time to cool off so the question annoyed him far less than
it had earlier. Besides, regardless of
his mood, the soothing tone in her voice and her fingers massaging the back of
his neck would have made him tell her anything
“I guess he came around to give me
fatherly advice or maybe make up for lost time.”
“So what’s wrong with that?” she asked
and looked into his face with a mischievous smile.
“Too late for all that. Me and Shamar been livin’ without him for so
long I don’t think we can ever be close to him.”
“Well, I ain’t gonna act like I could understand
that,” she replied softly. Her voice
seemed to be tainted by an old sadness she had never quite been cured of.
“What’s hard to understand?” Tyler asked. He could actually feel the sea of subdued
sadness that poured from her and filled the room.
“Me and my father was real close. I still miss him so much,” she told Tyler . Her lips trembled and her eyes began to
water. She quickly covered her face with
her shaky hands.
“I’m sorry,” he said and pulled her
hands away from her face. He wiped away the
tears that had fallen down her cheeks and a warm kiss stopped any more from
falling. After their lips separated she
looked at him, surprised by the method he chose to calm her down. She hugged him and rubbed the side of her
face against his chest and felt his heartbeat.
Tyler
closed his eyes and leaned his head back as she moved slowly, seductively, like
a kitten in his lap.
“I think about Daddy every day. I know that Ma does too even though she try
not to let me see it but I know. She
can’t hide it from me. I can see it in
her face and in her eyes every time she walks through the door and knows that
he isn’t gonna be there. I wish he could
have held little Stacy in his arms even though, he probably would have wanted
to kill me when I got pregnant.”
“Why?
I remember your father as the most easy-going man I’d ever met. I ain’t never seen him upset.”
“Be for real. Me getting’ pregnant at my age would have
ranked right up there with my brother Sean getting’ locked up.”
“I almost forgot you even had a big
brother.”
“That’s how long Sean been locked
up. I hardly know him no more except for
the letters he sends sometimes. He been
there so long he don’t even send those too much no more.”
“You gettin’ pregnant ain’t as bad as
your brother doin’ a stretch bid in prison.”
“That’s what you think. And, to make things worse, look who I got
pregnant for. My father would never have
let me and Remy be together.”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t like
Remy either. Never did. Somethin’ about him I don’t like. I mean, I know he’s your baby’s father and I
don’t know him that good but I know I ain’t feelin’ him.”
“My father liked him though. Matter of fact, Ma said that after my brother
got locked up it was like Daddy adopted Remy.
Maybe because Sean and Remy was real close at one time I guess Daddy
wanted Remy close to him to remind him of Sean.”
“If your father liked Remy so much, what
was the problem with him being your man?”
Tyler
asked.
“Daddy knew Remy liked me. He even caught us kissing once. I thought he would have killed us when I
looked in his eyes but he didn’t say much.
He calmly asked Remy to leave and didn’t speak to me for at least a
month. I can honestly say that it was
the worst month of my life except for the first month after he died. I cried whenever he walked past me without
saying anything until, eventually, he couldn’t take it anymore. When he finally did speak to me he said
something about not wanting me to end up with ‘men like us,’ was his statement.”
“The way Remy turned out, I can see
where your father was comin’ from.”
“I know my father used to gamble. Sometimes he’d win and sometimes he’d lose
but I don’t think he was into nothin’ like Remy. He did what he could to make sure that me and
Ma was all right but I’m sure he ain’t do half the shit Remy done did. After the time Daddy threw Remy out for
kissin’ me, Remy started to change towards him but no matter what, Daddy still
loved him like a son. I’m sure Remy
loved him too but maybe he was hurt when Daddy wouldn’t let him see me.”
“But if your mother knew your father
didn’t want you with Remy, how come she let it happen anyway?”
“When my father died, part of my mother
died with him. She ain’t hardly have
strength to do nothin’. She ain’t pay
attention to Remy always bein’ around because she thought he was just tryin’ to
help us out. When she found out I was
pregnant, she was hurt but she tried not to let it show. She just worked things out with me as best
she could. She didn’t want to loose me
too I guess. She loves her granddaughter
but I don’t think she likes Remy that much.”
“Are you into Remy that much?” Tyler
asked.
“I love Remy,” Tracy answered, her eyes filled with devotion
and somewhat shaky certainty.
“Are you sure?” Tyler
asked immediately. He doubted her words
and the conviction in her voice. Her
response, hollow as it seemed, stuck an invisible pin in his chest.
“Of course I’m sure. What kind of question is that?” Her demeanor became like that of a sick
patient who wanted to hide obvious symptoms of sickness from a physician.
“So why am I here?” he asked but silence
followed instead of a response. The
recent turbulence in his life, in a short time, had transformed him into
something totally different than what he had been. He started to feel Tracy the way she seemed to be feeling him
and as he thought about the way she looked at him, he believed he could be the
remedy for her sickness. The light in
her eyes along with thoughts of her thighs infected his mind. The heat of her body against his started to
convince him that she could be his cure as well.
“Tyler ,
you know sometimes I dream,” she started to say.
“Everybody does,” he interrupted.
“And sometimes I have this dream that
I’m flyin’,” she continued. “I’m flyin’
high above everything here and I look down and I understand everything. I always get scared though because it feels
like when them people say they die and leave their bodies.”
“You mean them people who say they died
but then came back?”
“Yeah, somethin’ like that, but you know
the thing that freaks me out? No matter
what I see at first when I’m up there, I always end up over this big trash
dump.”
“A trash dump?”
“Yeah.
And then when I look down, on top of all the garbage, I always see a
naked, dirty, little plastic doll with its head broken off, laying beside its
body. In my dream, after I see it there
broken and tossed aside, it always starts to rain and I wake up crying.”
“Why?
That’s not so scary?” Tyler
asked.
“Because I feel like that broken doll on
that pile sometimes,” she answered as tears filled her eyes and as her voice
trembled like straw in the wind, she buried her face in his lap. He gently stroked the back of her neck as she
cried. Then, he lifted her face as he
held her chin and examined her tear-soaked cheeks. He smiled and then wet his fingers with her
tears as he wiped her face with his hand.
She grabbed him and washed away his unseen tears with her warm mouth as
she kissed him softly but passionately.
When they finally broke from the kiss, both their chests heaved heavily
and blood pumped furiously through their bodies. Tracy threw
her legs over his and sat in Tyler ’s
lap, face-to-face with him. While she
lowered the thin straps of her night dress to expose her full, voluptuous
breasts, he lifted the back of it and firmly gripped her behind. As his lips began with soft pecks on her neck
and then chest, they worked together with his hands to explore her curvaceous,
femininely soft, sensuous body. She held
his head with both hands, leaned her head back and moaned softly. Their bodies together caused them both to
burn with a fever that had only one cure.
She began to rotate her hips and rock slowly in his lap. As he became drunk off the rhythm of her body
he moved with her. She put both hands on
his chest and leaned him back further in the couch as he teased her and tugged
gently on her panties. Tracy lifted his shirt with her teeth and
tasted his chest with her tongue before she lay flat against him, her hard
nipples pressed against him. He hugged
her while her hands steadily moved towards his belt. She stroked his stomach lightly with her
fingers after she opened his pants but then, because life, and emotions are
unpredictable, she stopped herself. The
better times she remembered with Remy still held her in shackles and as she
thought of the daughter she bore him, she touched her own stomach. As hot as she was at the moment, the ice-cold
traces of loyalty that ran through her could not be burned out or melted away.
“Tyler ,”
she whispered, unable to hide the pain in her voice and not certain how to tell
him that she needed to stop.
“I know,” he answered. He tried to avoid forcing her to explain
something she probably didn’t know how to.
The sudden change that had come over her was more powerful than if she
had screamed for him to stop.
“It’s just that,” she started to
apologize while she held his face tenderly in her hands as if he was made of
glass.
“Shh,” he told her before he kissed the
palm of her hand. “I should leave.” Neither one of them said anything as they
fixed their clothes and avoided each other’s eyes. They didn’t speak as they walked to the
apartment door and silence still reigned as Tracy let him out. After the door closed, she leaned against it
on her side, completely oblivious to the fact that he lingered on his side,
wanting her but lacking the voice to say so.
Copyright
© 2009 Keith Kareem Williams. All rights reserved.
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