Afterburn: a novel

by Zane

  “Sounds like a winner to me.”

  She kissed me on the lips and climbed off me. “I’m going to run us a bath. Come join me in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Rayne disappeared into my bedroom and the phone rang, as if on cue.

  “Hello. This better be important,” I said, not even knowing who it was.

  “Hey, man. It’s me, Felix.”

  It had been several months since I’d spoken to Felix. I was pissed at him when he’d called Rayne out of her name at my parents’ anniversary party. He was the last person that needed to be commenting about anything.

  “Yardley, you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I’m a bit early but I wanted to wish you a happy birthday tomorrow,” he said.

  “I’m surprised you remembered.”

  I sat down on my sofa as an uncomfortable silence ensued.

  Felix sighed on the other end of the phone. “Of course, I remembered. Are you forgetting that the boys and I gave you a party for your sixteenth birthday? I remembered your birthday then and I remember it now.”

  “Well, thanks for the well wishes.”

  “Yardley, I realize that I fucked up royally—more than once—but I’ve always regarded you as my closest friend. Mike and Dwayne are cool with me, but you and I have always been tighter than tight.”

  I couldn’t help it. I had to say what was on my mind. “Is that what was going through your mind when you and Roxie disrespected me in my own home?”

  “We can rehash that shit over and over and it will still turn out the same way every time.”

  “True,” I agreed. I decided that was the last time I’d ever bring that up; to Felix or anyone else. Roxie was a dropped issue. She’d finally given up her pursuit and determination to have me run back to her. The shit wasn’t going to happen. “We won’t mention that again.”

  “I do need to apologize for what happened at your parents’ party. That remark I made.”

  “Yes, you do need to apologize for that. That’s for damn sure.”

  I wasn’t that hot under the collar, but I refused to even consider being his friend unless he made amends for that.

  “I apologize, man. I really do, and if I ever get the opportunity to apologize to Rayne, I will.”

  Felix was one of my closest friends. I didn’t understand his ass but I did love him like a brother. I thought about Belford. I’d been thinking about him a lot lately; about all the things he never got to do. It was time to either accept Felix as Felix or let him go forever.

  “Felix, Rayne didn’t even hear your comment, but you can apologize to Rayne at our wedding. It’s in two months.”

  “You’re inviting me?”

  “Yes, I’m inviting you.” I paused. “I can’t have you stand up for me, man. I’m not prepared for that yet. But I’d appreciate it if you’d be there.”

  “I’ll be there, man.”

  The situation was getting too emotional for me. “Listen, I need to run. Rayne’s waiting for me.”

  “Okay, cool, man. I’ll call you again tomorrow. What are you doing for your birthday anyway?”

  “Rayne’s actually cooking for me. This will be the first time.”

  “She’s never cooked for you?” Felix asked in astonishment.

  “No, never.”

  “You mean she hooked you without having to get to your stomach? That shit would never happen with Dwayne.”

  We both chuckled.

  “Yes, that’s exactly what she did. I’ve cooked for her a few times, though.”

  “I bet those were some science experiments.”

  “Ha, ha, ha, very funny.” I heard the bath faucet turn off, which meant the water was ready. “Thanks for calling, Felix. I’m glad we were able to be civil.”

  “Me, too. Does this mean you’re going to start coming out on the courts on Saturday mornings so I can whip your ass?”

  I’d stopped showing up for the weekly games when Felix and I had the big fallout. Dwayne, Mike, and I would hit some happy hours from time to time, but it was never the same.

  “I’ll be there this Saturday. You better be prepared because I’m going to make up for lost time.”

  Felix laughed. “See you then, but I’m going to still holler at you tomorrow.”

  “Peace,” I said and hung up the phone.

  I addressed one last invitation, to Felix, before I cut out the lights in the living room area and went to join Rayne.

  She was in the tub, posing like a Nubian princess—my Nubian princess—when I came in. I’d taken off all my clothes in the bedroom and put on the latest Jill Scott CD. It was smooth as silk; just like Rayne’s skin.

  “I took the liberty of bringing a bottle of champagne in with me,” I told her as I pulled it from behind my back.

  She seemed mesmerized by my dick. She didn’t take her eyes off it.

  “See something you like?”

  She finally looked up at me. “I’m sorry. I was hypnotized there for a second.”

  “It’s not like you haven’t seen it before.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen it,” she said. “Shit, I own it.”

  “Damn, next thing you know I’ll be sporting a ball and chain.”

  “Don’t worry. They make them with leather accessories now. They complement anything.”

  I got into the garden tub, facing her. She started giving me a foot job. She rubbed my balls with her big toe and I grabbed her foot.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked and giggled. “You’re not ticklish down there, are you?”

  “You know the answer to that.”

  “What I don’t know the answer to is why you brought a bottle of champagne in here and no flutes.”

  “Who needs flutes when I have toes?”

  I lifted the foot I was holding and poured about an ounce of the champagne on them. Then I sucked each toe one at a time. Rayne slid her back farther down in the tub and started moaning. Once I’d sucked the other set of manicured toes, I poured a little on her calves and licked them also.

  “Damn, it feels like my birthday instead of yours,” Rayne whispered softly.

  I stopped and started giving her a foot massage. “You’re the only present I need. You can just wrap yourself up in a big bow and let me unwrap you.”

  “Stand up,” she instructed. “I want to taste some of that champagne.”

  I stood up and flinched when she got on her knees, picked up the bottle of champagne and poured some on my dick. It was freezing.

  “Aw, don’t worry. I’ll warm it up.”

  Rayne drew me into her mouth and warmed me up indeed. Her lips felt so soft and succulent, wrapped around my dick. I helped guide her head back and forth as she devoured me for the next ten minutes or so; until I couldn’t take it any more and climaxed.

  We cleansed each other with shea butter soap and then toweled each other off. We ended up in my bed, on crisp white sheets, enjoying the sex we’d learned to master. Rayne had masturbated in front of me on several occasions. She wanted me to witness what turned her on. She realized that brothers aren’t psychic so I’d watched and I memorized “her spots.” She’d lie there, in front of me, and play with her nipples with one hand; her clit with the other. She’d tell me what she was fantasizing about, describing every little detail. Then she’d cum. It was an amazing thing to watch a woman cumming by her own hard work. Men jack off all the time, so we know what we look like, with the scrunched up faces and the “oh shit!” comments. Watching Rayne please herself pleased me and ultimately, allowed me to truly please her.

  At midnight, she sang “Happy Birthday” to me while I was deep inside her. After each line, she’d tongue kiss me, so it took her a few minutes to get through it. I didn’t mind a bit.

  I fell asleep inside her.

  Damn! Happy, happy birthday to me!

  You only live once, but if you work it right, once is enough.

  —Joe Lewis

  Thirty-thre
e

  Rayne

  October 2004

  I hated it when the weather lived up to my name. It had been gorgeous all day but, as usual, come quitting time it was overcast. Within ten minutes, about the length of time it had taken me to get my car from the parking garage and pull out into traffic, it was a torrential downpour.

  Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, there was a six-car pileup on Massachusetts Avenue, which meant I had to take an alternate—slower route—home. Why couldn’t people learn not to act a fool during bad weather? Getting into an accident won’t get them home any sooner; that’s for sure.

  The smaller side streets only had one lane going each way and during rush hour, it was a nightmare. I decided to calm down. After all, I was a month away from marrying Yardley and I’d never been happier. As the wipers danced back and forth on my window, I daydreamed about what our children would look like.

  We’d already discussed names. Our firstborn son would be named Yardley, Jr., and if there were a second son, his name would be Yavier. If we were blessed with a daughter, her name would be Yasmin. I was really feeling Y names because I was feeling Yardley so damn much.

  Yardley. It suddenly dawned on me that I’d promised to cook him dinner. I was planning to make Cajun fried catfish and had forgotten to pick up flour the night before when I’d purchased the fillets. Luckily there was a small market on P Street; two blocks away from where I was inching along in traffic.

  There was no parking along P Street during peak hours but I lucked out a second time by finding a space around the corner from the store. I planned to be in and out of there with a quickness. I had on a new pair of high-heeled pumps and my feet were killing me. Besides, I wanted to be home early enough to take a bath, or at least a shower, before Yardley got there around eight. With all the licking and sucking that went on during our lengthy lovemaking sessions, I always liked my coochie to be fresh.

  I’d barely gotten out of my car when my cell phone started ringing. I hoped it was Yardley. I missed him and simply wanted to hear his voice. I cringed when I looked at the caller ID and realized it was Momma. As I pushed the talk button, I promised myself that I wouldn’t allow her to disrupt my flow of happiness.

  I was trying to clutch my purse under one arm and juggle my phone and opened umbrella with the other. I was getting soaked.

  “Hello, Momma.”

  “Hey, baby,” she said anxiously. “I need to talk to you about something important.”

  “Can this wait, Momma?” I asked, realizing that she was likely to start rubbing her stress onto me.

  “No, this can’t wait!” she snapped. “I’m about to lose my home!”

  I rolled my eyes up to the clouds. “Again?”

  “Yes, Miss Smarty Pants! Again!”

  Momma had gotten out of rehab and gone right back to drinking. I was so disappointed, but realized that it was a lost cause to expect her to reinvent herself after all that time. It was like that day in my apartment, when we’d revealed and supposedly released all our pain and built-up frustration, had never happened. It was like I’d never sent her to Atlanta to get help.

  My friend Brook had hired Momma to help out in her accounting office, but called me less than a week after she’d started to tell me that she was showing up for work drunk. Under those circumstances, Brook couldn’t keep Momma on, or recommend her to someone else. I’d assured Brook that I understood. I loved my mother but she’d have to take a backseat to what I was trying to build with Yardley.

  “Let me guess. You expect me to send you some money?” I asked her.

  “Uh-huh, I damn sure do,” she stated demandingly.

  “Momma, I’m in the process of making final plans for my wedding. A very expensive wedding, I might add.”

  I could hear her hissing through the phone. “Rayne, no one told your fast ass to plan some fancy wedding you can’t afford.”

  I was pissed then. How dare she come at me like that? Then again, being that it was Momma, how dare she not?

  “Oh, I can afford my wedding. I simply can’t afford to do that and keep playing parent to you, too.”

  “What the fuck did you say to me?” she asked with venom in her voice. “You better watch your tone, young lady, when you speak to me. If it wasn’t for me, your ass would’ve been a cum spot on my waterbed back in the day.”

  I was in front of the store but didn’t want to go inside so people could overhear my responses to her.

  “Listen, I’ll call you back in a few minutes, Momma.”

  “But what about me and my problems, Rayne? I realize I may not be the greatest mother in the world, but I did the best I could by you, baby. I really did. Now I need you to do right by me. You owe me.”

  “I know you did the best you could, Momma. And yes, I do owe everything I am to you,” I said, not agreeing with her but realizing she probably—in her mind—believed every word of it.

  We were both silent for a brief moment. She was obviously waiting for me to hold true to form and give in. Eventually, I did.

  “Don’t worry about a thing, Momma,” I said reluctantly. “I’ll take care of everything, like I always do.”

  Instead of saying thanks, she held true to form. “Don’t you need to know how much money to send?”

  “I’m about to run in this store. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

  “But, Rayne, I need—”

  “Momma, give me three lousy minutes. I’ll get right back to you.”

  “Promise?”

  I took a deep breath and sighed. “Promise.”

  “Okay, baby.”

  I hung up before she could change her mind and start rambling again. What was she going to do if something happened to me? If I lost my job or something and couldn’t keep sending her funds on the drop of a dime.

  There were only a handful of people in the store. I was thankful that no one was at the register waiting to be rung up. I was going to locate the flour and haul ass. Like the majority of small markets, all of the items were overpriced to pay for convenience.

  I made my way to the rear of the store, grabbed a two-pound sack of flour and headed back toward the front. I was rifling through my purse for a five-dollar bill and not paying attention when I bumped into another patron; a young white man.

  “Excuse me,” I said, walking around him. He didn’t reply.

  I was less than four feet from the counter when I froze. There was another young white man pointing a rather large gun toward the Middle Eastern man behind the register.

  “Freeze, old man!” he yelled at the merchant. “We don’t want any trouble! Give us all the cash in the register and we’ll leave! Don’t fuck around, so we can all go home tonight!”

  “What are you? A fucking crackhead?” the man shouted back at him with an accent.

  I practically drowned him out. Did he say “we” and “us”?

  I scanned from side to side, trying to figure out who else could’ve been with him. There was a Puerto Rican woman holding an infant in the health-care aisle. One second after I’d ruled her out as his accomplice, I felt the cold metal on my temple and an arm grab me around my waist.

  “Don’t move, bitch, or you’re dead!”

  I whispered, “Shit,” as everything dropped to the floor out of my hands.

  He was trembling as much as me and so was his partner at the counter. I had a feeling that they were crackheads or some type of drug addicts.

  “Don’t fucking move!” he screamed so loudly in my ear that I felt like my eardrum might explode.

  “I’m about to get married,” I heard myself saying.

  “Who gives a fuck?” He tightened his grip around my waist and started gyrating his hips behind me, rubbing his dick against my ass. “You know what? Now that I’m checking you out, you look like a sweet little piece of ass. Want me to take you in the back room and do you?”

  His friend started chuckling. “Do her right here, Donny. I wanna see, and save some for
me.”

  “Listen to me,” I said. “You’re not going to rape me because I won’t allow it. You came here for money, right? Simply take the money and leave.”

  The one at the counter eyed me with disdain. “Bitch, if we wanna fuck you, we will. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  I don’t know why but I still felt like I could talk some sense into them. “I’m a woman who is in love for the first time in her life—truly in love—and I want to live. I want to get married in a month, grow old together, and have beautiful children to carry on our names. I want to have a nice home, go to work every day, and come home to my family. I want to travel around the world with my husband and kids. I’m a woman who wants to love life. Don’t you love life?”

  “Does it look like we love life, bitch?” the one behind me yelled and pressed the muzzle of his gun harder onto my temple. “On second thought, man, this whore is psychotic. Let’s get the money and get the fuck out of here. I need a fix, man.”

  The woman holding the infant started crying and clutching her baby to her chest. The man behind the counter started fidgeting with the cash register. Good, he could simply give them the money so they could leave and we’d all be safe.

  My heart dropped in my chest when I saw a glimmer of metal in his other hand that had been reaching under the counter. You idiot, I thought as everything seemed to move in slow motion. Now I won’t be able to keep my promise to Momma!

  As the first of many shots rang out, only one word left my mouth. “Yardley!”

  Thirty-four

  Yardley

  As I sat there, listening to Chance deliver Rayne’s eulogy, I found it difficult to even breathe. This wasn’t fair. I heard someone weeping in the pew behind me and glanced to see an older woman drying her tears with a handkerchief. I’d never seen the woman but she was visibly distraught; probably depressed about the horrific situation like everyone else.

  “Yardley, did you want to say something?” I heard Chance speak the words but they didn’t register until she repeated them. “Yardley, would you like to say something?”