“I would also like Tillman to go with me.”
“Another good choice.” Gunnar nodded.
“He’s so cute. I want him to ask me out, but I don’t think I’m his type.”
Tisha had no idea.
“It might not be a good idea to date your coworker.” Gunnar tried defusing the situation before feelings got hurt. “If things don’t work out between the two of you, it’ll make working together awkward.”
“Oh, yeah, I guess you’re right.” Tisha lowered her gaze.
“Besides, you don’t have to keep your romantic choices confined to this salon. Go out and meet people. Live a little.” He held up the postcard. “Go to the hair show.”
Tisha took the card from his hand and stared at it.
“Let me know if you’re interested.” He stood and headed back out to the main salon.
Before he could cross the threshold into the main area, he heard Tisha say, “I want to go.”
Gunnar glanced back at her.
“This butterfly needs to spread her wings.”
“Very good. After work, I’ll register you and see if anyone else would like to go.” He held the curtain open for her. “Ready to get back to work?”
Tisha stood and stuffed the postcard in her oversized sweater pocket. “Yes, sir.” As she walked by him, she stopped and hugged him around his waist.
He glanced over at Eboni, who cut him a strange look before attending to her client.
“Shay, you owe Tisha an apology for hurting her feelings.” Gunnar stood in between the two women’s stations.
“She doesn’t have to say anything.” Tisha shook her head vigorously and turned her back on Shay as she cleaned her station.
“Yeah, she knows it was a joke. All we have here in the salon is jokes.” Shay pumped up the chair that her client sat in and turned the woman around to style her hair.
“She didn’t find it funny. Apologize.” Gunnar crossed his arms over his chest as he faced Shay.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am. Apologize now or go home.”
Shay shook her head. “Damn crybaby. I’m sorry, Tisha, that you can’t take a joke.”
“Did that hurt?” Gunnar went over to the shampoo station.
“Yes, it did. This is what I meant about you messing up the flow in here. We women can’t be women in here. We should be able to tease each other and talk about things like S-E-X.” She licked her lips.
“I don’t care if you talk about sex, so long as there aren’t any kids around.”
“Okay.” Shay scanned the area. With a waiting area filled with women and no visible children around, she continued. “So, Big Guns, do you have one?”
Gunnar called over a client to the bowl. “One what?”
“You know.” Shay bounced up and down and simulated having something large between her legs. “Do you have a big gun, and I’m not talking the one with bullets either.”
Several women laughed, including the one who came over to his bowl to get her hair washed. The client sitting at Eboni’s chair screamed in pain.
“You burned me!” the woman said as she rubbed the back of her head.
“Sorry.” Eboni glanced at Gunnar and turned her back on him.
He still caught her looking at him in her mirror. “None of your business. Whatever happened to you women saying it’s not the size of the ship but the motion in the ocean?”
“Honey, we only say that to guys who are like this.” She held up her hand and placed her thumbnail against the upper section of her pinkie finger. “That way we don’t hurt their little feelings, and I do mean little feelings.”
The women in the salon laughed.
Gunnar wrapped a towel around his client’s shoulders and lowered her to the bowl. “If you love someone, size shouldn’t make a difference.”
“Says a man who saves himself for his wedding night and reveals his tiny package to his new wife.” Shay put her hands in prayer form and bent her knees. “Please, honey. Don’t mind my little dick. I love you.” She pushed air through her lips. “I’m used to working with long, hard things.” She held up her curling iron. “I can’t go from this to tweezers.”
The women in the salon erupted in laughter.
“Hold on. Eboni, you said you and Mr. Guns here had a thing back in the day. Tell us. Was he packing or pretending?”
Eboni glanced at Gunnar before she looked at Shay. “I’m not talking about that here. It’s not right.”
“That’s code for a little winky.” Shay waved at Gunnar with her pinkie finger. “Or you can prove me wrong and join me for a drink.”
Gunnar filled his hands with shampoo and scrubbed the solution into a foamy lather in his client’s hair. “So you think that a night of drinking and I’ll jump into bed with you?”
“Why wouldn’t you? You’re young and hot. And, well, look at this?” She showed off her body. “How could you resist?”
“I can resist by respecting you as a woman. I don’t know you. Therefore, I’m not going to jump right into bed with you. Plus, I tend to go for women who have more going on for themselves than what they can offer me between their legs.”
“I’m liking this guy more and more each day,” Monica said before she answered the phone.
“Whatever. He’s no different than any other man. That I know for sure.” Shay turned her back on him and continued doing her client’s hair.
“Let’s get off me.” Gunnar rinsed off his client’s hair.
“Haven’t gotten on you yet.” Shay blew him a kiss.
“As a man, I’d like to know what you women want in an ideal man.”
“A big dick!” a group of women said simultaneously.
Even Tillman laughed at that response. “You asked for it.”
Gunnar helped his client to a chair where he applied a deep conditioner to her wet tresses. He covered her hair and then moved her to a hair bonnet next to the wall.
“Put it on a low setting. I want to hear this conversation,” his client said and winked.
Gunnar adjusted the setting and turned to the main salon again. “No, really. What do you women want from men? Monica? You’re married. What did you look for in your husband?”
Monica remained quiet for a while before a smile spread over her face. “He knew how to dance. I never liked dancing at the school dances. But he could always get me out on the floor. He was patient. And he could move. He swept me off my feet then.” She chuckled. “I guess he’s still sweeping me off my feet now.” She picked up the desk’s phone receiver. “Let me give him a call.”
“My husband knows how to make me laugh,” a client chimed in. “Granted, his jokes are always corny. But it tickles him so much to tell the joke that you can’t help but laugh with him.”
Gunnar turned to Shay. “Shay? What do you want? And don’t you dare talk about anatomy.”
“Whatever. Men don’t have much to offer besides the sex.” She adjusted her sunglasses. “Maybe security.”
“Financial?” Gunnar asked.
Shay didn’t answer.
“What about you, Tisha?” Tillman asked.
Tisha’s face turned every shade of red known to man.
“I’ll tell you what I like,” Eboni said.
Gunnar gave his full attention to her.
“Good dancer just means he’s good in bed.” Eboni directed that statement to Monica.
The older woman poked her head up but continued with her phone conversation.
“Good sense of humor is great, that way when things get rough, the two of you can somehow laugh about it.” Eboni styled her client’s hair but seemed to get lost in her own thoughts. “My ideal man has to have those things and be honest. Honesty will give me security. He has to be intelligent. If I can’t hold a conversation with him, there’s no use for us to be together.”
A chorus of umm huhs sounded in the salon.
Eb
oni continued. “He has to be a great listener. I hate it when you tell a man about your day and they want to fix things for you. Like if I say that I burned my tongue on a Starbuck’s coffee, don’t tell me what I should do next time. Just hold me and kiss me. If I talk about a bad day at work, I want him to listen. Don’t ask what you can do to help.”
“We can’t help it.” Gunnar put his hand to his chest. “Men are expected to fix things. We automatically go into fix-it mode, especially when it comes to someone we love.”
When Eboni glanced at him, Gunnar had no problem staring back at her, almost daring her to make the next crucial step. She wanted to keep their new relationship quiet. Would she?
“So apparently, your need to be a fixer caused the two of you to break up years ago, huh?” Shay posed as she pulled the drape off her client.
“I guess so.” Gunnar summoned another client to him to the shampoo bowl. “Guess I’ll know better for the next relationship.”
The client Gunnar put under the hairdryer lifted the face shield. “Are you all going talk about sex again?”
Laughter filled the salon again. Too bad Gunnar found nothing funny in losing the most incredible woman he’d ever known. After last night, he had to figure out a way to get her back. He needed Eboni, and he needed to leave Virginia.
* * * *
At the end of the day, Eboni helped Gunnar lock up the salon.
“Are you going to come over?” Gunnar asked. He held his hands up as if to surrender. “To see Queen Elizabeth. I don’t want you to think that I want you for one thing only.”
“I know you better than that.” Eboni headed to the office to get her coat and purse. “I would love to see Elizabeth. I have to make a stop first.”
“Where?”
Eboni turned to him as she put on her coat.
As though answering a question she wanted to ask, Gunnar quickly supplied, “I just wanted to know if it’s a place where you would like my company or if it’s someplace private.” He walked into the office. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.”
Suddenly, the space felt confining. Eboni swallowed. She wished she had made it to the doorway before Gunnar entered the office. All day, she’d thought about his body and what he’d done with it with her.
Just thinking about the sex, Eboni felt phantom pressure against her inner thighs, as though Gunnar had positioned himself in between them again. Her nipples hardened just from her looking at his mouth.
She broke her gaze from him to pull herself out of the spell. “I was going to stop off at the center to check on some donations.”
“I’d like to go with you, if you don’t mind.” Gunnar reached behind her and picked up his coat.
“Really? I didn’t think you liked the center. The last time I took you, you damn near bolted out the door like you’d seen the devil.” Eboni tried to maintain eye contact with him.
“I’m trying to appreciate things that are important to you.”
The closeness of their bodies caused Eboni to sigh.
Gunnar must have picked up on her lusty exhale. “Or we can stay here. I’m sure there’s a load of laundry I can put in the washer.”
“You are so funny.” She pushed against his chest and made it out to the main salon. “You can come with me if you want.”
“That’s my preference.” He winked at her.
Eboni didn’t comment on his salacious statement. If she did, they would never leave the empty salon. “I’ll meet you there.”
“You don’t want to ride with me?” Gunnar opened the back door for Eboni and locked it.
“No. I’ll drive myself.” She got to the driver’s side of her car. Before she got inside, she felt Gunnar standing behind her, pressing his massive body against hers.
“I promise to behave.” His warm breath felt good on the back of her neck.
“You mean like now?”
He put his hands on the roof of her car, surrounding her with his arms. “I haven’t touched you at all today. I barely looked your way, which killed me. If getting some alone time with you means driving you ten minutes, I’ll take it.”
Eboni turned around and faced him. “It means that much to you to be with me?”
His eyebrows furrowed. “Are you kidding? I realized in one night what a fool I’ve been for the last ten years. I want to spend every waking moment with you.”
“Until?” Eboni wanted to hear the answer to that crucial question.
“Until we can figure out where we go from here.”
She dropped her gaze. “Perhaps where we go is just around here. When you leave, that’ll be it.”
Gunnar shook his head. “Not good enough. But it’s too cold to talk about something so heavy out here. I’ll see you at the center.” Before parting, he gave her a kiss on her forehead. He turned to his truck, stopped and turned back around. “Oh, hell.” He wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her close to his body.
As soon as Gunnar’s lips touched Eboni’s, her body became alive like a million and one firecrackers ignited all at once. She couldn’t deny that she missed this intimate connection with him. If she had been honest with herself, she would admit that she wanted more.
Gunnar broke from the kiss long enough to say, “I’ll see you at the center.”
Eboni could do nothing but nod.
Once she got into her car, she stayed in it. She would have been content to have her heater and defroster remove all of the ice and snow from her windows. Gunnar felt differently.
Before she knew it, Gunnar had come to her car and scraped her windows while she sat inside getting warm. He gave her a smile and wink as soon as he finished his work. Then he worked on his truck.
Eboni opened her door. “Let me help you now.”
“Get back in your car and stay warm. I’m fine.”
Gunnar Wells certainly fit every category of fine in the dictionary.
While everything progressed so well for them, Eboni decided holding off revealing her damaging news to him until he prepared to go home would be best. He would want to go once she shared it.
As soon as Gunnar gave her a nod, Eboni led them to the Oceanfront Community Center. He parked next to her car, and they walked to the building in silence.
Inside, Eboni went straight to the business office where she knew Drew would be. Drew had been the manager there since Eboni had gone to the center as a teenager. No one had more passion about the place than him. He worked day and night to keep the place going.
“Hey, Captain. What’s shaking?” Eboni smiled, hoping he would match the expression.
The older white man pursed his lips and exhaled. He shook his head and Eboni got her answer.
“No donations?” She clasped her hands together and hoped for a miracle.
“None,” he answered.
Damn.
“I thought for sure that local dairy would come through for us. The donations they promised would have been enough to fix the pool.” Eboni rubbed her forehead.
“I know.” Drew glanced up at Gunnar. “Can I help you?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Drew, this is, um, my friend, Gunnar Wells.” Finding a tame way to introduce him became complicated considering what they’d done. “Gunnar, this is Drew Pausini. He’s the manager here, but I like calling him Captain.”
“She’s the only one I let get away with that.” Drew smiled and shook Gunnar’s hand. “Nice to meet you. Any friend of Eboni’s is a friend of mine.”
“Ditto.” Gunnar stared at Eboni. “She’s pretty special.”
“Yes, she is.” Drew stared at Gunnar for a moment. “You look so familiar.”
Eboni watched Gunnar draw his shoulders back.
“I used to come here back in the day along with Eboni.” Gunnar clenched his jaw as though expecting a confrontation.
“Hell, I barely remember what Eboni looked like when she first came here. No, I’ve seen you elsewhere.”
“He’s a fighter,” Eboni quickly supplied.
“Like boxing?” Drew held up his fists.
“Mixed martial arts,” Gunnar said.
Drew’s dull brown eyes widened. “Oh yeah. I heard the kids talking about you around here. Guns, that’s what they call you, right?”
Gunnar nodded. “I’m home to help my mom.”
“I’m trying to convince him to help promote the place.” Eboni nudged Gunnar on his side.
From the glare he gave her, he didn’t find anything amusing in her admission.
“That would be awesome. The kids would love seeing a local celebrity talking up this place.” Drew rubbed his hands together. “And we could certainly use the publicity.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t do commercials or promotions.” Gunnar held out his hand. “Nice to meet you.” He glared at Eboni. “I guess I’ll see you at the house.” He left the office.
“Did I say something wrong?” Drew asked and shrugged.
“No. I think I did. I’ll talk to you later.” Eboni rushed out to the parking lot in time to see Gunnar stomping to his truck. “Gunnar! Gunny!”
He stopped at the driver-side door and turned to her. As soon as she got close enough to him he unloaded on her. “Why did you do that? Why did you try to make me feel guilty about not doing some promotion for this place? I told you I don’t do commercials.”
“I didn’t mean to make you feel trapped.” Eboni tried making eye contact when she found Gunnar looking elsewhere. “Hey, will you at least tell me why?”
“What I do. The fighting. I see it as a job. I find it ridiculous when guys get on TV and talk about how they’re going to beat me up and hurt me. Show me. You don’t go around to other salons and tell them you do the best hair and that Press ’N Curl is going to run them out of business.”
“No. But I have done radio spots and promotions at local hair shows. Unlike you, we don’t have a built-in audience. We also have way more competition. We need to shout from the rooftops how good we are, like this place needs someone to be a voice for them and talk about how great this center is. The news has covered us a couple of times, and we’ll get some donations, but it isn’t enough.”
Gunnar balled his hand into a fist but kept his gaze away from Eboni. After a beat, he finally looked at her. “My mom used to have this husband who used to brag all the time what a big man he was. When she would have dinner parties, he would tell their friends what a great provider he was. To his boys, he talked about how much my mom couldn’t keep her hands off him. Truth of the matter is he didn’t work and he had a problem keeping his hands off her.”
The Look of Love Page 16