by Kennedy Ryan
“Just for a few weeks, Lo,” she says, some of the guilt on her face turning into impatience.
“No,” Iris screams, squeezing me tighter. “Don’t send her away.”
“Just for a few weeks,” Mama says again, her tone firmer.
“Then I’m going with her.” Iris pulls her lips into a flat, determined line.
“You ain’t going nowhere, girl,” Aunt Pris says. “What I tell you about getting in grown folks’ business?”
“But Mama,” Iris says, her voice thick and wobbling. “Where’s she gonna go?”
The stalks shift and part, snapping under someone’s feet, startling us all. It’s my great-grandmother MiMi. She takes her time looking at each of us, but finally fixes wrathful eyes on Ron. He gulps, shivers.
“I’ll take her,” MiMi says, looking at me with those ancient eyes. “She can come stay with me.”
31
Kenan
If there’s one place I never expected to be, it’s here.
New York Fashion Week. Front row of the JPL show. Yet here I sit, anxiously awaiting the first “look,” as Lotus calls it. She told me the show JP has been designing and planning for months will be over in less than twenty minutes.
My kind of event.
The waiting audience is seated on a terrace overlooking Lincoln Plaza. I can’t fully appreciate the city on the verge of sunset, or the excitement electrifying the air because I’m ready for it to be over. I’m happy for JP and his team, whom I’ve come to know and actually like over the summer. But the sooner the show and the after-party are over, the sooner I can have Lotus to myself. She warned me her schedule would be bruising in the last few weeks leading up to the show, but I wasn’t prepared for how little time she’d have for anything else.
How little time she’d have for me.
I’ve never been involved with someone whose schedule and commitment to their craft rivaled mine. In three weeks, I report for training camp, and the NBA will own almost all my time for the next nine months, at least. Ten if we make playoffs, which August and I are determined to do. Then Lotus will be on the receiving end of my career. It’s not easy to live with. I’m not easy to live with. I’m even more obsessive about my eating and workout regimen during the season. I watch film constantly. I talk even less because I’m in my head studying plays, scoping other teams’ offenses, mentally picking apart their defenses before games.
It’s all ball.
I may not have started out thinking I’d be an NBA player, but I’ve always been driven in every endeavor. I would have been this way about law, if I’d fulfilled my father’s dream and pursued it. If I’d been a farmer, I would have been this way about fruits and vegetables and soil. It’s the way I’m made, and nothing has ever disrupted this pattern in me. I know what Bridget did was wrong, but I also recognize that I’m no picnic, especially once the season starts.
And Bridget lived through a lot of seasons.
She’s the last thing I want to consider right now. I’ve moved on completely. It doesn’t matter that Lotus is in fashion, something I never gave a rat’s ass about, or that she doesn’t know Oscar Robertson from Oscar Meyer. That I’m eleven years older. Or that I live on the West Coast and she’s on the East. It doesn’t even matter that she may believe in voodoo. Maybe she’s a witch. I don’t know. I do know one thing for sure.
I’m falling for her.
And if I’m keeping it one hundred, at least with myself, I’m probably already in the past tense on that score. I’ve fallen for her.
You’d think with all the drama and trauma I experienced with Bridget, I wouldn’t be doing this again. But that’s just it. There is no “again” to what I’m feeling. This is uncharted territory. I’ve never felt this way about anyone. God, it shames me to think it, but Bridget and I met in college. I’ve known her sixteen years, been married to her for most of those, and I never felt for her what I feel for Lotus after mere months.
I’ve always jealously guarded my solitude, so wanting to be with someone all the time is not only foreign, but disconcerting. I read The Song of Solomon for notes to send her. That’s right. It’s in the Bible. This is some body-snatcher shit. I don’t know who has taken up residence in this mind and body I’ve always been so disciplined with. Who has taken up residence in this heart.
The circular path of my thoughts stalls when the lights drop and music fills the terrace. The song is like Enya screwed a DJ, and gave birth to some bastard New Age music possessed by a heavy baseline. A woman, tall, thin, strides with confidence and swagger down the runway. She poses, pops, turns. Before she’s out of sight, another has taken her place at the end of the runway.
The next twenty minutes presents a parade of women whose beauty is only rivaled by the gorgeous clothes they wear. I may not know much about fashion, but I know these clothes are art, and I feel pride that my girl was such a crucial part of this masterpiece. Celebrities, not just critics and fashion insiders, stuff each row. I spot Bristol James, Grip’s wife, a few seats down. We wave briefly, but Bristol returns her attention to the clothes right away.
It’s all over in twenty minutes like Lotus promised, and JP emerges from behind the curtain, joined by all the models, and struts to the end of the catwalk, waving and receiving the adulation the collection deserves. The crowd is on its feet. I’m scouring the scene for any sign of Lotus, but she’s probably backstage.
As a spokesperson for the line, I have a pass, which I use as soon as the show concludes and people start dispersing. Lotus said the Fashion Week schedule is brutal. Back-to-back shows scheduled in venues all over the city have most critics, editors, fashion bloggers, and attendees doing their damnedest to get from one to the next on time.
Among the Amazons, some of whom almost look me in the eye wearing their high heels, it’s hard to find my little Lotus. When I spot her, she’s hugging JP and wearing midnight blue skinny velvet pants that mold to every line of her svelte figure. The shirt, if it can be called that, is ivory-colored silk. It’s not much more than a bra with long sleeves clinging to her arms and some kind of crystals pouring from the wrists and over her hands. A hint of dark nipples shows through the fragile shells cupping her breasts, and her stomach is bare, a lotus flower the only interruption of her smooth skin. She turns to answer someone, and I gulp. Her ass in those tiny pants is criminal. God, I want to lick that zipper climbing her spine. I should be used to this—how parts of me go painfully hard and other parts of me go unbelievably soft at the sight of her—but I’m not. I half-hope I’ll never get used to it.
Maybe she feels my eyes on her. I wouldn’t put it past her. There is something unique, different about Lotus. She senses things, feels things I’m not always in tune to. She searches until she finds me.
“Kenan!” she squeals, and quickly picks her way through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd to reach me. She’s wearing more makeup than usual, and a nose ring, a tiny gold hoop encircling the keen curve of her nostril. As soon as she’s close enough, I bend my knees, wrap my arms around her, and with my elbows locked under her ass, pull her up to me.
“I’m so proud of you, Button,” I whisper through that cloud of platinum curls.
She stiffens in my arms, pulls back to peer into my face. Her smile is blinding, an amalgamation of joy and fulfillment. “You know it’s not my line, right?” she teases, resting an elbow on my shoulder and tracing my eyebrows, my cheekbone with one neat nail.
“I know everything you’ve done,” I insist. “And I know nothing about fashion, but the show was fantastic.” I kiss the warm line of her throat. “You’re fantastic.”
She dips her head until our eyes meet, and the smile fades from her eyes, from her lips. She lays her forehead against mine. “I want to spend the night with you, Kenan.”
My heartbeat trebles behind my breastbone and I swallow my eagerness.
Calm your cock and lower your expectations.
We haven’t had sex and I’ll wait a year, two, however long
it takes for her to feel comfortable. She’s spent the night several times, and it’s always hard to stop, but I do. For her, I always will until she says we don’t have to. So when she says she wants to spend the night, my cock and I should know by now it doesn’t mean . . .
“Sure.” I set her on the floor. “You mentioned an after-party—”
“I’m not going,” she cuts in, her eyes affixed to my face. “I already told JP.”
“Oh, okay. Yeah.” I clear my throat. “If you want to grab something to eat—”
“I don’t.” She takes my hand and peers up at me in the dimness of backstage. Models, critics, celebrities, JPL staff all mingle around us, but for me, we’re the only two people here. “I want to go to your apartment, and I want to spend the night. Kenan, I’m ready.”
“Lotus, baby, you don’t have to—”
“Kenan!” JP shouts near my ear.
Lotus and I don’t break our stare immediately, but linger on each other for a few seconds before we look to her boss. He’s practically vibrating with triumph, and I get it. I’m happy for him, but right now, I need to figure out what Lotus means. What she’s saying—if it’s what I think she’s saying. If it is, we’re out of here as soon as possible.
“Did you enjoy the show, mon ami?” he asks me.
“Yeah, it was great.” I pull Lotus into my side, caressing the smooth skin of her back. “Everyone seemed to love it.”
“Oui!” His obvious pleasure coaxes a smile from me. “And Lotus, you’re sure you don’t want to come with me to the after-party? Everyone will be there. All the industry giants.”
Lotus snuggles more deeply into my side with a husky chuckle. “After all the hours I’ve put in the last month,” she says, sounding tired but happy, “there’s only one giant I want to see.”
My smile stretches so damn wide it hurts. I can’t even hide it, what she means to me and how I want her. Now that Simone knows, I don’t give a damn who sees us together. People aren’t generally interested in my life except when Bridget makes a mess of it.
“Well, I like to take some credit for this,” JP drawls, his French accent thickening and his eyes gleaming, “since it was my button that brought you together.”
“I think I would have found a way with or without the button.” I bend to kiss the top of Lotus’s head. “But thanks for the help.”
“De rien.” He flicks his head toward a side exit. “Go on and get out of here then, lovebirds.”
“You’re sure?” Lotus asks, her fingers tightening at my waist.
“We’ll start again soon enough,” he reminds her. “So go before I remember that I can barely function when you are not with me at these awful parties.”
For someone so small, Lotus manages to drag a man twice her size through a crowd with seemingly little difficulty. As soon as the door opens, September sunlight pours into the backstage area. Lotus draws a deep breath before stepping outside a little ahead of me.
“Freedom,” she says, releasing an extended breath. “It’s over.”
A wry chuckle unwinds from her and is quickly gobbled up in the squawk of horns and New York’s urban cacophony. She glances back at me over slumping shoulders, the look filled with weariness and anticipation.
“Take me home, Kenan.”
32
Lotus
This is what I wanted. He is what I wanted.
To be here with the man leaning against his apartment door is what I’ve wanted for days, weeks. Kenan didn’t even notice JP practically salivating over him in the three-piece suit from the JPL Men line, but I did. The perfectly groomed shadow darkening his granite jawline. The impossibly wide horizon of shoulders straining the tailored fabric and narrowing to slim hips, and the powerful length of his legs. There’s an indolence about him, but it’s deceptive. The air pulses with want—a patiently-checked desire I’m finally ready to indulge.
I’m so proud of you, Button.
Not you look beautiful, which would have been nice, too, but I’m so proud of you.
The perfect thing to say to the girl whose one parent spent so much time changing and molding her, pressing out her crinkles and straightening her waves, but was never satisfied.
I’m proud of you.
“I’d like to talk first,” I say, sitting on the living room couch and slipping off my shoes.
“First?” He pushes off the door, stalks to the couch, and sits in the opposite corner, leaving a few feet between us.
“Yeah, first.” I smile despite the churning in my stomach. “Before we make love.”
“You know I’d wait months, years,” he says, eyes fastened to the large hands on his knees. “I want you badly, Lotus. I think you know that, but I’ll wait as long as you need. You mean that much to me.”
His words, perfectly timed, placed, spoken, settle me, and the story comes pouring out. “I told you before there were things I needed to share with you.”
“Yeah.” He glances up and that flick of lashes is the only detectable movement. He’s gone completely still, and alertness sharpens his stare.
“I’m ready to . . .” I swallow the nervousness threatening my words. “To tell you why I needed to wait and what happened.”
A muscles ticks in his cheek. “You’re going to tell me someone hurt you,” he states, not asks.
Remembering his response to Chase, I think this might be nearly as difficult for him as it is for me. I shift on the couch until I’m beside him and take his hand between mine, kissing his knuckle. “Yeah, I need to tell you.”
He nods and pulls me closer until my head is on his chest and his chin rests in my hair.
“I don’t want to do details tonight,” I say softly. “I shared the whole story, detail by painful detail, with my support group last week, and—”
“Support group?” he asks.
“You may not have noticed because it’s only for an hour every Thursday, but I’ve been attending a support group for . . . for, um, childhood sexual abuse survivors.”
His massive chest swells under my cheek with a lengthy inhale. The heartbeat in my ear surges, accelerates, thuds.
“Okay,” he says simply.
“My mother was never happy with me.” I shake my head against him. “I’m not really dark, but compared to the rest of my family I was. My hair was all wrong.”
“Your hair?” He runs a hand over the mass of it, kissing the crown. “What did she think was wrong with your hair?”
“It’s not like hers or Iris’s or Iris’s mom’s, or any of our family’s. It seems like such a small thing now, but growing up, it was a big deal. It made me feel like I wasn’t good enough.”
I shrug, a dismissive gesture that doesn’t come close to telling the story of how my mother rejected me in a million small ways before she rejected me in the greatest way possible. In the worst way possible.
“She had this boyfriend who . . .” I falter, my throat closing around the secrets, around the dark memories. My body is reluctant to release them, but I have to. I’m not holding onto this trauma. It’s holding onto me. It has me in a vise grip. I have to get it out to move on.
“Dammit,” I mutter, twisting my fingers in my lap.
“Baby, you don’t have to—”
“I want to,” I tell him, glancing up. “I need you to know.”
He stares down at me and passes a callused thumb over my lips. “Okay. Tell me.”
I nod and swallow, forcing myself to keep going. “She had a boyfriend.”
“What was his name?” Kenan demands before I can go any further. His hand is clenched into a tight fist on his knee.
“Ron Clemmons,” I reply in a hushed voice.
I want it behind me. I want it out in the open and left behind so I can run forward.
“He, um . . . he raped me when I was twelve.”
“He . . .” Kenan’s words get caught up in his throat like a jammed rifle. “Is he in jail? What happened to—”
“He’s in hell,�
�� I interrupt, the words falling fast, sharp, heavy like a guillotine, quick to execute judgment. “We made sure.”
I meet the questions collecting in Kenan’s eyes, but he doesn’t ask how one “makes sure” someone goes to hell because I think he knows that is, believe it or not, the least important part of this story.
“When I told my mother what he’d done,” I continue, the hardness melting into a sorrow I’m not sure when or if I’ll ever be able to shed. “she didn’t believe me.”
A hollow laugh spills over my lips. “Or she did believe me, but didn’t care. Not enough to give him up.”
“You’re saying she stayed with that motherfucker?” Kenan demands, pulling back to stare at me. “After what he did to you, she stayed with him?”
“She chose him and sent me to live with MiMi.”
“That’s how you ended up living with MiMi?” Kenan’s voice rises, powered by outrage and fury and scorn. “What kind of woman does that? Baby, what the . . .”
He stands abruptly, prowling in tight circles like he’s caged and doesn’t have full use of the expensive apartment, only that tiny portion his feet outline in the carpet. His breathing changes, becoming erratic.
“Kenan,” I say gently, standing and approaching him. “It’s okay.”
“The hell it’s okay.” The words charge out of him like a battle cry, and murder and bloodlust seethe in the eyes looking down at me. “How could she choose that piece of shit over you? Over her own daughter, knowing that he . . .”
He slams his eyes shut maybe against images that for me are more than imaginations. They’re memories.
He shoves breath through his nostrils like a bull. Just this morsel of the dismay I’ve eaten all my life nauseates him, turns his stomach and sickens him. His fists open and clench compulsively at his sides. He can barely contain his rage on my behalf, and it makes me love him that much more.
I love him.
There is no more falling. There is no more choice or turning back. It’s done. I’m his in every way but one.