There was nothing he could say. He hugged her. “Find out where they hang out and let them see you now.”
She pulled away. “Do you really think that would make a difference?”
“Absolutely— kids don’t know how to recognize treasure.”
She started breaking the tags off the jeans and a light blue v- neck tee. “I have run into some of those guys around town. And they have asked me out, but I suspect they’re not looking for anything except a one-night stand.”
Her words stabbed him. He had to force himself to breathe deeply to avoid the anger he knew could knot his stomach and ruin his day.
“What did he get for you?”
Ian opened the bag that contained his clothes. There was a pair of jeans and two Tommy Bahama Marlin and Rossi Polos, one white and one black. There was a Ralph Lauren Barracuda Jacket that didn’t impress Ian nearly as much as her jacket had impressed her. Rico also included some stretchy Calvin Klein briefs that he knew Ian would hate.
“I think they’ll look cute on you.”
“I’ll be sure to tell Rico that when I’m . . . fellowshipping with him.”
She smiled. “You leave my friend, Rico, alone.”
When Ian saw Nesta in her new skinny jeans, he was inclined to forgive Rico for the briefs that, in spite of his jeans, he felt were exposing him to the world. In fact, he was pleased with everything she was wearing.
She looked back at the room before they left and recorded everything for her memories.
“Ian, I’ve had more sex with you in the short time I’ve known you than I’ve had in my whole life.”
He pushed the elevator button. “That was an interesting thing to say. What made you think of it?”
“These jeans look great, but they’re kind of rubbing a place that’s already a little sore."
There was a moment of awkward silence.
“I feel like I should apologize, but I loved every minute of it,” he finally said. “But I am sorry you’re feeling sore.” They stepped out of the elevator.
“It’ll go away. I’ll have plenty of time to heal back at my parents’.”
“That, unfortunately, is probably true.”
* * * *
As they waited for the car, he mentally repeated their elevator conversation, and it made him tremendously happy. No woman had ever been so comfortable with him. He wondered if it was her usual style or if she was just that at ease around him.
When he’d watched her reaction to the clothes, he’d decided he was going to ask her to consider moving to California and being his houseguest. Seeing her opening presents alone would bring him considerable joy, but all the other good things about her made facing the future alone unbearable. However, he knew his decision wouldn’t go over big with her parents and Fox.
“We have a stop to make before we go back to the shore.”
He wrapped his free arm around her. The weather was great, and he felt good.
A taxi pulled up in front of them, and he pulled her back. A single business man entered the cab. Ian heard him tell the driver “O’Hare.” He tried to push his own impending departure from his mind.
“Where?”
“Remember I told you about my friend who’s studying criminal justice?”
“Yes.”
“She’s going to meet us in a coffee shop to see if she can make that portrait for you.”
“When did you arrange that?”
“While you were shaving.”
Ian remembered his frustration in trying to shave with the disposable razor room service had delivered. “Regardless of whether or not this works, I want you to know I really appreciate it.”
Nesta started to say something, but surprised both of them when tears formed in her eyes.
He dropped the bag that contained their clothes and fully embraced her. “What’s wrong? How have I hurt you?” he asked as he rubbed her back with one hand and his cheek against the top of her head.
“You haven’t hurt me. It just makes me so sad to think about how long it’s been since you’ve seen your family.”
She sounded young, vulnerable. His heart felt so full he feared it would burst. Ian wanted to turn around, take her back to “their” suite and never leave.
“Nesta, I have friends who feel like family, and now I have you and your family too.”
His words came from the heart, but when he heard them he thought they would make her happy. He thought she would stop crying. Instead she sobbed louder. The car arrived.
“The car is here. I’ll drive.”
She looked up from his chest. “It’s okay, I’ll drive. I don’t know why I’m feeling so emotional this morning.”
“I can drive, Nesta. You just relax.”
“No, I’m the driver. You’ve already told me that you don’t enjoy it, and I do.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, Ian.”
As she got behind the wheel and went about adjusting the mirrors and locking her seatbelt, she thought about that moment in the early morning, when she’d realized they hadn’t practiced safe sex. Could I really be pregnant? she asked herself. Is that why I feel like my emotions are all over the place? And what kind of baby makes a mother this crazy at less than twenty-four hours in the womb?
Ian felt a set of intense eyes on him. He knew the feeling and looked around reluctantly.
Nesta pulled out to pass a car that was being unpacked by one of the bell hops.
There was something about the man’s height that made Ian wait to see his face. Ian looked behind at the car as they drove away. The man wearing the uniform looked up, and Ian caught a brief glance of the Pale Fox glaring at him.
Why? But before Ian could finish the thought, he remembered that Nesta had cried. I promise you for every tear that falls from my Nesta’s eyes in sadness because of you, I will sentence you to one year in that room.
He wasn’t in the white room, so Ian assumed Fox understood that he hadn’t made her cry.
* * * *
They met Nesta’s friend, Van. Her name was actually Vanessa, but they decided, when they were college students, that Vanessa would be Van. Even with three inches difference in their height, and Van being a little darker with a long hair weave, the white students in the dorm kept confusing the two. Ian wondered what was wrong with anybody who would confuse them.
Ian was impressed with Van and found her delightful, but not in a way that could ever attract him. As a man who’d lived so long, it was difficult to find young humans with enough curiosity about the world to interest him. He saw that curiosity and intelligence in Nesta, but not in her friend.
Van was smart and very competent in her abilities, but he could tell she had little interest beyond her own life and the lives of her friends.
He remembered how Nesta had asked so many questions while they were at the museum and how she’d waited for the answers. When they were in the motel and hotel, the few times the television was on, it was on a news channel, and she would look up and track various stories from around the world. Even when she didn’t make comments about a story, he could see in her eyes that the pain of others affected her.
Ian was surprised by how much of his mother’s face he remembered: her thick though naturally arched eyebrows, her full pouty lips. Like most Malians, his parents had Egyptian roots. His mother’s Egyptian heritage was revealed in the slight narrowness of the bridge of her nose.
“Are you sure?” Van kept asking.
Ian thought it was a conversational rejoinder that didn’t really mean she doubted the image she was creating on her laptop, but that there were a lot of choices and she wanted him to be sure.
“Ian’s African,” Nesta said. “His parents are from Mali.”
Oh, she wonders how my mother can look like that based on my current appearance.
“Really?” Van asked. She looked at him again, making no effort to hide her confusion.
“Okay,” she said, and she didn’t ask him
again if he was sure.
Ian thought her easy acceptance was typical of her generation. He was sure that Nesta would have had many more questions had the situation been reversed. Every time he heard a young person say “whatever,” he cringed. Van didn’t say it, but the shrug of her shoulders did. The hardest choice came when it was time to choose a color for his mother’s skin. None of the colors were quite right.
He remembered being a young boy, around ten years old. He was walking toward her as she was sitting outside their home, holding one of his younger cousins.
The sun was shining particularly bright that day. He remembered having the thought that she was causing the day’s brightness and the rays were going up from her beautiful reddish brown skin to the sun.
She looked up and noted his approach and her whole face lit, and then he was convinced. His mother lit the sun.
“That’s her,” Ian decided.
“I don’t have a lot of choices for black hairstyles.”
“She wore it cut close, and it formed big loose curls when longer and wet.”
Van looked up from her screen and looked at Nesta’s hair. Both women laughed.
Ian smiled. “No, not like Nesta’s hair. Much shorter with tighter curls.”
“That’s what we call naps, sweetie,” Van said.
Ian smiled. Although her calling him “sweetie” bothered him, he wasn’t sure why. “Okay, nappy works, it was a soft nap that separated and curled when wet, if that makes any sense.”
Van nodded. She clicked on a screen with men’s hairstyles. She picked a style she called her Jewish Afro.
“That’s it,” Ian agreed. “But her hair was jet black.”
With just another click, the brown became black. Ian stared at the screen. He felt as if he could cry. He looked away.
“Since I didn’t bring a printer, I’m going to send this to your e-mail and you can print it at home,” she told Nesta. “I’m saving it as a jpeg.”
Nesta nodded.
In another click her image was gone. Van didn’t need as much time with his father’s picture.
Ian suspected it was because she knew she was looking for African features.
When it was over, she wouldn’t take payment from him. He thanked her profusely and hugged her.
“Now, if you’ve got a brother, I will accept an introduction,” Van said as she packed up her computer.
“See why I said I wouldn’t introduce you to my friends?” Nesta asked.
“I’m not flirting, Nesta. I asked if he had a brother!”
Ian found the exchange interesting. Until Van said “sweetie,” he wouldn’t have thought she’d even noticed he was a man. Clearly she was the type who took care of business before allowing herself to play.
The women hugged again, and they all walked out together.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“So what did you think of her?” Nesta asked.
The freeway wasn’t as busy as it was going to be in another hour or two, but there was more traffic than he would have wanted to face. He was glad she was able to drive.
“I liked her. She seems like the type of women I would expect you to have as a friend.”
“How so?”
“Smart, cute, a little of all your wonderful traits without enough to be you.”
He didn’t have to look at her. He could feel the smile on her face. “Is she coming to the party?”
“Why?”
He thought he heard an edge to her inquiry. She wasn’t kidding, she really is jealous The notion pleased him. “I was thinking some of those young Hunters you talked about might be there. Maybe you can introduce her to somebody.”
“That’s a good idea. I’ll send her a text, or maybe I’ll give her the details when I acknowledge the pictures in my e-mail.”
“I remember when I thought telephones were the epitome of communication; now they’re too slow.”
“Ian, what was the world like when you were my age?”
He looked at her and saw a sadness that gripped him. He listened to her thoughts before he answered. “The world was incomplete, and it remained incomplete until the day I met you.”
She smiled, but he knew his words weren’t enough to lift the thoughts running through her mind, threatening to make her doubt her ability to satisfy him on an intellectual level.
“Nesta, do you have any friends whose parents were less affluent than yours?”
“Of course. I suspect that would be true of all of my black friends and most of my Asian and white friends.”
“Trust me, if Kingsley is typical of the other Hunters I know around his age, it’s true of all of your friends.”
She sucked in her breath. “I don’t know how to think about that.”
“And you shouldn’t have to—wealth is not my point. Anybody with half a brain who knows he or she is going to live three or four times longer than everybody else ought to figure out how to make money. My point is, you’ve been able to travel and do other things that your very best friends haven’t been able to do, but that doesn’t make you love or respect them any less, does it?”
“No, not at all.”
“Is there nothing your poorest friend can teach you?”
Nesta thought about it before answering. “She teaches me something whenever we’re together. She’s my most trusted confidant.”
“That’s my point, sweetheart. Time gives me an edge, but it doesn’t answer every question any more than wealth answers every question. There are humans who wouldn’t add much to my life, but they are not the ones who become my friends, and I certainly would never take any of those humans into my bed.”
“Thank you. I needed to hear that.”
When they entered her parents’ home, they heard laughter. “My aunt Ife is here. I’d know that laugh anywhere. Come meet her,” Nesta said as she pulled him toward the kitchen.
He immediately noted the name as African, a fairly common Yoruba name. If memory serves, I believe it means love. He was expecting to see an ex-Hunter or Tracker.
The woman sitting on a bar stool next to Dot was a strikingly beautiful African woman. She stood when they entered. When she and Nesta embraced, Ian felt chills as they formed on his arms. He knew Nesta’s face was very much her father’s, but the two looked like sisters from the side—similar facial profiles and nearly identical bodies. She broke the hug and looked at Nesta as if shocked and then at Ian.
He thought her look was accusatory. He suspected her superior sense of smell told her that the two had been intimate.
“Are you well?” she asked Nesta.
“Yes, I feel great. What about you?”
“Happier now. I didn’t expect to see you this trip.”
“Are you staying until the party?”
“No, I have to get back. I just came to bring your mother an outfit I thought she might like to wear on Saturday.”
“You came all the way from Sacramento for that and you’re going back?”
“Sit down, darling.” She all but pushed Nesta on the stool she’d evacuated. “I understand that your parents and Fox have had the big talk with you? Yes?”
Nesta nodded.
“Then you should know that I come and go like your uncle Ogo.”
“You too, Aunt Ife?”
Ife smiled. “I’m afraid so. We never wanted to deceive you, and I’m very pleased to have it in the open.”
Nesta nodded again. Ian supposed she was near sensory overload, but she was still handling the new information well. “I want you to meet my friend.” Her voice sounded odd to him, as if she’d already dismissed her “aunt’s” revelation.
Ife looked at him. “I know Ian. How are you, Hunter?”
If Nesta was near overload, Ian could certainly understand it. At least fifty-five percent of the woman who spoke to him was familiar, but none of it had anything to do with her appearance.
“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” he finally said.
Ife st
ood behind Nesta and wrapped her arms around her. Her hands rested on Nesta’s belly. “Look at me again,” she said.
He saw her face morph into that of a young white woman he knew in Sacramento who went by the name LeeAna.
He tried to avoid letting the shock show on his face. His Nesta had already been through too much.
There was much speculation among his Sacramento brethen as to why the woman was such a friend to the Dogon-Hunters there. Although he’d never seen her in her current form, he’d heard it suggested that she was a minor Yoruba goddess. That part didn’t make any sense to Ian because he knew gods and goddesses from other African pantheons, and they weren’t interested in the work of the Dogon-Hunters any more than they were interested in the work of the Greeks or Romans or anyone else.
Scented Dreams ((A Dogon-Hunters Series Novel)) Page 24