Black and Blue (7 page)

Below, my hardness already sat pressed against a center. Still kissing her, I entered. She sighed and sank back, already well past the point of defeat. Her tightness crushed me and every stroke was as vicious as any workout. I could barely stay in control.

I rode her back into the dark wooden headboards. The bed squeaked, then rattled, then brayed like a donkey as I plunged into her harder and faster. Our voices rode up with it, and then everything but the bed itself broke. I shuddered as I filled her with warmth. She thrashed around me, consumed in another bout of ecstasy.

Finally, she had the energy to look at me fully.

“I hate you,” she said.

“I know. Come on, let me give you a ride.”

I picked her out of the bed and led her to the bathroom. She bugged out at the vast standing shower, but I fought off the urge to drag us both in.

“Let me know when you’re ready,” I said.

I dropped off her clothes and dressed myself. I paced out to the sofa but couldn’t relax. I had gotten what I wanted many times over, and yet it still wasn’t enough. She might not really be angry at me, but that didn’t mean she’d want to see me again. Or that she could handle seeing anything but the facade of my life.

She only gave me a couple minutes to fret before hustling out, hair tied back, looking clean as an angel.

“I told Jada that I couldn’t meet her by my car. You’re dropping me off right?”

She had a nervousness to her that would have made me laugh if it didn’t look so sincere. “Yes, ma’am. Consider me your personal Uber driver.”

“Alright.”

She threaded an arm around mine and I felt a tingle - a goddamn tingle - at the simple joy of it.

I got the address from her and we pulled out of my lot. She lived in Grosse Pointe. My instincts about her being rich weren’t wrong.

“You always lived there?” I asked as we pulled onto the highway.

“As far as I can remember,” she said.

“I’ve never even been.”

“Oh.”

The radio chattered through our silence for a while. “So what’s a girl from Grosse Pointe need a job for?”

She raised an eyebrow at me. “We’re not the Ford family. I’ve still got to work to buy things I want.”

“Clothes?”

“Sometimes. Mostly gadgets and school books.”

That didn’t seem high maintenance, at least for a girl from her part of the world. But we had different scales for measuring those things.

“I’ll admit,” she said after a while,“that my dad is paying for school, but I’m doing my best to get the supplementals. He’s got another girl to put through too.”

“Oh.” Finally, a point of similarity: we both had younger sisters. Then, I thought of ever being able to send Sarah to a college that could handle her needs. The brief joy soured in my stomach.

We pulled off the highway and into a shaded suburb with large blocks of land filled by vast and storied houses. The lawns were twice the size of the place I’d grown up.

“Nice digs,” I said, as we sifted down a road full of them. I’d have to win a UFC championship to approach living here.

“Thanks. It’s, uh, this one here.”

I stopped in front of a large brick …colonial? It sounded like the right name. The thing looked out of some old British TV show. I wondered what her old man did to live in a place such as this.

Gabi unclasped her belt and turned to me. “Thanks for the driving,” she said, still looking on edge.

“Sure thing. Anything else you wanna thank me for?”

Her mouth trembled with a smile. “Last night was fun.”

“We should do it again then. Maybe something before that, as well.”

Her eyes slid over me, looking for who knew what. She nodded though. “Ok. I’ll call you.”

She opened the door, but I grabbed her arm and tugged her back for a kiss.

“Make sure you do,” I said.

She bounced out and shut the door, but glanced at me one more time. She couldn’t see me through the glass, but I could see her.

It seemed like it could be for the last time. That bothered me more than I could understand.

CHAPTER NINE

Gabrielle

No one was around when I came in. I headed straight upstairs and into the shower. The one in Sean’s place had been so inviting, but I hadn't wanted to dilly dally.

What would we have done if it there was time for it? Fool around some more? I wouldn’t have minded, but the hot steam sopped away my dirty thoughts as much as what was left of him between my legs. I could clearly see what a bad idea it would have been.

It’d been fun. He was sweet enough, but not as sweet as the guys I went for. He might live in a nice place, but I wasn’t exactly sure how he kept it. Did fighting really pay that well or was he getting money from some other sources? It wasn’t like he couldn’t lie if I just asked him.

I remember the sight of his hard jaw nearly falling open as it pulled onto our street. He looked like a kid at Disneyworld seeing the place that was just plain ol’ home to me. Something in me warmed at the memory - not the parts he usually brought alive, but one closer to my chest.

Maybe I was the one being an ice queen. He was chasing me like a puppy and I was treating him like some rabid mutt.

My head felt fuzzy, so I set it all aside for the moment and did my hair in the mirror. The dark sweep was getting kinky again, and I brought out the iron to set it straight. The girl looking back at me seemed to glow a bit brighter. Was sex supposed to do that to you, or was it just the workout that had come with this round? I smiled and even that looked especially dazzling.

Someone pounded the bathroom door.

“Gabi, you ready?” Gina’s muffled voice came through.

“What are you doing home?” I said. “I thought you’d be at the library.”

She groaned like an old stove through the door. “Don’t play with me. We’re already late.”

It came back to me. I was supposed to take her to the volunteer center today. “Oh right. Yeah, I’m coming.”

I’d have to straighten later. I got dressed and came out to find my sister striking an indignant pose and clutching her purse. She was looking just like mom.

“You’re driving, right?” I said, as we headed back down. “My car’s not here.”

“Yeah I saw.”

My breath tightened. “You saw?”

She blew past to the door, a smile on her lips. “Yeah, I saw how you got here.”

“Jada dropped me off. My car’s in the restaurant lot.”

“That wasn’t Jada’s car.”

“It’s her SUV.”

“Those aren’t her plates.”

She was giving me a look, but I ignored it and put on my shoes. “I guess you read them wrong.”

“Maybe. I wasn’t paying attention really. I was more interested in that white boy who was giving you a kiss.”

Her grin was practically falling off her face. I sighed.

“Alright, so it wasn’t Jada.”

“Who was it?”

“Just some guy.”

She didn’t pester me more as we moved through the house to the garage. She got into her old VW silently, but I knew that steam cooker in her head was just building up to another release.

My sister and I didn’t see eye to eye yet on guys. Mostly I didn’t like the idea of her thinking about guys at all in high school. Unfortunately, she was as pretty as she was smart, so the attention found her anyway. None of it was good enough for my little sis. In my mind, I was the prototype and she was the finished car.

She saw herself as a poor knockoff. Which meant that when I trashed some of the beaus she’d brought home, it might have sounded like I was criticizing her. I hadn’t given her an opportunity to reciprocate. Not until now.

I decided to pre-empt any outburst and get her on track instead. “So you know what you have to do with the system?” I asked.

“Yeah, piece of cake.”

“You done anything like this before?”

She sighed and pulled the car onto the street. “Come on Gabi, just tell me about him.”

“Not now. Let’s just focus on what we’re out to do.”

“You sound like Dad.”

“Well that’s not a bad thing. If you really want to put this on your college application, then you gotta help these people out.”

I was taking her Downriver to work at a career center. The people there weren’t the worst of the worst, but our parents hadn’t wanted Gina to go to a more desperate neighborhood. Even in this one, I was there to keep an eye on things. At least here, she could practice her programming to help the management at the center. It sounded better on an application than ladling out food at a soup kitchen.

I managed to wrangle Gina to school chit chat for the rest of our ride. We traced the river and things became more broken down. The houses looked more overgrown. We passed vacant lots and a couple empty office buildings with cracked windows. These too went away after a few blocks and we entered a worn out downtown with tired looking people on the streets.

We parked by the curb and went in the career center building. Gina introduced herself to the manager who took her to an office and set her up with a computer. He came back out and led me to a block of cubicles. I would be helping people with their job search for a couple hours. I’d volunteered here back when I was applying for school, so I could get straight into it.

The first man that came in had grown up around here. He was white and looked worn, and he seemed a little aback at seeing me. I hoped it was cause of my age, but people in Downriver still had a reputation for not being all that accepting of color.

“So what experience do you have, Mr. Jacobs?” I asked.

“Been sick a while.”

“So no work experience then?” I asked, looking over the bleak options on screen. “What about school?”

“Almost finished 11th grade.”

“Hmm.” I made a long show of looking at stuff, but there was really nothing. No diploma, no experience - there was nothing on offer for a guy like that. I talked to him about GEDs and some factory work. He just looked back at me with a gruff face until I was done and asked if there was anything office related. I could only say, “Nothing at the moment.”

Most of my appointments went like that. Even for people slightly better off, there weren’t many good options. It would take every ounce of energy in them to fight their way out and most no longer had the strength. I felt guiltier as the hours ticked by. These people needed help, but I was just window dressing. I wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for Gina. That was something else I lost hiding from risk: not wanting to waste time helping others.

I remembered again the way Sean had looked at my house. We lived in one of the nicer parts of Detroit, but to him, it was a castle. It struck me that he must have come from somewhere like this. Somewhere where he’d had to literally fight his way out. It made anything I’d done look like child’s play in comparison.

Gina finished up. In four hours, she had done a complete rewrite of the user interface. Their system practically sparkled, though the grim options behind it didn’t change. The manager thanked the both of us, and we left and headed back to our part of the city.

Gina didn’t probe me much more. I was lost in thought anyway. When we got back, I whipped out my MacBook and started reading about the Detroit fighting circles. I started watching a few matches and got engrossed. The fights wouldn’t have caught my attention on their own, but imagining Sean’s face made everything all the more personal.

I started reading bios from fighters not just in the US, but around the world. Some of the stories were remarkable. These weren’t guys from the wrestling teams in good high schools. They were, almost without fail, backstreet brawlers who found a legal outlet for their talents.

Mom came home from her early shift at the hospital. Dad came back an hour later. I sat engrossed till I was called to eat.

I slurped through soup and most of the meal, oblivious to the conversation. I had the night off from
Giuseppe’s.
I hadn’t planned on turning this into a fight research night, but learning about the sport was a fascinating window into a world I’d never even known.

Gina was talking about the day, and I tuned it out, until my ears picked up on some fateful words: “rough white boy.”

I snapped to her in time to hear her finish the sentence: “dropped her back home this morning.”

“What the heck, girl?” I asked Gina.

She gave me a devious smile. “You told on my boyfriend, before.”

“That was different. He was…no good.”

He was a jock, with a reputation. I hadn’t exactly told my parents about him, but it’d kinda slipped out. I wanted to be annoyed, but I couldn’t be much more than that.

“And who is this young gentleman?” my dad asked. He had that calm Huxtable air about him, even with just a t-shirt on.

“Just a customer at the restaurant.”

“An older man then?” Mom said.

“I said white boy, not old man,” Gina thoughtfully pointed out.

I wasn’t sure which sounded worse. The truth didn’t feel all that shameful after my reading though. “He’s young. He’d just won a sports championship.”