Fat Girl (27 page)

“So do I! What’s your point?”

“
That
is my point. You’ve got all this shit with your father’s drinking, and she’s got all this shit with her mother putting her into foster care. Sometimes people get together for the wrong reasons. You don’t want to rush into something when you’re only eighteen. Cooling things off is probably a good thing.”

“Yeah, it’s just fucking great.” I feel like punching something. But I can’t punch Victor, so I drink.

Rarely do I touch the hard stuff. Don’t want to be any more like my old man than I already am. But my beer buzz isn’t enough to dull the thoughts of Dee pounding in my head. So when the party’s in full swing, I join a game of strip shots. At my turn, I balance a quarter on my thumb, take a bleary aim at the red paper cup in the center of the table, and let it fly. The silver coin flashes in the dimly lit kitchen and flips over, striking the edge of the cup and knocks it over. The crowd hoots with laughter.

“If NC State could only see their draft pick now,” taunts Winston, one of my teammates. “Guess tossing quarters ain’t as easy as making those three-point shots you’re so famous for.”

“Fuck you,” I retort and remove my shoes.

Kimmie, Frannie Mae’s daughter, sticks a lime wedge in her mouth and beckons me with the crook of her finger. I laugh it off, skipping the lime, and just slam back the shot of tequila. It burns my throat and tastes like hell.

“Again!” someone shouts.

Victor pulls me aside and warns me to take it easy, but I shake him off and resume my position in the game. Three more misses and three shots later, I’m stripped down to my jeans and the room’s a little blurry. I rub a hand over my face to clear my vision and call it quits. I get heckled about being a lightweight, and Linc, another teammate, takes my place.

Victor’s on the couch chatting up Christa Hardy, and aside from the stripping boozers, everybody’s in some state of girl–guy contact. Not what I want to see.

Needing air, I grab a beer out of the cooler and head out to the deck. I kick back in one of the lounge chairs and let the balmy breeze blow over me. It’s quiet and I don’t dare look across the distance to imagine what Dee’s doing at home. Instead, I gaze up at the black sky. There’s a faint moon and a few stars. The dark suits my mood.

Behind me, I hear the patio door slide open, and then there’s movement at my side. “Want some company?”

I don’t. But my fuzzy gaze travels up a pair of long, slim legs beneath a miniskirt to the pretty face of Tamara Scott. She’s a college girl now, but we hung out last summer before she left for school. I don’t even know which one—when we were in her bedroom, we didn’t spend much time talking.

“I saw you come out here by yourself,” she says.

That should have been her first clue that I wanted to be alone, but I flash my patented smile. “Grab a seat.”

She steps forward, her eyes fixated on my bare chest. “I thought about you a lot while I was gone. About all the fun we had.”

“Oh yeah?” I take a swig of beer. Truthfully, I barely remember. “Didn’t all those college guys keep you too busy to think about me?”

“Some guys are unforgettable,” she says with a flirty grin.

I tip back the bottle for another long drink.

“Do you care where I sit?” she asks.

“Nope, help yourself.”

“I’ll pick my favorite seat then.” I don’t get her meaning until she hikes up her skirt and slings one leg over me to straddle my thighs.

Whoa.
That’s not what I meant, but her body’s warm and the lust that hasn’t found an outlet in almost two weeks fights to break free. I set my beer down on the deck. Screw being alone. Screw my black mood. This is what I need. Something meaningless to take the edge off.

Tamara slips her arms around my neck and wiggles up my lap. Need coils low in my belly, and I look into her brown eyes, but they’re not flecked with gold. I close my lids to block out the images. But all I see is Dee’s face. She kisses me and all I feel are Dee’s soft lips. I taste her and it’s only Dee’s sweet flavor on my tongue. I grip her hips and feel Dee’s lush body.

She rides me through my jeans, and I’m buried deep inside Dee, sheathed in her tight creaminess, her muscles clamping my dick like a silken vise as she slides up and down, fucking me slow, loving me so good, crying out my name…

“Mick.”

It takes a moment for my muddled brain to send out the alert that it’s not Dee’s breathy moan I hear or her supple body I feel beneath my hands. Jerked out of my fantasy, my eyes spring open. “Shit!”

Tamara stares at me in dreamy confusion.

Shit. Shit. Shit.
The fog clears and I jump up, almost dumping her on the deck. Before she hits the ground, I catch her arm to right her, but quickly let go.

“What’s wrong?” she asks. “I thought you were into it. You seemed into it.”

Aw, fuck!
I drag my fingers through my hair. What the hell have I done? Thinking about the girl I love while I let a girl I hardly remember ride my lap? That’s not who I am anymore. Being with Dee made me better than this. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have let that happen.”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” I say feeling like a world class dipshit. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I did.”

“Oh.” She smooths down her skirt.

“You should go back inside.” I try not to make it sound like the dismissal it is, and fail.

Tamara shoots me a dirty look, which is less than I deserve. She turns on her heel to stalk back into the house, while I stand against the railing, shaking and hating myself.

“Mick?” Victor’s voice punches through my guilty haze as he steps out onto the deck. I can’t quite meet his eyes as I brace for the confrontation. “Everybody’s been looking for you, man,” he says. “Tamara said you came out here, and then she left with Christa all in a huff. Don’t know what crawled up her butt.”

I feel sick and relieved at the same time. Sick with remorse, but relieved that Tamara was probably too embarrassed to say anything and that it was too dark for anyone to have seen us. Victor may think my relationship with Dee is doomed, but if he knew what I’d done, his loyalty to Dee would take over.

“You’re shaking, man. Did you drink too much?”

“Yeah,” I tell him, preferring to deal with his
I told you so
than tell him the truth. “I need to shut the party down.”

As soon as we get everyone out—with gripes that it’s not even midnight—Victor leaves me to sleep it off. But I go straight to the bathroom, yank off my clothes, and step under the steaming hot water.

After toweling off, I brush my teeth and rinse twice with mouthwash. Reverting back to old behaviors wasn’t my finest moment. The truth is, I’ve been an ass all week, lying around my house, drinking, and partying—anything to avoid talking to Dee. But I’m done being an ass.

I have to see her. Now. I’ll do anything to fix whatever’s causing her doubts. Beg, plead, stand on my fucking head—whatever it takes.

I pull on sweats and a T-shirt. Heedless of the late hour and the questions my sudden presence will raise, I cut across the yard, my strides long, my pace determined. When I reach the house, it’s all lit up. An uneasy feeling moves through me. I clear the steps in one leap and burst into the kitchen.

Papa T’s on the phone, pacing, his face harried. Eleven-year-old Maria is sitting at the table cuddling little Gabi on her lap, and Mama T is crying in Victor’s arms.

Fear chills my blood. “Where’s Dee?”

“She’s gone, Mick.”

I hear Victor’s words, but they don’t compute. I rush to her room. Everything looks the same. Except it’s not. Her clothes are missing from the closet. On her nightstand is the copy I’d given her of
Princess Dionna and the Dark Shadow
and a white envelope with my name written across the front in a messy version of Dee’s handwriting.

I steady my hands enough to tear open the envelope. I stare in disbelief.

Inside sits her ring.

And my world drops from underneath me.

I SURFACE FROM THE MEMORY to find Mama T standing in the archway.

“The only thing that can put that kind of trouble in a man’s eyes is a woman,” she says of Dee’s picture in my hand.

Mahogany wisps streaked with gray fall from the loose braid framing the face I’ve known my entire life. I don’t like seeing the stress lines pinch her brow. She’s still grieving for Cayo, and the threat of losing Dwayde looms over us all.

“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” I say, assembling a smile.

“We’re beyond all that, Micah.”

She means the secrets. The night Dee left, I came clean, confessing our relationship and my marriage proposal. I expected Mama and Papa T to be furious with me. They knew of my reputation with girls—the whole town knew. But my prediction of their reaction turned out to be all wrong. Instead of being angry that I would dare to date their daughter, they were disappointed that we’d deceived them, which felt a hell of a lot worse to me than anger.

My old man, whom Cayo had called to report Dee missing, was also there, hearing the whole story. He was livid. Not in front of the Torreses, of course. He put on the performance of concerned father and sheriff. But at home was a different story.

“What are you, fucking stupid?” He spat in disgust and grabbed me by the throat. “You were going to throw your life away because you popped the chunky girl’s cherry. Are you so far up Cayo’s ass that you’d ruin everything to stay in his good books?”

“This has nothing to do with Cayo!” I shouted, fighting back that time. “I love Dee!”

“Listen to me, you dumb fuck.” His beefy mitt tightened against my windpipe. “You have NC State and then the NBA to think about. Not some fat girl who saw the writing on the wall. She knew you’d get sick of her soon enough and realize she wasn’t worth throwing it all away for. She got the message and she’s gone. And if you so much as make one phone call to try to find her, I will put a bullet through your fucking head.”

A sharp blow to the temple punctuated his threat. But I barely felt it, past caring what Malcolm Peters would do to me. I went with Papa T to Amherst to look for her. We turned up squat. Papa T even hired a private investigator, but I suspect we never got any “real” answers because my old man intervened. Not that I could ever prove it. But with no idea where she would go—she didn’t have any relatives that we knew of—we were at a dead end.

As the days and then the weeks went by without a call, without a word, the hope of ever hearing from her spilled from me like sand through an hourglass. I descended deeper and deeper into darkness. When it came time for college, I couldn’t bear going to New York without Dee. I couldn’t bear life without her.

“Micah?” Mama T cuts through my jagged flashback. “Come sit,” she says, taking a seat on the couch and patting the cushion beside her.

I force the memories into the black-edged corner of my mind and put the picture down before joining her. Mama T angles her body to face me with kind but keen eyes. After I lost my mom, it was Rita Torres who stepped in as surrogate. She’d been the one to bandage my skinned knees, feed me soup when I was sick, call me on my shit, and hug me whenever I needed it. And even when I thought I didn’t.