Saved and SAINTified (12 page)

Xenia
burst out laughing. Saint turned her toward him.

“I’m serious,
Xenia. You know that when it comes to sex, I have problems abstaining, especially since I’ve found you ...” His eyes narrowed on her. He could feel his dick stiffen against his pants as thoughts of her dripping wet pussy gripping his dick that morning flooded his psyche.

“I’m weak when it comes to that
—when it comes to
you
. We have to be a team here, Xenia. If I try to get some, you have to tell me ‘no’ and stick to it.”

“But you were able to wait after I had both kids, and after
... ” She looked away; still, after all of these years, she struggled with the fact he’d been shot, almost killed.

“
Shot
baby, you can say it. It’s part of our story and I’m okay with it.  ...  It made us that much stronger, that much closer.” He traced her cheek with his index finger. “Now, as far as waiting—actually, not completely. Think about it. We had oral sex almost every day and you gave me beautiful hand jobs to help tide me over.” He grinned. “Be warned in advance, I know me. I
will
come after you, Xenia. You have to be strong, for the
both
of us.”

“Seven days?” she grimaced.

“I know
… we may have to sleep in separate rooms!” he half-joked.

“Even oral is off limits?” she whispered as she looked around them, making sure no one heard or was in close proximity.

Saint nodded. “Even dome—for me, anyway. I can do you though.” He winked as they began to walk again.

“Oh, well
, everything is fine then!” Xenia laughed boisterously. Saint shot her a faux angry glare. “Anyway, there are some other things we will try during this process, but I don’t want to get into a long, technical discussion.” This time, she was the one who glared at him. “Anyway, I think it is worth a try. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a small sacrifice.”

“For something that may or may not work.”

“Right—but I’m just trying to give you what you want.” He stopped and turned to look at her.

They stared at each other for a few moments.

“Saint, I know that you are.” She took his hands into hers. “But this isn’t about that. I want to have one more baby, but I want you to want her … or him, too.”

“I do. I wouldn’t be down for this if I had any reservations.”

“Well then, what is that look in your eye?” She smiled at him then briefly looked down at their sleeping boys.

“What look?” S
aint stood closer to her, pressing his chest into her body as he hugged her with one arm and held the stroller in place with the other.

“You know. There is something about how you look, when we talk about this
. What are your concerns, Saint?”

He sighed and walked closer to a bench. S
aint sat down, locking the stroller in place as Xenia joined him. “You know, I’ve been honest with you. I do want this.” He gave her a candid look and placed his hand on her thigh. “It’s just that I think it kind of scares me to have a daughter because … I know how men can be. I know what we do to women. At the Queendom conference, I could feel all that torn up energy, Xenia, and I had to think about my life, with the whole Payton shit—and how she became that person, that fucked up woman that she is, because of men. I know that as adults, we still have to take responsibility for our actions, we choose how we respond to the shit, but as men, we have so much control over y’all. It’s like what we do determines if you smile or not. If we have a little girl, she will be depending on me to show her how a man is supposed to conduct himself and one day…” He looked away then back at Xenia. “One day I will have to tell her some of the shit I did—terrible things, to so many women. She’ll know her father wasn’t shit, and that really upsets me, Xenia. I don’t want her to think of me like that...”

I can’t believe I’m admitting this to her
...

“If anyone ever hurt her
… or…”

Xenia
’s eyes glazed. She smiled and slid her hands around his neck. “I knew it,” she said with light humor. “You have a heart after all.”

She kissed him on the cheek. “Saint, you know all of this is normal. Look, you did that stuff in the past, okay? If we have a little girl, she won’t care about back then; she’ll only care about what you’re doing right now! I know there’s more to this, too.
You’d feel even more protective, right, if it is a girl?”

“Yes. I know it sounds sexist…
Men get hurt, too, so please don’t think I have less concern over our boys. It’s just different. I know Hassani and Dakarai could have all sorts of trouble with women, and the world, period. I know this. But … I don’t know.” He shrugged. “It’s just something about having that tiny baby girl that I know will do me in.” He laughed nervously. “I want her … or him, though, Xenia. Never doubt that.”

S
aint leaned toward her and wrapped his arm around her waist. A slight breeze blew, making the soft curls in her hair move about. He feathered them with his fingertips, then looked back down at her, studying her lips intensely. He pressed his lips against hers; their breathing soon mingled as he snaked his tongue inside of her mouth.  After a couple of minutes, he pulled away from her, cupping her chin.

“It’s a good thing we are skipping abstinence this cycle, because I think we need to get home and take care of a few things.”

Xenia giggled as he brought his face back toward her to give her yet another passionate kiss…

****

One week later…

“Mmmm,” S
aint whispered in Xenia’s ear. The warm, minty breath from his salivating mouth escaped as he cloaked her earlobe with his lips, kissing and sucking gently. “Don’t you want me to?” He smiled mischievously and twisted his hips between her thighs.

“Now, do I really need to answer that?”
Laughing, Xenia rubbed her nose against his. Just then, they heard a boisterous giggle come from the audio monitor. Saint shot a look at the clock.

“It’s four in the goddamn morning! What is Hassani doing awake?”
He immediately flung the sheets off of their naked intertwined bodies and rose from his resting position.

“Now S
aint, don’t go in there all crazy! Calm down.”

“This is the third time this week that he was told to go to bed but stayed up and then, what did he do? He fell asleep in preschool
, and who did the teacher blame? Us.” He angrily flipped the monitor off, grabbed his long black robe from the side of the bed, wrapped it around his taut body and made his way toward the master suite bedroom door.

Xenia
doesn’t need to hear me give this boy a piece of my mind. She’ll run in and try to save him...

S
aint walked out into the dimly lit hallway, his footsteps hard and dominant as he seethed with each stomping blow.

“Hassani! Still the numero uno cock blocker,” he mumbled under his breath, then
put on a stern face when he reached Hassani’s bedroom door.

He turned the knob and burst in. Hassani looked up at his father in the dimness. S
aint’s eyes glossed over as he stared in wonder around the room. In the air were colorful, assorted toys, moving about on their own. Spinning … turning … vibrating … flashing.  Saint ducked as a model airplane he’d built for Hassani came barreling right toward his face. He watched it crash clumsily into the wall and the other toys drop one by one, onto the dense, vibrantly-hued carpeted floor...

“Hassani?” Saint said in almost a whisper.

H
e hit the overhead light. Hassani blinked, the sudden brilliance blinding him as his eyes tried to adjust. He put his little hand up to his face, rubbed his dark eyes softly, then peered between his little tan fingers at his father, as if he were afraid.

“I’m sorry, Daddy
. … I didn’t hear you coming,” he mumbled.

S
aint sighed loudly and slumped down onto Hassani’s bed. He pushed his legs forward, his calves flexed as he dug his toes into the soft carpet before crossing his ankles. Many seconds of silence passed.

“So this is what you’ve been up doing?” S
aint asked softly.

Hassani nodded, refusing to make eye contact. Two figurines still spun around on the floor, moving aimlessly as one tiny toy plastic police car bumped repeatedly into the wall, red and blue lights flashing brightly.

“How long have you been able to do this?” Saint quickly looked over at the NYPD marked vehicle, concentrated and turned it off.

Hassani shrugged
. “I don’t know…”

“Did it just start happening in
, say, the last week or two?”

Hassani nodded.

“And this is why you haven’t been getting any sleep…” Saint rubbed his eyes and reached gently under his son’s arms, bringing him forward from the floor and sitting him down next to him on the half-made bed.

“Hassani, I’m not mad at you, okay?” S
aint yawned.

Hassani nodded again, seemingly not believing his father.

Saint cupped his son’s chin and turned the five-year old’s face toward him. “I’m serious. I’m not mad at you at all.”

S
aint smiled down at him. A childhood memory flashed before him, wrapped in a sensory explosion of his mother’s kitchen. He felt his adrenaline surge as the image hit him, one he thought he’d long forgotten.

S
even-year-old Saint stood in his parent’s small, South Bronx kitchen filled with spices, green and blue goblets and earth-toned, glassy-eyed, macabre owls. As he tried to help his mother wash the dishes they’d used to make the bread and vegetables, he realized that if he concentrated hard enough, he could dry them without using his hands.

But as quickly as he discovered the possibility, which was met with his mother’s laughter, his father came
through the front door of the apartment, huffing and puffing—obviously agitated from a long day at school with the troubled local youth.
In the process, the broken concentration caused a calamity—a plate crashed to the floor, breaking into countless, jagged white fragments. His father bolted into the kitchen, almost as if he knew. Saint recalled how his heart beat loudly in his chest as he looked up at the big man, who stared down at him with a scowl on his face.

His father fisted his hand at his side, until his mother put her hands on S
aint’s shoulders and said softly,“It was an accident. It slipped out of my hands. Dinner is almost ready.”

Before he knew it, his father stormed out of the kitchen, grabbed the phone off the wall in the living room and
spoke in Arabic to someone from Egypt. Noticing how frightened her son had become, Saint’s mother spun him around toward her, smiled down at him, and cupped his pointy chin with her suds covered hand. She winked at him.

“It will just be our little secret
,” she whispered…

“Daddy?” Hassani repeated. S
aint hadn’t realized that his son had been calling to him as he reminisced.

“Oh, yes, Hassani, I’m sorry
… just a little tired. Look, I don’t want you to keep things like this from me, do you hear? You can tell me anything, okay?” He hugged Hassani tightly, not giving him a chance to respond. He felt Hassani nod in his constricted embrace.

He slowly released him, and took his son
’s hand.

“I thought
… I thought you’d be mad, Daddy.”

“Why?”

“Because I made a mess and woke you up.”

S
aint laughed. “Yeah, I don’t like messes, but I’m not mad about what you were doing, although you still should be asleep. Now, when it is time for you to play by yourself in your room, then it’s fine, but when I tell you it’s time to go to bed, that is what I mean. Do you understand?”

Hassani nodded.

“I want you to know something.”

“Okay.” Hassani looked up at him with his big brown eyes.

“Now, you can tell me and your mother anything, and I want you to. But Hassani, it is very important that you not show
anyone
at your school, or anywhere else for that matter, that you can do this. Have you told anyone yet?”

Saint began to fill up like a tall glass of fear.

“No, Daddy.”

“Good. The reason being is that it can make some people uncomfortable and when people are uncomfortable, sometimes they can do and say hurtful things. My job as your father is to love and protect you. If someone sees you can do this, they may not understand it and…” Saint hesitated as he tried to choose his words carefully. “They may not understand it and they could do the wrong thing. I don’t want that to happen. What you can do is really neat but just like when you go to use the bathroom, it should be private—at least for right now. It’s not bad though, okay?”

Hassani
nodded in understanding.