After The Dance (22 page)

But rather than take his tail out, Carl turned around and tilted his grinning mug toward the water cascading from the shower nozzle. Standing there, getting a right nice eyeful of his naked ass, I knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted me to touch him. And don’t think I wasn’t tempted. He’s got these big, broad shoulders, a wide, muscular back, and one of those high, tight behinds—the kind you generally see on track athletes. Honey, please, just thinking about it gets me all … Anyway, fine specimen of Black manhood that he is, I knew if I touched him, it would be all over with. He’d either have me squirming on the hard, cold porcelain floor of the tub, or else in some awkward position all up against the wall. So rather than give in, I got out, wrapped myself up in his robe, and went and had myself a seat on the end of his bed.

The room pulsated with the sound of Carl’s musical selection for the evening, Erykah Badu’s “Orange Moon,” on repeat, no less. The song is one of my favorites, but sitting there listening to it against the backdrop of my own rapidly beating heart made me somehow feel like I was hearing it for the first time.

Before long Carl came out and joined me, his body more wet than dry, but with a towel tied loosely around his waist. The latter I knew he’d done only out of a latent sense of courtesy toward me. On positioning himself next to me he took my hand, leaned over, and whispered into my ear, “You know your modesty is a turn-on, don’t you?”

“What doesn’t turn you on?” I asked him.

He chuckled and said, “When it comes to you, baby, there isn’t a whole heck of a lot that doesn’t. Even your bitchiness is, at times, extremely arousing.”

He already had me way past hot and bothered. And knowing from previous experience how hard it was to get
him to stop gabbing, once he got started, I said, “So are we going to talk or are we going to do this?”

“Oh,” he said, “we are most definitely going to do this.”

But instead of making a move toward my lips or taking me into his arms, he lowered himself to the floor and started rubbing my feet. At first I was like, I’ll be durn if this man don’t like himself some heels and toes. Rather than linger, though, he kissed a path up my ankles, past my shins, and over my calves. By the time he reached my locked knees, I had a pretty good idea where he was headed.

When he tried to peel his robe off my thighs, I grabbed his hands. He looked at me and said, “Why are you so tense? You act like we haven’t done this before.”

As far as I was concerned we hadn’t. Well, not
that
anyway.
That
wasn’t something I’d indulged in with anyone since … well, since Scoobie. Remember the whole Sunday morning, strawberry sex-capade I told you about? Even though Carl had tried to coax me into changing my mind, I’d drawn the line at letting him take his drip and lick act too far down into my lower divide.

Call me old-fashioned and out-of-touch with the current trends if you want to, but I still say casual sex ought to come with certain rules and limitations. And as far as I’m concerned that’s just too intimate an act to be out here doing with some of any and everybody. Of course, this wasn’t just anybody—it was Carl, a man truly unlike any I’d ever encountered.

And instead of giving up and turning his attention elsewhere, like he had the time before, this time the brother persisted. He rubbed his bristled chin against my tightly clasped knees and asked me if I trusted him.

I told him, “I suppose, or else I wouldn’t be here.”

He said, “So let me do this. Let me give you something to remember me by.”

His cockiness cut through some of my anxiety. I smiled and said, “Come again?”

He guided my hand to the nape of his neck and said, “Go on, close your eyes, baby. If you get uncomfortable, all you have to do is take your hand away and I’ll stop.”

So with those durn “Orange Moon” flutes paving the way and my girl’s sultry “How good it is,” refrain egging me on, I unlocked my legs and let dude lower his head between them. He brushed his mustache and his closed mouth against the inner portion of my left thigh, before treating the right one to the wet press of his lips and just the tiniest bit of tongue. Moving slowly and steadily upward, he went back and forth like that, from one leg to the other.

The intensity was more than I thought I could possibly bear. He’d only made it to the halfway point when I eased my hand away from his head. And just like he said he would, he stopped. But with disappointment creasing his face, he looked up at me and said, “You sure? You’re gonna always wonder …”

I knew he had a point. So without a word, I reached down with one hand and slid my fingers over his shoulders, up the back of his neck, and into his hair, which was still damp from the shower. After giving him the nod to go ahead and pick up where he’d left off, I closed my eyes again and waited for the music and the warm caress of Carl’s tongue to take me wherever it was they wanted me to go.

He must have thought I just might catch another case of cold feet, because the brother’s pace picked up considerably on the second go ’round, and before I knew anything, girl, he was there. If I had to describe it, I’d have to say it was kind of like the feeling you get on a diet when you deliberately deny yourself the one special treat you enjoy the most—Häagen-Dazs’s black-cherry ice cream, for instance. And then after what’s seemed like an eternity, you finally allow yourself a little. That first taste is so wonderfully exhilarating, it rolls through you like an electric shock might. Every cell in your body seems to suddenly come alive. In a
matter of seconds, not only did I have both of my hands rocking against the back of the brother’s head, but you’d best believe Ms. Badu wasn’t the only sister up in that joint giving shout-outs about how durn good it was.

The brother has got skills, is all I can say, girl. I’ve never had anything close to what I had with Carl that night. It went beyond just good sex with an attentive lover who knows his way around a woman’s body. No, this was some of that “get a sister all choked up and bring her ass to tears” kind of ecstasy that you generally only read about or see in the movies. Honey, I kid you not, somewhere ’round about that second orgasm the brother had me all worked up and crying so hard I think I kind of scared him.

He raised up and was like, “Damn, baby, what’s wrong? Did I hurt you? I didn’t mean to. Really, I didn’t.”

All I could do was shake my head and press my face into his chest. I couldn’t even speak, girl. But what I wanted to tell him was, “Yeah, you put a hurting on me, all right, one I’m not likely to forget anytime soon.”

I lay there for a little while wrapped up in Carl’s arms, listening to the steady thump of his heart and dreading what I had to do next. It wasn’t hard to tell he didn’t want to let me go. Every time I so much as stretched a leg or wiggled a toe, he held me even tighter and said something along the lines of, “Not yet, baby. Just a couple more minutes.”

When I finally did get up and go to the bathroom, I made sure to lock the door behind me. I had every intention of making my exit as quick and painless as possible, and the last thing I needed was Carl busting up in there, trying to throw more stumbling blocks in my path. I even forfeited the shower in exchange for a few hurried splashes here and there. After all, it wasn’t like I didn’t live right next door. Anyway, I got finished getting dressed and came out only to find him sitting up on the side of the bed, still naked as a jaybird and with my bag clutched in his lap.

He stood up as I approached him and even managed to summon forth a smile. But his eyes, which were bigger and sadder than any puppy dog I’d ever seen, said it all. On handing me the purse he said, “I guess this means I’m really
out,
huh?”

When I didn’t answer him, he said, “It could have been good, you know?”

Wrong as I knew it was, I couldn’t resist the urge to run my fingers over his chest one last time. I told him, “It was good, the best I’ve had thus far.”

He caught me by the hand and said, “I wasn’t talking about the sex, Faye.”

After making myself look at the hurt written all over his face, I told him, “I know. Neither was I.”

He looked like he was about to say something else, but I hushed him with a kiss. And then … and then I walked.

She walked out. She left me standing there butt-naked and begging. It was terrible, man. I felt so … so used.

Yeah, I know, it was my own damn fault for not heeding her warnings, right? Maybe if I hadn’t drifted off so deep into my own little world I would have taken more serious note of the subtle resistance on her part. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so ready and eager to carve out a permanent place for her in my life. But hey, all I’d wanted was to make her happy; to make her smile, to make her back arch in ecstasy as many times a week as she mighta wanted. Okay, so I admit, I was a brother who’d pretty much lost touch with reality.

I was still trying to reassemble the bent and busted pieces of my playa’s mask the night I took my Uncle Westbrook
up on his invitation to join him for a burger, a couple of beers, and a nice earful of some of them down-home blues. We’d just wrapped up our inspection of the quaint little spot I’ll soon be calling home. I told you about the deal I worked out with him, right? Yeah, see, Unc owns a couple rental properties and he’s agreed to let me move into one rent-free in exchange for helping him do a total rehab on the joint. Anyway, after walking through the place and checking out everything the old guy wanted done, I followed him to his favorite North Memphis getaway, Big Mama Mae’s Cafe and Grill.

Big Mama’s is this little dark hole-in-the-wall joint over there on Chelsea, the kind of place where you can order either red Kool-Aid, iced tea, or a cold brewski to wash down the great big helping of okra and peas that comes with your plate of fried chicken and hot-water cornbread; the kind of place where they’ve still got the likes of Muddy Waters, B. B. King, John Lee Hooker, and the three Bobbys—Rush, Blue Bland, and Womack—in heavy rotation on the jukebox.

Oh yeah, man, I’m a blues lover from way back. And if anybody’s to fault for that, it’s my music-loving former disc jockey of an uncle. Straight up, he’s the cat who first turned me on to a lot of the old stuff I listen to now.

But getting back to Big Mama’s, I’da probably been all right had I been able to get in and out of there without being forced to listen to that doggone song. I’m saying, man, me and Uncle Westbrook had finished grubbing and I was bobbing my head and tapping my foot to the closing lines of my all-time favorite Johnny Taylor jam, “Cheaper to Keep Her,” when some fool went over to the jukebox and cued up, of all things, “Dimples.” Yeah, man, it’s this old John Lee Hooker cut about some chick with dimples in her jaws. And you know, having just been through all that I had with Faye, that particular song was the last one in the world a brother wanted to hear.

Still bobbing my head, I had closed my eyes and was sitting there determined to maintain my cool brotherman front when my uncle’s voice bumped against the thin scab covering my blues. “So is what Squirrel said true? You and ol’ gal done broke up?”

My cousin Squirrel, with his jive, meddling ass, had earlier in the evening taken it upon himself to publicly bust me on my apparent lack of luck with the ladies.

Instead of hollering, “Ouch,” at the old guy, like I felt like doing, I opened my eyes and told him, “According to her way of looking at things, I don’t think we were ever really together.”

He passed me one of the beers the waitress brought to our table and took a long hit off of his before he asked, “You ever figure out what kind of volunteering she was doing up at the hospital?”

I took a hit off mine before I told him, “Nope.”

On that note, Unc reared back in his chair and nodded at this big-legged chick who’d been eyeballing us on the sly from the bar. Knowing old dude like I do, I thought our conversation pretty much over, and I was on the verge of closing my eyes again when I heard him say, “You wanna know?”

I cocked my head sideways and looked at him like, “What you talking ’bout, Willis?”

With his sights still set on the chick, dude took another long swig before he said, “Listening to you and Squirrel talk about your lady friend’s weekly trips up to the hospital got me kinda concerned, so I checked into. Just so happens I’ve got ties with a couple of fellas who work security out at Baptist East. I told ’em the deal—described ol’ girl as best I could, said I thought her name was Faye—and come to find out they knew exactly who and what I was talking ’bout.”

I leaned forward and was like, “Well, come on then, G, and tell me something already.”

“For starters,” he said, “it ain’t nowhere near as bad as you and Squirrel was making it out to be. I went up there on my next free Wednesday and the fellas I know in security took me to the third floor and walked me over to that ward where they keep the newborns. And sure enough, that’s where I saw her.”

Now that threw me. “The infant ward? What was she doing up there?”

Unc said, “Not much that I could see besides sitting there rocking.”

Dude wasn’t making much sense and for a second I wondered if maybe his Barnaby Jones cover had somehow led him astray. “Rocking?” I said.

“Yeah, her and a couple of other women. They were all sitting there together in these here rocking chairs. And they were rocking … you know, rocking babies.”

Babies? Even though the imagery was starting to click, it still wasn’t exactly clear. I said, “Okay, so she sneaks up there every Wednesday evening to rock babies? What’s that all about?”

My Uncle Westbrook shook his head and said, “Far as that’s concerned, youngblood, your guess is ’bout as good as mine. But I will say this—any woman who makes time every week to go somewhere and rock other folks’ chillren can’t be all that bad.”

When I shared with Nora what Scoobie had said about his mother’s affection for me and how she’d made him promise to seek me out when he finally decided to settle down, girlfriend was quick to dismiss it all with a snort and a curt wave of her hand. As if that wasn’t rude enough, she went
on to refresh my memory about the precarious state of Mrs. Payne’s mental well-being.