RECKLESS — Bad Boy Criminal Romance (24 page)

              I worried something bad had happened.  Had they been caught?  And if so, how?  As I fretted, the door opened and Ariel walked inside.  I stood quickly off the couch.  “Where were you?”

              “Whoa, easy,” Ariel said, smiling.  “Are you going to ground me for breaking curfew?”

              “Seriously, I was worried about you.”

              “When Terrell stopped by and had the key made, he said he was going to be eating late and asked if I wanted to join him when I got done.”

              I listened.

              “When the kid’s parents got home, we met at CK’s Coffee Shop.”

I glanced at the time.  “That’s a long time eating waffles, wasn’t it?”

“I drank some coffee and we just talked a lot.  That’s all we did.  I didn’t even realize how late it’d gotten.”

“Alright, whatever, it’s fine.  He’s got the key, right?”

“Yeah.”

I turned my back to her to return to the couch and fall back asleep.

“Hey.”  Before I stepped away, Ariel wrapped her arms around my back and hugged me.  “Thanks for caring about me though.”

Chapter Fifteen

I visited Terrell at his house.  His grandmother’s memory was even worse than usual.  She wandered continuously from her bedroom to the living room to the kitchen and asked, “What’s happening today?”  And, “Are we expecting someone over?”

“Everything’s good,” Terrell told her.  “Why don’t you just sit down and watch TV or read or something?”

“Is there a book I’m reading?” she asked.  “I don’t remember.”

“I don’t know,” Terrell said.  “How about some TV?”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“How about sitting and just relaxing for a minute then?”

She agreed and sat in her chair in the living room.  She still fidgeted, her mind muddled with fragmented thought.

Terrell and I stepped into the kitchen to speak privately.

“Cassie babysat at big place out in the suburbs around Collierville a couples nights ago,” I told him.  “The woman of the house collects art.  There’s a big room full.”

“Sounds good,” Terrell said, looking into the living room.

“We need to get a SUV probably,” I said.  “There are some big paintings we’ll need to stack up.”

“Yeah …” Terrell kept glancing at his grandmother.

I realized he wasn’t listening.  I stopped talking which elicited no response.

His grandmother stood up from her chair.

“Where you going?” Terrell asked her.

“To my bedroom.  There’s something I want to check on.”

“What?”

She started to answer but drew a blank, a confused expression on her face.  “It slipped my mind.  I’ll be right back.”  She scurried away into her bedroom.

Terrell sighed and looked at me.  “I don’t know what the fuck’s going on,” he said.  “She’s been having some real bad days.  Her memory has been bad for years and only getting worse, but at least she could chill out and get through the day.”

“Sounds rough.”

“The other day I heard something that woke me up in the middle of the night.  Scared the shit out of me.  I grabbed a baseball bat to see what it was.  It ended up being her stumbling through the kitchen, confused about where she was.”

“Maybe you could take her to a doctor.”

“What would a doctor tell me?  Put her in a nursing home?  Fuck it.  She took care of me when I was a kid.  I’ll take care of her now the best I can.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“I need to tell you something,” Terrell said.

“What?”
              “I’m interested in your sister, but I don’t want it to cause any problems between us.”

“She’s old enough to make her own decisions.  She told me she was with you the other night after she was done babysitting.”

“I only kissed her some.  That’s all we did.  I wanted to talk to you before I went any further.  I don’t want to fuck up our friendship.”

“Just be honest with her,” I said.  “You do that and I’m good.”

Sunday is my first day as a donation collector.  I’m scheduled for the eleven o’clock service.  Angela attends with me.  Britney and I have plans to meet later for dinner at her apartment.

During the service Angela and I sit together in a back pew, off to ourselves.  About halfway through the service I have to walk to the back of the church.  A tall, older gentleman named George, the head of the collectors, stands at the back.  He hands me a wicker collection basket.  I’m designated for the row of pews that Angela and I are sitting in.  I walk to the front of the row and hand the basket to the first person.  The basket then gets passed down the row, back to the next one, and so on all the way to the back.  I stand next to Angela, the last person in the last row.  When the basket reaches Angela, I turn toward her.  She turns toward me and pretends to put some money in the basket.  Instead she grabs a fistful of bills from the basket and quickly stuffs them in her purse, our bodies shielding the act.  I take the basket back to George, who holds a large black leather bag into which each collector dumps the money from his basket.

After church on the way back to the car Angela asks, “What kind of old person do you want to be?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was sitting in church, looking around at everyone.  I saw all these old people and it made me think about it.”

“So what did you decide?”

“I don’t want to be the type of old person who ends up, like, crippled, sitting in a chair all the time.  I want to be active no matter how old I get, travelling around, enjoying life and still hitting on cute guys.”  She laughs.  “How about you?”

“I don’t want to get old,” I tell her as we step into the Toyota.  “I think when I get to that place, when I’m fifty, sixty, whatever, whenever I start feeling old, that’s going to be it for me.  I don’t want to end up hobbling around on a walker or be in a wheelchair or something.  And I couldn’t stand having my mind go on me, making it so I need people to take care of me because I can barely function. The day I feel I’m at all headed in that direction I’m buying a gun and a putting a bullet in my brain.”

“Are you seeing Britney tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“I have a date with Eddie this Wednesday.”

“Cool.”

“I know what you can say to get Britney to sleep with you.”

“What?”

“Try this line: ‘Do you need prayer?  Because I’m willing to lay hands on you.’”

At Britney’s apartment that evening, for dinner, she prepares oven fried chicken with mash potatoes and gravy.  Afterward we sit together on her couch.  Thinking about the banter between Angela and me earlier, I look at Britney and say, “Want to practice speaking in tongues with me?”

“What?” she asks confused, not realizing it’s a joke.

“Nothing.”  I chuckle and kiss her neck.

We start making out and she’s much more aggressive than usual, pushing me backward onto the couch.  I start with my hands on her waist, then move to her back and before I squeeze her ass.  She slides her right hand down my chest, abdomen, then starts to unbuckle my belt.  Suddenly she freezes.

“Keep going,” I tell her.

Britney hesitates and says, “You’ve definitely had sex before, right?”

“Yeah.”

She gets off me and sits back up.  “I’ve been thinking about it and … I always thought I’d wait until the night I got married to have sex, but I don’t know … Being with you has totally fried my brain.  Part of me feels like I’d like my first time to be with you.”

I rub her leg.

“I know lust is a sin, but this feels more like love to me.  It doesn’t feel sinful.”

“Good.”

“If we did it, since I never have, would it hurt?  I probably wouldn’t be any good at it.”

“Just talk to me and I’ll do my best to make you comfortable.”

She listens.

“You ready to keep going?”

“I’m on my period,” she says.

“That doesn’t bother me.”

“Do you mind waiting?  It’s just … I only get one first time and I’d rather it be when I’m off.  I’d rather my memory of it be that way.”

Somewhat frustrated, I coolly say, “It’s fine.”

“It’s so weird,” Britney remarks, staring away.  “I always feel extremely sexual when I get on my period.  Really, it’s overwhelming.  And it’s always been like that for me.  Do you think that’s normal?”

“I’ve had other girls tell me they’re the exact same way.”

She looks at me and says, “How many girls have you been with?”

“I don’t like talking about the past.  Let’s just enjoy being with each other, right here and now.”

              At Platinum Pleasures strip club, Terrell leaned against the wall across from the main stage and eyed the crowd.  Curtis Reznok sat at the stage and his associates milled around the room.  Curtis stood and went to the bar for a drink.  He spoke to the bartender and a couple strippers on break.

              While he was at the bar, another man – black, late thirties, dreadlocks, wearing baggy jeans and oversized white T-shirt – sat in Curtis’ seat.  This went unnoticed until Curtis returned and informed him.

              Taking offense and not realizing who Curtis was, the man jumped up and shouted in Curtis’ face.  Before anyone could intervene, the man shoved him back a couple steps.  Curtis only smiled and some of his men whisked Curtis back to the bar.

Terrell hesitated, afraid that one of Curtis’ men might pull a gun.

Instead, one of them quickly approached Terrell.  “That guy over there,” he said, pointing to the man.  “Throw him out.  Out into the back parking lot.”  He slipped Terrell a few hundred dollars.

Terrell pocketed the cash.

The man was again in Curtis’ seat, watching the girl dancing on stage, sitting as if nothing had happened.

“You’ve got to go,” Terrell told him.  “Right now.”

“I ain’t going nowhere, motherfucker.”  The man jumped up again.  “Why you hassling me?”

“You don’t walk out, I’m dragging you.”

“Fuck you.”  The man swung a wild right hand.

Terrell ducked the punch, barred the man’s arm and kicked him hard in the head.  Terrell released his arm, wrapped the man into a full nelson, and dragged him out the back door.  Terrell slung him into the gravel parking lot.

A swarm of Curtis’ men had followed outside.  The man staggered to his feet, blood running down his face, and stumbled to his car.  Curtis’ men got into a car of their own and followed him off the property.

Terrell went back inside where Curtis sat at the bar with a few of his men who had stayed.  Curtis stayed at the club until closing time, later than he usually did, and took a stripper home at the end of the night.

The man who shoved Curtis was found the next day in his apartment – his arms, legs, and head hacked off and set neatly beside his torso on the living room floor.

Police showed up at the strip club, asking questions about the man and the last time he was seen.  The brief altercation with Curtis was mentioned, but the bartender and strippers vouched that Curtis had been at the club until closing time.  And one stripper told police that she went home with Curtis and spent the entire night and following morning with him.

Police asked Terrell why he threw the man out.

“He was drunk and getting belligerent,” he told them.

“Was anyone in particular not getting along with him?  Or did anyone follow him after you escorted him outside?”

“No, not that I saw.”

Not long after the police left, Curtis’ man who gave Terrell three-hundred dollars showed up.  “What did you say to the police about me?” he asked.

Terrell looked at him.  “I’ve never met you before, have I?”

The man grinned and patted Terrell on the shoulder.

“Maybe I have a bad memory,” Terrell mused.

A date between Angela and Eddie is scheduled for a Thursday.  She tells him she has a late class in Film Lecture that ends at six o’clock.  She suggests he pick her up from there to go out to dinner.  That evening I drive her to the University of Arkansas and drop her off in front of Kimpel Hall forty-five minutes beforehand, just to be safe.

I have dinner at home with my mother.  Afterward we watch television together.  My mother asks what I want to watch and I tell her I don’t care.  She flips to the Discovery Channel and we watch an hour special on how the sun is expanding and will eventually envelope the earth.  Near the end, during a commercial, I drift off to sleep. 

I have an intense, weird dream that starts off inside a huge college classroom.  It has light-colored, specked linoleum floors and a tan tile ceiling and a chalkboard, but no desks at all and the room is absolutely enormous.  And there is probably fifty or sixty of us all standing around in there.  It looks like the building I left Angela at earlier.

All the people with me – the students, I guess – are people I’ve never known or seen in real life, though in the dream it is like I know them all.  There doesn’t seem to be any teacher.  But for some reason, we all start to walk out of the classroom and out of the building.  Across the street is a towering building.  It isn’t that wide, but there are several steps up to the front door, and the building stretches upward to the heavens.  The building starts off as a library but then starts to look like a cathedral.  It is an ornate, old stone structure with a tall, heavy front door.  I, along with several other guys in our group who are taller and bigger and stronger than me, start to pry open the front door.  But once we do that, there is another door behind it.  And behind that is another one.  We go through about six doors, all of them tall and painfully heavy.  Almost all of the students at this point are helping, using whatever force they can muster to pry the doors open.  By the time we get to the seventh door I notice pieces of the building from up above starting to crumble.  Little pieces of rock start to fall.  I am scared and stop helping though everyone else doesn’t pay any attention and they continue on.  It starts to make noise and crumble even more so I run as fast as I can off the steps and to the sidewalk alongside the building.  I look back and the building starts to collapse, crushing the people right by the door.  I run across the street just to be sure I will be clear of all the debris as it continues to fall.  Everyone is trapped and they are all screaming, being crushed by huge pieces of stone.  I briefly consider running over and trying to help them, the few who still remain.  But then I feel warm, relaxed, and I just think, ‘Fuck them.’  They will probably all die but I am going to live and that is all I really care about.  I stand there a while looking at the rubble feeling content and lucky.