They were out of toilet paper and paper towels. 

What quality they would get would be dictated by the change scrounged up from the bottom of her mother’s purse, as well as whether or not they would get a single roll to last them until the next paycheck rather than a pack. The exact amount was $17.84, three crumbled fives and some change coupled with a handful of silver gum wrappers that Patience didn’t think the cashier would accept. That was how she ended up out of the house to begin with, at the Family Dollar around the corner, a six pack of single ply toilet paper rolls tucked underneath her arm in the checkout line.

“And you betta’ make fo’ damn sho’ to bring me back my change,” Her mother’s words had followed her out the door, an inarguable stipulation that no matter how bad she thought she was, Patience would not violate. Still, the sweetness of the day was not to be denied; it had gathered in the corners of her mouth as she’d begged her mother to allow her to make the ten minute walk to the store on her own, dispersing across her tongue when she relented, pressing the bills into her palm with a crease already forming on her forehead.

“Bring yo’ ass right back here, you here me? I don’t care if you see one of yo’ lil’ friends on the street, you better be back here in thirty minutes flat or I’m coming after you and whoopin’ yo’ ass in front of that whole store.”

Patience hadn’t doubted a single word she’d said, and she didn’t waste any time attempting to haggle for more. She kept track of the time religiously, forcing her legs to pump faster when it seemed that they were lagging behind the tick of the analogue clock widget she’d equipped on the unlock screen of her phone.

At the intersection of Thekla Avenue and Welles Road, approximately two blocks away from her house, a group of boys on bikes surrounded a fire hydrant as it vomited torrents of water onto the street. She recognized none of them except for him, and him only by his doggish laugh, trailing behind him as he circled the hydrant.

Patience felt her lip curl and tried to smooth out her face before he saw her coming. The day had sweltered; even the breeze that had blown through the open windows of her home earlier felt as if it had been freshly exhaled from someone’s lungs, hot and moist with July humidity.

She was glad for the plastic wrap around the toilet paper as she stepped off the sidewalk into the street, wincing when she felt the cold of the water seep into the canvas material of her shoes. She heard herself call his name, and gradually all five boys looked to her. Owl circled her like a shark closing in on its prey before he abruptly lifted his body off the bike, stumbling until he stood in front of her. Without him, it careened into the sidewalk, the spokes spinning lazily.

She checked her phone. Ten minutes before she was to deposit the remaining $9.46 into her mother’s hand.

“Just in time, I was just getting bored of these niggas.”

Before she could thrust out her arm to block him he was suddenly upon her, wrapping an arm around her waist to crush her body against his. She squeaked, wriggling furiously until he released her, but the damage was already done to the front of her shirt. She cut her eyes at him, sharp as an ax. He’d already turned back around.

“Aight ya’ll, imma head out. Don’t miss me too much.”

One of them snorted, placing a foot on the ground to steady himself as he peeled his shirt off. He balled it up, hurling the sopping white ball that landed a few inches short of Owl’s feet.

“Niggas get a girl and suddenly ain’t got time for nobody else no more. Aight bitch, gon’ head then.” He peered at Patience through a curtain of dreads that hung down to his chin. She wrinkled her nose. “If you want a real nigga, hit me up baby girl. I’ll treat you right, unlike this clown.” The words were light and fluffy, diffusing as soon as they reached Owl, who was already steering her away.

He parted from her side only to retrieve the bike before he was pulled back by an invisible chord. Patience’s irritation crackled in the silence that fell upon them. She almost snatched her hand back from him as he slipped it into his back pocket, but instead she gripped the wet denim, willing herself to chill out. By the time she succeeded, they were already closer to his house than they were to hers. “You got my shirt wet, you ass. How I’m supposed to go home like this?”

“Easy. Don’t go home. My mama got a double today, you can stay with me.”

She shook her head. “My mama gon’ throw a fit.”

Her time was well up. She didn’t care to think what would be waiting for her at home.

His house was almost a mirror of hers except his mother had had the sense to have the carpet ripped out and replaced with hardwood floors before he was born, though scratched from endless movements to make the furniture appear less ugly. It was clean enough to suggest that his mother had been home within the last two days but dirty enough that she could tell it hadn’t been within the last twenty-four hours. She tasted a tinge of ramen in the air and was unsurprised; in the five months since they’d been together, Patience had learned that all Owl knew how to make was cereal and ramen that he drenched in hot sauce and chicken seasoning, sometimes boiling a hot dog that he blanketed in plain white bread when he ran out of the first two and couldn’t bring himself to make the trip to the nearby Schnucks.

She felt his hands on her shoulders, steering her towards the couch. An indecent place, she thought, because what was to happen if his mother happened to come home early? It wasn’t enough to stop him as he lifted her shirt over her head, wasn’t enough to stop her from helping him out of his jean shorts, wasn’t enough to stop her from kneeling between his legs when he sat down. After so many times, her hands still shook, but she’d been getting better at catching herself; this part was simply a means to an end. It meant nothing and so she needn’t treat it like it did. She told this to herself each time like a mantra, and still it did nothing to quell her turning stomach.

His breathing increased just as she began to feel an ache in her jaw and suddenly she was once more made aware of him, of the fact that he was there and a part of it. She bit the meat of her cheek. Tasted blood. Swallowed it.

She’d had to train him the first time they had sex; he’d been much too gentle, assuming that with him was her first time. She hadn’t told him anything different. Instead, she had instructed him through a series of breathy fasters and harders, had guided his hands to her throat and pressed his fingers down until black spots danced before her vision.

She’d ignored the look he’d given her after. If she was bad for needing it, wasn’t he just as bad for agreeing to do it?

He cursed loudly as he spilled into her, kissing her so roughly that his teeth knocked into hers. Her stomach flipped. He slipped out of her, and there it was; that gritty texture as the sweat of what they’d done dried and cemented on top of her skin, the disappointment that he had tried and once again failed in fucking the pieces of her back together into the semblance of a whole being. His breath fanned her neck that was sure to bruise. Her skin seized wherever they touched, breaking out in goosebumps.

Without a word, she placed a hand on his damp chest to shove him off of her. When she sat up, her leg knocked against the toilet paper and she stared at it hard.

Her mother. She would be waiting, and what would Patience tell her when she finally came back? She knew better than to say anything about Owl; there was nothing that she knew of that could explain why she’d typed her number into his phone that first day, but Shanice would have called it stupidity and that would’ve been the end of it.

Whatever it was, it was the same sickly sweet drug that made her take a pair of his sweats and a shirt, folding her own clothes into tiny squares that would be easy to find the next morning. At the very least she would receive a tongue lashing and an open palm to the head if she tried to go home then. Her mother’s attempt to ’knock some sense into her.’ And at most, well, Shanice was creative. She’d have to say she’d gone over to Qway’s house; of course her mother would call to verify, but he’d cover for her.

“Damn Patience,” Owl rolled his shoulders, wincing as he stood from the couch. She had created art on his back, the lines from her nails raising the longer she looked. She tried to stop. “I know I be throwing down but you got to calm down a little. This shit hurt.”

She could have laughed. He was giving her the opportunity right then and there, his brown eyes cautiously jovial. If she would’ve laughed, he would’ve. He was giving her a chance to avoid talking about it. But she couldn’t.

“Sorry.” The word was hollow.

He kissed his teeth and turned away but didn’t push it further. As the waning sun bathed the room in piss colored light through the cracks in the curtains, even he could tell that although her body remained on the couch, she had gone somewhere that he could not follow.

Darius was constantly ready for someone to knock on his door.

Every night before he went to bed at night, he rehearsed a script on what he would tell his mother. How he would answer her when she asked why his fingerprints were the ones pressed into the dead woman’s skin, why his semen could be found in a condom he had carelessly discarded in the dumpster that he’d left her body next to. If his room were searched, they would find a tightly bundled pair of dark wash jeans shoved into the back of his closet underneath all of his shoes, the crotch stained with blackened blood. He hadn’t the foggiest idea of what to do with them. 

Hours were spent in the still darkness of his room, his arms locked behind his head as he drifted back and forth across the blurry line that separated dreams from reality. It was always well after midnight before he heard his mother’s footsteps pad past his door from the direction of the front room, and he listened for the soft click of her own bedroom door closing before he peeled himself off his mattress. The floorboards creaked underneath his weight regardless of how lightly he treaded, the frigidity of them seeping in through the soles of his feet. His bare chest was studded with goosebumps long before he made it to the bathroom, where he used two hands to mute the noise of the door as it closed. Only then did the tiny room flood with dim light, and in the mirror he would draw his thick brows down into what he thought was a pained frown, smile, then let it fall when he decided it looked too insincere. He tried on more than one occasion to coax tears from his eyes, but they simply stared back at him, dry, impassive pits of dark earth.

His days ran together, one right into the next with only the sunrise and sunset to remind him that time was passing. With each day that came and went, he grew more confident; in the mornings before he left for work, he was able to mean it when he joked around with his mama over burnt pancakes. He would make her swear to call him if she heard the roar of his daddy’s busted up Chevy anywhere near the house and left knowing that she wouldn’t, pressing a syrupy kiss to her temple with a promise to return as soon as possible. Just as often as he did it, she reminded him that she was a grown woman and could take care of herself, a lie that neither of them believed even as she said it, and sent him on his way.

He did his best not to deviate from his established schedule. Countless hours were spent on the scuffed basketball court of the local YMCA, some days from open right until close. He played hard, slamming the ball so hard against the polished wood it nearly hurt as it smacked against his palm if he was too slow to rebuff it with his fingers; whenever her name crept into his mind, which was quite often in its own right and more often than he would ever admit, he would push himself as hard as he could as if he could feel her eyes resting on his neck. He wanted to give Patience a show. Let her know what she’d missed out on. Afterwards, he always relished the way his muscles burned and the way that his lungs refused to fail him, powerful and robust. He was the prize. Never a contestant.

He’d taken a short leave from his job, but it called him back soon enough.

Business was slow the day that she came in. Darius spent the entirety of his day examining their meager on hand inventory of parts and various liquids that were the lifeblood of the cars they serviced, drawing up a list of what they had and what they needed whilst calculating the costs. Numbers filled his eyes and ears, birthing a vague shape to the spreadsheet that he would later recreate in a computer as he puttered about.

She was the owner of an inherited 1991 Nissan Sentra that, in her words, had suddenly just stopped running. Nino made quick work of the car’s inspection. He listed off the issues relentlessly as soon as he found them, the volume of it carrying easily through the thin walls of his office that doubled as a storage room for on hand parts. The alternator was malfunctioning, the starter needed replacing, the battery terminals were corroded, and he was absolutely sure there was something wrong with the engine because of the way it rattled when you turned the key. The numbers fell away altogether, his flow shattered when he heard a woman’s voice climb to a higher octave.

He grunted, slapping his notepad down onto one of the shelving units with much more force than necessary.

“Look, it really ain’t nothing we can do for it. It would cost more to fix it than to just get a new car,” He said, swiping at the beading sweat on the crown of his head with the back of his hand. He left behind a streak of matte black oil against his light skin but didn’t seem to care.

Both jumped when Darius suddenly appeared next to Nino, placing a hand on the shoulder that sat a few inches higher than his own. The small, apologetic smile that commanded his features was instinctual.

“I’m so sorry about that, ma’am.” Darius said.

Her forehead began to smooth out. She uncrossed her arms and shifted her weight but didn’t smile back at him.

This gave Darius a generous view of her cleavage through her unzipped jacket, a black bubble jacket that did nothing to hide the shape of her body. When he looked away, out of the corner of his eye he could see her gaze skimming over the ropy muscles that made up his arms, the broadness of his shoulders, then back up to his face where it traced the curve of his jaw.

“That’s okay, but you should teach yo’ boys how to talk to a woman. Clearly at least one man here knows how.” The bite was still in her tone. The smile was frozen on his face.

“Sure thing. I’m really sorry about all that; the man is overworked.” He patted Nino’s back hardily, feeling the bone of his shoulder blade through the thin, stained shirt he wore. “Aye man, how about I take over this transaction? You can head out a little early, get a head start on the weekend. I won’t tell anybody if you don’t.”

The older man shrugged; within minutes, Darius heard the squeal of his tires as he peeled out of the employee parking lot as if he was concerned that he would be called back. He shook his head. Nino had a mind similar to the machines that he fixed on a daily basis; to the amateur eye, it appeared to make no sense at all, a mass of oily parts and belts that were haphazardly placed. Whilst its output was undeniable, he was an older model and had the user-friendly interface of a stick shift with the ball on the end screwed in upside down. Needless to say, there was no manual that Darius had ever found that accurately explained how the man operated.

That left Darius to explain to her in the simplest terms that he could that even if she wanted to shell out the money to fix the car, which truly wasn’t worth it due to its age and mileage, it would still end up back in someone’s shop within the week. Then, on top of the rest of the costs, she would be saddled with a tow bill.

His tongue trailed his bottom lip and he raised a hand to his head. “How about I give you a ride home? An apology for Nino’s behavior. How’s that sound?” He was already pulling his keys from his pocket. He wasn’t sure exactly when he decided that he wanted to sleep with her, but now that he had, he studied her more intently. Her cheeks glowed, and a crinkle was beginning to form at the corners of her eyes. They were the typical brown, framed by thick lashes and eyeliner. She had already given him her answer.

He would learn her name was Brianne from the number she left in his phone as she leaned in through the window of his car, her bubble jacket zipped up to her neck once more. He received a text only hours after dropping her off, her name illuminating his phone screen. As he waited in the lobby of Imo’s for a sausage and pepperoni pizza, they traded surface level banter that exasperated him; still, the imagery of her thighs wrapped around his waist was enough to persuade him to go on.

Their first date was underwhelming, spent in the darkness of Theater Eight whilst a movie, the title of which he’d forgotten by the time they sunk into their cushioned seats, took up the entirety of the wall adjacent to them. He liked the braids that she wore, different entirely from the dark, glossy waves that fell well past her shoulders at the auto-body shop; hers were blond and Patience’s were usually black, but they were the same kind and she had the little gold cuffs in them too. He hadn’t touched the popcorn that sat in his lap once, but he watched her hand dip in and out of it, slick with butter. He had refrained from anything more than a chaste kiss to conclude that date, though he was sure that had he pushed a little, her door would have opened.

There came a second; he treated her to barbeque at J. Smugs GastroPit, sipping on a lemonade on the menu while she started in on the cornbread. He listened politely as she spoke about her hopes to become a registered nurse and asked her questions about the difficulty level of her studies. He carefully avoided the ribs on the menu and instead opted for the avocado turkey sandwich and tried not to turn up his nose when the Cuban sandwich was placed in front of her.

He gave her credit where it was due; her dark blue top remained unsoiled by the time that they were finished, and in the window he caught a glimpse of the two of them. She was just short enough to fit him without it being awkward for him to drape his arm around her shoulders. She laughed when she was supposed to and it was neither too loud or overwhelming like that of most of the black women he’d encountered. He could appreciate her for what she was, what his mother would have referred to as a peach; sweet, supple and pretty to look at.

Between dates, he carried her to the places that she needed to go. He had yet to explain his living situation to her and hadn’t decided if he planned to do so at all, and so he often spent the night with her. Bits and pieces of himself slowly began to appear in her apartment; a toothbrush because he didn’t like kissing her with morning breath. Basketball shorts for when he needed to go straight to the gym. A bottle of sandalwood cologne that he had ‘forgotten’ before one of their dates.

He was patient with her in exactly the way that he wasn’t with Patience. He wanted her to come to him. And she did.

He’d taken her out to the Galleria because the stores in the Chesterfield Mall were all slowly but surely making their way out, leaving behind empty, dark cells. Darius disliked the mall; too many loud teenagers showing off to one another, the food court stank like fried cheese and feet, and all there was to do there was to spend money. But Brianne wanted to go, so they did. They went from store to store, hardly a word passing between the two of them as she slowly collected bags that she passed off to him.

He lagged behind her, her hand warm in his. A man around his age swaggered past them, a speaker at his hip blasting Drake. His eyes hit three points; Brianne, their joined hands, and then Darius’s face. He moved along.

They’d been there for an hour, his arms saddled with three bags apiece before she announced that she wanted a pretzel.

“I think Auntie Anne’s is on the second floor.” He said.

They took the escalators to the second floor. The mall itself was busy and so he was unsurprised to find a line. Brianne turned to him.

“You wanna go find a table? I can wait.”

He immediately refused. “I’ll wait with you. Watch, any of these dudes see you without a man by your side and they’re going to think you don’t have one. I don’t mind.”

Already turnex away from him, she couldn’t see his face as she laughed. He hovered beside her, staring down the young man with a beard that didn’t connect who took her order.

He didn’t relax even when they claimed their table in one of the corners of the food court. He leaned back in his seat, swallowing a mouthful of her soda. She daintily tore apart the cinnamon sugar pretzel she’d been given, dipping bits into the icing before popping it into her mouth. Excess butter and sugar dropped from the pretzel into the space between her breasts and he imagined tasting it.

He hadn’t wanted to do much talking. As soon as they’d gotten into his car, he’d turned the radio on. 104.3 the Beat was the first station and he left it there, the whiney voice of the newest breakout rapper bouncing through the speakers.

Her voice faded in and out as his free hand tapped the steering wheel irritably. “...and I told her she need to chill on all’a that, she ain’t even the supervisor. I swear, it’s always the ones with no edges and hot breath.”

He nodded, bouncing his left leg. He couldn’t even remember a thing she’d said. Ahead of him was a sea of uninterrupted red lights as far as he could see. Every so often, someone honked and he had to refrain from rolling down his window to curse at the culprit. What would honking do? It wasn’t as if one person was holding them up; did they not understand bumper to bumper traffic?

Unconsciously, his fingers pressed down into the soft flesh of her inner thigh. She abruptly stopped talking, taking in a sharp breath.

He glanced at her, then back to the road. “You good?”

She gestured to his hand. “Are you? Chill on that. Or else you might start something you can’t finish.”

The car stopped again. He looked at her and raised a brow. “Something I can’t finish? Or you can’t? I don’t know, it sounds like you’re the one trying to start something right now.”

She didn’t move his hand. “You coming over tonight?” Her teeth dug into her bottom lip. He slid his hand further inwards just a little, slowly and intentionally.

“I mean, I was going to go hit up the gym, go home after that. Why?” He said, drawing his hand back.

She kissed her teeth, crossing her arms over her chest. “Boy, you betta quit playing wit me. You talking a big game over there, you gon’ come over and prove it or what?”

There it was, finally. He’d been waiting.

It didn’t happen as soon as he’d have liked; it took them another half an hour to get through the traffic, another five to get into the house. He dropped all of the bags by the door and she didn’t protest. It happened in the living room of her home because they couldn’t make it to the bedroom, her soda gathering condensation as he worked to reveal as much of her as possible. The extra pretzels she’d ordered grew cold as her head bobbed between his legs, the flaps of his jeans flayed open like skin. Even when he found himself buried inside her, her acrylic nails digging pleasantly into his back, his head was full of Patience, how Brianne smelled like the inside of his grandmother’s purse while Patience always smelled like Shea butter, jojoba oil and vanilla. Afterwards, as he sat with his bare ass pressed into her couch while she drank the rest of the watered down soda, he hated Patience for the choice that she had made, forcing him to make his. 

Next Chapter: 13