Hey fam, please remember that I’m sharing these excerpts with you before they’ve been to the editor (and they will), so what you’re reading should be a mostly clean first draft. There is a first excerpt if you missed it. Enjoy!
KEENAN
“You sure?” Stepping out of the SUV rental, I glance at the piece of paper again.
520 W. Superior Street.
“I’m sure. This is the building,” the private investigator replies.
I reach back inside the car and grab the bouquet of two dozen pink roses. My initial impressions of Eugenia tell me she’s not a “roses” kind of woman. But since I don’t know yet what her “thing” is, the only way I can express the big question mark drawn through the center of me is with some simple, cliche ass roses.
I stare at my watch. “Seven o’clock?”
It’s 7:01.
“Seven o’clock,” the investigator replies, taking a smoke.
Why in the hell did I go with pink roses? I probably should have gotten a more sophisticated color like purple or royal blue. Why did I spend a hundred and fifty dollars on these for somebody I don’t even know?
The answer pops into my head immediately as I stare at my sneakers for whether they’re white enough.
“There she is,” the P.I. notes.
Dark gray jogging pants come pushing through those double doors. In those leggings are the lithe legs that delivered one of the best Christmas gifts I’ve ever had. The black sports bra framing her breasts, even the loose-fitting tank falling over her chest and abs remind me of the soft but firm gifts underneath. Heading toward the Loop, her ponytail starts swinging.
Negro, do what you came to do. My feet don’t move, throat dries up. What if she reacts the way she did last weekend, at her son’s birthday party?
But Sheldon Rouse and his family, and all those Hamptons folks, aren’t here.
“You doing this or not?” the P.I. presses me.
I inhale and get ready to say it with my chest.
“Eugenia!” As my heart pounds, I wait for her to turn around.
She takes off running.
“Eugenia!” I shove the flowers at the P.I. “Take these and follow us.”
I hit the side walk after her, a long, beautiful figure that reminds me of Nicole Murphy. She keeps pushing forward, fast. Through a yellow light, she bounds as the crosswalk timer flashes its warning.
And since she’s put a good amount of distance between us, I get caught at the red light. Some force inside me cringes at the thought of spending anymore time away from her. Hell, it’s been five months already. That force propels these legs through the light.
“Excuse me! Sorry about that,“ I say as I bump, and place my arm on, an appalled lady.
But I keep going, not losing sight of my object. Down Superior Street, Eugenia doesn’t just jog light. Those legs must pump on the gas of ferocity. She turns off down a pathway that leads to A walkway for bicycles, strollers and running. In pursuit, start breaking into all light sweat.
I play basketball with my boys, swim, and lift, and she is still doing a damn good job of outpacing me.
Or maybe I’m still attached to her, sucked in like a magnet, because I want to see that toned ass and the way her muscles ripple, how they extend into tight thighs, curl down to her calves, which are toned and form a bulge inside her a legging. She must also lift weights occasionally.
I could have followed her from inside the SUV while the P.I. drove me, but that seems too lazy. And my adrenaline rush right now will not allow me to just sit in the car, idle and inactive after I’ve waited for months.
So in these $450 Air Jordans, I keep pumping after her. Of the several blocks that separated us, I’ve now cut the distance down to a few paces, about a block and a half. I came this far. That intensity on Christmas Eve night, the uninhibited way she threw her ass back on me, now reveals itself in her concentrated, intense stride. It’s the magnet that pulls me, won’t let me be still. Her electric energy won’t allow me to simply ride in the SUV while watching her flowing artwork in action, without me doing something about it. Like watching a Butterfly float by, or a hummingbird, or shit, a shooting star, and you just wanna chase it, look at it, and have that goddamn beauty forever.
For what must be several blocks, I put in a good jog in these inappropriate shoes they are now hurting my feet. But as she reaches what looks to be a park, I’m closing in. Throwing in a few more puffs, an extra burst of motivation, speed it up. With more muscle, I throw myself into this half a block of separation now, toward a butterfly maybe no one else managed to catch or understand, or could even hold onto for long, before letting it go.
“Eugenia!“ I manage, huffing and puffing like hell now. With everything in me, Stunt Man from B’More muscles ahead, my curiosity and intrigue giving me the fuel to push through my fatigue.
Finally, on a clear stretch of the path, almost a mile from where we started, my arteries pulsating in overdrive, lungs about to burst, I’m at Eugenia’s side.
My arm brushes her and we keep running against each other.
When I don’t move away, she looks and jumps, practically from her skin.
Startled, aghast, her eyes mushroom in shock, and as she recoils from me, she swerves off the path, tripping into the grass.
“Eugenia!“ I reach for her so she doesn’t fall, but as I grab her arm, her feet stumble anyway. In her state of apparent disbelief, she jerks as I lunge forward, which lands us in a pile on the grass. I’m on top of her, covering her supple, svelte, catlike, slinky body I held for a few precious hours. “Hello, gorgeous.”
Breathing hard, her chocolate brown eyes still might be processing if I’m real, they frost over, gazing like she’s in wonderment. “Kee…” she murmurs between breaths.
With a snap in those beautiful eyes, her chest seems to jolt, as if she’s snapping back to reality. Writhing underneath me, she starts scurrying backward.
“Keenan.“ Her voice has taken a different tone this time, like that is sobering recognition of some fact that I missed.
“Hey, good morning, I tried to call for you back at your building, but–“
“You were at my place?“
“Well, yeah. I wanted to pick you up and take you to breakfast.“
Eyes wild, in a flurry of sudden panic, she pushes off the grass. “How do you know where I live? How did you get my address? What are you doing here?“ wide-eyed between each blink, still catching her breath, she silently accuses me. “I thought I asked you to stay away.”
Now it’s me who blinks, stunned as hell, still trying to catch my breath that won’t come, so my lungs tighten up. The lack of oxygen chokes off my coherent words, shit, scrambles my brain waves.
“No, at the party, you asked me to leave. And I-I did. So I thought you and I could talk here, just us. Away from all those people in New York.”
I say it as I pick up her earbuds From the grass after I knocked them from her ears.
“Well, you thought wrong. You shouldn’t have come.”
The words are boulders crashing down on me. How is this butterfly so damn damaging?
“Eugenia, damn, you act like I’m some masked murderer or something.”
While shaking her head, worried lines crease her forehead, where a neon stoplight may as well be sitting. “No, no, that’s now how I mean come off.” She waves her hands. Her labored breathing might no longer be from the workout. “But I can’t. I-I can’t, Keenan.”
“Don’t say what you can’t do.”
“Keenan, do you want these?” The P.I. comes toward us holding the roses.
As subtly as I can, with tiny quivers of my head and hands, I attempt to tell him “no dice,” to stop. He misses my cues and shoves them at me.
Stammering now, which this nigga never does, I hold them out to her. “I got these for you. I didn’t know what your favorite-“
Eugenia’s gaze bounces around us. Is she looking for somebody? Like she might get in trouble if she’s seen with me.
Is she searching for a dude? Did my P.I. screw up and miss that she might have a man?
“I can’t take those,” she tells me.
A little annoyed at this point, after I almost chased her ass nearly a mile, I shrug. “Why not? They’re flowers. Literally, just flowers. There’s nothing in them. No toxic gas. No poison. No practical joke. Look.” I stick my nose in them and take an exasperated, large sniff. “See?”
Seeming to recollect herself, she starts off, back in the direction of her building. “Stay away from me, Keenan. Please, don’t do this again.”
My sore feet and me, we start running after her again, but I’m keeping up this time, I don’t care how bad it hurts. Fuck it, I grab her. “Why are you so scared? Can you stop a minute, and give me just—“
What must be the fear of God shakes in Eugenia’s eyes. My hand is left empty when she snatches her arm from me. “No, no, I will not.”
Her grimace crashes all the eagerness that flew me here to Chicago from New York. I mean, she doesn’t just land my plane. She’s King Kong completely slinging my shit from side to side and then tearing off the wings and smashing my shit against the side of a building.
“Eugenia, what did I do to you? Besides keep you company on Christ—“
Her eyes, nostrils, face, all flare at me. “Stop talking!”
“We had a good time together. It was dope as hell, so what do you have against me? What happened between then and now? At least tell me that.”
“Nothing! Okay? It’s not you.” She starts with a roar and ends with a whisper. “I just can’t.”
Whatever is behind those terrified eyes, I wish I could get behind them and remove it myself. Because the deathly way she’s glaring at a nigga right now is a one-eighty-seven, for real.
The nervous hands she shoves against her waist, several times, are those of a woman being held at gunpoint. As if she’s a robot being made to say all this against her will.
I hand her the roses. “At least take these. Don’t let them go to waste.”
Her eyes dart around us again, like she’s looking for her imaginary hall monitor.
“Do you have a man or something? Is somebody watching you? Scared your mommy or daddy will catch us?” I ask with a laugh and hope I can relieve some of this tension.
Snatching the roses, she struts to the nearest trash can.
In slow motion, I cringe as she dumps them inside.
“I appreciate the gesture, but I can’t accept these.”
This is definitely not the woman I dropped off in my helicopter on Christmas Day, who stopped on the heliport a ways and spun toward me. Excited, maybe in awe, definitely curious, she’d forgotten herself for a little while. And was still floating on cloud nine after our oceanic night.
Nowhere around here is that free-spirited bird now.
“A-all right. Fine, if that’s what you want.”
A tiny flicker in her eye precedes her determination that she must be choosing. “It’s what I want. Now will you please… go.”
That last part, that last hesitation, last wavering energy feels unnatural, coerced. As if she’s not saying what she really wants, as if that’s a lie.
I will send out an email in a few days when their novella, Christmas Down Under is ready!
Lula
💙
Lula White 