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“Which one?”
“The one you sleepin’ behind.”
I climbed out of the king-size bed in my one-chamber apartment and moved toward the front.
Maybe five eight, with those upstanding spikelike braids making her taller, she was slender, darker than the darkest chocolate, and with eyes that neither accused nor forgave.
Then she smiled.
The kiss lasted a very long time. It wasn’t an erotic or suggestive connection. It wasn’t leading anywhere, just being there, where we both wanted to be.
“I missed you,” we both said.
“Come on in,” I added.
There’s a sealed, strawberry-red table for two set against the window wall of my spacious one-room third-floor apartment. It looks down on Montague Street. The moderate foot traffic down there told me that it was middle evening.
“Malawi white?” I offered.
“Please.”
I went to the counter across from my bed and started water to boil for her tea and my coffee.
“Have you talked to Aja?” Leaf Alyssandra Morton asked.
“Not today. Have you?”
“Asked her if she heard from you. She said that the last time you called you sounded bone-tired.”
“She knows her father.”
“You on some kinda job?”
“Yep.”
“The kind get you killed?”
“I doubt it,” I said as I brought two press pots to the red table.
When she poured the steaming water for both of us I felt at home for the first time since she left, more than a year before.
“I missed you,” she said after the first satisfying sip. “I didn’t… I didn’t wanna be gone for so long but, you know.”
“Yeah.”
The boyfriend that she had before me, Andrew “Gatormouth” Williams, my father’s best friend and his Judas, that boyfriend that she had to leave because he couldn’t stand himself in her light, Andrew had died because I confronted him with truths about me and her and my father too. That was a lot for Leaf to take, so she went to Alaska, a place she’d never been before.
“You back now?” I asked.
“Wanna be.”
I remember us sitting for a while after that.
Finally, she said, “You got to go workin’ tonight?”
“I need to spend some more time in my bed.”
“Me too.”
