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Levi’s father shifted his suddenly ice cold gaze to his son. “You dare bring this into my house?” he said, his voice full of disgust.
I knew that tone of voice. I’d experienced it on more than one occasion growing up. It was the voice that reminded me I wasn’t equal. That even after years of serving my country, saving lives and being a good citizen, I was still defined by the color of my skin. As a black man who also happened to be gay, I routinely had to deal with an extra dose of bigotry, even from members of my own race, but to hear the disdain coming from Levi’s father stung. Not because I gave a shit what the fucker thought of me, but because it made me wonder about the man I’d been spending the last several days with.
“Dad-”
“Get the fuck out!” the man snarled at me. “Your kind isn’t welcome here!”
“Dad!” Levi said as he took a few steps forward, but as soon his father began heading towards him, hands fisted, Levi stepped back and I quickly put him behind me.
The move stopped Levi’s father in his tracks.
“Get your nigger ass out of here before I call the cops!” the man warned.
“Levi, get Henry’s things,” I said. As pissed as I was, I wasn’t about to leave Levi and the baby with the fucker. I’d seen enough to know where the man’s rage would fall if I left them both here.
I kept my eyes on Levi’s father, but saw Levi moving quickly to grab a diaper bag off the couch. “Is that it?” I asked.
“His car seat is next to the couch,” Levi said. Fear was etched into his voice.
“Go, I’ll grab it,” I said.
I kept my body between Levi and his father as I followed him out the door, snatching the car seat on the way out.
As soon as I closed the door behind us, I put my hand against Levi’s back to urge him down the stairs. “Phoenix,” he began to say, but I shook my head.
“Not here,” I murmured.
Once we reached the second floor, Levi said, “Just a second, okay?”
I followed him to an apartment door near the stairs. He knocked, but there was no answer.
“Okay, we can go,” he said as he snuggled Henry against his chest. At some point, Levi had managed to give the child a small stuffed caterpillar and the baby was currently playing with the toy’s different colored feet that also made various sounds.
As soon as we reached the sidewalk, I began crossing the street towards my car, but Levi grabbed my arm. “Thank you for what you did up there. I’ll take Henry to the church until he” – Levi motioned to the building behind us – “goes to work.”
I could tell Levi was tense and I suspected a lot of that had to do with his father’s treatment of me.
“Get in the car, Levi,” I said, keeping my voice light, despite the tension still running through my frame.
He hesitated before saying, “We need the base for the car seat. It’s in my father’s car…I use it sometimes when I have to take Henry to the doctor and don’t want to wait for the bus.”
“Which one is it?” I barely remembered to ask since I already knew which car belonged to Curtis Deming, since I’d seen the car on the video footage from the Mercer Island house.
“The blue Honda,” Levi said as he motioned to the car parked a little farther down the street. Thankfully, the vehicle was unlocked and it only took me a few minutes to get the base out of the sedan and transferred to my SUV.
Once we got Henry settled in the backseat, Levi said my name again as I went around to open his door for him, but I was still too raw, so I said, “Not now, Levi.”
I hated the look in his eyes, but I still had so much to fucking process that I couldn’t deal with the fact that the man I was fighting an insane level of attraction for was the product of a racist.
Even though I’d grown up in an upper middle class neighborhood in the suburbs of Maryland, I hadn’t been completely immune to the prejudices people of color faced in even the most benign of cases. I’d been completely clueless as to what was happening the first time I’d entered a department store as a teenager to pick out a birthday present for my mother and had been followed around by a security guard for the better part of an hour before the man had told me I needed to leave because the store was for paying customers. I’d been humiliated beyond words as my parents had had to explain to me what the man had meant, and even my father going down to that store with me in tow to confront the security guard as well as the store’s manager hadn’t made a difference. That security guard had looked at my father the same way he had me, even after he’d discovered my father was a high-ranking official for the Department of Defense. And when he’d been fired on the spot by the store’s manager, I’d heard that ugly slur for the first time.
