Me + Somebody's Son: A Heights Story Read online

  “What do you guys want? There’s really some of everything here, and then even more if we go to Blackwood,” I explained. “I can get on the app and request a ride.”

  Toni waved that suggestion off. “Nah, I’m sure there’s something right here in the neighborhood. Isn’t Pot Liquor here?”

  “It is.”

  “And those are Teddy’s people,” she mentioned, referring to her sister Joia’s boyfriend. “So I can’t leave here without popping in to see them anyway.”

  “You won’t be popping by there expecting anything on a Friday night without a reservation,” I laughed. “Maybe we can hit them for lunch tomorrow, but it ain’t happening tonight. There’s a food truck park up the block though.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Toni agreed, and since Jemma was cool with that too, we headed out, locking up behind ourselves.

  Just like every other summer night in the Heights, the streets were moderately populated with people heading to and from dinner, parties, clubs, and whatever else.

  It was the stream of giggling, drunk ass women our age coming out of the Hideaway Bar that caught our attention.

  “You ladies need something to do, I can tell,” one woman at the door called out to us. “Come paint and drink with us – and eat too, it’s catered and included in the price.”

  “Eating and drinking are both very relevant to my interests at the moment,” Jemma laughed. “How much?”

  “It’s forty each, and half the proceeds are going to a local charity.”

  “Well, I’m sold,” I spoke up, and Jemma and Toni agreed.

  Ten minutes later, we were seated in the bar’s private event space with about fifteen other women. It ended up that Pot Liquor was doing the catering, serving the food cafeteria-style into recyclable containers we got to take back our seats with us to chow down.

  Once everyone had eaten, that’s when the “fun” was supposed to start.

  There was wine in abundance, and servers came around for drink orders as the woman who’d talked us into joining started speaking over a mic.

  “Okay ladies, I hope your canvasses are ready for tonight’s subject – remember, this is for charity, so if you want to tip in a few extra dollars, nobody is going to mind!”

  A bit of an uneasy feeling hit me, and I looked to Jemma and Toni on either side of me to see if they’d picked up on the same thing, but they were both too busy with their drinks to have noticed anything.

  “Tonight we’re raising money for Thirsty Roots, a local charity whose mission is to get and keep Black children interested in agricultural science and horticulture – their motto is, “Because plants grow in the hood too, so let’s get those babies some seed money and fertilizer money ladies!”

  Do not fucking tell me…

  “As is always our custom with live models, we will be securing your cell phone, for the privacy of the model and our other guests…”

  “What the fuck did y’all get me into?!” I hissed to Jemma and Toni, who laughed.

  “Girl, you were the one talking about “well I’m sold!”,” Jemma giggled. “This shit is right up my alley.”

  She and Toni both put their phones in the labeled envelopes we were offered with no problem, so I grudgingly did too. The emcee didn’t speak up again until all the phones were collected, and the box placed in clear view at the front of the room.

  “Okay, I think we’re ready now,” she drawled. “I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. Tonight’s charity is near and dear to our model’s heart, and if you live around here, it shouldn’t come as much surprise that it’s our very own—”

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  “August Somers!”

  FUUUUUCK.

  “Oh my God!” Toni practically shouted in my ear, before bursting into raucous laughter with Jemma as August himself came sauntering out to applause and wolf-whistles. I practically hid behind my canvas so he couldn’t see me, but he was hella visible.

  In just boxers.

  With a prominent bulge in front.

  He wasn’t shy at all about the attention either, damn near preening as he made a circle around the room, speaking to the women – some of whom were already tossing money onto the floor.

  “If he breaks into a single dance move, I will literally die in this seat. Do you hear me?!” I hissed at Jemma and Toni, who were still bent over laughing.

  Until August made it over to our section.

  “I wanna laugh too,” he teased, oozing the same confidence as he had in all our other interactions. He was talking to them – not me, because I was still hiding behind my canvas, but of course he peeked around, knowing someone else was there.

  His eyes went wide when he saw me.

  “Haven – you didn’t have to pay to see me like this, I would’ve posed for you for free,” he teased, only intensifying Toni and Jemma’s amusement – and my embarrassment.

  Before I could respond, he was called over to his seat at the center of the room – thank God. Apparently, there would be no dancing, just drunk ass painting.

  “Hey!” Toni stood up and shouted over the music, getting his attention. “How big of a donation for you to take the boxers off?!”

  “I will literally kill you!” I hissed at her, grabbing her hand to try to pull her down.

  “I’ll match her!” Jemma shouted, making my mouth drop open.

  “I cannot believe you bitches!”

  “How much you got?!” August answered back, good natured and smiling about the whole thing. “I teach those kids how to plant some pretty cool things, takes money…”

  “I got twenty-five hundred dollars for the kids,” Toni replied, ignoring my protests.

  “Plus mine is five grand!” Jemma added, since… I guess she had offered to match it.

  “Very much appreciated ladies, but I’ve got one more requirement,” August said.

  “We’re listening.”

  “Your friend has to have dinner with me,” he answered, looking straight at me with a smirk. “Come on, Haven… for the kids.”

  Oh, fuck.

  “Fine!” I huffed, crossing my arms like a toddler.

  I couldn’t hold on to my indignance too long though, because true to his word, August stood… and started pulling his boxer briefs down.

  “Wait!” I shouted. “He can’t really do that, can he, aren’t there laws, or—”

  “I’ve got a permit honey!” the emcee shouted. “Take ‘em off!”

  So…

  He, amid much yelling and whistled encouragement from the audience… took them off.

  And took all the damn air out of the room.

  Every single one of us went quiet, speechless at the fucking… beauty of him, and his gorgeous dick. We were just a room full of open mouths, in awe and hell… invitation, nobody saying anything until one drunken soul shouted –

  “Can I pet dat dawg?!”

  And then… we were all laughing.

  August took his seat, casual as hell like his dick wasn’t laying long and thick on his leg, fully exposed.

  And he wasn’t even hard yet.

  Damn.

  “This is the best business trip I’ve ever taken,” Toni said, reaching for her paints. “This is awesome.”

  “Best money we’ve ever spent. What a worthy cause,” Jemma’s tipsy ass added, leaning into me. “Now what were you saying about not fucking him?”

  “You know what I said,” I grumbled, trying not to make eye contact again with August.

  But… I couldn’t help it.

  He was looking at me, so I had to look at him, and when I did… he grinned, looking me right in the eyes when he spoke.

  “I’ll pick you up tomorrow at four.”

  4

  Haven

  Butterflies.

  Unwelcome, unrequested, all up and through me as soon as I stepped through the front door of the brownstone I was renting and saw August waiting in front, resting against a gleaming b
lack… something. I didn’t know shit about cars, but it was beautiful, and so was he, and… ugh.

  Jesus be a pesticide for these damn bugs.

  I wasn’t supposed to be feeling butterflies for any man, but especially not this one. As the friend of an ex, he was supposed to be off-limits in my mind, a neutral entity whose dick I did not want to ride.

  A lot easier to manage when the dick in question wasn’t branded in vivid, long, thick detail in my mind.

  This was so much.

  This was so, so much.

  And here I was, overwhelmed, in booty shorts and flawless shoes at four in the afternoon for a date I’d been suckered into.

  For the kids.

  “Damn you look good,” August called as I descended the front steps. And I’d be a liar if I claimed the compliment didn’t make me feel warm inside. For all my objections, I liked August, and all the feelings of my inappropriate crush on him in college were creeping back.

  Only now, with the potential for worse.

  Undergrad August would never, ever have posed for a gaggle of drunk women fully clothed, let alone in nothing but his underwear. And he certainly wouldn’t have been coerced into taking those off.

  Not that he was necessarily shy, just not really interested in being the center – or even within arm’s reach – of attention. He was reserved, even at the parties Marcus dragged him to, more interested in not jeopardizing his grades or his job than anything social.

  He was handsome, yes, but I was also attracted to that focused energy.

  Which, he still had – only now it was accompanied by confidence and charm, and in the face of that…

  I wasn’t sure I could keep myself… to myself.

  Especially when August greeted me with hands at my waist, pulling me into his body for a hug. He smelled like heaven, and felt like it too.

  “As much as I like the shoes… they might be a little impractical for the first part of this date,” he told me when I finally forced myself to pull back from the embrace.

  “This is why I asked how I needed to dress,” I reminded him, taking a step back to give an exaggerated turn on the sidewalk. “You said to surprise you, so… surprise.”

  Knowing he’d said to be ready at four in the afternoon, I hadn’t been entirely impractical – my cute little shorts were accompanied by an off-shoulder tee, minimal jewelry, and the four-inch heeled sandals he was objecting to now.

  “I did say that, huh?” he asked, his face wrinkling for a moment before he shook his head, and opened the passenger side door of the car. “Don’t worry about it – we’ll make it work.”

  I wasn’t too sure about that, but I accepted his help into the car anyway – I loved seeing men make shit work.

  “So where are you taking me?” I asked, once he’d slid behind the wheel and merged into the growing traffic.

  I watched his profile as the smile grew on his lips before he gave me a quick glance. “You’ll have to wait until we get there to find out.”

  “Well that sounds ominous.”

  He laughed. “Don’t do that.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Act like you think I’m not going to take good care of you.”

  My eyebrows went up. “Take good care of me? That’s… quite a way to put it.”

  “Is it?” he asked, his eye on the road. “Is that not what you’d want from a date? To feel well taken care of?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t date – not in that manner. So… I wouldn’t know.”

  “What does that mean? When you say you don’t date?”

  “It means, I’m not looking for romantic partnership of any length, in any capacity,” I told him, studying his face for a reaction to my words. “I believe I’ve said this to you already…”

  “I’m just trying to get an understanding.”

  This time, I was the one laughing. “No, what you’re doing is trying to change my mind, and I can tell you now – at best, you’ll get my resolve to waver. At worst… you’re going to end up with your feelings hurt, just like your friend.”

  “Damn,” August whistled. “You don’t think that’s harsh?”

  “I think it’s the truth, which is what I prefer to deal in at all times.”

  He nodded. “I can respect that. So… tell me the truth, then – what do you have against dating?”

  “Now why would I tell you that?”

  Eyebrow lifted, he glanced at me again. “You just said you like telling the truth.”

  “There’s a difference between something being the truth, and something being your business,” I explained. “And the truth is that I don’t care to talk about that right now – or ever – with you.”

  “Wooow,” he drawled. “Okay. But you can’t say what you’re not going to talk about without offering an alternative line of conversation – I can’t accept that.”

  “You can’t accept that?” I chuckled a little. “Okay, so, that’s what I want to talk about.”

  “What?”

  “Where all this demanding, grown man energy came from,” I said, watching his face again, waiting for the answer. It didn’t come immediately – he sat with it for a moment, then shrugged.

  “What else would you expect, Haven? I am a grown ass man now.”

  “Obviously.” I shook my head, turning my gaze toward the front window as he pulled into an unfamiliar, much less populated area, and still kept going. “A grown man who openly shows his dick to a room full of women.”

  “For charity.”

  “Yeah, because that matters,” I laughed. “Charity or not, that was a bold ass move, that I wouldn’t have expected from the August I knew back then.”

  “You didn’t really know me though, did you?” he asked. “I was just… Marcus’ friend. And I don’t mean that as pitifully as it sounds,” he added, when I opened my mouth to counter that assessment. “Yes, I was a fully realized person, blah blah, I’m just saying that to you, I was your boyfriend’s friend. Not yours. It’s not like we were hanging out together like that.”

  I sucked my teeth. “So all those two in the morning conversations when everybody else was passed out, those don’t count?”

  “That happened what… once or twice?” he said, and I wanted to deny that, insist that it was much more than that, but…

  Damn.

  He was right.

  Maybe they’d just had an outsized impact on my view of him, but still it wasn’t really the quantity of conversations, more about the quality of them. And I felt like his assertion of me not knowing him was a definite downplay move.

  “Did you end up developing those frost-resistant seeds, or…?”

  A smile broke over his face at my blatant attempt to prove him wrong, but he nodded. “Yes, actually. And I got paid very nicely for the research and patents.”

  “See. I remember all your boring ass agricultural engineering stuff, but you talking about you don’t know me,” I teased.

  “Okay, I’ll give you that – you know what I do.”

  “It was your passion, August – it’s part of you.”

  “So knowing you love books, that means I know you?”

  I sighed. “Of course not.”

  “Well then… I think we got that settled. But the good news is, there’s nothing standing in our way from correcting that,” August said, turning off the main road onto a much smaller one, barely wide enough for two lanes.

  I called myself trying to take in my surroundings, but there wasn’t much to see, other than tall grass that seemed to be suffering in the heat. “Um… nothing except that you stood in my ex’s wedding. Not that you were a guest. You’re in the damn family!”

  “So focused on the past,” August chuckled as the car topped what I hadn’t realized was a large hill – from there, a vast property spread out in front of us, anchored by a greenhouse I immediately clocked as our destination. “When you could be thinking about our future.”

  “Of which we have none, as I’ve already sa
id.”

  “Keep telling yourself that, gorgeous.”

  I rolled my eyes, saying nothing as we pulled into a parking spot in front of the building, which had Owens Nursery displayed on the front.

  “This is yours?”

  “My family’s,” he said, reaching behind my seat for a moment before dropping a brand-new pair of flip-flops into my lap.

  I raised an eyebrow at him as I picked them up. “Um… you just keep cheap women’s shoes in your car?”

  “No,” he chuckled. “More like, I had a hunch you wouldn’t be wearing appropriate footwear for this, so I had a contingency plan. Told you I would make it work, right?”

  Without waiting for my response, he opened his door to exit the car. I sat there for a moment, still a little stunned, then made quick work of switching out my shoes for the much less cute – but quite comfortable – flip-flops he’d given me. As soon as I was done, he opened the door to help me out, but didn’t step back, even once my door was closed.

  Instead, he moved in closer to me, his expression inscrutable as he gazed into my face, examining and taking me in. I’d always admired the beauty and depth of his eyes, but they were different now. Wiser, and filled with something it took a moment for me to identify, but I was damn near sure of it.

  Regret.

  “What?” I asked finally, unable to handle the suspense.

  My question seemed to break him out of some deep thought. One corner of his mouth pulled into that gorgeous white smile, and he shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “It’s definitely not nothing.”

  “Fine,” he said, biting his lip as he moved even closer, boxing me against the car. “You wanna know what I was thinking, just now?”

  “I do.”

  His gaze landed on my lips, before coming back to meet my eyes. “You should’ve been mine.”

  That said, he walked away, motioning for me to follow, but I… needed a second.

  With my weak ass.

  Ugh.

  For all my big shit talking about how I didn’t date, and didn’t fuck friends… I kinda wanted to date the fuck outta my ex’s friend. None of my little rules seemed to make much sense or hold much weight in the face of the fact that August’s fine ass wanted me – pretty bad.