Sweet St. Louis

  Sharron stopped and frowned at her. “You know his name, Celena. Okay? So learn to use it,” she piped as she headed to her room.

  “Well, you better start telling Anthony to have you home at an earlier time on weeknights. You could have at least called me and told me where you were. I do that for you.”

  “Why, were you scared that I would walk in on you, doing something?” Sharron cracked with a smile. She had walked in on Celena before, all over the sofa with company, half naked and heated.

  “Girl, shut up,” her roommate countered, still embarrassed by it.

  “Leave me alone then. And go get yourself some sleep before you end up with bags under your eyes in the morning.”

  “And it’ll be your fault if I do.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Sharron said, reaching her room. She felt at peace, undressing from her work clothes with the radio on, listening to soft, late-night, quiet storm music. Before she knew it, Anthony was calling from home to inform her that he had made it back safely. What a way to finish off a perfect evening.

  “Well, I really enjoyed myself tonight,” she told him.

  “Yeah, it was all right,” he responded, sounding much more reserved about it.

  Sharron was a little spicy in response to him. “Oh, so I guess it’s not the bomb for you unless we end up in bed,” she commented.

  “Of course,” he answered with a chuckle. “I’m a guy.”

  She shook her head and grinned. “At least you’re honest about it.” And when they hung up late, for a second night in a row, Sharron felt fully satisfied with her new man, and comfortable that she could call him that, even though they had still not made it official. She was satisfied with what they had so far.

  Satisfied? A young man? Never! They always want more. More of everything. More chicken and gravy. More horsepower in their cars. More success. More property. Money. Women. And definitely more sex. So by the time the first week of July rolled around, Ant was on a serious mission.

  “Come on, Sharron. Why not?” he was pleading. They were stretched out across his sofa on a calm Sunday afternoon. “Why we gotta go back to this waiting game stuff? We broke the ice already.”

  Maybe you have, but I haven’t, Sharron was thinking to herself, hesitant to indulge. Not that she didn’t want to. But did they need to? That was a more important question.

  “This is a very easy way of making our relationship more physical than it needs to be,” she pouted.

  “Well, what do we need, to never touch each other? All affection and no passion?”

  She smiled, all twisted up in his arms and legs in their summertime clothes.

  “I didn’t say that,” she told him.

  “What are you saying then? We gotta have a special event every time we do it? Or do you just want me to beg all the time? Because that’s not my style.”

  “Well, what is your style, since you like to bring that up so much?”

  “We just feel it, go with it, and get into it,” he answered.

  Sharron laughed. “That sounds like every guy’s style,” she countered.

  Ant backed off his statement. “Naw, sometimes I like it to seem special, like when you don’t expect to get none. But you don’t want it to be that way all the time. Sometimes you just want to get busy. I mean, what do you think our parents did? You think they had to sit down and think about why they wanted to get busy?”

  “Oh my God! I don’t believe you’re bringing parents into this,” Sharron responded. “How low can you go?”

  “I’m serious, though. I don’t want to have a reason to do it all of the time,” he argued, holding on to Sharron’s hips for dear life.

  She got to thinking about it. Well, I did hold myself back last time. But when guys get as pressed as he is right now, it usually doesn’t last long. They get too damn anxious! So I’ll have to slow the whole process down again.

  “You wanna take a warm bath?” she asked him.

  “A bath?” he asked back. He wanted to get right into the sex. But her idea of a bath meant that she would get naked with him. Nakedness meant that he could stimulate her. And stimulation would lead them right to where he wanted to go, penetration. So he quickly agreed to it.

  “Aw’ight. Let’s take a warm bath then. With our clothes off, right?” he joked with a smile.

  “No. Fully clothed,” she joked back.

  “That ain’t no fun. Then our clothes will end up all heavy. We’d have to take them off, wring ’em out, and throw ’em in a dryer.”

  Sharron said, “Are you kidding me? It’s so hot outside that we could hang our clothes out the window and have them dry in ten minutes. That’s why we’re inside today.”

  “Aw’ight, so, you know, let’s go take that bath.”

  Damn he’s anxious! Sharron thought again. She grinned at him as he pulled her to her feet and led her to his bathroom.

  “Do you have any candles laying around anywhere?” she asked him.

  “Naw, ask Dracula,” he joked with her.

  Sharron just smiled at him. “Smart-ass.”

  “Yeah, I know. Now let’s get naked.”

  There comes a time in relationships with women where guys drop their swords and shields and become fully human. They become emotional and caring, silly and serious, petty and thoughtful, happy and sad, eager and poised, patient and impatient, predictable, surprising, and totally vulnerable. However, the level of their revealed humanness depends on the woman. If she’s too easy, she may receive nothing but the negatives. If she’s too tough of a shell to crack, she may receive an overdose of the positives up front, and then be shattered by the negatives later on. But if she’s just right, sort of like in the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” then she’ll get a perfect mix of everything, the way that it should be.

  Sharron Francis was just right, and had come around at just the right time in Ant’s maturing life to receive all of the perfect small pieces that would eventually add up to a perfect whole. Perfect, meaning to possess most of the elements that each woman and each man could find themselves comfortable with. Because no one on earth was perfect like in flawless. Looking for flawless attributes could only lead one astray.

  So as they ran the warm bathwater in the lime green porcelain tub, and stripped naked inside the bathroom, watching and giggling at each other, they were no longer embarrassed by each other’s thoughts, words, and actions.

  “You weigh about one-thirty, hunh?” Ant asked Sharron.

  “One twenty-seven, to be exact.”

  “Well, you wear it well,” he told her, gleaming.

  “Why, thank you. You wear your weight well, too. What are you again, one-eighty?” she asked, rounding up on purpose like he did.

  “One seventy-four, to be exact,” he answered, mocking her.

  They climbed into the water with Ant leading the way.

  “Whoa, this may be too warm,” he pouted, tensing up as his body hit the water.

  “No it’s not. It’s just right,” Sharron said, joining him.

  “Yeah, because you don’t have any exterior parts,” he whined.

  “What about my breasts? And if the water was really hot, I would feel it, too.”

  Ant doubted her. “I don’t know if your stuff is as sensitive as mine is,” he said.

  Sharron smiled and shook her head. “Shut up and pass me the soap,” she huffed at him.

  “Shut up?” he asked, frowning. “You better watch what you say to a guy when he got you butt naked. That could be dangerous.”

  She ignored him. “I like this bathtub,” she commented of the green porcelain, taking the soap and lathering her hands with it.

  “Yeah, I did too when I first moved in.”

  “You don’t like it now?”

  “You get used to it. Then other people talk about it.”

  Sharron smiled and asked, “So how many women have you had in here? You don’t have to answer if you feel uncomfortable about it,” she added.

&nbs
p; “Why even ask me then?”

  “Okay, I take it back.”

  Ant shook his head. “You can’t take it back. You asked me already. But I never took a bath with someone before. I mean, what are we supposed to do in here? We can’t even really get comfortable. It’s not enough room for both of us.”

  Sharron sighed and said, “Just relax.” She reached out and rubbed the lather of soap onto his muscular chest and shoulders. Ant lathered up his hands and did the same to her, realizing how soothing it felt.

  “How many guys have you done this with?” he asked her. As soon as he did, he wanted to take his question back as well. Now what the hell I ask her that for? Unless she gave the right answer, it would do nothing but sour his mood. Men hated to think of other guys with their women in any circumstance. Yet, they asked those painful questions anyway, all out of competition to find out if they were the one and only or the best.

  “One,” Sharron answered, getting the stress out of the way. “But it was nothing like this.”

  “What do you mean, ‘It was nothing like this’?” Ant asked her. He was all ears.

  “I didn’t really like him that much.”

  Ant frowned. “So why’d you do it with him?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Because it was something different to do, I guess.”

  Ant shook his head, thinking, I knew I shouldn’t have asked her that shit.

  Sharron leaned forward through the water and kissed him on the lips, right as he began to worry about her past.

  “I like you four times more,” she assured him.

  He smiled. “What’s that supposed to do, make me feel better?”

  “I’m just telling you,” she answered, grinning. With the touches of soapy water on her face, hair, and body, her grin and smooth brown skin were enticing. Exciting! Delicious! Ant could feel his heart rushing blood to that exterior tool that he treasured so much.

  Sharron smiled, and drove her soapy hand through the warm water, caressing him. When he felt the full rise, he reached out to titillate the nipples of her firm breasts with his own soapy hands. And as they enjoyed the silence, they forgot about all other men and all other women, immersed in only the heat of themselves.

  This is beautiful! Ant told himself. DAMN, THIS IS BEAUTIFUL! He lost all of his hunger for the immediate sex, understanding that they had all day, all night, and all of a lifetime. As long as they continued to enjoy each other and block out the rest of the world, like they were able to do while in that small, crowded, lime green bathtub, they would be just fine. And then a minute turned into ten minutes. Ten minutes turned into twenty. And twenty minutes turned into a full hour, and they had become two brown prunes.

  Sharron stared at the shriveled-up flesh on her fingertips. “Okay. Time to get out,” she said.

  “Yeah, the water’s not warm anymore anyway. And I have to take a leak,” Ant added with a chuckle.

  Sharron shook her head and continued to smile. Guys! she thought to herself. She stood up out of the tub and wrapped herself in a towel. “I’ll see you in the bedroom, mister,” she said, teasing him as she walked out.

  Ant was so tickled he nearly slipped and wiped out on his bathroom floor.

  “Aw, I’m gon’ love this,” he mumbled to himself. He couldn’t wait to join her. But he was no longer anxious about it. He was perfectly calm, and in full control of his senses. He even thought again of going natural with her, depending on how she felt about it. So when he slid into the bed beside her, he was without condoms.

  “I notice that you don’t have your protection behind the pillow again,” she commented.

  He laughed about it. “Naw. They’re in my drawer.” But we don’t have to use them if you don’t want to, he thought but did not vocalize.

  Sharron slid her thighs onto his and whispered into his left ear, “Can you go get them please.”

  Ant laughed. Sharron had rules of her own, and she was still disciplined, no matter how sweet their bath together had been. He respected that, because rules of other women were too easily broken. So were the rules of many men, which, under the wrong circumstances, easily led to disaster.

  Ant heeded her sound advice and pulled out their protection; Sharron decided to do the duties of putting it on.

  “What, you don’t trust me or something?” he asked her, half joking and half serious.

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you; I just wanted to be the one to put it on. Is something wrong with that?”

  There wasn’t. In fact, it seemed rather sexy to him. It was assertive and confident of a woman to feel that comfortable about the intimacy she shared with her man. And as long as Ant was not embarrassed by the size of his tool, which he was not, he was all with it.

  “Naw. I don’t mind. As long as you put it on right.”

  “Why? You don’t trust me?” she asked, mocking him.

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you; I just want to make sure that you know what you’re doing.”

  Sharron took care of business before Ant could count to five. That made him wonder again.

  “How many times have you done that?” he asked her.

  “Never,” she told him. “Only with you.” And it was the truth.

  “So, how come you decided to do it with me?”

  “Because I wanted to. And stop asking so many questions,” she told him with a kiss as she straddled him.

  He smiled at her ironic sarcasm, finding himself asking questions he had never bothered or felt a need to ask other women before her. And as he leaned up to kiss her back, and to stroke her breasts with his fingers, he wanted to solidify his hold on her.

  “You know what?” he said in her right ear. “I wanna be on top this time.”

  Sharron chuckled and fell limp to the bed, and was ready to receive him, all the way. And she did, holding on and digging her fingernails into anything she could anchor herself to, while making sure that her nails never injured his skin, because guys hated that. She wanted him to love her. All the way. And he did, bringing things out of her that she had only fantasized about. Because Ant had something to prove, as though his life depended on it: opening her up and making her feel everything that a woman should feel from a man she wanted to love.

  But it was mostly mental. They thought about it, giving their all, and then the physical part fell right into place, all night long and until the next morning arrived.

  “Damn! It’s six o’clock. I gotta get ready to go to work,” Ant said, taking in the time.

  Boy is he dedicated to his job, Sharron thought, with her eyes still closed. Dedication to employment was a good thing. Definitely! She respected that. But she wasn’t looking forward to being taken home so early on a Monday morning, knowing that she did not have to be to work until noon.

  He knew her work schedule, and she knew his. So Ant thought about that early morning drive to University City as he took a quick shower. And he decided to break his own house rule, and let her stay until she was ready. As long as she didn’t answer his telephone. Fortunately, since he had cut back on the cat-and-dog game, he didn’t have many women still calling. Nevertheless, players could never fully let their guards down, so he decided to turn his ringer off as a precaution.

  “You go to work at twelve again?” he asked her to make sure.

  Sharron was out of bed and ready to shower.

  “Mmm-hmm,” she answered him, still drained from the night before.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what. You go ahead and get some more z’s, and when you get ready to leave, just make sure you lock the bottom lock on my front door. Okay?”

  Sharron was surprised by it. She knew how protective Ant could be about his things. That was a good thing as well. That meant he would take good care of anything that meant something to him.

  “Are you sure?” she asked him.

  He nodded, convincing himself. “Yeah. You got money for a cab?”

  She nodded back to him. “Yeah, I have money.”

&nbsp
; He pulled out a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to her anyway.

  “I said I had money,” she told him, pushing it back.

  “Just go ahead and keep it. Now if it was a Benjamin, I’d take it back. So take that cab ride home on me, because I brought you over here, and I should have driven you back.”

  She smiled and asked, “Do you feel that way about everyone?” Knowing that he was an adventurous man and sex-crazed with an ego to boot, she doubted it.

  Ant smiled back at her and said, “Naw. But we talking about you now.”

  She gave him a kiss on the cheek, and said, “Thank you,” before climbing back into his bed.

  He gave her one more look before he walked out and headed for work. He was confident he had done the right thing. Imagine that. After not allowing any of his women to remain at his apartment, unattended, for close to three years, Ant let Sharron stay when he had known her for less than two months.

  As he cranked the engine of his car he gave one more look up to his second-floor apartment. “Fuck it,” he told himself. “All rules are meant to be broken in time anyway.” And she’s a good woman, he thought. I can trust her.

  Trust had to be earned. It was rarely a given. Ironically, people who trusted themselves were more likely to trust others. Maybe that was why Celena Myers trusted no one. She didn’t trust herself. Since she had thought and done too many ridiculous things in her life to count or want to remember, she assumed that others could be just as conniving, demanding, short-fused, and hopelessly insecure as she was. Not to mention having too many aggressive, masculine traits for her own good. Assertion was one thing, but aggression was entirely something else. Something few rational women hungered to attain.

  “Well, don’t call here no fucking more if you feel that way, Darryl!” Celena shouted through the phone.

  “Oh, now why you gotta cuss me out? I’m just trying to talk to you about it.”

  “I’m not ready to have just one man in my life right now. Okay? And I do as I please.”

  “Aw’ight, then. You know what? Fuck you then, ’cause I don’t have any more time for your sorry ass.”