Sweet St. Louis

  Sharron hung up with her father and was tickled by the whole idea of introducing Anthony to him. She hadn’t done that since Sean Love, back in high school. Her father was never too cordial to Sean. He said the boy didn’t have a proper backbone. He wasn’t too sure of himself. Or maybe he was just plain nervous. After all, at six foot two and buffed, Robert Francis was an imposing man. And Sean was taking his daughter out to the prom, hoping to finally score with her.

  Sharron thought back to those days and kept right on smiling. But she was older now. She had a new man to bring home to Daddy. And she had a feeling that this young man had the right kind of “backbone.” So she couldn’t help but to be a little anxious about her trip back home.

  Touching, for guys, was more allowable. Especially with a woman who looked good enough to peek two and three times at. That was another problem for men. They just couldn’t seem to keep their greedy paws off of so much tasty candy. The more well-curved and available the women were, the more it tempted guys to just reach out and touch someone, anytime and anyplace, whether they were permitted to or not.

  “Damn, Ant! You see that?!” Tone asked his partner. They were heaving his blue tweed sofa up the steps of his new, second-floor duplex apartment on Louisiana Avenue. Tone had found a southside apartment that was walking distance from Ant’s place on Nebraska. And he was moving in right away, forcing Ant to take off from work early to rent a truck, because Tone didn’t have any credit cards to rent with.

  Ant shouted from the front end of the sofa, “Shit, man. Pay attention to what you’re doing before you drop this shit on me!”

  Tone’s eyes were filled with a sexy brown neighbor, walking into the apartment just two doors down from his.

  “I can see it now, dawg. I’m gon’ love living over here!” Tone expressed excitedly as they made their way up the stairs with the sofa.

  I can see it, too, Ant thought. I can see that I’m gonna hate it!

  They made it up to the new apartment and gingerly set the sofa down in the living room on a shiny hardwood floor.

  “Was your floor this shiny when you first moved in, Ant?”

  Ant shook his head and grinned. Tone seemed astonished by his new place. “I guess you don’t remember,” he commented.

  “Naw. I don’t remember it being as shiny as this. But now you got them oriental rugs everywhere. I think I like this shiny floor better,” Tone responded.

  “You better buy a good mop then,” Ant advised with a chuckle.

  “Yeah, I’ma buy a lot of stuff. I can’t wait to hook this crib up!” Tone was an oversized toddler in a new playground.

  “You better wait,” Ant warned him. “You just got that job, man, and until you’ve had it for at least four months, I wouldn’t start spending my money too fast.” You shouldn’t have even gotten this apartment so soon, he thought.

  “Aw, man, we get overtime up the ass on that job. And you wouldn’t believe how many calls we get. I mean, everybody need their carpets cleaned. And them fancy cribs gotta keep up their appearances for guests and shit,” Tone argued.

  “I’m just saying, man. It took me a while to hook up my apartment. Remember how empty it was for them first five months?” Ant reminded his friend.

  Tone blew off his warning and said, “Yeah, well, that was you,” before heading back outside to have another look at his sexy brown neighbor. Fortunately, she decided to sit out on her front steps and suck in the cool summer air as the sun traveled westward and slipped out of sight. Tone took the opportunity to admire her. Ant joined him outside a few seconds later.

  “Is she tough or what?” Tone asked him, referring to the well-curved neighbor. She appeared to be in her early twenties with poise.

  Ant gave her a look and smiled. “Yeah, I’d talk to her. No doubt.”

  “Well, you got Sharron now, so don’t worry about it. I’ll do it. You just start me off.”

  Ant looked at his partner and frowned. “I’m not startin’ shit off for you, man. I’m dirty, tired, stinking, and we’re finished moving your shit, so I’m gettin’ out of here and walking back home. I’ll see your ass tomorrow morning when we turn the truck back in. And remember, seven o’clock, sharp,” he said, walking off.

  Tone grabbed him back. “Come on, man. Let’s just walk over there and act like we being good neighbors, and then I’ll take it from there.”

  Ant shook his head and grinned. Tone was apparently too dependent on his partner’s social skills.

  “Just act like we all in a club and go over there and ask her to dance or something,” Ant joked. “We too old for that set-up shit. She knows it, too.”

  “Aw’ight, aw’ight, this last time, dawg,” Tone pleaded.

  Ant was still hesitant, so Tone found the heart to go ahead and speak up for himself.

  “Excuse me, is this a nice neighborhood around here? I’m just moving in,” he said.

  Ant frowned at him. “Man, go over there and talk to her like you got some sense.”

  To his surprise, she responded openly.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty nice. But it gets boring around here at times, too. There’s more people who hang out further up,” she said, waving her hand eastward, in the direction of Ant’s apartment.

  Ant nodded and said, “Yeah, it is more people up that way. A bunch of wild-ass kids. I live up on Nebraska,” he told her.

  “I know,” she responded to him.

  “You know?” he responded back. Do I know this girl? he thought. He tried to focus on whether he knew her or not.

  She said, “Yeah, you have a burgundy car, right? With shiny rims and stuff?”

  Ant nodded, still trying to figure out who she was. “Yeah. It’s cranberry. A seventy-nine Chevy,” he told her.

  She smiled and said, “My girlfriend used to talk about you washing your car with no shirt on. This was a few years ago. She lives on California.”

  California was two blocks east of Nebraska.

  Not to be outdone, Tone slipped into their cordial conversation and said, “Well, why don’t you call your girlfriend up and see what she’s doing right now?”

  “She should just be getting in from work. Hold on. Let me call her and see,” she said, getting up to go inside for a phone.

  Ant looked at Tone and asked, “What the hell you doin’, man?”

  “We might be able to get with these girls,” Tone answered, cheesing.

  “Man, I’m not thinkin’ about no damn girls. I’m thinkin’ ’bout a hot-ass shower.”

  “Just talk to her first. You can take a shower and come back.”

  Ant was still hesitant. “I thought I had Sharron, a, few minutes ago,” he added sarcastically.

  “I mean, it ain’t like you gotta do shit with this girl, man, just talk to her. Ain’t no harm done in that.”

  Before Ant could say another word, the sexy brown neighbor was back outside with a cordless phone in hand. She was headed in their direction over the small grass lawn.

  “He’s out here in front of me right now,” she was saying over the phone. “You wanna talk to him?”

  Ant could not believe it! Shit! he told himself. And her girlfriend’s probably the ugly one at that.

  The next thing he knew, he was being handed the phone.

  “Hello,” he answered.

  “Do you even know who this is?” a confident voice asked him through the line.

  “Naw. Who is it?”

  “Diane.”

  “Diane?” he repeated. The name didn’t ring a bell with him.

  She said, “Remember you were outside washing your car a while ago, and you asked a girl with long braids how old she was. And when I said that I was nineteen, you told me to stop lying. Then you said that I would break a grown man’s heart one day when I got a little older.”

  Ant began to laugh. “Oohhh, yeah, I remember you. You looked like you was about fifteen.”

  “I can’t help how young I look. But I am turning twenty-one in October, so I’m not so
me young teenager,” she huffed. She sounded headstrong and sexy. From what Ant could remember of her, she was. She was just extra young-looking in the face, which in the long run would be a good thing.

  “So what are you trying to say?” he asked her. Language was a loaded gun, especially for people who knew how to use it. Anthony Poole used it well. He wanted Diane to express just how confident she was. Then he could use it against her.

  “I’m saying that I’m old enough to handle myself,” she told him.

  “Well, your girlfriend said that you would come around here if I asked you to. She said you had a crush on me.”

  “She told you that? Oh my God! What else she tell you?”

  “She said you used to fantasize about me,” Ant bullshitted. He figured he might as well have a good time with it since Tone had led him right smack into the middle of things.

  Tone’s new neighbor smiled it off, and did not seem to mind that Ant was making up stories on her. After all, he was just the kind of man her girlfriend Diane would want: crafty and confident in his own right. If he wasn’t, Diane would have chewed him up and spit him out anyway.

  “So are you staying in the house, or are you coming around here to see me?” he pressed her. He had nothing to lose. Why not force the issue?

  “All I have to do is put my shoes back on. I can drive around there in five minutes,” she responded.

  Meanwhile, Tone began a conversation with her friend, who was much less impressed with him than Diane was with Ant. She figured that after Ant and Diane were able to go in their own direction, she would politely tell Tone she was uninterested in him.

  Ant said, “Aw’ight, well let me see how grown-up you are.”

  Diane laughed at it. “Five minutes,” she repeated.

  Ant handed the phone back to her girlfriend and thought, What the hell did I just do that for? It all happened so fast, he didn’t have time to think and slow himself down. Nevertheless, he was curious about her, so he waited anyway. And when Diane drove up in her dark blue Honda Civic and climbed out, he was glad he’d waited. She had done away with the braids and wore her hair in a shoulder-length bob, making her look closer to her age. Her body was much thinner than her girlfriend’s, but her brown babydoll face more than made up for it!

  Damn! Ant thought to himself. Tone thought it, too. It was just Ant’s luck, all of his life it seemed, to have a way with pretty women.

  “So, do I look my age now, or at least older?” she asked him.

  Ant nearly swallowed his words. “Ah, yeah, you ah, look your age now. Definitely!”

  They all shared a laugh.

  “What brings y’all around here?” she asked.

  “His friend Tone just moved in,” her girlfriend answered. “He was helping him to move, and I noticed him, and we just got to talking, so I called you.”

  Diane looked them over and smiled. “Both of y’all are sweaty from moving furniture and stuff?”

  Ant was still in a minor daze, checking her out. In her neat work clothes, she could even pass for a part-time fashion model.

  “I was just about to head back home and take a shower,” he responded to her.

  Diane smiled, giving her thoughts away far too soon. She was fantasizing about his godly brown, car-washing body. Ant read her smile and jumped all over it. Instinctively.

  “Then I can change into something nice, spray on something that smells good to you, and just kick it with you for a while, if you can stay out. ’Cause we all gotta go to work in the morning.”

  “Ain’t it the truth,” Tone added his two cents, proud of his new employment.

  “Why don’t you drive him around there, Diane?” her girlfriend commented. She just wanted to get rid of Tone, basically. Diane and Ant could do their own chitchatting in the car.

  Ant looked at Tone and couldn’t believe his good fortune. This is crazy! I can’t drive around there with her! Or can I? he thought.

  “All right, I can do that,” Diane responded.

  All eyes turned to Ant, who looked confused. He was the only one who wasn’t pleased. This girl lives right around the corner from me. I can’t fuck with her. Or can I?

  “Do you want a ride home?” Diane asked him, grinning. “I won’t bite you,” she added.

  Ant didn’t want to seem gun-shy. He finally spoke up and said, “Let’s go then.”

  “Aw’ight, then, Ant. I’ll see you when you get back,” Tone told him. If he knew his partner as well as he thought he did, there was no guarantee that they were coming back.

  Ant climbed into the passenger side of Diane’s Civic, still thinking how crazy it was to luck up with an unexpected brown beauty queen. Then he decided to get buck wild with it, to find out if he was only dreaming. Guys would do that, roll their dice all the way to the edge to find out if they would be millionaires or broke bums. But since he still had Sharron, waiting in the wings, Ant didn’t really care if he lost Diane at the crap tables. He wasn’t planning on keeping her anyway. He was just curious to see how far he could go with her.

  “You know what apartment I live in?” he asked her.

  She didn’t want to admit it him. She grinned and said, “Would you hold it against me if I did?”

  “Why would I hold it against you?”

  “I mean, I don’t want you to think that I was stalking you or anything.”

  “Naw, if anything, I would he flattered,” he told her.

  She didn’t admit to anything. At least not verbally. Because she did pull up in a parking space behind his car. But that was easy to do since she knew what his car looked like and what block he parked it on.

  Then he got cold feet again. What if Sharron just popped up around here out the blue and caught me? he asked himself, guilt-ridden. That only made him roll his dice more desperately, expecting to lose. Ant wanted to be broke. That way, he could claim that he had tried and failed. Then he could leave empty-handed and regain his real treasure: Sharron.

  Ant went for broke and said, “Now, if you decide to come in and wait for me, who’s gonna stop you from stripping naked and jumping into the shower with me?” He just knew that she would put a stop to it all, sooner or later. He planned on saying anything he could to turn her off, and make it easier on himself to get out of a sticky situation.

  Diane broke out laughing and said, “I’ll stop myself.” Yet, she was still willing to wait inside for him instead of in the car, or back at her girlfriend’s. How did Ant know? Because she was taking her key out of the ignition and grabbing her pocketbook.

  “So, you’ll wait for me then?” he asked her, making sure.

  She nodded. “Yeah, I don’t mind. I’ll wait if you want me to.”

  He looked into her pretty brown face once more, and decided that he did. They climbed out of the car and headed inside. As they ascended the stairway, Ant continued to think how unlikely it was to luck up so good. Damn! Am I that smooth or what? he thought to himself. He led Diane into his apartment and told her to make herself comfortable on the sofa, where she could watch television or listen to his stereo system.

  “Do you want something to drink?” he asked her.

  “What do you have?”

  “Water. 7Up. Orange juice.”

  “7Up,” she told him.

  He went and filled her a large glass of 7Up and made sure to turn the ringer off on his telephone.

  “Aw’ight, well, relax right here, and I’ll be back out when I’m all washed up,” he told her.

  “Okay,” she said with a grin and a sip of her pop.

  Ant went ahead and ran his shower water, still shaking his head concerning his unplanned company. “I don’t believe this shit,” he mumbled to himself. “And this girl is fine as hell!”

  He began to take his shower and got anxious. He slipped up and thought with his wrong head. You got a fine-ass girl waitin’ inside of your damn living room for you, and you in here butt naked taking a shower. You didn’t even try anything with her yet! What the hell is on
your mind?! If you’re gonna get caught in the act, then at least get caught IN the act!

  Ant gave himself a quick wash down, wrapped a towel around his waist, slipped on his slippers, and walked back out to his living room to go for it all, while still dripping wet with shower water.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to join me in a shower?” he asked his company with a ridiculous smile. It was outlandish to even ask. But that’s a man for you, rolling his dice hard!

  Diane looked at him, chuckled in his face, and calmly sat her drink down. She said, “You know what I was just thinking while you were in the shower?”

  “Naw. What?”

  She shook her head and said, “This is crazy. I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I have a boyfriend, you have a girlfriend, and this doesn’t even make any sense, Anthony.”

  It occurred to him at that moment that he hadn’t even given her his name. He just assumed that she knew it. And she did.

  “How you know I have a girl?” he asked her. How much does she know about me anyway? he thought.

  “I mean, it’s obvious,” she answered. “You have everything going for you. Why wouldn’t you have a girlfriend? Or at least one.”

  It was a crazy situation indeed. The craziness made it more tempting. Ant rationalized that it was such an unbelievable occurrence that it was meant to happen. Give a guy an inch, and if he’s cunning enough, he’ll find a way to stretch a mile out of it.

  Ant got slick on her and said, “Well, if you really want to leave me, then I guess that’s what you have to do,” looking puppy-eyed, wet, and homeless.

  Diane read the game and cut him off. “Don’t even try that with me. You know this isn’t right. It’s not.”

  “What’s not right? We haven’t done anything. We’re just talking. Unless you have a guilty conscience about what you want to do?”

  “What I want to do is leave, because this is not happening.”

  Ant poised himself. “If you really wanted to leave me, you would have left already.”

  She said, “I thought about that, but I didn’t want to be rude.”

  “So, you were afraid to even face me when I came back out,” he said, working her confidence again.