Our Muted Recklessness (Muted Hopelessness Book 2) Read online

  The Carters’ “Heard About Us” is about to be my next mood. I damn sure need to escape this one.

  -TWO WEEKS LATER-

  “Shit!” She wheezes, rolling off of me.

  Shit is right. My heart is pounding. The girl is possibly the most voracious woman I’ve had. One who appreciated pure fucking, that is. My hand went down to my shrinking dick to check the status of the condom.

  Intact.

  Perfect!

  “I needed that,” she pants. “I’ve got this twelve-hour flight ahead of me. Shit!” She flips to her side of the bed, in search of her purse on the floor. “What time is it?” I hear the shifting of shit from her digging through her purse.

  That has me reaching for my phone on the nightstand nearest my side of the bed. I have several notifications awaiting me. Tapping, I go straight to my text messages.

  Sade is laying with me now…

  Tammy from Sports Illustrated’s finance department…

  Teea, whom I’ll block…

  Luke Brown from BSU…

  Jamal from my cleaners…

  Maury…

  Maggie…

  Mom...

  I chuckle quietly.

  I’ll be home shortly!

  “Damn!” she cries next to me, lifting from the pillows. “It’s almost six. I’ve got to go.”

  I watch her five-foot, two-inch naked body leap from the bed and shoot straight into the bathroom. Her body’s firm and dewy. I’m reminded of the ever-beneficial decision I made a year ago to call up the cabin attendant on my commercial flight to coastal Greece. She wrote her name and number on a napkin, handing it to me as I left the plane. Such a bold, clandestine move considering I was with a woman. A woman she overheard telling me all the things she’d do to me if I stayed in her villa that night instead of mine as she served us the final snack of the flight. Nicole, the president of an arts foundation for Black women pursuing ballet. For me, it was a business trip. For Nicole, it was a twofer.

  Sade, here, is on a layover from Hawaii to Croatia. She claimed the need of unwinding. I answered the call by meeting her at a hotel near JFK airport. I just flew down from a fundraiser in Martha’s Vineyard. Her text and needs came through with impeccable timing. Stretching, I exhale and think of a mind-numbing thing I can do to kill time. My car service won’t be here for another forty-five minutes. A horrible vice I have as a so-called journalist is following a Black gossip page on Instagram called Spilling That Hot Tea. They’re awful, but accurate about eighty-nine percent of the time.

  The admins don’t post often, but when they do, I’m guaranteed to walk away with a piece of truth I can confirm or dismiss within ten minutes. I learned of them from a friend of mine who isn’t a celebrity. They posted a series of pictures and documents from an indie-documentary a kid out in Los Angeles produced. It was a piece about how many rap artists’ videos and startup careers are sponsored by the drug dealers they claim to be in their art.

  The documentary, which was mostly credible, included a detailed mention of my friend and his relationships with a few artists. It trailed money back to my friend with claims of him being a drug kingpin. That shook up the worlds of many of us who knew him and his affiliates. It took a few months, but his lawyers were able to snatch the documentary from a major network and put a muzzle on its producer. Ultimately, it was repudiated. This friend called upon me to assist with independent media sources who kept the story alive.

  In the age of Instagram and Twitter bloggers, the most reputable was and still is Spilling That Hot Tea. I tried requesting, then pleading with one of the admins, Meks from The Bahamas. She told me to fuck off. Then I was able to find out the other’s name is Pawkid, a computer savant out of Ohio. She replied with a paragraph filled with four-syllable words that accumulatively echoed her partner’s sentiment. That’s when I had to call in the big dogs and have their page shut down. They garnered millions of followers on Instagram alone on pure gossip. That was nearly a year ago, and they’re nowhere close to the numbers they once had.

  Serves their asses right…

  My chest expands on that accomplishment then suddenly deflates as I see their latest post about America’s favorite undefeated middleweight female boxer.

  When you’re the best at what you do, a beautiful queen too, and you still get treated like a Felicia. I hate seeing gems with insecure asshats who need the sparkle of a gem to shine. Do better, sis. Do better.

  The picture to accompany it is Tori McNabb on the cover of Sugar&Spice magazine. And shit, is she beautiful. Not too much color on her beautifully contoured face, and very little photoshop tricks done to glam up the image. Seeing her chocolate eyes gazing directly at me without contempt, after all these years is…terrifying. She’s a stowed source of my resentment, betrayal, and hurt.

  A rectangular text message balloon drops from the top of my screen.

  Ms. Wanda: I’m going through your office looking for pictures. I saw this one. This that Tori girl?

  The mention of that name makes me swallow involuntarily. My mother’s turning fifty-five years old this fall and the original plan was to throw her a party. That was until I mentioned it to her. Now, she’s working with the event planner and throwing herself a party I’m paying for. Her looking for pictures doesn’t explain why she was in my office. I tap to go to the text app. There, in my mother’s thread, is a picture I forgot I left out on my desk.

  It’s of Tori and me in Macen Beach that spring semester of her first year at BSU, and my last. We’d just wandered out of the woods and were met with a camera in our face. I threw my arm around her a little out of nervous energy, but more from being sexually satiated after going so long without seeing her. Until the picture resurfaced recently, I didn’t notice how…free she looked. Her eyes were narrowed, body posture completely relaxed, and cheeks pinched in contentment. Replete.

  A warm wave hits my belly. It’s mixed with sorrow. The Spilling That Hot Tea post returns to mind. It highlights the insecurities and fears of the young Tori who, I had thought, briefly put them aside and was able to engage healthily in relationships. But I was proven wrong not too long after this picture was taken and am still wrong. It’s evident in her choice of a fiancé.

  I scoff.

  This nigga…

  “Hey!” Sade sings out near the door of the bedroom. “I’m out. I have a stop to make before the airport.” She drops her head to the side and bats those long lashes. “This was fun, like always. My uncle’s scheduled to have hip replacement surgery. I’m going to be his caregiver. So, I don’t know the next time I’ll be out this way.” I have no idea where this woman lives, which makes these partings awkward. “You traveling anywhere interesting before the holidays roll around?”

  I think for a moment. “Indonesia in a few weeks.”

  “Ooooh! Where to? Bali?” She performs a shimmy. “We connect out there to Denpasar. No non-stops, though.”

  This is weird, making me suck in a breath, trying to be polite. “Not Bali.”

  “Oh. You just seem like a Bali guy.”

  Sade, sweetie, you don’t know me…

  “I’ve been once with friends.” Old family is more like it. “I’ll be visiting Kamigu. It’s a small island—”

  “Holy shit!” She sucks in a breath. “I knew you had money, but goddamn?” Her eyes are wide; mouth, too. Sade’s expression isn’t dissimilar to the one she makes when she’s coming on my dick. “Ash! Are you taking someone special there?”

  So she does have an ounce of decorum and morality?

  “It’s a business excursion.” I quell her growing suppositions.

  “We don’t fly out there.” She gasps.

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

  Then Sade begins to nod, internally calculating my wealth and vocation. We discuss none of that. I’m not in the habit of telling a woman how I earn a living unless I’m actively pursuing them, and even that is scaled. I don’t pursue women for more than their sexual feminine wilds. A
nd on that rare occasion, I’ll share my career in journalism. But my income and wealth aren’t up for common knowledge. Sade here has zero idea what I do besides travel extensively under the guise of work…which is entirely true.

  “How long will you be there?” A nervous giggle pushes through her cords. “Just wondering when we’ll meet up again.”

  I have no idea how long this piece on Tori will take. I know what I need to abound a solid story, but have no clue how forthcoming she or her team will be.

  My face folds. “That’s a good question, yet one I can’t answer,” I mumble more to myself. Then I peer over to her again. “But you know how to contact me when you’re in my neck of the woods.”

  There’s a delay as she beams my way. “I know this sounds crazy, but work with me, old bearded one.”

  A chuckle pushes from my nostrils. “Okay.”

  “I know we don’t discuss personal shit, but I bet you went to college.”

  I nod when she pauses. “I did.”

  “You probably went to a good one, but anyway. I wonder—just for a moment—what if we met back then on campus.”

  My brows meet. “Why?”

  “Because I’d have you before your first heartbreak.”

  “What makes you think I’ve had my heart broken?”

  Her dark eyes rove around the small hotel suite as she holds her purse and jacket behind her back with a twinkled smirk on her glossed lips. “A man too converse with this meeting space is either one without the ability to give love a try, or one who has and vows to never do it again.”

  “Well, damn…” I blink, shocked as hell. “I don’t know if I should be shook or properly offended.”

  Sade’s little shoulders shrug as she takes a step back. “Be neither. I grew up poor, on a small dirt road in the middle of nowhere. College was never in the cards for me.”

  She turns and leaves for the door. I hear the click once it’s closed. I decide to be offended. Just because she was poor doesn’t mean we couldn’t have dated or had something real. That’s fucked up.

  Exhaling, I stretch my arms and prepare to shower four hours of fucking off before resuming to my real world. Walking to the bathroom, I mutter, “Poor girls are just as dangerous, if not more. Shit. One was my fuckin’ kryptonite.” I scoff, recollecting. “In college!”

  After rinsing my face in the shell-shaped bowl, my head comes up and I see myself in the mirror. The face is familiar, but the eyes are from a weary stranger. It’s late, been a long day, and I’m exhausted, but this is beyond being spent and I know it. Thank God I’m finally home, in my own space. I turn off the water and grab a hand towel. I know I need to deal with it before this fight, and more so before training. Taking a deep breath, I make a muted promise to myself to do just that.

  My vibrating phone on the vanity snatches my attention. I grab it and sit my naked frame wrapped in a towel on the bench. Once I’m in the text thread from Trent, my eyes burn from unwilled tears. I pinch my nose to chase away the burn there, too. Life can be so cruel to good people. And it happens so randomly. How could this be happening?

  Me: Yes. God is still in control. My heart’s bleeding right now. Prayer is a given. Always. Don’t let this shake or break you. Tell Jade I’ll be by in a day or two whether she likes it or not.

  After hitting send, I sit back, reclining all my weight on the wall behind me. Words I cannot articulate pour from my spirit. I’d already had a lot on my mind, the fear of this news coming into fruition is one of them. Absentmindedly, my attention goes back to my phone and I end up on Instagram, not knowing exactly why. If there’s been one thing I’ve learned since becoming a “celebrity,” it’s that folks who reach this attention bracket get no privacy or benefit of the doubt. We’re just targets for voyeurism and criticism.

  It doesn’t take long for that claim to be proven. I have a barrage of tags leading me to a Spilling That Hot Tea post where, once again, I’m a topic. They’ve used a picture of me from the Sugar&Spice magazine feature to speak on the rumors of Deon cheating on me…again.

  When you’re the best at what you do, a beautiful queen too, and you still get treated like a Felicia. I hate seeing gems with insecure asshats who need the sparkle of a gem to shine. Do better, sis. Do better.

  I hate it. It burns my soul like acid on human skin. My first thought is to call Raj, who now knows these “bloggers” to tell them I’m prepared to pull up anywhere they are. But after taking a deep breath and thinking, I realize this isn’t exactly a negative post by them. Yes, they’re minding my business and circulating rumors about people they don’t know. But I also know Deon’s been giving them something to talk about. I understand he’s new to this relationship thing, but wish he would tighten up with the things he does publicly. He’s a running back for the Connecticut Kings and knows better than being so free with his company or actions. Is he cheating on me? I don’t know.

  What I do know is I won’t be disrespected. The most of what I know about marriage comes from what I see from Raj and his wife, Wynter. I’ve also been spending more time with Trent and Jade Bailey, and Rut and Parker Amare. I had been cool with Trent and Rut for a while now since we share the same sports agency. But now that I’m engaged to their teammate, I see more of them. However, what I’ve never seen of Ragee, Trent, or Rut is them being sloppy with women.

  Maybe that’ll take Deon some time, but it has to change. I’m ready for the next chapter in my life, and it doesn’t include goofy behavior that allows people who don’t know me to talk shit about my life.

  “Tor!” his deep, piercing cry penetrates the wall. “I’m waiting!”

  Sighing, I stand and dump my phone on the bench. Next, I drop my towel and cut the light. A single streak of the streetlight from outside bursts through my dark bedroom as I toe to my bed, where I find him. At first contact, Deon pulls me into the bed and I wrap around his body, straddling him. And he’s ready. I feel his erection against my trunk and his hands grip my hips. I find his mouth to guide him. He knows little about foreplay, or just isn’t a fan of it.

  For me, I need the prelude, the foreword of a kiss. It’s where promises of respect and mutual gratification are made. It’s where the communication of intimacy begins for me. I’ve not been with a lot of guys, but I know what I want in sex and intimacy is nonnegotiable. Kissing is a passion I’ve been addicted to since my very first one. Since then, it’s lost the magic once felt. But I was determined to find it in each man I’ve allowed to put his mouth, lips, and hands on my body.

  When Deon pushes down on my hips, gesturing for me to take him in, I lift my mouth from his and ask, “Where are the condoms?”

  “Shit,” he whispers between gritted teeth. But I feel him reaching for the nightstand. “But you’re on the pill.”

  I don’t answer; instead, wait patiently. As his hands work beneath me to apply the condom, I find his mouth and slip my tongue inside again. I’m searching for something. Something to make me feel a deeper connection. Confirmation of my next chapter. Something.

  I’m struggling because I know what a kiss can do. I’ve felt how electrifying a meeting of the mouths can be between two people who claim to love each other. Even those who have no clue they do. It’s something innate. Constitutive. A kiss can be an affair that binds even the most unsuspecting lost souls. It can heal, seduce, communicate, initiate a promise, and spark a soul.

  Why can’t I have that with the man I’ll be spending the rest of my life with?

  Chapter Two

  -THEN-

  “Hey, champ!”

  My head shot up from watching my shoes while walking into the library. It was the DJ Paulie guy and a small group of boy-humans with him. I wanted to roll my eyes, but couldn’t quickly come up with a reason why. That was until I registered what was in their eyes. It was that familiar, creepy “I mean you no good” slant. Paulie didn’t hold the expression like his friends. He appeared calm and observant as his friends smiled big; one even groped himself, clench
ing his dick with pride. That’s when I rolled my eyes, having decided I didn’t like them. I flipped them the bird, not breaking my stride. They laughed as I continued toward the elevator.

  Champ…

  I didn’t like that nickname from people who didn’t know The Banger. It was a term people used to label me anything but a girl with feelings. A human being.

  The elevator arrived and I stepped on, thinking about when my cousins learned I boxed and was good at it. They would try to drag me into their beefs, using me as a damn bodyguard. The same with friends. When I started training in North Jersey with Uppercut, I stopped telling people how good I’d gotten to avoid the expectations. I wasn’t a violent person and didn’t like to be used.

  The elevator door slid open and I walked out onto the third floor. My heart rate skyrocketed. Though I headed toward the study room number he’d BBM’d me earlier, I didn’t want to be here, and almost canceled. This was going to be super awkward. I had no idea what I was thinking—last Friday in the massage room or—right now, en route to my tutoring session. When the door of the private library room came into view, I let go of a deep breath. My knees wouldn’t stop trembling, but my mind was made up. I was going to do this. Yes, I’d made a mistake, but life had to go on.

  When I walked into the small study room, predictably, Ashton was there on time. His big body swallowed the wooden chair as he sat slouched while looking into his laptop. I closed the door behind me and pulled off my bookbag. Quietly, I unzipped it and reached inside for my writing course binder and lay it on the table. Then I sat down, opening it. Slowly, Ashton’s chestnut eyes lifted to acknowledge me.

  He didn’t speak at first. His attention returned to his screen before he uttered, “You’re not late.”

  I didn’t want to be. Things between us were already dangerously awkward; the last thing I needed was to have him bitch to me about being late again. I made sure I was on time tonight.