Game (Jasper Dent #2)(48)
“And I’m the only black girl you’ve ever dated. So there.”
“So, we’re good?”
“We’re beyond good.”
“Is your dad gonna come at me with a shotgun the next time I come over?”
“Probably.” She waited for a moment. “You went too far, you know. At the airport.”
“I know.”
“You crossed the line.”
“I know.”
“It’s one thing to mess with a teacher’s head to get out of detention or to charm that girl at the police station to get you some file you shouldn’t have, but—”
“I know.”
“—this is my dad, Jazz. He’s my father. And you were, like, like, waving a cape in front of a bull.”
“It was totally wrong.”
“And you know what they do to the bulls, right? And that’s how you were treating my dad.”
“I’m sorry. I really am.” Nah, Billy whispered, you ain’t sorry. You just know sayin’ it gets you what you want.
Jazz shook Billy away. He was sorry.
He was, like, 99 percent sure he was really sorry.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “I’ll apologize to your dad right now.”
Maybe 98 percent.
“That is not a good idea. He’s still on fire. He’s so pissed it’s ridiculous. He just now stopped lecturing me. If you’d called five minutes ago, he would have grabbed the phone and you’d be talking to him instead.”
Ouch.
“But anyway,” she went on, “every couple has their thing, you know? My dad doesn’t like you. And your grandmother thinks I’m the spawn of Satan. We’ll deal.”
“What about…” He didn’t even want to bring it up, but he had to. It was in the open now. “What about sex?”
“Yes, please,” Connie deadpanned.
He laughed. “Seriously. Come on.”
“We’ll take it slow.”
“We’ve been taking it slow. Because of me. You know it’s true, Con. Any other guy would have been all over you after a week. We’ve been together for almost a year.”
“Maybe those guys would have been all over me, but they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. And you wouldn’t have gotten anywhere, either. Not that soon. I wasn’t ready. Not then. Now I am. Any man worth having will wait for his woman to be ready. How can I not return the favor?”
And that was when Jazz knew Connie was more and better than he deserved.
“I’ll just have to get by thinking about you while I’m in the shower,” she went on. “It’s gotten me this far.”
Jazz groaned. “You just had to put that image in my head, didn’t you?”
“It’s a pretty great image,” she admitted. “All that lather and soapy bubbles making me slick and shiny.” Her voice dropped, low and sweet.
Jazz adjusted uncomfortably. “I surrender. We need to change the subject. You’re killing me.”
He could almost hear Connie’s delicious smile over the phone. “What are we supposed to talk about?”
“I don’t know. Tell me what you were doing while I was with the cops yesterday.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.” She quickly filled him in on her mini-tour of some of the murder sites.
“Crime scenes,” he corrected her. “It’s possible they were murdered elsewhere and dumped there.”
“Right, right. Anyway, there was this graffito—”
“Graffito?”
“It’s the singular of graffiti.”
“Now you’re just messing with me.”
“I swear to God. Graffiti is plural. It’s like data and datum.”
“No one says ‘datum.’ ”
“People who speak properly do,” Connie sniffed. “Anyway, someone had painted Ugly J.”
“Ugly J? Why did you even notice that?”
She explained how it had stood out. “So someone went back afterward and left that tag,” Jazz mused.
“Maybe the killer? They go back to the scene, right?”
“Sometimes. Not always. It’s just as likely it’s some smart-ass tagging crime scenes. Some kid’s idea of a sick joke.”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t stylized or artistic. Like, most taggers have a style. A little finesse. They want it to stand out, to be noticed. But this was just there. It was like doing your homework in Arial or Times New Roman. And before you asked: I already Googled Ugly J. Didn’t find anything.”
“It’s probably some New York thing.”
“I love the way you say ‘New York’ with such contempt,” Connie said, laughing. “You were there, what, thirty-six hours? And you already hate the place.”
“Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure. Let me tell you about the bath I took the other day….”
He groaned. Eventually, they hung up, and Jazz went to take the coldest shower in the history of cold showers. He tried not to think of Connie in the shower, too, but that task wasn’t particularly easy to accomplish. He had a very, very vivid imagination.