Hook Shot (Hoops #3)(86)

I can’t even defend myself. I haven’t said a word since I yelled hopscotch and brought Iris running. Mama and Aunt Pris weren’t far behind. The five of us stand in the middle of this field, and Ron’s lies are as rotten as the sugarcane.

“May,” Aunt Pris starts, her lips pressed tight together. “I don’t know if—”

“That’s right, we don’t know,” Mama says, her eyes narrowed on her sister. “I just need a minute to think, Pris. Gimme a . . .”

Her voice breaks like a dish crashing on the floor, and she starts crying, both hands covering her face. Ron reaches for her, and she slaps at his shoulders, at his face and head.

“You no good . . .” she screams, her light skin going red. “How could you, Ron?”

“Baby, come on now,” he says, capturing her flailing limbs, trapping the talons of her fingers in one hand and pulling her against his chest with one thick arm.

“I ain’t coming on,” she screeches at him. “Not this time.”

“Baby, you know me,” he coos into her hair, making circles on her narrow back with his hand. “I love you. You know how it is with us.”

Sobs shake her against him, and she tosses her head back and forth, denying, but she stops scratching and clawing and starts clinging, burrowing into his neck.

“How could you?” she whispers over and over again, sounding more hurt than angry. Broken, not outraged on my behalf.

“We gotta tell the police,” Iris says, as if she’s the adult.

“No!” me and Mama say in unison.

“No,” I say again. Iris’s face blurs through my tears. “I don’t want anybody to know.”

I turn pleading eyes to my mother. “Mama, please, no cops.” I glare at Ron. “Just make him go away.”

She stiffens at my words, looking helplessly between me and the man who hurt me, like there’s a hard choice to be made.

“Make him go, Mama,” I beg again. “Please, we don’t have to talk to the cops. Just make him go away.”

“But, Lotus, we . . .” She licks her lips. “We all probably need some space to figure out what happened.”

“I know what happened, Mama,” I protest. “He ra—”

“Lotus!” Mama cuts in like a blade. “Don’t say that.”

“But he did,” I weep into Iris’s hair. “He did.”

“Maybe you should stay somewhere else for a while,” Mama says, avoiding my eyes. “Until we all feel more comfortable.”

“Me?” I bounce my shock between Mama, Aunt Pris, and Ron, whose bloodied lip pulls with a smug smirk. “But, Mama, I—”

“Just for a few weeks, Lo,” she says, some of the guilt on her face turning into impatience.

“No,” Iris screams, squeezing me tighter. “Don’t send her away.”

“Just for a few weeks,” Mama says again, her tone firmer.

“Then I’m going with her.” Iris pulls her lips into a flat, determined line.

“You ain’t going nowhere, girl,” Aunt Pris says. “What I tell you about getting in grown folks’ business?”

“But Mama,” Iris says, her voice thick and wobbling. “Where’s she gonna go?”

The stalks shift and part, snapping under someone’s feet, startling us all. It’s my great-grandmother MiMi. She takes her time looking at each of us, but finally fixes wrathful eyes on Ron. He gulps, shivers.

“I’ll take her,” MiMi says, looking at me with those ancient eyes. “She can come stay with me.”





31





Kenan





If there’s one place I never expected to be, it’s here.

New York Fashion Week. Front row of the JPL show. Yet here I sit, anxiously awaiting the first “look,” as Lotus calls it. She told me the show JP has been designing and planning for months will be over in less than twenty minutes.

My kind of event.

The waiting audience is seated on a terrace overlooking Lincoln Plaza. I can’t fully appreciate the city on the verge of sunset, or the excitement electrifying the air because I’m ready for it to be over. I’m happy for JP and his team, whom I’ve come to know and actually like over the summer. But the sooner the show and the after-party are over, the sooner I can have Lotus to myself. She warned me her schedule would be bruising in the last few weeks leading up to the show, but I wasn’t prepared for how little time she’d have for anything else.

How little time she’d have for me.

I’ve never been involved with someone whose schedule and commitment to their craft rivaled mine. In three weeks, I report for training camp, and the NBA will own almost all my time for the next nine months, at least. Ten if we make playoffs, which August and I are determined to do. Then Lotus will be on the receiving end of my career. It’s not easy to live with. I’m not easy to live with. I’m even more obsessive about my eating and workout regimen during the season. I watch film constantly. I talk even less because I’m in my head studying plays, scoping other teams’ offenses, mentally picking apart their defenses before games.

It’s all ball.

I may not have started out thinking I’d be an NBA player, but I’ve always been driven in every endeavor. I would have been this way about law, if I’d fulfilled my father’s dream and pursued it. If I’d been a farmer, I would have been this way about fruits and vegetables and soil. It’s the way I’m made, and nothing has ever disrupted this pattern in me. I know what Bridget did was wrong, but I also recognize that I’m no picnic, especially once the season starts.