Authors: J. J. Murray
“Amen to that,” I whisper. I like Ty.
“Hi, my name is Darcy.”
She looks like that Darcy chick on
Married with Children.
Wasn’t she gay on that show, too? I know all Darcys aren’t gay, but this is creepy.
“I’ll be your server tonight. What can I get y’all to drink?”
Y’all? Maybe she’s from
Hee Haw.
Do they do gay salutes on
Hee Haw?
Getting “down on the farm” has just taken on a totally new meaning.
I giggle. If this book were written solely from Ty’s point of view, I might be enjoying myself more. This should have been the first chapter anyway. A lady should always get to speak first…and last.
“I’ll have a grande frozen strawberry margarita,” says Pat, the alcoholic, while I stare her down. “What?”
“Who’s driving?” I ask.
Pat latches onto one of Mike’s muscular arms. “Mike is.”
I roll my eyes. “So you two aren’t trying to get any tonight? Just trying to get your drink on?”
“It’s a Monday night, girl,” Pat says. “Who goes macking on a Monday night?” She rests her head on Mike’s shoulder.
Mike moves his shoulder away from Pat’s head. “Go ahead, girl. You’re blocking all the testosterone up in here.”
Pat waves at the crowd of people at the bar, their eyes glued to
Monday Night Football.
“How do you know if any of them are gay?”
Mike only raises his eyebrows, and I shake my head at the two of them. Pat, who is the most heterosexual being I have ever met, goes on dates with Mike, the strong, silent gay guy. Yet if you ever saw either one of them on the street, you’d think Pat was a librarian with her granny glasses and old-fashioned clothes and Mike was a preacher all dressed up sharp in electric blue.
Oooh, that E. Lynn Harris! Every time you turn around there’s another gay black man in a book. And what is Ty, who seems to be levelheaded, doing with a freak and a homosexual? I know they’re friends, but come on! Is everything going to be “opposites attract” in this book or what? And that crack on librarians, oooh! I have never worn granny glasses in my life!
Though my mama has. Hmm. Two stereotypes so far. Maybe D. J. Browning is going for a record.
“Ahem,” Darcy says.
Don’t be a-hemming me, wench! You made us wait, so I’m going to make you wait. “Let’s see now…I’ll have…a strawberry daiquiri and…a glass of water, please.”
“And I’ll have a Sex on the Beach,” Mike says. “And Darcy, I hope it won’t take you fifteen minutes to get our drinks to us since we’ve already been sitting here for fifteen minutes waiting to place our order.”
Darcy fiddles with the gold cross on her necklace. Oh, right, Darcy’s a Christian. Not. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that. Monday is one of our busiest nights.”
And later, it’s going to get busier, huh, Darcy? I look over at Dan. Still sitting there, still ripping labels off bottles. Pitiful.
Well, hook up already. Do
something.
I know they have to develop their relationship over—I flip to the back of the book—285 pages? This book is kind of light. I could read a book like this in a couple hours. Hmm.
“Would y’all like to order appetizers with your drinks?”
“We’ll have an order of hot wings and an order of spinach dip, please,” Mike says, and I blink at him. “What?”
“What if I wanted something different?” I say.
“Go ahead,” Mike says.
I’m not really that hungry for anything but good conversation, but I can’t stand anyone ordering for me. “Make it two orders of hot wings.”
“Okay,” Darcy says. “I’ll be right back with your drinks and food.”
Yeah, right. We’ll be lucky to see Darcy before the second half of the game.
“Anyway, as I was saying,” Pat says, “before I was rudely nudged with somebody’s hard and crusty elbow—”
“My elbows aren’t crusty,” Mike interrupts.
“Dag, Mike, lube them things,” Pat says. “So, Mike, we haven’t seen your friend Paul around in a while. Are you two still kickin’ it?”
Mike shrugs. “Yeah, we’re still cool, but I think our relationship changed when I asked him to give me a little space. I’m just tired of partying all the time. I’m getting too old for that shit.”
And this ends Ty’s opening section. Not terrible, not wonderful. Adequate. I’m getting hints for what’s to come, and it isn’t as if it will take long for these two to get together. It’s Dan’s turn again:
3: Dan
I’m getting too old for this shit.
I’ve been peeling beer bottle labels ever since I had my first Michelob—or was it a Miller?—back in high school. I peeled quite a few bottles of Bud in the service, too. I know it means I’m horny. And I am. It’s hard for me to admit that at thirty-two, yet it’s true. I know I’ve just been dumped for another woman, and I know that this isn’t the first time it’s happened.
But at least the first time involved a woman dumping me for her mother.
Oooh, nasty! Why can’t Dan just be a plain, ordinary man? Why does he have to have so much baggage?
Which isn’t as twisted as it sounds. Okay, it does sound twisted, but there’s a logical explanation. Given the choice between marrying me, the surfer boy Marine from California turned elementary school teacher from Virginia, and the traditions of her Thai, man-hating mother in Cleveland, Jewel chose…the Honda Prelude that her mother promised her if she broke off her engagement with me.
This is different. A white man with a Thai ex will be bumping uglies with a rugged sister—an interesting development. At least it means he’s open to interracial relationships.
Either that or he’ll mess with any woman, anytime, anywhere.
The freak.
Yeah, it’s a little bit twisted. And it also involved her mother agreeing to pay for all of Jewel’s med school bills, but I feel that I’ve been replaced by a two-door coupe that I hope rusts to dust up in Ohio, and I don’t want to think about Jewel anymore. She’s past history, end of story, archives, end of the road…yet she visits me whenever I have situations like this, as if she’s sitting across from me right now in Beth’s empty chair. The ex that keeps on giving me pain.
And I still have the ring I gave her that she threw back in my face.
Which means that Jewel will be back in Dan’s life. That’s how these books work. He’s hard up and hurt from a past relationship, and as soon as he finds true love with Ty (though I still don’t see
how
), Jewel will be back with a vengeance. Such a soap opera. I’m so glad real life isn’t this way.
I look at the mess in front of me: seven beer bottles’ worth of labels, two plates of chicken bones, and a pile of sticky napkins. Leftovers from a five-date relationship with…a lesbian who is going home to wait on my waitress, to serve my server, who is going to get the tip of Beth’s tongue.
Damn. I hope the Sam Adams and all those hot wings give Beth some really bad gas. Or loose stools. Yeah, that would be perfect. Just an evening of Darcy and diarrhea. An evening of sucking down Pepto-Bismol instead of sucking face. An evening of starts and farts, fits and shits.
HAAAAA! That’s a good one. Nasty, but good. Funny, but I don’t mind it so much when a man of any race curses. That’s how most men communicate when they can’t think of anything intelligent to say, right? But educated sisters—no, they can’t be cursing up a storm and get my approval.
I reach down to pick up a stray fleck of a label and turn my head just enough to see the delicious, sexy, toned brown legs of the black woman with cat’s eyes in the booth across from me. Beautiful is the wrong word. Stunning. No, dazzling. Classy, definitely elegant. Cute toes, too. She must work out. So smooth, flexed just right, so well-proportioned, so—
So busted.
She saw me.
I raise my head too quickly, bump it hard on the bottom of the table, and see a few stars. When I finally am able to sit up, I steal a glance her way—and she’s smiling at me. Perfect teeth gleaming like that gum commercial. Fabulous.
Or is she laughing? She has her hand over her mouth and—
Yeah, she’s laughing. Private Sidney, a hot black woman from Alabama whom I hung out with in Saudi, used to laugh at me the same way whenever I tried to dance, covering her face with both hands. Yeah, I’m that bad of a dancer. I wasn’t bad at dancing horizontally, though. Yeah, I wonder what Cyd’s up to these days? We used to go at it—
Dan
is
a freak! Do I want him messing with Ty? What on earth could she
ever
see in him? Do all white men in their thirties behave this way? This is getting beyond ridiculous. A Californian former-Marine
freak
of an elementary school teacher is going to hook up with a trailblazing, cultured sister? Against my better judgment, I’m going to give it a few more pages, but it had better get moving, and it had better start getting real.
Geez, I need to get hold of myself. I’m too old to be reliving old relationships and flirting, yet that’s what I’m doing, and who am I flirting with? A black woman sitting next to a guy twice my size just minutes after my lesbian girlfriend has left me to go play field hockey—or should I say tonsil hockey?—with one of Hooters’s finest.
Yeah, life can suck in oh so many special ways.
I toss two twenties and a ten on top of the check. I know that will give Darcy more than a 20 percent tip, but who knows? Things have a way of working out. Maybe things won’t work out between Beth and Darcy, and Darcy will see me in a new light because of my generosity, realize the errors of her ways, and give me a chance.
And then again, maybe Darcy will use her tip to buy Beth a new leopard-skin thong, and then they’ll—
I down a full glass of lukewarm ice water, and as I set down the glass, I look once more at Cat Eyes. Such ripe, red lips, such devastating eyes.
And thighs. Don’t forget the thighs. They are smokin’.
At least he’s not a chest or booty man. Eyes and thighs. I have two pairs of those. They aren’t “smokin’,” but they can
smolder
when I want them to.
I nod once at her, and she nods back. I put on my coat and nod again. She nods again.
We’ve just had a nodding moment.
I don’t have many of these moments. What do I do next? If I had any guts, I’d go over and speak to her. But what would I say? “Hi, I’m the guy who’s been scoping out your fine, sculpted legs like a drooling teenager, and I was wondering if I could have your phone number, maybe give you a call sometime?” But if the big guy is her boyfriend, I might be leaving with a busted nose to go with my bruised ego.
No, Dan, you might be leaving with
his
phone number.
Instead, I weave my way through the tables to the door, where I pause to look back at Cat Eyes and only see Darcy at her booth, serving their drinks. What’s Cat Eyes drinking? A…strawberry daiquiri. Hmm. Kind of matches her lips. She takes a sip, those cat’s eyes wide and painfully sexy.
I almost have an epiphany—something about cats’ eyes, strawberries, and leopard-skin thongs—but the epiphany vanishes when stinging rain pelts my face outside the door. Rushing to my Subaru, parked away from the neon orange glow of the Hooters sign, I jump in, start the engine, and pop in my favorite cassette.
Eric B. and Rakim to the rescue once again.
At least he has okay taste in music. So, Dan’s “old school.” I just wish he wasn’t such a freak. Now let’s see Ty’s reaction, and she’d better react. I wouldn’t shrug off a man staring that hard at me for anything—not that it happens that often to me. Let’s see, the last time a man really gritted on me was…I sigh. It was during my first year at Purdue. He was a fifth-year senior football player named…Kentrick? Kendrick? He had looked me up and down and up and even circled me once, like an African lion stalking his prey. I felt so…exposed. He never actually approached me. He just…looked.
And I graduated
before
he did, four years later.
4: Ty
A white guy nodded at me, and I nodded back. Twice. Either we just had us a moment—in
his
mind, anyway—or that boy has Tourette’s. And what a perv! Checking me out like that, hard staring at my legs, like maybe he thinks he can get between them. That will be the day.
“Preach on, my sister!” I shout. But then I sigh. I bet they will be getting busy by page fifty, which is about all I’ll probably want to read of this book. That’s one of my rules. I’ll give any book fifty pages, and if I’m not fully grabbed, embraced, and fondled by then, it’s over for me.
Though I do have some fine legs. At least he has some taste. And he does have sandy blond hair and blue eyes. For whatever reason, I’ve always had a thing for blond hair and blue eyes on a guy, not that any of the brothers I’ve ever dated have gone that route.
So,
she
has never been in an interracial relationship. And Dan the vodka-drinking elementary school teacher/freak, who can’t tell if a woman is a lesbian or a man is gay, is the one for her? What would Mike Tyson say about this? Oh, yeah. This is getting
ludicrous
.
But why did he tip Darcy? There isn’t even forty dollars’ worth of food on that table. He is obviously a generous fool when it comes to women.
With a “Stupid” sign around his neck.
I turn to watch Mike stirring his Sex on the Beach, still going on and on about Precious Paul. “Paul is somebody I can have fun with, but I don’t see us together five or ten years from now. He’s just not settle-down material.”
Pat slurps her daiquiri. Girl has absolutely no manners. “Speaking of settling down, Ty, are you and Mr. Tickler in it for the long haul, or are you going to get Charles to make an honest woman out of you?”