“Sleep well? I know I did. Like a baby.” He winked.
The memory of last night brought a smile to her lips. They hadn’t gone at it like that since they were newlyweds. Corey had been insatiable, and his desire had lifted her to a feverish height of passion that, afterward, had shuttled her into a deeper sleep than any sleeping pill known to man could have provided.
She’d been pleasantly startled by his ardor. Yesterday, after that sleazy old friend of his, Leon, had shown up at the gas station, Corey had gone in to a funk, and when she’d confided to him that Leon had run in to her at lunch, he had sounded furious-reinforcing her decision to refrain from mentioning Leon’s offensive remarks to her and possibly send him over the moon in rage. She had expected Corey to be moody all evening, and though he had been quieter than usual, he had been especially attentive to her and Jada.
She wasn’t certain how to interpret his mood swings, but the end result had been good. Memorably good.
He came to the bed and took one of her hands in his, kissed it. “All right, I’m off to make the donuts.”
“Got any lunch plans?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. Why?”
She took his hand and placed it on one of her breasts, molded his fingers to its fullness. “I think I want a lunch date.”
“Oh? I think that can be arranged.” He squeezed her.
In the early days of their marriage, they’d often enjoyed “lunch dates.” She couldn’t recall why or when they had stopped having them. Perhaps they had merely allowed life’s tiresome demands to get in the way.
“How about noon?” he asked.
“Noon it is. Be there or be square.”
“I’ll be there-and I’ll be straight.” He smiled, bent to kiss her on the lips.
She put up her hand to block him. “Hey, I have morning breath.”
He kissed her anyway. “Call me when you get to work.”
She didn’t normally call him when she arrived at her practice each morning. Although he’d tried to make his request sound casual, she thought she detected a trace of concern in his gaze.
Is he worried about that Leon guy? She suspected he was, but she was reluctant to ask. She didn’t want him to shut down on her or get angry, not when they were enjoying a playful resurgence of some of their old passion.
“I’ll be sure to call you,” she said. “Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
He left the bedroom. She heard him go upstairs, where he would kiss Jada good-bye as he always did each morning before he left for work. A few minutes later, she heard his car pull out of the garage.
But not before she’d heard the beep of the security system, indicating that he’d activated the perimeter alarm again. If she asked him about it, she could bet that he’d repeat that dubious comment from last night about running “diagnostics.”
What was going on? His reticence, so unlike him, was unnerving.
Glancing at the clock, she calculated that she had about half an hour before she’d need to get Jada into gear for summer school. She climbed out of bed and padded to the shower enclosure in the master bath.
As she showered, she tried not to think about Corey, but of course, he remained at the top of her mind. In her opinion, they had built a genuinely strong marriage. While they’d experienced occasional arguments like any normal couple, they’d been able to successfully navigate the potholes in the road by virtue of their willingness to communicate respectfully, openly, and honestly with each other.
She didn’t want to worry too much about how he’d been acting lately, but she had a gut feeling that his apparent bad blood with Leon was only the tip of the iceberg, and that a much more troubling problem lurked beneath the surface. She didn’t know what it might be. She wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to know.
But try as she might to ignore it, her uneasiness had a lot to do with the question of why Corey had ever been friends with a clearly shady individual like Leon in the first place. Not merely acquaintances. Best friends, as Corey had confessed.
Your hubby C-Note and I were thick as thieves back in the day.
She wasn’t naive. She knew Corey had grown up in a rough area of Detroit; she could understand if he’d skirted the law a bit in his youth. Hell, her big brother, college-degree mechanical engineer that he was now, had experienced a couple of brushes with trouble as a teenager.
What disturbed her was the possible severity of Corey’s misadventures with this Leon character. Those were the thoughts she was most reluctant to entertain-and were why she hadn’t pressed Corey for more details. She preferred the comfort of willful ignorance.
Counselor, counsel thyself, she thought ruefully.
After about fifteen minutes under the shower, she dried off with a bath towel and began to apply a generous lather of cream to her skin. Her complexion showed ash easily if she didn’t use lotion every day, and growing up, the threat of ashy knees or elbows being pointed out derisively by her classmates had made her obsessive about moistening her flesh.
She was in the midst of rubbing down her legs when she thought she heard the security system beep. It was the quick, five-chirp signal the alarm emitted when it was deactivated.
Had Corey forgotten something and returned home? Or had Jada turned off the system for some reason-unlikely given that Jada, like Simone, loved to sleep in?
“Corey?” she called out. “That you, honey?”
No answer.
Her skin glistening, she went into the bedroom, pulled panties and a bra out of a drawer, and slid them on. As she dressed, she checked the security system control panel mounted beside the doorway. The green “Ready” light shone, which meant the alarm had been disengaged by someone entering the PIN.
She wrapped herself in a terry cloth bathrobe and opened the bedroom door, Corey’s name on her lips.
On the threshold, she froze.
Leon was coming toward her down the hallway. Unlike yesterday at lunch, he wasn’t wearing sunglasses. His deep-set eyes held the predatory intent of a wolf eyeing fresh prey.
“Good morning, good morning, Miss Thang. My goodness, ain’t you lookin’ scrumptious?”
Upstairs, Jada screamed.
13
When Jada awoke and discovered the giant sitting on her bed, she screamed.
She’d been having a fantastic dream about her all-time favorite movie, Shrek. In it, she was best friends with Shrek and Donkey, and they were traveling all over Duloc together getting involved in thrilling adventures. When Daddy had come into her room to kiss her good-bye, she’d smiled at him sleepily, reluctant to let the dream fade, and sure enough, she sank back into the marvelous cartoon fantasyland as soon as he went away.
It was the smell that woke her up for real.
It was the unmistakable scent of chocolate. She loved chocolate, especially Snickers bars and her Grandma Rose’s double-chocolate cake, would have eaten it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and every snack in between if her parents had allowed her to, but they were strict about the foods she ate and let her have candy and desserts only every now and then, because they didn’t want her to get cavities. She could never remember waking up to the odor of chocolate in her bedroom, not even on her birthday, which was in September, three months away yet.
The smell came from right beside her.
She opened her eyes and found a giant man sitting on her bed beside her. He had light brown skin, a humongous head with puffy hair, and the biggest hands she had ever seen in her life-hands as big as shovel blades resting on the legs of his jeans.
Unlike Shrek, who was a funny, nice, giant ogre, this giant man was scary.
It wasn’t his smell that frightened her, though the smell, she realized upon waking, was not just chocolate. It was the aroma of chocolate mixed in with something foul, like the way the poor man who asked her and her friends for money during their third-grade school trip to the aquarium had smelled, as if he hadn’t taken a bath or used deodorant in ages. Combined with the chocolate, it was a disgusting, sickly-sweet scent. A putrid smell.