He laughed. “Who said I am? For all you know, I could be falling apart, too.”

  She smiled. “No. I watched how you swooped into town and got your aunt’s affairs in order. That’s not how people act when they’re falling apart. I’m proud of you, Deon.”

  He glanced at her and smiled. “Thanks.” He drove on silently for a moment, lost in thought. After a few minutes he spoke again.

  “I thought about what you said the other night. That thing about my mother and Aunt Mercy having a dance party in Heaven. I had a dream about her the night Aunt Mercy died.”

  Chanel looked at him, curiously. “Your mom?”

  He nodded. “First time I’ve dreamed about her since she passed. In the dream, me and Judah were little. She grabbed my face and she leaned in close to me and said, ‘Good boy.’ I woke up and Aunt Mercy was gone.”

  Chanel turned it around in her mind over and over.

  “What do you think it means?”

  Deon shrugged. “I have no idea. But I needed to hear it.” He got choked up.

  Chanel sensed his emotions were at their height. She watched him and listened as he chose his words carefully.

  “You ever had somebody say something to you … and until that moment you didn’t realize how much you needed to hear that?”

  Chanel nodded.

  “It was like that.” He shrugged. “I was never the ‘good boy.’ Judah was. He got the good grades, held the door open for old ladies, always played fair. That’s not who I was. Not ever. From preschool, I was challenging authority. Breaking the rules. Then I fucked up so bad that Judah got sent away and … I just thought the best thing for me to do was to get away from everybody. I disappointed them, so why stick around? But then this happened.”

  He sniffled, and Chanel handed him a tissue. He thanked her.

  “I went back to New York and that conversation I had with Aunt Mercy the night before she died is something I’ll never forget. She forgave me. And she gave me a chance to step up and be a good boy for once. I got to honor her, and by doing that I honored Judah and I made my moms proud. So, that dream … and what you said about that dance party in Heaven has me feeling optimistic. Maybe I’m not such a piece of shit after all.”

  Chanel smiled. “I’ve been trying to tell you that for years.”

  Two hours later, they arrived at her apartment complex and Deon pulled into the parking lot.

  “Thank you for the ride,” Chanel said, unbuckling her seat belt. “This beats Greyhound any day!”

  He climbed out of the car and grabbed her duffel bag from the backseat. He walked around to the passenger side where she stood and set the bag down. He opened his arms for a hug.

  “Good seeing you again, Nelly.”

  He hugged her tightly.

  She looked up at him, sadly. “I guess this is the last time I’ll see you,” she said.

  He nodded. “Guess so.”

  They stared at each other, still embracing. Then he kissed her, lightly at first. She parted her lips and their tongues intertwined. Their kiss deepened and moments passed before they breathlessly pulled apart.

  “Don’t leave,” she whispered. “Stay.”

  Deon nodded. He picked up her bag and followed her inside.

  The second the door shut behind them, she gripped his face and kissed him again. There were no words, only sounds as they explored each other in her darkened apartment. The intensity of Deon’s touch told her that he had wanted her for years. The passion in her kisses showed his desire for her was mutual. Stripped down to nothing, she led him to her bedroom. Their lovemaking was loud, raw, and uninhibited. They came undone together, each of them seeking to heal wounds deep inside themselves that only they knew existed.

  They went at it all through the night. As the sun began peeking its head up, Deon lay across Chanel’s queen-sized bed trying to make sense of it. In the light of day, the taboo things that happened between them felt exposed. He watched her sleeping and told himself that it was only physical, it would only be a onetime thing.

  But the moment her eyes fluttered open and she smiled at him, he knew he had been lying to himself. Chanel was, and had always been, special to him. There was no way he could pretend that what happened the night before hadn’t been significant.

  “Hey,” she said, propping herself up on one elbow.

  “Hey,” he said back. He pinched her nose, playfully.

  “I was scared you would be gone when I woke up.”

  “I thought about it,” he said, honestly. “That would be the easiest thing to do.”

  Chanel knew it was true. “We would have never seen each other again. Like you said. Nothing left for you in Staten Island anymore.”

  He nodded.

  “So, why’d you stay?” she asked.

  He wasn’t sure what the answer was.

  “’Cause you’re cute when you sleep,” he said. “I was enjoying watching you so much that I forgot to sneak out.”

  She laughed. “Makes sense.”

  Chanel stretched her body and laid back flatly, staring up at the ceiling.

  “For real,” she said after a minute. “What was this?” She gestured at the crumpled sheets and their clothes flung all over the room.

  Deon had been trying to figure that out since he woke up. Chanel watched him fumbling for words. She sat up and faced him.

  “Be honest. I can take it.”

  “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I know Judah wouldn’t approve.”

  Chanel wasn’t sure she agreed. “Judah forgot all about me.”

  Deon sighed. “It’s different for men. Women wear their hearts on their sleeves. Men are better at hiding what we’re feeling. Even though a lot of years passed, in his heart I’m sure he still considers you his girl.”

  Chanel shook her head. “Well, let’s get that straight,” she stated. “I don’t belong to him or to you. I belong to me.”

  Deon felt like he had been put in his place.

  “I learned that the hard way when Judah left, then you left, and all I had was myself.” She knew where Deon was coming from, but she wanted him to view it from her perspective.

  “Growing up, the three of us were so close. You and Judah were my best friends. We played ball together, liked the same music and TV shows, and hung out together all the time. I was closer to you in a way because we’re the same age, went to the same school, and a lot of times we had the same classes. I was close to Judah, too, because he was so smart and he had a way of making me think outside the box. He read a million books and he would get so excited to talk to me about them. When we got to junior high school, I had a crush on you.”

  Deon grinned. “You did? You never told me that.”

  “Because you started acting up. Your mother had passed and you were in trouble all the time. Everybody was saying that you had a bad attitude and you were headed down the wrong path. But I knew the real you. Even when we got to high school and you would say stupid shit in class to get kicked out or get in fights and get suspended. I could tell that you were just playing a part. You were acting like an idiot. But you were never really dumb. You needed attention. Maybe you needed a hug. But you didn’t need to be locked up.”

  Deon thought about high school and the times Chanel tried to talk some sense into him.

  “When you came to my house that day and gave me that picture of you and your mother, I wanted to cry. No guy had ever given me something so special and so sweet before. I loved you from that day.”

  Deon recalled the butterflies he had felt in his stomach as he knocked on Chanel’s apartment door that day. He had been crazy about her then. In fact, that hadn’t changed.

  “So, why didn’t you say something?” he asked.

  “I was fourteen! I was shy, didn’t know how to say it. Plus, I wanted to see if you were gonna change. You were getting high all the time, getting in trouble. As much as I liked you, that’s not the kind of guy I wanted as my boyfriend. You know me. I wanted to go to school dances and pep rallies, go to the movies and to the mall. You were more interested in posting up in the stairwell and smoking weed.”

  Deon laughed. “That’s true.”

  “Then you got sent back to juvie. Judah took it really hard and so did I. We bonded over that. We talked about you all the time, and how frustrated he was that you wouldn’t act right. He talked to me about his desire to be a good son, to get out of the hood, and to be great. I talked to him about things I never shared with anybody. Like how I felt about my brother going back and forth to jail, and how I wanted my mother to pay as much attention to me for doing the right thing as she paid him for doing wrong. Me and Judah were dreamers together. We had a game where we would add things we wanted in life to a list we kept in our heads. He would come up to me in the hallway at school and go, ‘Surfing in Hawaii!’ and he’d rush off. I would see him in the lunchroom, and I would go over and say, ‘Eating croissants in Paris.’ And nobody else knew what we were talking about. It was our little language that only we understood.”

  She smiled at the memory. She closed her eyes and the tears came then. She looked at Deon.

  “I did love him. I thought we would get married one day and have kids and live the life of our dreams. But he went to prison, and he shut me out of his life. I wanted to wait for him. I would have waited. But he pushed me away. That was the loneliest time of my life. Judah was gone. Then you were gone. Nothing was the same anymore. I went to prom with my friends and it sucked because all I could do all night was think about Judah and what our plans had been. At graduation, I wanted you to be there so we could drink a forty-ounce like we joked about since freshman year.”

  Deon smiled and wiped away Chanel’s tears. He remembered joking with her about smuggling in forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor underneath their graduation gowns. He pulled her close to him.

  “Since I came to Delaware, I’ve started fresh. Made new friends, established a new routine, and moved on. Then Miss Mercy died. My mom called me crying hysterically. I rushed home and there you were. All grown up and living the life I always knew you were capable of. And I saw Judah. And he looked right through me. I finally gave up hope that he would be the guy I loved once. That guy is gone. And that’s not Judah’s fault. But it’s still true. I don’t meet too many guys who spark a fire inside of me. The ones I’ve dated are not from where I’m from. They haven’t seen what I’ve seen. But these past few days with you I’ve felt understood. And it confirmed the fact that I understand you, too. I always have. I was right when we were younger and I suspected that you weren’t really a coldhearted asshole. I knew that you were just acting out your pain. I believed that you could be a good man if you chose to be. And seeing you now is proof that I was right. When I heard you say that you were leaving Staten Island and I realized I might never see you again, it scared me. I wasn’t ready to see you go. I’m still not. So, for me this…” Chanel gestured again at the disheveled bed. “Is a sign that maybe you and I could start over.”

  Deon sighed. She had given him a lot to digest. The light in the room brightened slightly as the sun rose higher in the sky. He looked at her.

  “You asked me earlier why I was still here when you woke up. The reason is everything you just said. When I’m with you, I feel understood. You always made me feel like that. Like you could see right through me. When I left New York and started trucking, one of the things I liked about it was I could be whoever I wanted to be when I was on the road. I’ve made up so many stories about where I’m from and who I am. It felt good to be somebody else for a while, knowing that I would never see these people again and they would take whatever I was saying at face value. Nobody knew the real me and I could forget all the ways I fucked up for a while. But seeing you and talking to you this week, I felt more like myself than I have in years. Talking to you about the old days … it’s the first time I’ve allowed myself to talk about it in years. Because I would get emotional and start regretting the shit I did. And there’s no way for me to go back and fix it now. So, I’d rather just forget it.”

  He looked at her, his expression at once sad and full of love.

  “But I can’t forget you. And I don’t want to.”

  Deon stayed with her for three days before he reluctantly got in his truck and headed up I-95 to Philadelphia. He thought about the events of those three days as he drove home. He and Chanel had tucked themselves away in the sanctity and solitude of her apartment. Their time together had been sweet, soul-stirring, and passionate. They talked for hours about their childhood, reminiscing on shared experiences and reveling in their commonality. She cooked for him, fed him with her fork, her fingers, and with her body. He devoured every inch of her and she returned the favor. Their heated lovemaking was only matched by their intense conversations. Deon spoke to her about things he had never shared with anyone. Like how the loss of his mother, his cousin, and now his aunt made him feel more alone in the world than ever.

  They were careful in those conversations not to mention Judah directly. They spoke of their childhood, of Deon’s family and their shared history in broad terms. They tiptoed around the elephant in the room until the day he left. Chanel had come up to him in the bathroom that morning and wrapped her arms around his waist while he was brushing his teeth. She looked at his reflection in the mirror and spoke to it.

  “I know you want to run from this because it’s the easy thing to do,” she said. “Maybe it’s even the right thing to do. Run from this so Judah won’t be upset. But I don’t want you to run, Deon. Don’t disappear on me. This is the first time I’ve felt like this. I don’t want to lose you.”

  He had kissed her and promised that he wouldn’t run. Now, as his foot mashed the gas pedal in his truck, he wondered if that was a promise that he could keep. There was no doubt that he cared about her. They understood each other deeply and she was one of the few people able to see through his façade. Since they were kids, she had always challenged him in ways no one else dared to. She knew he was smart even when he played dumb. Chanel had always brought the best out of him. She made him want to be a better person.

  But he knew that there was no way Judah would ever understand this. No matter how much time had passed, Judah wouldn’t accept that Deon had fallen in love with the girl he had left behind.

  Deon busied himself with work for a couple of days. His mind drifted back to her again and again and he found ways to distract himself. He wrote a letter to Judah telling him about returning to Philadelphia and putting Mercy’s belongings in storage. He left out the part about the three-day layover in Delaware with Chanel. He pushed thoughts of her to the back of his mind and kept moving. Then she called him and he lost all willpower.

  “I miss you,” she said. “Come hold me.”

  He was back in her arms hours later.

  They established a rhythm. When Deon wasn’t on the road for work, he was at her place. When school let out at the end of May, she began traveling to Philadelphia by train on the weekends. Deon picked her up at the station and they spent days together holed up in his apartment. For both of them, it was their first real adult relationship. Without giving voice to it, they fell in love.

  Chanel changed that as they lay together in bed one summer night.

  “What would your mother think about us?”

  Deon smiled. “She would love you,” he said. Chanel reminded him of his mother in some ways. Her free-spiritedness and determination to go after what she wanted at all costs. Lenox would approve, he imagined.

  “Do you love me?” Chanel had asked it so sweetly.

  Deon was silent.

  “I love you,” she said. “You don’t have to say it back. I just want you to know that’s how I feel.”

  She touched his face, tracing the line of his sideburns and goatee gently.

  He had stared at her for a moment before climbing on top of her and smothering her with kisses.

  “I love you, too,” he admitted. “Now, what are we gonna do about it?”

  She didn’t answer him. They made love instead. Now eighteen months had passed and they still didn’t have an answer to that question.

  Deon felt like a traitor. He was living a double life, having a full-blown relationship with Chanel while keeping Judah in the dark about it.

  Chanel was keeping their relationship a secret as well. Her mother and brother knew that she was seeing someone and that it was serious. She spoke of him only in the broadest terms, wouldn’t give them a name. But at her graduation in May of 1999, Deon arrived with a big bouquet of flowers. Barbara was surprised at first, then appalled when Chanel greeted him with a kiss on the lips that made it clear that they were far more than friends. Deon sat with Barbara and her son, Dallas, during the graduation ceremony. It was awkward and confusing for her. She was preoccupied the whole time trying to come to grips with the thought of Deon and Chanel together. She pulled her daughter aside the second they found her in the crowd after the ceremony had concluded.

  “The guy you’ve been seeing all this time is DEON?” Barbara hissed. She stared at her daughter in disgust. “Mercy must be turning over in her grave!”

  “Ma! You’re making a scene.” Chanel looked around, embarrassed.

  “Are you that selfish, Chanel? Don’t you think Judah has been through enough already? You want him to find out that his cousin betrayed him, too?” she asked.

  “Me and Judah were kids when he went away. You read the letter he wrote to me and saw the ones I wrote to him that came back marked return to sender. Why are you acting like we’re stabbing him in his back?”

  “’Cause that’s exactly what you’re doing. And I’m not gonna fake like I think it’s okay.”

  Barbara was true to her word. She didn’t address Deon directly for the rest of the day. He felt the change in her energy around him and kept his distance. He tried to shrug it off, but it got under his skin. Barbara was treating him like some new guy she was meeting for the first time rather than a young man she had practically watched grow up.

  It began to wear on Deon’s conscience more than ever. He thought back to the question Chanel had asked him when they professed their love for each other. What would his mother think of all this? Suddenly, he wasn’t so sure.

 

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