Fear of the Dark

“Yeah?”

“You know your friend Jessa had another boyfriend before you,” the skinny young man said.

“Uh-huh.”

“This big mean guy called Tiny.”

Greg had my attention then.

“What about Tiny?” I asked.

“He’s been comin’ around on days that you’re not here.

And last night he asked me what the name was of the guy paying her rent.”

Gregory had a pale, crooked face, with permanently blood-shot eyes, but he looked to me like a savior right then.

“Thanks, man.”

I hadn’t gone back to the rooming house for a week. That meant it was time for the rent to be paid and so Jessa would be looking for me. My phone had been off the hook for three days. I’d taken sixty-five dollars from my savings account to give to Jessa if she came by, but I intended to tell her that she needed to leave me alone.

So, Three Hearts notwithstanding, I had to turn Useless away. Because if he was there when Jessa was, I would most certainly come to grief. Useless was like monosodium glutamate for problems; he brought out the evil essence and magnified it.

I h a d j u s t f i n i s h e d rehearsing my speech to Jessa for the thirteenth time when her gentle knock came on my door.

I pulled the drape back to be sure she was alone, took a deep breath, and then opened up.

13

Walter Mosley

She was wearing a tan dress that hugged her slim figure and somehow wrapped around her calves.

“Hi,” she said, letting her head loll to the side.

“Hey.”

“Can I come in?”

No died on my lips as I backed away from the door. She swayed twice and crossed the threshold. She pushed the door closed, and I shivered.

Jessa Brown reached out as if she was about hold my hand, but instead she unzipped my pants and reached down into my shorts with quick and deft fingers.

“That’s what I need,” she said, looking into my eyes. “You know a girl can’t give up a treasure like that.”

I took half a breath and held it.

I am what the genteel folks call well-endowed. Some women like that. It gives them a de facto sense of power, I believe.

I’m small and weak and scared of my own shadow, and so my sexual prowess is one of the only things I have to be proud of in a masculine way. So when a woman looks me in the eye like that and tells me she needs me, I can’t say no.

“Let’s go upstairs,” I said.

“No.”

“Huh?”

“Let’s do it right here on the floor, with your pants down around your ankles and me riding that monster.”

14

Th e r e w e w e r e , lying on the wood floor, naked where it counted. Jessa’s feathery touch was 3 keeping me excited, and her kisses on my shoulder and cheek delivered me from fear.

I would be thirty years old later that year, but in my heart I was still a kid. When a woman laid her hands on me, there was nothing I could do. That’s why I hadn’t as of yet entertained the idea of marriage. My auntie Three Hearts had always told me, “A man shouldn’t say I do until he can say I don’t.”

I was a long way from no in the presence of a woman like Jessa.

She was a good seven years younger than me, not pretty but fetching. White women were another taboo that I liked breaking now and again. But there were other qualities about that girl.

The first thing was that she didn’t feel compelled to talk and didn’t mind listening. She liked masculine company and so never complained about toilet seats, dirty dishes, or the errant eructation. And when she did talk, she knew how to speak to a man.

“How come you haven’t been by to see me, lover?” she said with her head on my chest and her left thigh over both of mine.

15

Walter Mosley

“Tiny.”

“Him? Why you worried about him?”

“Because he’s big and the jealous type.”

“Big? He’s not even half of you.”