Damon
Damon watched her closely, taking in the long back settling into slim hips, swaying just a little provocatively, tapering to long, long, never ending, slender muscled thighs and calves and slim dainty feet. Brielle would have laughed her head off if she’d known that Damon thought that her size eleven feet were dainty, but he wore size fourteens so almost everyone’s feet were smaller than his.
Damon watched Brielle walk away and felt a tightness in his whole being. The girl had a body. She was tall but not Amazonian like some tall girls. Until recently, he was attracted to thick girls like Sasha, but there was nothing thick on Brielle except for her hair. He took a deep breath and walked out of the lap pool area, feeling a lot lighter. He was glad that she’d accepted his apology. He didn’t know why he hadn’t noticed before just how fine Brielle was. And she was nice. A really nice girl. Jada said that Brielle was someone you could count on. A ride or die friend was how she put it. Not a sister. But not a sexer, either. Something new.
He left the pool area, turned a corner in the hall and nearly bumped into Kyzie Bronson.
“Watch it,” she said. She stepped away from him as though he had some bad body odor, her face scrunched up with distaste.
“What’s up with you?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, eyeing him up and down. Kyzie was one of the many young girls who made Damon nervous, if for a different reason than most. She had never liked him and watched him with narrowed eyes whenever they came into contact.
“You got some kind of beef with me?” he asked. “At least something new?”
He’d hit her in the face during a water balloon fight some years back. Forget the fact that his sister and her friends had ganged up on him during the fight. He also probably shouldn’t have dropped the beetle on her head while she was cleaning the water off of her face and hair. He could still hear her panicked screams. She had never forgiven him even though he’d apologized and gotten a smack upside his head from his father for harassing girls. Apparently, she could hold a grudge for her whole life.
“No,” said Kyzie. “As long as you treat my sister nicely, we’re as cool as we’ve ever been.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Damon.
“I see you watching her,” said Kyzie. “If you dog her, you are going to have some problems with me.”
“Are you threatening me?” he asked, voice strangled with incredulous amusement. He was twice her size, after all.
“You take it how you want to,” said Kyzie. “I don’t trust you. I heard what you did to that Sasha girl last year.”
“You know you’re a little evil child, right?” he asked.
“And don’t forget it,” said Kyzie, giving him one last malevolent glare. She turned and left Damon standing in the hallway, feeling chilled.
Later in the waning light of day, he was shooting hoops with his brother David. Kyzie’s warning had left him edgy and restless. He liked Brielle, a lot more than he’d ever liked Sasha and he didn’t want to do anything to mess things up. Sasha had made him feel that he was the man because an older woman was coming on to him. Damon shuddered at the memory of how enmeshed he’d been in Sasha without knowing her at all. He hadn’t realized how needy she was, how starved she was going to act. How could he have been so stupid?
David dance around him and dunked the ball, unchallenged. The street lights clicked on.
“Was’ sup with you, boy?” his brother asked. He threw the ball to Damon, who caught it and dribbled it lazily.
“Question for you.” He tossed the ball to his brother, who caught it and cocked his head to the side. David was twenty and he and Damon were extremely close.
“Shoot,” said David, “Since you ain’t paying attention to the game.”
Damon said, “You remember all the crap that happened with Sasha.”
“Of course,” scoffed David. “Like, dude, you got stalked and threatened. I’m supposed to forget it?”
“I don’t even know what happened?” said Damon. “Suddenly, Sasha was all up in my chocolate.”
David waited.
“I mean, at the time, I was like, dang, I’m the man,” said Damon.
“She was fine,” said David, bouncing the basketball.
“Then, she was all, do you love me, don’t you want me,” said Damon, rubbing his chest with the palm of his hand.
“And the problem with that was?”
“After the sex was over, we didn’t have much to talk about,” said Damon.
“Was she stupid or something?”
“Not that,” said Damon. “I thought she just wanted to have sex.”
“Of course you did,” said David. “Thinking with your little head instead of your big one, man. We’ve all done it. Some of us more than once. Sex will get a brother hooked up in some mess with a quickness. Makes a brother so stupid he’d sell his mother.”
He bounced the basketball and went up for a shot. Damon half-heartedly tried to block the shot but was more interested in talking to his brother
“Then why do it?” Damon had asked. He pulled down the rebound and dribbled the ball.
“You tell me,” said David, rolling his
