“Yeah,” said Damon.
“That’s cool,” said David. He drummed the fingers of his free hand on the steering wheel. “You being careful?”
“What?” asked Damon.
“I said,” said David. “You throwing the raincoat on?”
Damon laughed.
“It’s not even like that,” he said.
“You aren’t having sex?” David asked baldly.
“Not that it’s any of your business,” said Damon. “But no, I am not having sex with Brielle.
“Why not?”
Damon sighed.
“Did dad put you up to this?”
“No,” said David.
“Then why so interested?”
“I remember that other girl,” said David. “Couldn’t leave her alone, but you wouldn’t cross the street to be with her, let alone burn gas money and go to Ypsi to see her swim. I figure she has to be giving up some sweet honey for you to go to all this trouble.”
Damon was furious. If his brother hadn’t been doing about eighty miles an hour he’d have punched him in the head. Instead he said through clenched teeth, “Brielle is nothing like Sasha. If you can’t be respectful, shut up.”
“You wanna jump bad?” asked David, incredulous.
“Keep talking,” said Damon, “You’ll find out.”
David looked at him with new respect.
“Little brother is growing up,” he said and then ruined it by bursting into laughter and singing in falsetto, “Damon’s got a Love Jones for Brielle,” for the next fifteen miles.
Damon made a rude hand gesture and shut his eyes to try to block out his brother’s antics. Inside he was smiling. He had a Love Jones for Brielle and he was proud of it. Brielle loved him back. Love Jones, yep.
December
Sasha
Sasha woke up badly. It had been long past midnight before she could get to sleep and now that it was morning, she was groggy and sluggish. She checked her phone in the hope that Damon had texted or called in the last months. There was nothing and the phone sat in her hand, back lighting her despair with its silence. She was supposed to be finishing up her first term of college. Instead, she gingerly rolled over onto her right side. She couldn’t lie on the left, anymore. The baby was riding someplace on the left and kicked her in the ribs something fierce if she wasn’t positioned just so.
I feel like my body is a battlefield. Fought over, coveted and pillaged, it has become the enemy. It has been invaded by an alien life force and it no longer belongs to me. Somehow, my body has never belonged to me.
She lay there, not thinking so much as taking stock. This is all there was for her. All the plans she’d made for herself were like dust, blown away in the windstorm of lust. She was stuck.
Sasha could feel the anger that had been steadily growing in her over the months since Damon had told her that he didn’t want her and didn’t want to be with her. The anger changed to a surging bitterness every time she thought about the fact that Damon was just going to be her baby daddy and nothing else.
Sasha still could not believe that Damon would be so cold. Hadn’t she been nice to that boy? Usually, men and boys came after her, drooling and panting like the dogs they were. Hadn’t she loved Damon like she had loved nobody else? She had given him everything she could and he took it. Just like that. She should get something back for that.
First Craig, the stupid liar, who made her feel like he wanted her so bad and then treated her like crap. She’d shown him. Sasha was beautiful and could be with anybody she wanted to be. All the boys said so. Liars.
Damon turned out to be another liar. Sasha was stuck with a permanent souvenir of lying boys. They just took what she offered and moved on.
Last night, she’d stayed up watching the movie “Color Purple”. The movie suited her mood down to the ground. She cried at the beginning when Ceilie gave up her baby.
When somebody, she thought it was Sophia, said that a girl child ain’t safe in a house full of men, Sasha wanted to yell at the TV and tell her that a girl child ain’t safe in nobody’s house, Sasha cried again.
Sasha rolled up to her side and looked blearily into the mirror situated on the dresser.
“You are so pretty,” she said to her bloated image. Hadn’t she heard that line drip off of lips of every shape and hue? Even Damon had told her that she was beautiful. “Being pretty should count for something.”
Tears filled her eyes and then she snorted them back, because they were useless. She ruminated on the message in the movie. If a girl’s pretty, then she’s enticing, and flaunting. If she’s not then she got to take what comes to her without a fight for herself, because she ought to be grateful somebody is paying attention to her. In Sasha’s opinion, the world was bass ackwards, like her daddy used to say. Lock up all the boys, then the girls don’t need protection.
Sasha’s unpredictable bladder kicked in and she stumbled to the bathroom, just barely able to pull down her pants and squat. She almost missed the toilet, she was so unwieldy. She sighed in relief and just sat there for a few minutes, counting the peach colored tiles on the walls. Her mother wasn’t home. The house was blessedly, empty. Sasha finished, washed her hands and went back into her room. She picked up her cell phone. Time for a change.
Damon
Damon answered the house phone only because he was passing by the kitchen and it was two feet from his hand. He was thinking about Brielle and smiling a little. He was so proud of her team, winning the state champs in the freestyle relay. He had taken her out to dinner and a movie to celebrate the next day, and then gone to the celebratory pep rally with her. Damon was trying to decide what he was going to buy Brielle
