This man was too good to be true! After all the sorry experiences I’d had with men, here was one telling me to my face that he was in love with me. “No! You ain’t moving too fast!” I really wanted to tell him he was not moving fast enough.
“Maybe I should stop while I’m ahead. The last thing I need to hear is that you . . . um . . . want a different type of man. I mean, a beautiful woman like you could probably get a rich businessman.”
“I don’t want no rich businessman,” I said, speaking so fast I almost bit the tip of my tongue. “All I want is a decent Christian man. And one who won’t run off when he gets restless and leave me to raise a bunch of kids by myself like so many women I know.” I closed my eyes for a couple of seconds and massaged my temples. When I opened them, Odell gave me a big smile.
“Where do you want to go from here?” he asked, squeezing my hand.
“Do the people who own the boardinghouse where you live allow you to have women in your room after dark?”
“Nope. Some of the men do it anyway. But the landlady is blind in one eye and can’t hear too good. She wouldn’t know if the house was on fire. Why?”
“We can go to your room after we leave here if you want,” I said with a sniff.
He laughed. “What I meant was, where do you want this relationship to go? But we can go to my room if you want to.”
This time I laughed. “Like I said, we can go to your room. When we get there, we can talk more about where I want this relationship to go.”
Odell squeezed my hand some more, told me how beautiful I was again, and commented on how he couldn’t believe I was still single. Mama had been telling me since I was a little girl that anything worth having was worth waiting for. I hadn’t believed her until now.
Odell was definitely worth the wait. Now I was glad no other man had asked me to marry him. But even after all he’d said, I still didn’t want to get my hopes up too high. I recalled an ex-lover who had told me he’d been looking for a woman like me all his life. He borrowed five dollars from me on our second date, and I never heard from him again. That had really hurt, and it took me a while to get over it.
When our waitress brought the check and dropped it in front of Odell, I immediately opened my purse and pulled out my wallet. “How much is my portion?”
He gasped and slapped my hand so hard I dropped my wallet. “What’s wrong with you, girl? Put that wallet back in your purse. Don’t be making me look like no fool up in here,” he scolded.
“Oh. I didn’t know you were treating me,” I muttered. “I’ve been here and to other restaurants with men and almost every time I had to pay for my meal. I didn’t think this date would be any different.” Odell tickled the palm of my hand before he squeezed it again. And then he gave me the kind of look no other man had ever given me. He gazed into my eyes for about five seconds. Then he gave me such a warm smile, I thought I was going to melt.
“You’ll never have to worry about that with me,” he told me.
Chapter 8
Odell
I DIDN’T LIKE WHAT JOYCE JUST TOLD ME. IT MADE ME MAD. I KNEW a lot of trifling men, but I didn’t know any who would take a woman to one of the most expensive restaurants in town and make her pay.
“That’s a sad thing to hear but it’s funny, too. You must be joking,” I said, giving her a pitiful look.
She shook her head. “I’m not joking. The last man I came here with claimed he’d forgot to bring his wallet. I had to pay for both our meals and the nickel tip. Then he borrowed a quarter to get some gas, and he never paid me back.”
My jaw dropped so low, I was surprised it wasn’t touching the table. “What kind of niggers have you been fooling around with, Joyce?” When I realized what I’d just said, I held up my hands and gave her the most apologetic look I could manage. One thing I didn’t like to do was use offensive words in front of a lady. Especially one that the white folks hurled at us like rocks. “Excuse my language. And don’t think for a minute that I use that word on a regular basis because I don’t. The peckerwoods use it enough, but they don’t mean the same thing we do when we say it. But I call things the way I see them. Only a nigger would take a beautiful, intelligent woman like you on a date and expect her to pay for it.”
“Oh,” she said again. For her to have such a decent education, she didn’t use a lot of big words like other educated people I knew.
“That ain’t never going to happen with me.” I squeezed her hand one more time. For such a tall woman, she had small, soft, dainty hands.
“Oh,” was all she had to say this time, too. “Excuse me while I go to the toilet.”
Joyce was in worse shape than I thought. I really had my work cut out for me. But I didn’t mind. I’d been working hard all my life, especially when it came to women. While she was gone, my mind wandered back to people and events I didn’t like to think about too often.
When I was a youngblood, I loved women so much I juggled as many as I could at the same time. That was only because I had never been able to find just
