AllFreeNovel
Share Us
8
Mama and Nicky weren’t home when I made it there, and I climbed the stairs to my room and fell right into bed. Exhausted and full from the goodness Lorenzo prepared for me, I was asleep within seconds of my head hitting the pillow.
I woke up hours later to a dark, quiet house, headed downstairs to find something to eat, and quickly realized that both Nicky and Mama were still gone. I sighed and headed to the refrigerator in hopes that at some point during the day, Mama had cooked. No such luck. So I ended up digging one of Nicky’s frozen pizzas out of the freezer and sticking it in the oven.
I headed into the living room, turned on the TV, and sat there flipping through the channels for a minute or two before my mind shifted to Lorenzo’s book for some reason. I’d left it in my car and didn’t really want to walk outside to get it, but I did want to get it. So, barefoot and in my most comfortable, but unattractive, pair of sweats and a t-shirt, I tipped out to my car and retrieved Bulletproof.
As I waited for the last five minutes to tick off the pizza’s timer, I opened the thick book and read what he’d scrawled on the cover page:
For Doc. -Zo
Then I flipped to the prologue and read the opening lines:
There’s a rhythm to every street, every hood. It is similar to a movie’s soundtrack, or the opening strains of a symphony. The rhythm and the melody set the mood for the day, week, or month ahead, often warning the habitants, both unimpeachable and unscrupulous, of what’s to come. On the morning that Monty “Money” Quarles first killed a man, the streets were playing a lullaby, an innocent refrain paced at an easy, languid tempo. The streets failed to warn Money of what was to come that day, that before the sun set, the fifteen-year-old’s innocence, the essence of which was cocooned in that lullaby, would splinter, shatter, and leave in its wake an uncontained, all-consuming monster.
After reading that, my eyes were glued to that book to the point that I almost burned my pizza. I read at the kitchen table, in the living room, and in bed, riveted by the gritty tale of a young man seeking revenge for the murder of his drug-addicted mother, who becomes a heartless killer, and eventually, a sadistic drug kingpin.
Lorenzo could write his ass off. The evidence of which was me reading the book in its entirety that night, finally flipping to the last page around two the next morning as if I didn’t have to be at work in a few hours. I read the last sentence and shook my head, thinking to myself, wow. That was probably one of the best books I’d read…ever. His style of writing was addictive, too, because I found myself hoping his bibliography would be somewhere on the final pages of the book. Instead, wedged between a page of acknowledgements and a picture of the handsome author, was a check made out to the Genesis Scholarship Fund in the amount of ten thousand dollars. And on the memo line was a phone number.
*****
At work the next morning, I found it hard to concentrate and was glad I had no patients to see. It was Wednesday, and I’d planned to spend the day tying up paperwork loose ends before taking off the next day to prepare for a weekend trip to Atlanta for an annual midwifery conference I dreaded attending. Cass felt these conferences were important for us to keep up with new trends, and since she’d attended the previous year, it was my turn to be tortured.
I’d brought the book with me and sat it on my desk as a reminder to call and thank Lorenzo for his donation, but I was afraid to call him because of the feelings he evoked and the fact that he’d made it clear he was attracted to me. Plus, there were some steamy, grimy, nasty sex scenes in Bulletproof that caused me to have to change my underwear—twice. If he could create that kind of sensuality on paper, what could he do in real life?
Fuck you until you pass out.
“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” I actually said out loud. I was losing it, sitting there having a conversation with myself.
Finally, around 10:00 AM, I called the number on the check, hoping it wouldn’t send me to some office.
“Hello?”
His voice made my stomach quiver, and I took back my wish not to get an office.
“Hello?” he repeated.
I should hang up. “Hello, Mr.—Lorenzo?”
“Doc?”
I didn’t bother to correct him this time, because truthfully, it turned me on when he called me that. “Yes, um, I want to thank you for your donation. That was really generous of you.”
“You can thank me by having dinner with me tonight. My place, seven, I’ll cook.”
I held the phone.
“It’s just dinner, a friendly dinner.”
“What about all that stuff you said yesterday?”
“About the things I want to do to you? Oh, that still stands, but if you recall the rest of my statement, I said that’ll have to wait until you’re a free woman. Are you a free woman?”
“No, not yet.”
“Hmm, then unfortunately, just dinner. Should I send Rell for you? What’s your address?”
“I’m not giving you my address, and I haven’t accepted your invitation.”
