CHAPTER FOUR

She heard him come into the bathroom, and she could hear him taking off his clothes, but when he entered the shower as if he had every right to barge in on her like that, she felt some kind of way about it that she couldn’t put her finger on, but the feeling was there. And when he moved up to her and began rubbing his big, thick rod against her and kissing her, she’d had it. She pushed him away from her. “Where were you all night, Teddy?” she asked him.

“Where do you think?” Teddy tried to get back up against her.

“Just answer the question. You didn’t come home at all last night. Where were you?”

“I was working, Nikki. Where do you think I was?”

“What work you had to do all night? Nothing major like that came across my desk.”

“But it came across my desk!” Teddy was offended. “Last I heard I was the boss of Pop’s syndicate. You were the under boss. Since when did you get in the driver’s seat?”

“What work, Teddy, that would have you out all night?” Nikki refused to be sidetracked.

Teddy leaned his head back and then he looked at her beautiful brown face. “I had to check out a rumor that had me running all over town. But I ended up with blanks.”

“What rumor?”

“A sighting.”

“Of whom?”

“One of Pop’s archenemies. Who else?”

He began massaging her between her legs and kissing her breasts. Because she needed it, she allowed it.

“You could have phoned me, Teddy.”

“Yes, I could have.” He was kissing her neck.

“But you didn’t.”

Teddy didn’t respond to that. And Nikki decided to go there. “Is it because of my size?”

Teddy looked at her with a where did that come from look on his face. “What? What does your size have to do with anything?”

Nikki exhaled. “I had to fire one of the dock supervisors.”

“Which one?”

“Kirksten. And the whole time he was packing up to leave he was going on and on about my weight. He said I was gonna get turned out next because he knows for a fact that you don’t like big women. That you prefer skinny broads. That’s how he put it. That there was no way Teddy T was going to stay with a fat ass like me. That’s how he said it.”

Teddy’s heart dropped. He placed his hands on her arms. “That’s bullshit. You know that right?”

Nikki wasn’t ready to dismiss it so easily. “Every time I have to make a tough decision, they come at me that way. I used to think the fact that I’m a woman, and a non-Italian black woman at that, would be the issue around all those Italian alpha males in the syndicate who are only used to Italian alpha males as their leaders. But it’s all about my size. They always go for my size.”

“That’s because those assholes don’t know no better. They think thin will always be in and thick women needn’t apply. They wouldn’t know how to handle a woman that looks like a woman and not some flat-chested boy if their life depended on it. There’s always those kind everywhere. But I know for a fact they’re in the minority. The guys respect you, Nikki. Don’t you ever forget that.” Then he pulled her into his arms.

But it felt dismissive to Nikki. Like he heard her, and wanted to reassure her, but he didn’t want to know why she was feeling so out of sorts. So not like herself.

And then he went there. “Turn it to me,” he said.

Nikki knew what he meant. And although she sometimes felt self-conscious about her full-figured body, especially after going toe to toe with Kirksten, Teddy seemed to love it so much that she always overcame that fear. She didn’t hesitate turning her back to his front.

And when he entered her with that thickness she loved, and he sighed as those feelings overtook him, she felt it to the roots of her hair too. And it was on. They were in rhythm almost immediately. It was going to be a good one, she could tell. She needed a good one.

But she also couldn’t help but remember what Roz, Teddy’s stepmother, had warned her about. “When you stop asking real questions,” she warned her when she first hooked up with Teddy, “the Sinatra men will stop giving real answers.”

She knew, as she began sighing too with every stroke Teddy put down on her, that she stopped asking real questions long ago. And all those real questions she still had yet to ask were beginning to catch up with her. All those real answers she had yet to get were beginning to trouble her far beyond any reasonable curiosity.

All that could be heard was the sound of the shower water running and Teddy slapping against her ass as he did her. And she felt ashamed of herself that all he had to do was enter her and do her the way only he could, and all was forgiven. She had become the very person she said she’d never be. She was that girl.

She loved the way he did her. There was no denying the unbridled joy he elicited from her just from the way he laid it down on her. But there were tears too. A lot deeper down. Like an ocean of water with a drowning inside of it, slowly rising to the surface.