Page 37 of Score
I give a two-finger salute and steer Verity out to the street.
“What was that about?” Verity asks. “Remember she said what?”
“Nothing.” I tilt her face up so I can see her eyes under the streetlight. “You know how Petra is.”
“That I do. Missed you today.”
“Missed you, too.” I take her butt in both hands and squeeze. “Thought about this ass all day.”
“Monk,” she hisses, but grins and looks around self-consciously.
“How you gon’ be okay with a threesome,” I lower my voice, “but so concerned about me grabbing your ass in public?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugs and smiles up at me. “I just like to keep my shit behind closed doors. Nobody’s business.”
“Did you eat?” I ask her. “You haven’t been eating or sleeping enough lately.”
“I had a little something. Can we just go to your place?” She presses her hand over my heart, the touch warm through my shirt. “The only thing I’m hungry for is you.”
I tangle my fingers in the curls at her nape and kiss her as deeply as I dare on the sidewalk, given her aversion to PDA.
“Then I think,” I say between kisses, “we should get you fed.”
In the middle of the night, I wake to an empty bed and run my arm in the space where Verity should be. Groggily, I reach for my phone on the nightstand.
“Three o’clock?” I groan, put the phone down, and throw the covers back. My clothes are on the floor where I dropped them. We shed those as soon as we hit my room and were practically making love before we reached the bed. Four months and so far not once have I been bored or tired, or able to get enough of Verity. Not sure I ever will.
“Yo, Vee?” I call, grabbing a pair of sweatpants from the floor, not bothering with briefs. “You out there, babe?”
She stays at my place more than she does her dorm and typically doesn’t leave until she has class in the morning. The rustle of papers from the front room offers some reassurance.
“Baby, what the hell you doing?” I ask, rubbing my eyes and leaning against the bedroom doorjamb.
Verity glances up from her spot on my living room floor, surrounded by sheets of paper.
“Something finally clicked with this script for my project.” She sits back on her heels, her eyes darting across the pages laid out like some kind of disassembled treasure map. “I think I figured out how to approach it. I was starting in the wrong place of the story. That’s why I was having a hard time.”
“Mmmm.” I walk forward and glance down at the papers fanning out around her, a mix of handwritten snippets of scenes and dialogue. A grocery store receipt is wedged between the pages of Nikki Giovanni’sThe Women and the Men.
I pick up the book and flip to the page Verity marked, Giovanni’s “Kidnap Poem.” “You incorporating this into your screenplay?”
“Maybe.” Verity shifts some of the pages on the floor, and I catch sight of a few cards with illustrations.
“I didn’t know you could draw,” I say, grabbing one of the cards. “You’re pretty good.”
“I’m aight in a pinch.” She takes the card back with a smile and places it into a neat stack. “My father was the artist in our family.”
She so rarely speaks of her parents, I want to probe, but every time I’ve tried, she shut down or changed the subject.
“You have any of his art?” I risk asking.
“Not much. He sketched some stuff in a notebook that was at my aunt’s house. That was one of the few things we didn’t lose in the fire.”
“Wow.” I sit on the floor cross-legged beside her. “That’s intense. I can’t imagine losing everything. I’m so sorry, babe.”
She nods, eyes sober, and grabs my hands. “If your place caught fire and you could only save one thing, what would it be?”
I stare at her blankly for a few seconds, unsure of how to respond.
