Grip Trilogy Box Set - Kennedy Ryan Page 0,61

an extra moment, as if he may not allow me to steer our conversation into safer territory. “You mentioned that next Wednesday at three you have a sit-down scheduled with that reporter from Legit.”

“I checked the shared calendar, and that block of time was free. Was I wrong?”

“It’s my fault.” He shoots me an apologetic look. “I forget to add personal stuff there sometimes. I’m talking to some students in my old neighborhood that day. Could we reschedule?”

Between my request to cancel tomorrow’s interview for Qwest’s would-be booty call, and nixing next Wednesday’s sit down, Meryl won’t be too happy with me.

“What if she tags along?” I sit up straighter, twisting to peer down at him. “She could see you talking to the students and then you guys could chat a few minutes maybe right there on the grounds. Get some local color shots.”

“Local color?” A husky laugh passes over his lips. “There’s four colors in Compton. Black, brown, red, and blue. In the wrong place at the wrong time, on the wrong street, any of those could get you killed. I don’t know. And I don’t want the talk exploited. Like headline shit. That isn’t why I’m doing it.”

“I know that. Of course it isn’t. I’ll make sure it isn’t like that.”

He glances up at me, wordlessly reading between lines.

“You’d be coming, too?” His voice is soft, but the look in his eyes is loud and clear. His eyes tell me he likes having me near. It makes my stomach bottom out like we’re back up on that Ferris wheel, and if I’m not careful, I’ll fall.

“Why not?” I give what I hope is a casual shrug, though it feels as stiff as my neck.

“You just haven’t been around much lately.” His eyes never leave my face, and I hope I drop my expressionless mask in place fast enough to keep him out.

“We connect every day.” I look him straight in the face like it isn’t hard to do. “So I don’t know what you mean.”

“We text, email, FaceTime, but we haven’t seen each other much.”

I rub at the knots in my neck, wishing a masseuse would magically appear.

“Are you tight?” His voice and eyes seem to simmer, both hot and steady.

The double entendre of that question is not lost on me. As little sex as I’ve had the last year . . . years, I’m probably as tight as a peephole, but he’ll never know.

“It’s just been a long few weeks.”

“I know something that could relax you.”

He bends over me, pressing me back into cushions. “Grip, what are you—”

“Relax,” he interrupts with a laugh, stretching a few inches more to unscrew a jar sitting on the concrete pedestal beside my seat. He settles back into his space, freeing up my lungs to breathe again.

“My Uncle Jamal used to say if you can’t have a good ho.” He holds up a joint. “Have good dro.”

“Have I mentioned that your uncle is a misogynist who subscribes to antiquated and archetypal notions of womanhood?”

“Yeah, more than once, but I’m pretty sure he was a pimp, so that makes sense.”

What the what?

He says it as if he just told me his uncle was a fireman. “You mean like ‘big pimpin’, Jay-Z’ kind of pimp?”

“No, like, ‘bitch, go get my money on the corner’ kind of pimp.” A frown pleats Grip’s expression. “By the time he came out west, no, but I think back in Chicago he may have been a pimp.”

I’m having trouble processing this. I’ve met Grip’s Uncle Jamal a few times, and he never struck me . . . maybe that is an unfortunate way to think of it considering he may have struck the women who worked for him . . . but he never struck me as a pimp.

“He’s actually my great-uncle,” Grip says. “My grandmother’s brother. When she left Chicago to move out here in the seventies, he followed.”

Grip shakes his head, blowing out a heavy sigh.

“The generation before him thought Chicago was the answer to Jim Crow, so they left the South. And then they thought the answer to poverty and crime was California and left Chicago,” Grip says. “Always running. Stokely Carmichael said, ‘Our grandfathers had to run, run, run. My generation’s out of breath. We ain’t running no more.’”

We have Grip’s mother to thank for all the varied people he can quote.

“So your mother moved here for better opportunities?”

“My mother moved here because her mother moved them here.” Grip considers me a few extra