Dempsey’s arm and pulled him around to the alley just in back of Mama’s shop.
“I got these for you, Sookie. To make you feel better.”
“Don’t tell me why you got them. Lord, Dempsey, I know why you did.” It couldn’t be helped. The roses really had the fullest blooms and their scent, thick and sweet, blocked out the nasty smell of garbage and trashed liquor bottles that littered the ground next to us. I took the flowers, despite my fussing, and held them in front of my face, smelling that sweet perfume. “You should have waited.”
“No time like now.” He stepped closer, resting his palm on the brick wall at my back and I wondered if he’d dare to kiss me, right here, where anyone could look into the alley to find us standing close, our mouths just inches apart.
No. That wouldn’t do.
It was only him reaching forward, the space between us getting smaller and smaller that made the fog that had come with the smell of those roses lift from my head. Dempsey leaned, eyes already closed and I pushed him back with the flowers against his chest.
“Oh no you don’t, Dempsey.” He moved again, taking the flowers out of my hand to stand right in front of me and I shook my head. “No indeed. You stop right there.”
“Why would you want me to do that?” I hated that smile, just a little bit. I hated it because before it had loosened my strength that night in the fishing shack. It had me forgetting that I had no business kissing boys like Dempsey. By the end of that night, my lips were swollen and beat with a throb from all the kissing. That smile told me enough that Dempsey wanted to make my lips throbbing and swollen again.
“Come on now… just a little kiss. I did bring you flowers.”
“Uh huh, from your mama’s garden. You had to steal them. She wouldn’t give the Wise Men a single flower for Jesus’s birth, much less her son. Especially when he wants to give them to a no-account colored girl like me.” He really didn’t think sometimes and it had me fuming. God knows the trouble he’d be in now. “She’s gonna whip you good.”
“Ah, sweet Sookie, it’s worth the beating… or it would be if you’d kiss me.” He was taller than me by about three inches and it was that long stretch of shadow that distracted me, that and the thick scent of his hair, the clean smell from his soap that came off his skin as he moved closer. Dempsey got his kiss, a slow, wet one before my good sense returned and I pushed on his chest again.
“That’s enough. Go on, get out of here before your daddy’s people see us together.”
“I ain’t worried so much about that.” He moved closer but stopped short when I shot him an ugly frown. Dempsey leaned on the wall next to me pulling one of the flowers from the bunch in my hand. “He don’t much care for Joe Andres and so when the fool told my daddy that you’d attacked him…” He went quiet when I let out of muffled noise between my breaths, but waved off my worried frown. “Daddy had to drag it out of him. Damn idiot didn’t want to go around telling people some girl got him good.”
“How is it they haven’t come looking for me?” My throat felt tight and I worried something fierce that Dempsey might have sassed his daddy just to keep the man from nosing after me. But looking at him quick, there wasn’t nothing that told me he’d been beaten. The same sweet, wide smile met me just then. The same thick top lip twitched a little when he smiled. The same gray-blue eyes shined, lit with something like laughter as he looked down at me.
“Because, Sook…” There was a giggle between his breath that made me loosen some of my worry as Dempsey’s smile grew wide. “For once in my miserable life, my daddy believed me when I told him you weren’t to blame.”
“Wha… how is that possible?”
“Like I said, he don’t much care for Joe. He was likely to believe me when I said that fool was too drunk to remember passing out in the north field. My daddy believed me when I fibbed a little and said I’d seen him falling over the half-cut stump of that oak that got struck by lightning last summer.”