Letting Loose

by Joanne Skerrett

Genres: African American; African American Women's Fiction; African American Romance

Synopsis

Paradise When It Sizzles. . . Boston schoolteacher Amelia Wilson has always played it safe. But after a tough breakup from her boyfriend, she's ready to have some fun and take a few risks. So when friends hook Amelia up online with Drew Anderson, she takes the plunge and visits the small Caribbean island where he lives. Soon, Drew takes Amelia on a journey of unbridled pleasure, where no rules exist and anything goes. But Amelia's about to discover that even a delicious slice of paradise can have its secrets. . . Praise for the novels of Joanne Skerrett "A powerful story with a strong and timely storyline. . .I highly recommend this one!" --Mary Monroe, author of God Don't Like Ugly on Sugar vs. Spice "An entertaining story of friendship, love, and romance." --Nina Foxx, author of Just Short of Crazy on She Who Shops Joanne Skerrett is a former newspaper journalist. She lives in Philadelphia, where she is currently working on her fourth novel.

Release date: November 18, 2009

Publisher: Dafina

Print pages: 321

Sample

“Ms. Wilson takes it from the back!”

I whirled around from the chalkboard. What the…?! I knew that voice and its owner was going down today! I’d had it with these little brats.

“Who said that?” I wanted to scream, but I’m the adult here, the professional.

The classroom of thirty ninth graders rippled with repressed giggles, but no one was going to answer my question. They looked at me, none trying to appear particularly innocent or guilty. They knew and I knew that Treyon Dicks said it. Since he came back from his third or fifty-ninth stint in juvenile detention hall, Treyon’s been cruisin’ for a bruisin’ from me. Sometimes I think I’d like to let him have it, jail sentence be damned. But listen to me; who says “cruisin’ for a bruisin’” anymore? That’s the problem right there. These kids don’t respect me. I’m just not “down” enough.

I could walk into any of my colleagues’ classes right now and there’d be a lovefest going on. They’d probably be sitting in a circle, holding hands, and reading Proust out loud. But that never happens in Ms. Wilson’s class. It’s like my kids can sniff the eau de wannabe public school teacher that I wear every day. I’m supposed to be a refugee from a posh private school who doesn’t really want to be in this vast urban educational complex. But I do. I really do. Sometimes. Yes, I miss the genius students at my old school, the two swimming pools, lacrosse games, landscaped grounds, parents who care—at least the normal ones. But I don’t miss the awful incident that brought me to this place. And I shouldn’t even think about that right now. I need to just fit in and do a good job. Shape up or ship out, like my father used to say.

The rows of chairs and desks facing me were beginning to rock with laughter. I searched their faces, trying to affect my most serious warning face. No one would speak up.

Speak to me! But I got only averted eyes and giggles because I was freaking Amelia Wilson, lover of Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Morrison, Hughes, Walker, Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen. I don’t get Donald Goines or Jay-Z. I keep misspelling Ludacris. It’s ludicrous. And I’ll never gain my students’ respect although I’ve been in this school for over a year. I’ll just keep getting dissed (do people still say that?) day in and day out. But I can fight back!

“Okay, Treyon.” I put the eraser and the chalk down on the desk. I’d give him a chance to apologize. If he gets suspended again, God only knows what kind of trouble he’ll get into. The last time he pulled something like this—he drew a picture of two people having sex, doggy style—he was kicked out of school for three days. It was three days of relative calm and serenity for me; my twenty-nine other kids come with their own myriad problems. But I did worry about Treyon. I worried that he might get into a fight because he wasn’t in school. That he might get hit by a bus. That he would come to some violent, tragic end and it would have been all my fault because I had gotten him suspended. But I just didn’t know what else to do with this kid…. I didn’t tell him, but I was quite impressed with the quality of the drawing, though.

“You can apologize or you can go to the principal’s office.” I tried to smile, mainly to mollify him. What I really wanted to do was leap across the rows of desks and chairs, grab his skinny neck, and throw him out the window.

“I ain’t apologizin’.” His head lifted in defiance. “I ain’t said nothin’.”

Okay. This was how it was going to be. I had my instructions from Mr. Bell and I would follow them. This was last period and I was not going to make the last few minutes of my day go up in a plume of angry smoke.

“Fine. Go to Mr. Bell’s office then.”

He got up from his seat, grumbling as he gathered up his heavy goose-down jacket. He’s lucky I didn’t have the burly security guy escort him out.

“Bitch!” he mumbled, slamming the door hard.

The rest of the class went silent.

I took a deep breath and went back to writing down the homework assignment on the chalkboard: Read the first four chapters of The Grapes of Wrath. I didn’t care that they thought it was too much. I didn’t care if they hated me and were plotting my death at the bus stop every day. I didn’t care. I didn’t care. All I knew was that when I was in ninth grade, my teacher would assign us the whole book, not four measly chapters.

“We go’n have a quiz or sum’n?” asked Tina, a pretty girl who was actually one of my better students but who also thought her street cred was more important than maintaining her B average.

“Maybe. Maybe not. Just be prepared.”

They groaned and rolled their eyes. “Ms. Wilson, you so mean,” one of them said.

I didn’t answer. I’d heard it all before. Then the bell rang.

There seemed to have been a blizzard since lunchtime. My little Beetle was completely submerged under what looked like a foot of snow; I couldn’t see the lime green paint. I considered the white mound and weighed it against my aching back. That same back I’d almost put out after a murderous spin class at 6:30 this morning would not hold up to all of this shoveling. I looked around the parking lot. Maybe there was some student I could pay…. But the few boys who I saw walking toward me had nothing but hate in their eyes. They must have gotten the memo: Ms. Wilson is not cool, and she is mean. I sighed.

As I started brushing the snow off the top of the car, I saw that Miguel, Mira Gutierrez’s live-in boyfriend, had driven up and was cleaning off her car. Hmmm…Well, isn’t that nice. Five minutes later, Lashelle Thompson’s scary-looking boyfriend pulled up in a huge SUV, a Ford Expedition or something equally awful, thumping some bass-heavy music (Ludacris?), and started shoveling around her car. What the heck? I’m Amelia Wilson and I’m a loser who shovels out her own car, while my colleagues have their significant others do theirs.

In a high school parking lot, full of cars belonging to students and teachers and God knows who else, I seemed to be the only woman shoveling. Could this be real? Was there some implicit genetic code, like a computer command, that I was not aware of that automatically prompts men to show up to aid women whenever there’s heavy snowfall? Or if I were one of those women who possessed such a thing as a boyfriend, would I have to call him and order him to my place of work for shoveling duty? Was that how it was done? And would I ever get to participate in this ritual? From the looks of things, it was highly unlikely. And that was especially sad for all the men out there because, according to Treyon, I would “take it ‘from the back.’” The memory of the Treyon debacle prompted me to stab my shovel into my back tire a little too forcefully. He’d gotten sent home for a week. And this time I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. As a matter of fact, I was hoping that he’d be buried in a snowbank. Well, not fatally.

I have to get rid of this snow before my back breaks, I told myself. I was panting and huffing, and that really came as a disappointment. For a whole month—it was number one of my New Year’s resolutions—I’d been going to spin class three times a week. Granted, I could only make it through a half hour of the class. But I was trying! I shouldn’t be all out of breath because I was doing a little shoveling. I was actually sweating. Then panic hit. I remembered the news stories I’d read about people who’d had heart attacks while shoveling after snowstorms. Oh my God! I’d better slow my pace!

I was so tired, but I had to keep going. I told myself: You’re taking one for the team—the big girls’ team. You’re a strong, independent, smart, single woman. You can shovel out your own darned car. You don’t need a man to do that.

But then Lashelle’s boyfriend waved at me with an apologetic smile that said, Sorry you don’t have a big, strong man like me to do this for you. Then he went back to shoveling her spot. I felt exposed, cold, wet, and depressed. But I dug my shovel in, inches to go before I sleep.

Thirty minutes later, Lashelle, Mira, and their men in waiting had all left and I was still shoveling when the tow truck rolled by.

“Hey, sis, you need some help?” It was my brother, Gerard, who rarely did anything right, except for right now. Driving a truck with a snowplow was one of the many short-term jobs he’d managed to keep for the past two years since he’d gotten out of prison.

“I’m almost done, Gerard. Where were you a half hour ago?” I held my aching side with one hand, the shovel with the other.

“I just did a couple of driveways down Melville Park.” He showed me a roll of bills. At least he wouldn’t be asking me for any money for another week. “I’ll plow around you so you can pull out this space,” he said.

I waited in the car as he cleared the snow around it. It felt nice and warm and toasty. Even the little daisy on my dashboard looked happy. My back was sore, but I would live. At least it was Friday. I’d have all of Saturday to recover. Oh, and this half hour of shoveling meant that I was off the hook tomorrow. No spin class. Yay!

My cell phone rang just as I waved good-bye to Gerard. I popped it open and my heart vaulted over some invisible inner crossbar.

“Amelia. How are you?”

It was my bête noire. My one indiscretion in life that had cost me my cushy private school job, the respect of my students, and most of my self-esteem. I would also like to blame him for my weight gain, though admittedly I’ve always had a weight problem. But maybe if I’d never met him it would have already ceased to exist….

“I’m doing just fine.”

“Can I see you?”

“No.”

He sighed heavily, like he was expecting me to say something different. We’ve been having this same conversation for the past year!

“I really hope you can…”

“I really hope you can work on your marriage and leave me alone,” I said and hung up. I held my chest. Good girl. Good answer. Now breathe easy. I am not a loser. I deserve more than he could ever give me. But I had to hear it from somebody else.

“Whitney,” I wailed to my best friend, “he called again.”

“Jeez! Amelia, why don’t you use the block on your cell?”

“I don’t know how!” This was true. I was no good with technology.

“Whatever. If you really wanted ol’ dude to stop calling, you’d find out how.”

“You never showed me!”

“I didn’t show you how to screw him either, but you managed to learn all on your own.”

“Thank you, Whitney. What are you up to?”

“It’s snowing so I’m actually working late…. That lawyer guy is coming over later.”

“What lawyer guy. Duncan?” Whitney’s dates were as interchangeable as pop stars and usually almost as pretty.

“Yeah, Big D is what I like to call him.”

Of course. Whitney had an endless supply of Big D’s in her life. “Well, have fun. I’m going home.”

“Tell your roommates I said peace and love.”

“Very funny.” I hung up. At least she’d taken my mind off bête noire briefly. Ugh. Good sex, bad times, bad memories. Not going back there.

My roommates Kelly and James were back from another of their two-week “research” vacations. I could tell that before I even pulled into my parking space in front of our apartment. Their van, which I liked to call the peacemobile because of the assault of bumper stickers launched on every available space, was out front, and they had shoveled a space for me behind it. I loved those two, even though they were strange. Not that I had the right to be calling anyone strange.

The apartment was a cluster of warmth and comfort. Yummmm…Kelly was making chili. I sniffed the air for meat. No. Kelly only made vegetarian chili, or no-guilt chili. When I make chili, there’s plenty of meat. And guilt.

“Ames? That you?” Kelly called out from the kitchen. Like all the white girls I’ve come into contact with in my 27 years, Kelly found a way to shorten my name. My college roommate at Simmons, Wilhelmina Williams (yes, her parents did do that to her), called me Amy the first day we met and so did every professor and every other person I knew on campus over those three years. Even in graduate school and in the one year I flailed around in a doctorate program, I was called Ames, Amy, and Amester. I never objected. It’s not that big of a deal. I prefer Amelia but I’m not militant about it.

Kelly and I met in the doctoral program at Boston College. I quit to go back to teaching and she stayed. I would have finished, but from what I’ve read in my extensive self-help book collection, I have a fear of success. Anyway, I love to teach. It may not show when I’m facing a roomful of angry ninth graders, but I really think it’s my calling to get kids to fall in love with great books the way I did when I was a kid….

“Come in here, see what we brought you,” Kelly said.

The smell of the chili overpowered my will to do anything but follow its scent, and my aching back was now forgotten. All I wanted was a bowl of the stuff. If I did not eat now, I would surely die. I felt like Esau at this point. I would have given up my birthright, if I’d had one, for just a taste of this chili.

I hugged Kelly. “Welcome back, girlie. Gimme a bowl of that stuff. I’m starvin’ like Marvin.” The first time I’d used that expression, James (Kelly’s husband who is also in the same doctoral program) had asked very genuinely, “Who’s Marvin?” But then he’d started saying it himself later on. It was funny that they thought I was hip and in the know. My students could set them straight on that.

As I settled down at our kitchen table with a bowl of almost-done chili, I listened to Kelly talk about her and James’s trip to yet another sunny hotspot. They were researching primary education in former colonies, thus the frequent exotic trips. This time it was to Dominica, a tiny Caribbean island that supposedly had a boiling lake and some great hiking trails. That was the type of thing that Kelly and James did. After the tsunami hit South Asia, they promptly booked a flight and flew down to volunteer with some relief organization. They brought back some great pictures of themselves on the beach, looking tanned and happy with some brown-skinned, black-haired children. They believed in causes and lived for big political issues, unlike me who was just willing to let things slide as long as they didn’t affect me personally.

James and Kelly hated gas-guzzling vehicles, George Bush (father and son), consumerism, designer clothes, and rightwing Christians. They loved to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, uplift the downtrodden, extol the virtues of diversity, discuss ways to improve urban education, write poetry and smoke weed, and have noisy sex on the weekends when they thought I was asleep.

“Oh, Ames, you really should go down there! You’d love it! Lots of cute guys, great weather, and great food! You know, when our plane landed in Boston this morning and they said how much snow was going to fall, I thought, James and I need to move to somewhere warm. Permanently!” Kelly said as she stirred the pot.

“Ummm…mmm…mmm…” Oh, this chili was so good.

“But, here’s what we brought you,” Kelly said turning to me.

I looked at her hands and save for the chili-covered ladle could see no gift.

“James, she’s ready for her, uh, souvenir!”

James came out of their room, looking his tanned and rangy self, his long brown hair wet from the shower. I sometimes wished he were my brother, too.

“Okay, dude,” he said. “Now keep an open mind.” James called everyone dude, even his mother.

They both wanted to be professors, and I could see it in Kelly, but James was such a stoner…. At least he was rich, so if he failed at this it wouldn’t be the end of the party for him. He was from California. His parents were both in the movie business. Kelly, on the other hand, came from more humble beginnings in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and had been a high school teacher just like me. It was how we ended up getting along so well and being roommates for the past five years. James entered the picture later; I tolerated him at first for her sake, but he managed to grow on me after a while.

Anyway, I agreed to keep an open mind.

“We were hanging out with this dude, and Kelly thought you might like to talk to him…. Smart dude. I think you guys might have a lot in common.”

I looked from James to Kelly and then back again. The last time they set me up it had been with a guy from their program at BC. The guy was the most boring person I’d ever met, and coming from me that says a lot. I mean, I may struggle with how to spell Ludacris, but at least I KNOW who Ludacris is. His name was actually Tom. No kidding. Tom. Tall, skinny, uptight, nerdy Tom. I took one look at him and thought, “This kid has never been with a sister before and I’m not going to initiate him.” The date ended after I told him that I had a headache and needed to go home and lie down. He looked so relieved my feelings were hurt.

So who was this smart dude whom I would have something in common with?

James handed me the picture. It was a picture of them—James, shirtless, with Kelly, camouflage tank top and khaki shorts, and a big, tall brother (my favorite type) wearing a T-shirt that said MOREHOUSE, baggy cargo shorts, and Jesus sandals. Okay. This dude was no Tom.

“Isn’t he cute?” Kelly sang.

“Ummm…”

“We showed him your picture, too, and he sent you his e-mail addy,” James said, smiling.

I sighed. This could go quite badly or quite well….

“You gave him my e-mail address?” Did they cross a boundary? Did we have boundaries? Had I spelled out my boundaries to my roommates? And in this case, would that count? Because this guy was F-I-N-E.

“Your work e-mail…at the school,” Kelly said, searching my face for signs of “boundaries crossed anger.”

I shrugged. “It’s okay. I guess. What’s his name?”

Then James walked away to answer the phone, leaving Kelly and me to chat. This was better, because with James out of the room Kelly could give me the real dirt without fear of injuring James’s fragile man-ego.

She sat in the chair next to mine. I had already forgotten about the half-eaten bowl of chili in front of me. And I was still holding onto that picture of not-Tom and glancing at it every few seconds.

Apparently, not-Tom had a name, a rather pedestrian one, Drew Anderson. I looked at his picture and he looked as if he should be named Ramses or Spartacus or at least after some African warrior. Am I losing my mind? Here I was building up this guy in my head to be a warrior and I hadn’t even met him yet. Was I that desperate? Well, yes I was. I think.

“Oh, he’s so sweet,” Kelly was gushing. They’d met him while they were hiking up Mount Diablotins. (I decided not to ask why a mountain was named after the devil.) Drew was leading some high-school students on a hike, teaching them how to identify different plants and flowers, and James and Kelly decided to tag along. Once they’d stopped to eat lunch on the side of the mountain, James detected a slight American accent as Drew talked to them. Turns out that Drew had been educated in America but had moved back to his homeland after his father, who was the former prime minister of the island, died. He had lofty ideals, from what Kelly was saying. He was a sometime math teacher, a developer, and budding politician who was building schools out in remote villages with his own money. Own money, I asked? Apparently he’d worked in the U.S. during the Internet boom and had left the U.S. before the crash. Lofty ideals, rich, smart. What was wrong with him?

“He had a lot to tell us about the education system down there. Ames, I’m thinking of focusing my dissertation on how the British system is unsuitable for educating kids in the former Caribbean colonies.”

I looked at her. Oh. “That sounds interesting.”

“So are you going to e-mail him?”

“I thought you gave him my address?”

“Well, yeah. But I think he might want you to make the first move. He seemed kind of put off by the whole matchmaking thing.”

“Who wouldn’t be, Kelly?” I rolled my eyes. “This guy must have his pick of beautiful island girls. What would he want with someone two thousand miles away?”

“Well, from what he said, he doesn’t really have a lot of time to date. And besides, this is the information age. Distance is all relative….”

“Uh-huh.” I went back to the chili. Two thousand miles was not a relative I wanted to visit. Sure, this guy was cute and sounded near perfect, but he was so far away. I thanked Kelly for her efforts, but I couldn’t entertain any African warrior fantasies. But he is fine. And the son of a former prime minister. Who has lofty ideals. But two thousand miles away? Was I really that desperate? Was he? And if he were some kind of royalty down there, how would he see me?

“I’ll think about it,” I told Kelly, as I helped her clean up the kitchen.

“Are you and Whitney heading out tonight?”

“Nah, too snowy. Besides my back hurts. I think I’ll curl up with a book and some Häagen-Dazs.”

She shot me a look that was kind yet reprimanding.

“Okay. I’ll curl up with just a book.”

“Sure you don’t want to watch a movie with us?”

“Nah,” I said. I always felt like an intruder when the two of them got all cozy on the couch and I had to sit there with my eyes too embarrassed to do anything but stay glued to the screen.

So later I lay on my bed reading and thinking while the wind howled outside. I wished I were somewhere warm. I wished I had a date. I wished I could have some Häagen-Dazs. Butter pecan. That was my only addiction. Besides shoes. And I couldn’t even indulge it just slightly because I have no self-control; I could inhale a pint of ice cream in five minutes flat. Yes, I’ve timed myself. It really isn’t my fault; it’s all genetic.

I come from a family of drunks, and that is why I never touch alcohol. Never once did and never will. My father died of cirrhosis of the liver when I was thirteen. My brother, Gerard, has been through so many programs that I think he’s now well qualified to start his own drug and alcohol rehab business. My mother is a nondiagnosed alkie. She’s not dangerous, just pathetic. It may sound harsh, but you have to understand what I’ve been through with this woman. She was drunk at all my graduations, teacher conferences…I try to stay away from her as much as possible.

When I think back on my childhood, I have to laugh sometimes. There was never a time in my childhood that there wasn’t a drunk adult in charge. First, my dad, who loved me and my mother, but hated Gerard because he didn’t believe that Gerard was his son. So he beat Gerard every chance he got but treated me like a little princess. The two of us went to the movies every Saturday afternoon, or if it snowed we would rent movies from Blockbuster and make popcorn and just spend the entire afternoon in front of the television. He dropped me off at the Boston Public Library when I told him I wanted to read more books. On Saturday nights, he gave me money and sent me to the liquor store on Seaver Street to get him his Tanqueray and Johnny Walker; the store owner always winked knowingly at me. Back then my mother would only have “a taste” on her way to prayer meeting or bible study. But then my father lost his job as a transportation supervisor at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and he began to drink his unemployment checks away. When those checks stopped coming, my mother found work as a secretary for a big law firm downtown. Then they started to fight. Loud and hard. And she started to have more than a taste.

When my father got sick, it got worse. I was in private school on scholarship and I didn’t want to. . .