Where There's Smoke 2:

Book 2: Where There's Smoke

by Terra Little

Genres: General Fiction; African American; African American Urban

Synopsis

In this gritty sequel to Where There’s Smoke, the past comes back to haunt Smoke Avery and Anne Phillips, and the choices they make will change their lives forever.

A father’s work is never really done. Then again, neither is a lover’s.

After a few ups and downs, Alec “Smoke” Avery and Anne Phillips have found a rhythm they can both groove to, and they’ve made a love connection. But just when they think they can finally settle down, their past comes back to haunt them in ways they never imagined.

Smoke’s former flame is stalking him, and she’s determined to have him all to herself. That’s the last thing Smoke needs while he’s trying to deal with Anne’s emotional baggage and convince her that he’s all the man she needs. Anne suspects that Smoke is still stepping out on her, and when things get tense, she decides to do a little stepping out of her own.

Away at Kentucky State on a basketball scholarship, their son, Isaiah, has become motivated to straighten out his life, but his nemesis, Hood, isn’t done wreaking havoc. His sudden appearance on campus is jeopardizing Isaiah’s scholarship, and his life.

Things go from bad to worse when, during a heated lover’s quarrel, Smoke and Anne commit the perfect crime to save their son and themselves. When the smoke clears, truths will have to be told, and Anne will have to accept that she and Smoke are more alike than she cares to admit.

Terra Little takes listeners on a roller coaster ride of emotions in this story of a very real, very dysfunctional family.

Release date: June 1, 2013

Publisher: Urban Audiobooks

Print pages: 288

Sample

I had a flashback. Thought I was back in time, in a place where nothing and no one was safe; not me, not my stash, not my cash, nothing. Back then, I had the Robinwood Housing Projects on lock, pushing weight from one corner to the next and looking over my shoulder every step of the way. I managed to get away with the diabolical lifestyle I was living for three or four years. I was forced to get my head on straight. I was Smoke and you couldn’t find me in the club with 50 Cent, but you could find me on any given day, cruising around my domicile in a freshly waxed SUV, laying low and checking my rearview mirror for static.

For a brief moment, I imagined that the black Nissan with even blacker windows that was riding my bumper right about now was bringing static along with it and then I remembered that I was living a static-free life and had been for something like twenty years. So I did a roll call. License and insurance? Check. Registration and certificate of sale? Check. Was my house in order? Check. Was my house really in order? Check.

Yeah, right.

I made a quick, unexpected right turn and shook my head. The black Nissan was right behind me and pissing me off a little more every time it inched up on the bumper of my new truck. For the past twenty minutes it had been doing that, barely stopping in time enough to avoid rear-ending me and following me so closely that it could’ve been riding in the bed of my truck. I took it on a circular tour through a neighborhood I did not live in, led it across a busy discount store parking lot and made it wait for me while I filled my gas tank and went inside the station to get a soda. Then I came back outside, hopped up in my truck and started the parade all over again.

When I passed the grocery store I was supposed to be going to for the third time, I grabbed my cell phone from the passenger seat and dialed like a maniac. The phone rang three times on the other end before someone finally picked up.

“What are you doing?” I said straight out of the gate. I did not have time for this today.

Truth be told, I wasn’t a stranger to the black Nissan. This was about the fiftieth time I had caught it following me, but never for this long and never like this. If I didn’t know better, I would swear it was planning on going home with me and really starting some confusion, the likes of which I didn’t need nor could I ill afford. I could’ve kicked my own ass for allowing the situation to go on for as long as it had been going on.

I thought about a saying that my father used to say before he got a wild hair up his butt and decided to croak when I was thirteen. He used to say: “Son, never shit where you lay your head.” Young buck that I was, the lesson in what he said didn’t quite sink in until I started looking twice at women and contemplating the possibilities.

Even then, it had taken me a minute or two to fully understand the value of keeping my home-front peaceful.

Here I was, forty years old and telling my own son the same thing, thinking I was passing down pearls of wisdom, father to son and all that, and shit personified was following me around the city in a black Nissan every other day. And shit in a skirt, on top of that. Apparently, I hadn’t learned the lesson that I thought I’d learned.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Diana Daniels purred in my ear. “How are you, baby?”

“Dee . . .” I took a breath for patience and had to chuckle at myself. “This crap you’re doing, you know it has to stop, right?”

“You make me do this, Alec. This is the only way I get to see you anymore. You stopped coming to me, so I have to come to you.”

“I stopped coming to you for a reason.” I tucked the phone between my head and shoulder and busted a wide, spur of the moment U-turn. Damned if she didn’t bust one too, and speed up. A police cruiser passed me on my left and I debated catching the chump’s attention, so he could pull my Glenn Close wannabe over and give me time to get the hell out of Dodge. It figured that Mr. Officer was too busy yakking on his cell phone to notice a tax-paying citizen needing some assistance.

“Because you have Anne now?”

“Something like that, yeah.” I stopped for a red light and felt a bump from behind. Wrong answer. “You’ve got problems, you know that?”

“No, baby, I think you’re the one with problems.” Diana tapped her horn and then waved to me through her open sunroof—with her middle finger. “I wonder what Anne would say if she knew where you were two weeks ago, Alec? Wonder what she’d say if she knew . . .”

“You know what?”

“That you had your pants down around your ankles and your . . .”

“You need to chill out, Dee.”

“. . . in my mouth,” she finished, laughing. “Don’t tell me you’re scared of that bitch?”

“I’m starting to think I need to be scared of you.”

“Oh, so I’m crazy now?”

“It’s been four years,” I reminded her in case she had forgotten. “I’m where I want to be. I think I told you that. And stop bumping my fucking truck.”

“It’s been two months since your dick was where it wanted to be, Alec. You know you need to quit deluding yourself and admit you made a mistake when you dumped me for that whore you call a housewife.”

“I’ve made some mistakes, but getting with Anne wasn’t one of them, Dee. Stop following me.”

“Stop fucking me, Alec, and I might think about it.”

I turned into the grocery store parking lot and slowed my roll, with her right on my bumper. She was really taking it to the extreme today. Usually, she trailed me just long enough for me to notice her and then she turned off somewhere and disappeared. Today, she was trying the hell out of my patience and making me wonder just how twisted in the head she really was. Obviously, more twisted than I had given her credit for.

She was right though, I had fucked her. A grand total of two times since me and Anne had hooked up and both times were stick and runs. She caught me tripping one night when I ran out to rent a couple of movies and talked me into following her behind the video store to talk. At least that’s what she said. But she wasn’t wearing panties and I ended up having a conversation with the wrong lips, and using the wrong head. The second time, she showed up at the junior high school where I taught Honors Algebra classes and bent over my desk. Her panties were missing in action then, too. I hadn’t touched her since then, not that it made what I had done any less wrong, but there it was.

Two weeks ago, she showed up at my school again, wanting a repeat and I showed her the door. Then, I came out of the school a little while later and found my rear license plate missing and a note from her in its place. I had to go to her place to get my plate and she gave me a blowjob for my trouble.

She wasn’t in too big of a hurry to let me forget what we’d done, either. Like I really needed help remembering. Every time I looked at myself in the mirror, I remembered what I’d done and asked myself what I could’ve been thinking. I knew what I had been thinking with, but what I’d been thinking about was anybody’s guess. I couldn’t even claim to be a greedy man, because greed hadn’t factored into any of what happened. It wasn’t like Anne was selfish with her loving, so what the hell?

That’s what I asked Diana. “What the hell?”

“That’s what I want to know,” she said. “What the hell are you with her for if you can’t keep it zipped up?”

As much as I wanted to have an answer to that question, I didn’t and she knew it, so I didn’t even try to come up with one. I pulled into a parking space, threw my truck into park and tried to think about the situation objectively.

Four years ago, I was dating Diana when I ran up on Anne, hiding out in Illinois with my sixteen-year-old son. Wait, scratch that. Anne ran up on me with my son in tow and seriously rocked my world. She hadn’t wanted anything from me except help straightening out my son. Once I got over the shock of having a son in the first place, I signed on to help her as much as I could. I wasn’t expecting Anne and me to start rolling around in bed together and falling in love, but we did.

For a minute, I was dealing with both Anne and Diana and then Anne put the smack down on a brotha and I made a decision. What else could I do? It was either Anne or Diana and damned if I could see myself being without Anne. The problem was, Diana couldn’t seem to see herself being without me. So, for the past four years, I’d had a stalker that I couldn’t shake for nothing.

“Damn,” I said out loud without meaning to. Anne was not the type of woman to put up with even a tad bit of shit. I knew that going in, and in case I didn’t, she hurried up and told me what the deal was. If she found out about Diana, my house would be so out of order that Hurricane Katrina would look like a spread worthy of Good Housekeeping in comparison. Anne was nobody’s joke and how I managed to forget that, I didn’t have the foggiest.

Dirty Diana was breathing in my ear like the character in Girl 6. I turned my head and looked at her car, shook my head again. “You don’t love her,” she whispered in my ear.

“I don’t love you,” I told her and meant it. “And you know it.”

“Well, you had better start figuring out where to find some love for me, Alec, because I’ve got something over here that belongs to you. Something you can’t deny even if you wanted to.”

“Go home, Dee, okay? Stop following me and go home.” As far as I was concerned the conversation was over. I snapped my cell shut and dropped it in my pocket.

I got out of my truck and circled around to the passenger side back door. Diana’s Nissan hadn’t moved, so I decided to pretend it wasn’t there. I opened the door, reached in and picked up my daughter like she was precious cargo. Even in sleep she knew her daddy’s touch, knew she could wipe her nose on my cheek and finish drooling down the side of my neck and nobody would say a damn thing to her, least of all me. This was the stuff I lived for.

I was smelling the curve of my baby’s neck when I heard Diana’s car easing up behind me. Something told me to look over my shoulder. I did, and then I jumped ten feet to the left to avoid being run over by the crazy bitch. She burned rubber flying past me and turned a corner on two wheels. An oncoming car almost rammed her from the side as she merged into traffic illegally and flew out of sight.

A few seconds later, my cell phone rang and I didn’t have to look at the caller ID to know who it was. I snatched it out of my pocket and put it to my ear. I was so motherfucking mad, I couldn’t see straight.

I didn’t give her a chance to say anything. “If you had hurt my daughter, I would’ve blown your fucking brains out and gladly gone back to jail.” She was quiet and I was too angry to take a second and think about what the silence might mean. “You hear me, Dee?”

More silence. Then, “Smoke?”

My head snapped back on my neck so hard I heard bones popping. I stopped right where I was standing in the middle of the grocery store parking lot and counted to ten. “Anne?”

“Dee, as in Diana?”

“Yeah, baby, she . . .”

“Where are you and where is my daughter?”

“Iris is right here and I’m at the store, where I’m supposed to be.”

“Okaaaay. . . .” I could hear the wheels in Anne’s head spinning. “And how does Diana factor into that?”

“Ran into her,” I lied. A smiling door greeter had a cart waiting for me just inside the automatic doors and I took it with a forced smile in return. It wasn’t his fault I was on the hot seat. I pushed it off to the side and took the phone away from my ear to check the call waiting caller ID. I had an incoming call. “Hold on a second, baby, okay?”

“Smoke . . .”

“Hold on,” I said and pushed a button to take me to the incoming call. “What the fuck is your problem? You could’ve . . .”

She cut me off at the throat and at the knees. “I think I’m pregnant, Alec.”

I’m glad somebody had the foresight to snatch my daughter from my arms before I started sinking to the floor. I caught myself before I landed on my ass and fell against the wall behind me. Then I reached out and stopped the complete stranger who was holding my baby from moving out of my sight, working my cell with my free hand.

I switched back over to Anne. “Anne?” Nothing but dead air. “Anne?”

She had hung up.

Somebody passed me another drink and I took it straight to the head. I figured if there was one of those little dissolving date rape pills in the bottom of the cup, I was out of luck. I was feeling a little too mellow to remember exactly how many I’d had and I didn’t have the foggiest idea what I was drinking. I just knew that whatever it was, was about to sit a brotha right on his butt in a few minutes.

I found a wall to lean up against so I didn’t have to remember how to stand up and checked out the scene. Honeys on top of honeys, with a brotha or two thrown into the mix here and there to bring some balance to a situation that was perfect just the way it was. Even the ugliest dude in the place was bound to get laid tonight. I was nowhere near ugly, so what did that say about me?

Kentucky State University had more than its share of fine female undergrads and probably three-fourths of the ones to watch were in the house tonight. Friday night Kappa House parties were legendary on campus and some of the same sistas who sat in class and put the N in nerd were the very ones who showed up after dark and put the L in legendary. Quiet as it was kept, I didn’t think I had ever seen so many fine black women together in one place in my whole life. I thought I had peeped my share, but . . . damn.

I was a senior in high school the first time I toured the campus. KSU’s basketball scout was riding me about accepting a scholarship, so me and my old dude drove down here from Indiana to take a look around and see what we thought about KSU. They were one of three schools throwing full rides at me. Even though I was moaning and groaning about wanting to go somewhere more metropolitan, my old dude dragged me down here anyway. Old dude was asking all the important need-to-know questions and peeking around corners and what not, and I was taking in the scenery. Trying to keep my tongue from dragging the ground, for real. I came home and decided to go along with my mama—New York was too far away and so was Utah. A historically black university was where it was at and suddenly, I was down for KSU.

Did the man upstairs break the mold after he made the black woman or what?

“What’s up, Zay?”

And here was one such example of exactly what I was talking about. Five-foot-six, body tighter than a drum and titties like Jell-O. A chemistry major, planning on being some kind of doctor and smart enough to pull it off too. Her parents were big-time church folks, her pops was the preacher at one of them fire and brimstone churches down in Mississippi somewhere, and she could quote the Bible backward and forward. Only problem was, she was prone to using the Lord’s name in vain when it was convenient for her. Holy shit, this and goddamn, that. And, oh yeah, my personal favorite: God, you fuck me good. I just knew her pops wouldn’t approve of his baby girl’s nice-nasty mouth. But me? I didn’t have the slightest problem with it.

When her parents got a hair up their butts and decided to visit, she jumped into loose fitting khakis and oxford cloth shirts, remembered that she wore wire-rimmed glasses and put those mugs on. She pulled her hair up in a tight ponytail and called me Isaiah when she saw me on campus. But no sooner than their Jaguar was out of sight, I was back to being Zay, she was back in a demin miniskirt that was frayed around the hem and closer to her ass than ninety-nine was to a hundred and she was hunting me down at the Friday night Kappa frat parties.

“You,” I said as I covered a quiet belch with my fist. “You looking for me?”

“You know I was.” She took my drink and helped herself to a sip. Then, she leaned over and set the cup on the steps. Since my hands were empty, I filled them with her ass and tasted the strawberry flavored lip gloss on her lips. “What were you and Missy Davis over here talking about a little while ago?”

“Same thing you and Bruce were over there talking about a little while ago,” I said. “You didn’t think I was peeping you, did you? Over there getting your mack on.”

“If you were peeping me like you say you were, you would’ve seen me check him. I didn’t see you over here setting Missy straight, though.”

“I handled my business.”

“Yeah, right.”

I didn’t have anything to prove, but I still pulled out the folded piece of paper Missy had scribbled her number on and slipped in my pocket, and pushed it in the vee of her shirt, right between her tits. “Now what?” We stared at each other.

The music changed up and a slow groove replaced Ludacris’ hollering about coming for the number one spot.

She rolled her head around on her shoulders, ran her fingers through her waist-length wavy hair and started swaying from side to side. I watched her lips pucker like she was kissing the air and I wanted to lick those bad boys.

She saw me looking and grinned. “Ooooh, that’s my jam, boo. Dance with me?”

Everywhere I looked, couples were bumping and grinding, damn near having intercourse on the dance floor and not caring who was watching. I spotted Bruce’s punk ass pushing up on somebody else’s woman and shook my head. And some chick I had seen before but didn’t know was so high she was slowly coming out of her clothes, tripping on E and straight out of her mind. She pulled her bra off, shook her tits for everybody and then took off running, with her big, ugly boyfriend right behind her. I could’ve told him she was off the chain, E or no E, but he didn’t ask me, so I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open.

Any other time I would’ve tuned in to the hilarious reality show unfolding all around me, but I had other, infinitely more important business to attend to. I eased up on my dance partner from behind and spread my fingers out on her thighs. She reached up and wrapped her arms around my neck and we grooved like that through three slow jams.

The last thing I intended on doing when I came to college was hooking myself up with one girl and being monogamous, but that’s exactly what I was doing. Don’t get me wrong, a brotha was tempted all the time and there were plenty of opportunities to get my creep on, but right about now I was about as full as a tick. No sense in being greedy.

I was sucking on her neck when Ice Cube blasted through the speakers and everybody went back to humping and pumping. We kept on slow grooving and that’s how I knew it was time to go.

My boy Tommy’s room was on the top floor of the frat house and he was down in Florida. I stuck my head in his room and made sure the coast was clear and then it was on. As soon as I locked the door behind us, she was on me and I was on her, both of us reaching for my zipper and laughing when our fingers got tangled up together.

I fell back against the wall, my mouth dropped open and my eyes slammed shut. Good thing the music was pounding full blast, because I was doing some serious hissing and grunting. Toes curling and all that. Baby girl’s mouth was a lethal weapon and I think she knew it. But just in case she didn’t, I told her.

When I could talk.

“Baby boy like dat, eh?”

“Baby boy ’bout to tear your ass up.” I gripped her waist and spun her around, walked her over to the bed and bent her over. I tongued her ass cheeks until she started chanting in her native Jamaican tongue. She knew it drove me crazy.

“Oooh, dat’s it baby. Do dat shit, eh? Yeah baby, jus’ like dat.”

I wrapped my hands up in her hair and pulled her head back, hit a secret spot on her neck with my teeth and tongue and made her cum. My fingers got lost in her heat and I damn near came myself. I wanted to taste her, but I couldn’t make myself wait that long.

I was sexing a sista from the islands and I had been since a month after the fall semester started. Freshman year she was dating a dude named Jared. Sophomore year she was engaged to the chump and planning on getting married. Then he tripped and got caught slipping with one of her so-called friends, a high-yellow chick named Stefani from around the way. I had been lusting after her since day one and I didn’t sleep when her sorry-ass man lost his place. Ten minutes after she took the ring off, I swooped in and started whispering in her ear. It had been on ever since. Nobody was saying we were going together or anything like that, but nobody was saying we weren’t, either. Things were just kind of understood between us.

Erica was her name and for the most part brothas didn’t test the waters. They knew she was mine. Every now and again, Missy Davis or some other chick tried to step to me, but I was cool rolling like I was. Then there was punk niggas like Bruce, who didn’t believe fat meat was greasy, always trying to push up on her when he thought I wasn’t looking. But I was never not looking though, because I guess you could say I was . . . seriously infatuated.

“Hold up,” I hissed through clenched teeth. She was straddling me, rolling her hips round and round in the air over my dick and feeding me mouthfuls of her tits. I was so caught up that I had almost sent the chief in without backup, which was something I never did. She had me twisted in the head. I hurried up and rolled on a condom.

After that, it was all over for me. I didn’t hear anymore music, anymore more bass, anymore anything, except for moans and groans, and gasps and hisses. Tongues were everywhere, hands all over the place and I just knew we was gon’ break Tommy’s headboard clean in half.

“Shhh.” I flipped her over on her back and put my hand over her mouth. “Make somebody think I’m killing you . . .