Knockin' Boots

CHAPTER 1 EMILE Corn Bread, Collard Greens, Hogmaws, and Chit'lins I knew Fancy was a freak when I married her," Kevin said as we sat chewing hot wings and sucking down brew at a corner table at Fort Dix's All-Ranks Club. All eyes were on the dance floor, where Kevin's wifedressed in a candy-apple thong under a sheer black minidresswas rolling her body all over some twenty-year-old corporal, grinding him into the ground. The beat was slow and funky, and at Fancy's urging the corporal grabbed two handfuls of her sweetly rounded hips, pulled her close, and dry-humped her like a horny teenager at a red-light basement party. Fancy was fine, if that was the kind of woman you went for. She had a classic ghetto-fabulous bodyjunk all up in the trunk, juicy breastesses that looked like two ripe coconuts, tiny waistline with a bright tattoo and a perfectly pierced navel. She was even pretty in the face if you could get past the chewing gum and that bottom lip that stayed poked out all the time, but women like her didn't raise my pressure. I wouldn't touch a black woman with a ten-foot pole. Don't swell up! Quincy Jones, Taye Diggs, Wesley Snipes, Kobe Bryantthey were down with me too. They knew the deal when it came to sisters. Corn bread, collard greens, hogmaws, and chit'lins! Mouths too foul, fingernails too long, weave too big, and way too much drama in their blood. Not to mention the ratio of video hos to hoochies. But Kevin was my brother, the only family I had, so I nodded and went along with his program. Still, it had to hurt coming home from a monthlong deployment in Iraq and busting your wife getting her swerve on up in a club. "I mean"Kevin licked hot wing sauce from his thumb and shrugged his rationalization"this is a crazy lifestyle us soldiers live. Marching off to all corners of the world at the drop of a dime. A woman like Fancy needs hands on her. Lots of hands. On her ass, in her hair, between her legs . . . you just can't put chains on a woman like her and expect her to hush up and hold still." I just looked at him. Kevin had always been a little slow, even as a kid. Dig. While his wife was out dancing in the club, I'd driven the fifty miles round-trip to pick him up from the Philadelphia International Airport where he'd been waiting for hours. Thirty days of doing dirt just hadn't been enough for Ms. Fancy Pants Lawson. Instead of greeting her man with some sweet-smelling hair and a set of clean sheets, she was out there rubbing that stuff on the next soldier. "So what are you saying, Chief? You're not going to roll out there and snatch her up? Let her know you're back from the desert and you've peeped her?" Kevin just grinned and licked more sauce off his fingers. "What for, Emile? I know where my woman sleeps at night. 2651-B Cedar Street. Let her have her fun now. She'll make sure I have mine later." Fools and flies, I thought and put on my hat and scooped up my car keys. I do despise. These days, the more I trifled with fools, the better I liked flies. Kevin was real laid back for a man who had just witnessed his wife putting the moves on another man. Why he would even marry a woman like Fancy was beyond me. As if we hadn't learned enough from Lil Mama and them growing up. How much more of that could he take? Everybody knew Fancy was scandalous. A real skeezer, always running the streets. Hitting on men at unit functions, getting her swerve on in Kevin's bed while he was away on temporary duty. Rumor had it that she swung both ways, and judgPrice-Thompson, Tracy is the author of 'Knockin' Boots ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780345494955 and ISBN 0345494954.