Carole Buck - Three-Alarm Love

“You must be wearing catnip for cologne, Fridge Randall,” she observed with a trace of asperity after a few moments. “Anybody else comes to visit, Shabazz hisses, spits and scratches. With you...”

“What can I say?” he asked wryly, stroking the cat from head to tail with a slow sweep of his fingers. He glanced down, struck by the contrast between the color of his skin and the color of the animal’s silken fur. He repeated the head-to-tail caress several times. Shabazz’s purring grew louder with each pass. “I have the magic touch with certain females.”

“Mmm.”

Something about this nonverbal response caused Fridge to look from the cat to her mistress. Keezia was staring at Shabazz. Or, rather, she was staring at Shabazz being petted. Her gaze was fixed on his hands, the dilation of her pupils reducing her irises to narrow rings of gold. Her lips were parted and trembling. There was a faint flush of excitement along the line of her angled cheekbones. She looked...dazed.

The memory of what he’d felt earlier in the evening when he’d watched Keezia toy with her right earring came back to Fridge. His body tightened in response to an erotic rush of sensation. Blood—heated and heavy—began to pool between his thighs.

Time to go, he told himself.

“Keezia,” he said, disciplining his voice into something he hoped approximated its normal tone.

She jerked, causing her earrings to swing wildly, then lifted her eyes to meet his. Although she did her best to hide it, he could tell that she was shocked by the potency of what she’d just experienced. He wondered, not for the first time, whether her ex-husband had been sexually incompetent as well as abusive.

“W-what?” she asked, the word catching in her throat.

“It’s getting late,” he told her, easing Shabazz off his lap The cat rebuked him with a disdainful twitch of her tail, then leapt to the floor and padded away.

“Late?” Keezia checked her watch. “Oh. I didn’t realize—”

“No problem,” Fridge assured her, standing up. “But it’s definitely time for me to be headin’ home.”

Keezia rose to her feet as well, smoothing the front of her pullover with a languid gesture as she did so. The garment’s V-neckline dipped for an instant, revealing the top of the shadowy cleft that separated her breasts. She seemed unaware of what she’d done.

Fridge cleared his throat, willing himself to stay focused on her face. “You plannin’ to take MARTA to work tomorrow?”

“MARTA?” It seemed for a moment that his hostess couldn’t imagine why he’d raised the question about Atlanta’s public transit system. Then she blinked, apparently recalling the circumstances that had led to his being present in her apartment. “Oh, yes. MARTA. Absolutely.” She underscored the affirmative with a nod. “There’s a, uh, bus stop about a block from here. I’ll change to the train at the Five Points station. It’ll probably be a quicker commute than when I drive.”

“Sounds good.” His gaze started drifting downward toward her breasts. He yanked it back up. “But listen, sugar. If you should happen to find yourself in need of a chauffeur before Jamal gets your car fixed up...”

Keezia smiled fleetingly, neither accepting nor rejecting his implied invitation. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

They walked to her front door.

“Thanks for the coffee,” Fridge said.

“Thanks for the ride home.” Keezia smiled again, less noncommittally than before. “And the dance.”

“As I said earlier, that was my pleasure.” Although he knew it was unwise, Fridge sought to prolong the moment. He made a show of surveying the apartment. “You’ve got a lot more room here than in your last place.”

“Don’t I know,” Keezia concurred feelingly. If she suspected he was stalling, she gave no sign of it. “That other apartment was so small, I practically had to go outside to change my mind.”

He chuckled, dimly registering that Shabazz had evidently recovered from her feline snit and was rubbing up against his left leg. “I have to admit, I sometimes worried the walls might be closin’ in on me. I always felt a little cramped.”

“I thought about moving the furniture into the hall whenever you came to visit,” Keezia joked. “You seemed to get into a lot of elbowing contests with that ugly old sleeper-sofa I had. And you’ve probably got scars on your shins from bumping into my coffee table. A man your size...”

Her voice trailed off into silence as the blood drained from her cheeks. Her gaze veered off. She trembled for an instant, then went terribly still.

If Helen Rose Randall’s only child had been given to cursing, he would have done so.

Neither of them spoke for what seemed like a very long time.

All right, Fridge finally decided, forcing himself to unmake the fists he didn’t remember clenching. Let’s stop the jiving around and deal with this. The longer we wait, the harder it’s going to be to say what needs to be said.

“It bothers you, doesn’t it, Keezia,” he began, inflecting the words like a statement of fact rather than a request for confirmation.

Keezia brought her eyes back to his. He could tell it cost her to do so. “What?”

“My size.”

She made a gesture, obviously attempting to deflect the issue. “You can’t do anything about how big you are, Fridge.”

He shook his head, unwilling to let her evade the point he was trying to make. “Neither can you, Keezia,” he declared. “And I know that scares you sometimes. You’ve found the guts to take care of a whole lot of business since you left that ex-husband of yours, but when it comes to dealin’ with me—”

“What?” She cocked her chin, daring him to go on. “When it comes to dealing with you—what?”

Fridge hesitated. Forcing Keezia into confessing her fear was tantamount to bullying her into a corner, and that was something he desperately didn’t want to do. He also suspected that it was something she wouldn’t forgive.

Carefully, cautiously, he lifted his right hand and stroked the curve of her left cheek. He was attuned to the slightest hint of resistance. Detecting none, he cupped the curve of her jaw gently, finessing her smooth skin with the ball of his thumb. Keezia quivered at his touch, but didn’t try to turn away from it.

“Baby,” he began, letting his voice drop into a deeper, more intimate register. “Baby, listen to me. I’m bigger than you. That’s a fact and neither one of us can change it. But don’t you understand? I know what being bigger means. I know my own strength. It’s been...well, it’s been a gift to me. Same as my singing voice. My strength has helped me save lives, Keezia. I respect it. I don’t use it against people. And I would never, ever use it to hurt you.”

“I—” Keezia paused, moistening her lips “—know that.”

The darting lick of her tongue triggered a snap-to-attention reaction below Fridge’s belt. Closing his mind to the pulsing of his flesh he asked, “Do you?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “Yes...I do.”

It would have been easy for him to accept this assurance at face value and take the next step. Heaven knew, his libido was clamoring for him to do so. But he couldn’t. Because with this woman, accepting at face value wasn’t enough. Soul-centered certainty was the only thing that would serve in building a relationship with her.

“Maybe you know it up here,” he agreed after a moment, touching Keezia’s temple. “But here?” He lowered his hand and feathered the tip of one finger against the spot over her heart. “Do you know it in here, baby?”

Keezia released a breath on a tremulous sigh, her eyes wide and liquid. “I can’t...I mean, I—oh, Fridge. I trust you. I trust you more than anybody.”