“What is it?” he asked, releasing his grip on her slacks. He took up her interfering hands and grabbed her arms by the wrist, pinning them to the mattress above her head. Removing one of his hands, clamping both of her wrists down with a single closed palm, he stroked the outlining curve of her body and pressed his lips to hers, preventing her from voicing what it was she apparently wanted to say. He was in no mood to converse with the enticing vision beneath him. He wanted her and had so for, what was for him, a substantial length of time. Having finally been able to maneuver her into this compromising position, he would do what he could to keep either of them from spoiling the mood. Their lips still interlocked, tongues massaging one another, he rubbed his down her leg to the knee and pulled her thigh up as he pressed his pelvis against hers with a little more force.
Jasmine squirmed under the firm pressure of his embrace until she managed to free one of her hands. After rubbing it down his chest she gave him a push that was just forceful enough to remove his lips from hers. “We need to talk,” she said to him after quickly catching her breath.
“We are talking. That’s the problem.” When Curtis tried to lean down into her again he felt the resistance of the hand that was still pressed against his chest. Jasmine applied more pressure to his body and Curtis rolled off of her onto his back. “I’m listening,” he said after a brief moment of silence. Jasmine hoisted herself up on her side and Curtis turned his head towards his left shoulder, looking her in the eye.
“I had dinner with my momma yesterday,” Jasmine started.
“I thought things were getting better between you two,” he said, assuming that had been the source of her apparent distress.
“She wanted to know exactly what it was you did for a living.”
Curtis let out an audible sigh of irritation and turned his eyes up to the canopy above them. “How many times do we have to go through this?” he said, catching wind of what the topic of this discussion was going to be about.
“Until you finally get it through your head that I want you out.”
“I’m gonna go get a beer. You want one.” When Curtis tried to get up from the bed Jasmine crawled on top of him and pushed him back down.
“You’re not going anywhere until we finish this.” She sat up on his stomach with her knees under his armpits. “Now you want to tell me what’s so complicated about you telling Phillip to go fuck himself and coming back home to me?”
“Nothing that we haven’t already been over a million times before. You can blame Phillip; you can blame me; you can blame every smoker in the street, but it’s not going to change our situation in the least,” Curtis told her, raising his voice a little with his growing frustration. “A nine to five check didn’t pay for this house, your car, or the dinner you treated your family to yesterday.” Jasmine simply glared down at him in anger as he went on with his rant. “What is all this about, anyway? What your momma thinks?”
Her brow crinkled up some more as the fire behind her eyes swelled. “It’s about me dragging your bullet riddled body out of Club Ray in the middle of the night and watching you hang within an inch of your life before a miracle occurred, allowing for us to even be having this conversation.” Now it was Curtis' turn to stare her down. “Do you have any idea how hard it was explaining to the guy at the detail shop why the backseat of my car looked like the floor of a slaughterhouse?”
“First of all, that was two years ago, and I wasn’t even that bad off. And number two, I bought you another car.”
“That’s beside the point, Curtis,” she said furiously.
Curtis sat up on the bed, sliding Jasmine down to his legs. She remained seated on top of him, refusing to allow him to walk out on this conversation the same way he had done so many times before. Curtis wrapped his arms around her waist.
“Alright. Alright,” Curtis said to her, weary of the words they spoke. “How about this? You and me, we get out of here for a while…” Jasmine immediately looked away from him and sighed out in frustration. Here we go, she thought.
“We can let your momma look after Matthew,” Curtis continued.
“No!” she protested, pushing away his hands when he tried caressing her body in an attempt to smooth his proposition over with her.
“Colorado,” he said, pulling her into him, placing kisses on her neck as he spoke softly. “Snowy mountains. Hot chocolate.”
“No, Curtis. Forget about it.” She fended him off as best she could. “That’s not gonna work this time.”
He leaned back down on the bed, pulling her with him. Curtis moved his fingers up her back and into her night black hair. Jasmine looked into his eyes again. “You, me, snowed in at a lodge on the floor in front of the fireplace.” Staring back into her brown eyes, he could see that she was starting to crack, just as she had done in so many similar circumstances.
“I can’t believe you,” she said, trying to hold in the smile that was trying to fight its way through all of the anger she felt. Jasmine knew that she had to choose her battles when it came to this subject. As disarming as Curtis could be when he attempted to lavish affection on her, his intentions were always dwarfed whenever Jasmine would let the reality of their situation settle in on her. After all, Curtis was right. He couldn’t exactly put in a two week’s notice and clean out his desk, expecting that to be that.
Regardless of how much she hated it, Curtis was, in fact, a high ranking official in the cartel that he’d helped put together and bring to power a little over three years ago. Getting him out wasn’t going to be a cakewalk, especially without his help, but she was definitely going to continue pressing the issue.
“This isn’t over."
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