Shiny, Nappy People
Been
I’d started braiding hair in my apartment on the weekends for a little extra cash. My job in cubicle hell didn’t pay for shit, and besides, there were these funky red leather boots on Zappos that I just had to have. (Hey, a girl needs her footcandy.) Anyway, I didn’t mind doing it. I actually kinda liked braiding hair. There was something relaxing about it, comforting even, especially since my mama had up and bought herself a pine condo four years ago.
Braiding hair had become a refuge; one of the few times, other than fighting or fucking, that I had a legitimate excuse to lay my hands on other black folks. And I needed an excuse because somewhere along the line, between childhood and adulthood, it had ceased to be okay to touch the brown, black, and high-yellow people who were related to me by blood. And a girl can really miss that, ya know?
So running my fingers through the soft, nappy, kinky spirals of brown-skinned strangers was my answer to paying some clueless shrink $120 an hour to listen to me bitch and moan about how much I missed my dearly departed mommy. Braiding was, well, braiding was therapy, black-girl style.
So, maybe you can understand why when my celly rang one Sunday afternoon, and Amani asked if he could make an appointment for some cornrows, I was real quick to say, “Cool. Why don’t you just swing on through now, baby.”
Amani was the kid brother of this chick from work who sat three squares down from me on the cubicle farm. Fatima was mad cool, and I figured if she was okay, her brother had to be awwright, too. That, and the fact that I wasn’t doin’ shit except painting my toenails a tasty new shade of Urban Decay’s Asphyxia, made me more inclined to overlook a tiny, little, inconsequential detail like I was inviting a complete and total stranger into my crib.
Twenty minutes after the first call, my celly rang again (which reminds me, I really gotta change that annoying Beyoncé “Ring the Alarm” ringtone, but I digress). Anyhoo, Amani told me he was pulling up outside my building. I went to the window and spotted a honey-brown-complexioned brother parking a shiny, white Jetta with gold rims. Cute, I thought.
I told
Shorty to “Look up…. No, higher, baby…. No, to the right of that big red sign over the sushi restaurant…. Yeah, that’s me, Kiki, waving at you. I’m in 3A. I’ll buzz you in, okay?”
Moments later, I heard a knock on my door. I opened up and stepped aside to let this tall, fine, caramel piece of ass come in. Amani was wearing all white from head to toe, a sexy Good Humor ice cream man, and he commenced to doing a nice little broh-man swagger right into my tastefully-gawdyyet-minimalist-with-a-Moroccanish-Indian-sort-of-vibe studio apartment and looked around.
“Nice place, Kiki,” he said, picking up the gleaming golden statue of a Hindu goddess that sat on the mantelpiece over my bed. “So, who’s this supposed to be, Shiva or somebody?” He raised a curious eyebrow in my direction.
“No, playa, that’s not Shiva.” I tried my best not to sound like a know-it-all. “Shiva is a dude. This little beauty here is Sarasvati. And, since you asked,” I said, flipping open my handy-dandy book on Hindu deities I just happened to have, “she is the goddess of knowledge, speech, poetry, and music.”
Amani cut his eyes at me in a way that said, “Shut the fuck up,” and continued scoping out the apartment, admiring my Eastern-flavored decor every now and then. I was admiring something, too. Mmm-hmm, like the way those white linen pants were skimming his deliciously shapely derriere. Goddamn, he must live at the gym, I thought. Now usually, my rule was to avoid those ego monsters known as gym rats who loved a mirror more than I did, but Amani was looking so damned tasty that I figured sometimes you just gotta forgive a person’s shortcomings…know what I mean?
Amani and his fine, fine behind made their way over to my bookshelves, which covered two walls of my bedroom. His eyes darted curiously across the endless titles.
“Damn, you got a lotta reading material in here and shit, girl. What are you, some kinda librarian or bookworm or somethin’?”
I preferred to think of myself as a book whore, but tomayto, tomahto. “Yeah,” I said. “Something like that. Actually, I was an English lit major in college and I guess I just can’t ever kick the book habit.”
“Let’s see. What do you got here?” Amani asked rhetorically. “Hmmm, a section of Caribbean cookbooks, a whole ’nother section on Buddhism, some shit in French, oh, and what do we have on this top shelf here? Oooh, Kiki got herself a little porn section.”
“It’s called erotica, thank you very much,” I huffed indignantly, snatching my steamy copy of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. out of his hands and putting it back on my, errrrrr, ummm, “erotica” shelf.
“Well, if it looks like porn and quacks like porn,” Amani teased, winking. “What else you got? Kamikaze Lust, Lovers’ Yoga, the Kama Sutra, Going Down: Great Writing on Oral Sex, Tantric Orgasms? Ms. Lady, I do believe you is a straight-up freak perpetrating as some kind of ghetto-fabulous hippie intellectual.”
I rolled my eyes. “Didn’t you come here to get your hair ‘did’ or something, if I remember correctly?”
“Yeah, that’s right. The cornrows.” Amani took a seat in the kitchen chair I had moved into the living-room-cum-bedroom for braiding purposes. “I really do need to get my wig smoked in a hurry because I’m going to the Wizards-Heat game later tonight and I want my stuff looking right.”
“No problem. I got you, boo. You’re dome is gonna be looking sharper than Allen Iverson’s when I’m done with it, my Nubian prince.”
He smiled at me, revealing a set of teeth so white and pretty, they would put Taye Diggs out of business, and lips so soft and juicy even Angelina would have to hate on him.
Putting my mind back on work for distraction from the tingling feeling I was beginning to get in the recesses of my cunt, I started combing through his long, billowy ’Fro. Gently, I worked some coconut oil through his tresses, massaging it occasionally deep into his scalp. Amani’s strong, textured hair was thirsty for this moisture and started to gleam almost immediately. I noticed how the beautiful honey-brown skin at the side of his neck shone also, and overall he gave the impression of a shiny copper penny in human form. I started to think about how I’d like to spend that penny when…my goddamn Beyoncé ringtone rang again (damn, I really gotta change that).
“Whatchu doin’?” my friend LaTonya asked.
“Co-chillin’ with a client,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could.
“Co-whoin’ wid a what?”
“Girl, I’m braiding hair, okay?”
“Oh, excuse me, Ms. Lady, for not bein’ up on all the ling-O. We still on for seven o’clock tonight or what? I am fiending for a mojito.”