Shu: A Novella (Them Boys Book 3) Read online

  Shu

  (Them Boys: Book 3)

  Alexandria House

  Pink Cashmere Publishing, LLC

  Arkansas, USA

  Copyright © 2020 by Alexandria House

  Cover image by Camell Page.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing 2020

  Pink Cashmere Publishing, LLC

  [email protected]

  Shu - the god of peace, lions, air, and wind in ancient Egyptian religion.

  1

  Shu

  At first, I wasn’t sure what woke me up. Hell, I didn’t even realize where I was until my eyes began to focus on the darkness around me only disturbed by the light from the muted flat screen TV hanging on the wall. Full awareness came when my eyes landed on the bed I was sitting next to where my father lay fast asleep. I straightened my slumped posture in the uncomfortable chair, my head snapping toward the sound of footsteps outside the room’s door.

  It eased open, and she hesitantly stepped inside the room, jumping a little when she noticed my presence. “Mr. Shu?”

  “Yeah, sorry I startled you.”

  “Oh, no problem. I just need to check and see if your father needs to be changed. It’s time to turn him, too.”

  I nodded. “You doing all that by yourself tonight?”

  “No. Another aide is coming to help me.”

  I stared at the tiny woman, the beautiful tiny woman with silky-looking dark skin and a puff of kinky hair sitting on top of her head. Her eyes were big and expressive. Her lips were so full and pouty; it looked like they were made for kissing. Tiny gold earrings trailed up her earlobes, and a white t-shirt peeked from under her green scrubs. The ID badge hanging from a lanyard around her neck read: Denver, Nurse Tech. I’d seen her taking care of my father before, but she usually had someone with her, to help. This was the first time she’d come in this room alone. “Uh, I can help you,” I offered.

  She frowned and shook her head. “I can’t let you do that. That’s my job.”

  Standing from the chair, I stretched and said, “I wanna do it, so tell me what to do.”

  The door creaked open again, and a woman wearing green scrubs that matched Denver’s stepped into my father’s room, her eyes swinging from me to Denver. “You still need my help?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so?” Denver said slowly.

  “I’ma help her,” I explained.

  “Oh, okay. Holler if you need me, Denver,” the other lady said, and rushed out the door.

  Denver smiled nervously at me. “Um, we should change him first.”

  I nodded and watched as she pulled the covers back, checking my father’s diaper. When she left to grab some supplies off her cart, I stared down at Omar Mitchell. He was once so big and scary to me, but now? Now, he was thin, frail, withering away both mentally and physically. I glanced at the door and then back at my father. There were so many words I wanted and needed to say to him, but just like every other night that I found myself in his room, I couldn’t. The words were stuck in my brain, unable to make their way to my vocal cords.

  Denver stepped back in the room with a diaper and some more stuff, and I did what she told me to do to help her, watched her change him like he was a baby, grabbed his arm when he tried to hit her, and after I’d helped her reposition him in the bed, I left, hoping the sleep I’d found in his room would follow me home.

  It didn’t.

  *****

  I’m the middle child, the kid who exists in a hidden place between the youngest and the oldest. I was also the quietest child, so I slid under Omar’s radar more than my brothers did. Shit, I honestly think he forgot to abuse me sometimes. Don’t get it twisted, though. I definitely wasn’t exempt from his cruelty. I was snatched out of bed and punched more times than I cared to remember. I was forced to do chores in the middle of the night and to fight my brothers, too. Life was fucked up for me just like it was for Set and Jah, but the nights when I was awakened by my brothers being hurt instead of me outnumbered theirs. So I decided he forgot about me sometimes, or maybe it was that I never showed fear or anger. I just…took it. I didn’t cry. I didn’t get mad. I just stared at him while he hit me and tried to hit him back until those tries turned into successes. Then he stopped, and like my brothers, I kept the violence going outside our home. We all liked fighting. I actually loved it. I still did, although I avoided it. I did everything in my power to avoid it, because once I unleashed that part of me, it was hard to lock it back up.

  The thing is, my father made fighters out of my brothers, but me? He made me a killer.

  2

  Denver

  I beat on the door and sighed. I could barely keep my eyes open after eight hours of changing, washing, and flipping grown folks at the nursing home, and this girl had the damn deadbolt locked? The one that only locked and unlocked from the inside?

  Banging my fist against the door again, I shouted, “Sunny! It’s Denver! Open the door!”

  Finally, I heard the locks disengage and watched as the door opened. On the other side stood Curtis, my cousin Sunny’s older, creepy-ass boyfriend, her main sugar daddy. He was shirtless, proudly displaying a field of taco meat on his chest, and there was something wet making his beard glisten. I guess I’d interrupted him eating my cousin’s pussy, but I paid half the rent up in this bitch, so whatever.

  “Mornin’. Sorry it took so long to answer the door. We was…busy,” he said, giving me a salacious grin.

  “Yeah, can you move so I can come in?” I basically hissed. I was too tired for this small talk shit and I had no desire to smell Sunny’s coochie on his breath.

  “All right. Come on in, Little Bit. You mean as hell to be so little. What are you? Four-ten?” He licked his lips.

  His ass was still in the doorway, so I shoved past him and headed to my room, slamming and locking my door behind me. This fool had messed up my tiny high from seeing Mr. Mitchell’s fine-ass son with his big tall self. He was older than me, probably much older than me, and I usually didn’t like older men, but there was something about him that made him very appealing to me. He was handsome, had these narrow eyes that if you really looked, you could tell were two different colors—one was dark, almost black, and the other was a caramel brown. Those eyes were so beautiful. His lips were nice, kissable lips that I’d never seen form a smile. He always looked, I don’t know, a weird mixture of mad and sad, but more than that, he felt dangerous, like deadly dangerous. Being around him made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, but despite all that, I kind of liked him. Shit, I kind of wanted him, too, which was crazy. Nevertheless, after I showered and climbed into bed, it was his face that occupied my dreams.

  Shu

  Still wearing my steel toes and my work clothes with my orange earplugs draped around my neck, I rang the doorbell next to the front doors of the Eternal Waters Care Center, since they locked the building down after hours. It was almost midnight, I’d been on my feet for sixteen hours, and I was nowhere near tired, so I came here hoping to find sleep as it only seemed to exist for me in my father’s room. A security guard let me in, giving me a nod that I returned. Most of the night shift knew me, so I didn’t bother to stop a
t the nurse’s station, making my way to Omar Mitchell’s room and taking the seat next to his bed that my mother occupied in the daytime. She was devoted to him, but who could blame her? He treated her like a queen. He loved her. I hadn’t quite worked out what it was he felt for me and Set and Jah, but if it was supposed to be love, that love was twisted like a motherfucker.

  I stared at him as an old episode of Gunsmoke played on the TV, pretending to myself that I was beginning to feel tired when I wasn’t. I wished I was, though. Anyway, sleep was never that kind to me. When it did arrive, it snuck up on me. I never saw it coming. I wouldn’t even know it had been there until I found myself waking up. Sleep’s ass pulled that shit again since I found myself startled awake just in time to see her again—tiny, pretty, timid.

  “Hi, Mr. Shu. Sorry for waking you up,” she said softly.

  “How old are you?” I asked, making her stop in her tracks.

  “Sir?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Why?”

  “You keep calling me Mr. Shu.”

  “Yeah, so?” There was a little bit of an attitude in her voice. I liked it.

  “So, unless you’re under the age of eighteen, call me Shu. Just Shu.”

  “Oh…okay, Shu.”

  I nodded and hopped up from my chair.

  She gave me a smile and reached into her pocket, pulling out some gloves. “I brought extra larges for you this time. I could tell the larges were too tight.”

  I lifted the corner of my top lip a little and nodded. “Thanks.”

  Then we went to work, pulling and tugging on Omar to get him changed and turned. Well, I just kind of stood there while she handled the diaper changing, because fuck that.

  “That’s your real name? Denver?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “Yes, but I’ma change it.”

  “To what?”

  “Anything other than Denver.”

  “You from Denver?”

  “Nah, my mom said she just liked the way Denver sounds.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is Shu your real name? Like the Egyptian god?”

  My eyes widened a little. “Yeah, it is.”

  “Nice. God of peace, huh? Does that fit you?”

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t think mine fits me at all. Denver sounds like a white girl. I’m the opposite of white.”

  And you’re beautiful, I thought. “What’s your last name?” I questioned, as she fastened the new diaper.

  She glanced up at me. “Hayes. You know any Hayeses?”

  I shook my head and grabbed what I now knew was the draw sheet, helping her pull Omar to the left, then taking the pillow she handed me and stuffing it behind his back.

  “He must really be tired tonight. He didn’t even wake up to fight me,” she said with a grin.

  “I’m sorry he does that to you,” I offered.

  She frowned a little. “Oh, it’s okay. I know he doesn’t know what he’s doing. I’m sure he was the sweetest man before all this.”

  I studied her for a minute before saying, “What makes you say that?”

  She shrugged. “You. The way you visit him, sit with him, help take care of him, all that tells me he had to be a good man.”

  I couldn’t respond to that, because then I’d have to explain that my reasons for dragging my ass up in this room night after night had nothing to do with him being a good man. I’d have to tell her the truth, and that shit was hard for me to even think about, let alone say.

  My silence didn’t seem to bother her, though. “Well, let me get to the next room. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. You gonna be here?”

  “Yeah.”

  She nodded, and I watched her leave, then settled back in my chair, fixing my eyes on Omar.

  Denver

  He was still there when I came back just like he said he’d be, hopping up the moment I opened the door, his eyes puffy with sleep. He was tall and thick and so, so handsome with a mustache and beard that only enhanced his features and made him seem even more dangerous than he naturally felt to me. But he was also very quiet, not a man of many words. To say that he was enigmatic would be a gross understatement. He was also kind of…strange, but so was I.

  I was very strange to most people, but I considered myself free. I lived how I wanted to live, had since I left my mother’s house ten years earlier. No one understood me then, and no one really understood me now, but I really didn’t care.

  “Why you always got that little band-aid on your nose?” he asked, his deep voice startling me as I cleaned his father.

  “Um, I have a nose ring. They said I either had to take it out or cover it up. I wasn’t taking it out, so…”

  He nodded. This man was always nodding.

  “So, you work at the plant?” I asked, eying his bright orange shirt emblazoned with DonCo in white letters.

  He glanced down at himself. “Yeah.”

  “You always come here straight from work?”

  His eyes were glued to me. “Sometimes.”

  “Well,” I said, as he helped me position his father on his back, “I really admire your dedication to your father.”

  He nodded, sadness clouding his eyes, and after standing there unable to take my eyes from his for a ridiculous amount of time, I left.

  3

  Shu

  After so many nights of doing this, standing across my father’s bed from her, I should’ve been accustomed to it and her. But still, I had to remind myself that I was supposed to be helping her. I couldn’t stop staring at her as I tried to figure out how one person could be so beautiful. She was so much shorter than my six feet, two inches and fragile looking. She almost looked like she would break if I touched her, but at the same time, I knew she wouldn’t. I knew she was tougher than she appeared to be, that she’d seen a lot of shit that could’ve, and maybe should’ve, broken her but didn’t.

  “Okay, you ready to turn him?” she asked, her thick eyebrows lifted.

  I nodded and helped her move Omar, helped her cover him up, and a minute or so later, watched her leave his room.

  “So we’ve been doing this tag-teaming thing for what? Two weeks now? It’s time for me to start paying you, huh?” she said, when she returned to Omar’s room that night.

  I frowned. “Huh? Naw, don’t do that.”

  She smiled. “It was a joke. You know…ha-ha?”

  “Oh…”

  We’d just finished getting Omar situated, and she was peeling a glove off as she said, “Do you ever smile or laugh?”

  “Not really.”

  She nodded. “I didn’t think so. Well—”

  “How long you been a nurse?”

  “I’m a CNA.”

  “Okay, how long you been one of those?”

  “A year.”

  “You real good at it.”

  She smiled again. “Oh, thank you!”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Denver

  My favorite color used to be red, but now I regretted putting a red curtain on the one window in my room. It didn’t foster peace for me anymore than the bare walls that surrounded me. I hated this little room along with the second-hand full-size bed I was lying in, shoved into a corner so the room wouldn’t feel so claustrophobic. I didn’t have a closet, and there was no space for a dresser, so I lived out of a suitcase, but at least I had my own bathroom.

  I rolled over and tried to block out my cousin and one of her men as they yelled at each other. She was always either fighting or fucking somebody, loudly, and I could count on one hand how many times I’d been able to sleep soundly in this house. Some days, like today, I couldn’t fall asleep at all. Days like this, my mind would race with thoughts and memories and ghosts, which led to sadness and tears. The more tears, the closer I inched to sleep, until finally, the surge of emotions would deplete my energy, my eyes would drift closed, and my body would finally find rest.

  I sat straight up in the bed, yanked from a sou
nd and hard-won sleep by an eerie feeling that seemed to cover my entire body, making the terrain of my skin rough with goosebumps. In the darkness of my room, I rubbed my eyes and groped for my cell somewhere in the bed, finally finding it and focusing my eyes on the screen—8:00 PM. I’d literally slept all day, hadn’t even eaten lunch or dinner. I was obviously tired and not just from working a physically taxing job. My damn life was wearing me out, but that was nothing new. I stretched, let my eyes scan the dark room, and yelped when I saw movement by the door.

  “Sunny?” I instantly recognized the fake-confused voice.

  “You know this ain’t Sunny’s room! Sunny!” I yelled.

  “Damn, Little Bit. Shit! Why you yelling? Sunny ain’t here. She just used my car to run to the store.”

  “Then why the fuck did you act like you thought I was her?”

  “Shit, I don’t know…I’m drunk.”

  “Well, get your drunk ass out of my room then!”

  “You don’t need no money? Some food? I got enough money and dick for you and Sunny. I know how you little young hoes like money. I bet you’ll spit all over my dick for fifty dollars.”

  “If you don’t leave my fucking room right now, I’m gonna shoot that little dick of yours off!”

  “You a spitfire, ain’t you? You ain’t got no gun, Little Bit. With your pretty ass…”

  “You willing to bet your dick on that?”

  “Aw, Little Bit. Don’t be like that.”

  I heard the front door open and close, and shouted, “Sunny?!”

  “Yeah!” her gruff voice returned. She really needed to leave those damn cigarettes alone.

  “Come get this nigga out of my room before I fuck him up!”