Submission {UNFIN}

Chapter Seventeen.

2:23 p.m., JFK Airport, New York. 

I embraced my friend for the last time in what I knew would be a while before granting her the opportunity to exit my Mercedes. Her strong scent of Burberry Brit Sheer perfume tickled my nostrils as she slid out of my passenger seat and retrieved her bags from the trunk. 

"Be safe, okay? Call me when you land," I requested, already fairly certain that she was flying on some private plane that our President had sent for her. Though it was rather extravagant for a forty-five minute flight back to D.C., her man spared no expense on her and it was showing. I chuckled at her imperceptibly fading annoyed expression when she knelt down to my window low enough so that I could see her. Liv hated being seen as though she wasn't capable of taking care of herself, and I couldn't blame her; I bore the same trait. 

"Okay. Kisses," she said with a genuinely jubilant beam, and blowing me a kiss. A returned the notion. 

"Kisses." After making sure that she made it inside safely, I rolled up my window and hoped that I could drown out the worrisome thoughts surrounding me with my music, until my hands-off calling rang through my car's sound system. With a cursory glance at the display screen, I saw that the caller was one of the men I instinctually loved to hate. The idea of such a notion forced me to slap my left wrist in a hasty manner so that I wouldn't steer off of the road. It was a way of scolding myself for letting that man get to me even more than I thought he had. "Hello?" I answered, sparing him a pithy lecture on why he had a lot of nerve to double-call me. Two nights prior, after our coy exchange was interrupted, he'd called me that night as he said he would, however I'd failed to pick up due to my flashbacks that had now returned with full force. Being around my old.. 'comrades' had only awoken memories that I'd tried to keep from piercing my nightly dreams. There we were, two days after, and he was calling me again. 

In my eyes, it was a move of pure vulnerability. Double-calling within our lifestyle was as frowned upon as double texting in a teenage girl's mind. 

"Hey, what's up?" His casual, folksy tone came quite unforeseen, but as we progressed through the weeks, I tried to convince myself that our correlation to each other had mellowed to a simmering, twisted version of friendship. I drummed my fingers against my leather-upholstered steering wheel as I kept myself from catching road rage at the sight of a Honda Civic cutting in front of me (A/N; I'm just now learning to drive on the streets & someone did that to me the other day. I almost had a fucking heart attack). 

"Um, just dropped Olivia off at the airport, why?" He was calling for a reason and I identified that in a terse matter of moments. 

"Damn, Sunshine. Why a nigga always gotta want something?" A muted laugh emerged from my freshly glossed lips and I flipped on my turn signal in attempts to avoid the impenetrable New York traffic by following a shortcut. It in no way was helping me that I was still in close proximity of JFK Airport, which is always crowded as a result of the constant arrivals and departures in New York. 

"Because you and I don't call for no reason. People like us don't call for no reason."

"Well I ain' like every other one of 'us' you've met," he corrected. That easy-going, breezy, seductive hood dialect was quickly creating a situation in my underwear that we both knew he didn't have the immediate pleasure of fixing. I decided to focus the remainder of my attention on driving my vehicle because after all, I didn't want to crash. 

"Then what do you want to talk about, Shawn? The next issue? Pride weekend? The new Marc Jacobs collectio-"

"You've seen the new Marc Jacobs collection?!" he interjected, "I mean, you've seen the new Marc Jacobs collection?" he repeated, removing the child-like excitement from his voice. The sound of him just as ecstatic over fashion as I seemed uncanny, but trust me, Shawn wasn't gay. I'd dibbled and dabbled in a bit of everything so I knew how gay men felt when they had sex, and Shawn, babyyyy, Shawn was certainly not gay.