Free Man Enough For Me by Rhonda Bowen Page A

Needless to say, the softer side of his personality had been sacrificed during the experience. But even now when he seemed a bit too aggressive for Jules’s liking, she knew it was only because he cared about her.
    From the instant Jules and Easy had first met, they had just clicked. In fact, if he hadn’t been so raw and she hadn’t been what he called a “good girl,” they might have gotten together. But now as she watched his mouth curl in scorn at the mention of Germaine, she began to wonder if his overprotectiveness was not just a cover for some other feeling.
    “What’s your deal with Germaine? He’s a nice guy.”
    “He ain’t right,” Easy said, shaking his head.
    “Why?”
    Jules watched Easy clench and unclench his jaw. She could tell he wanted to say something but was holding back. She looked at him and tried to meet his eyes, but he wouldn’t let her. She remembered her concerns from a couple days earlier and decided that it was a good time to find out from Easy what was really going on.
    “What do you know about him?” Jules asked.
    Easy shrugged. “Some things I’ve seen make me wonder about him.”
    “Wonder how?” Jules asked. “Did you see him with another woman? Does he have kids? Was he on
America’s Most Wanted
?”
    Her tone was light, but she was only half joking. With the brothers she had encountered, anything was possible. Easy chuckled a little and shook his head.
    “Talk to me, Easy,” she said softly, her eyes searching his face. Instead he took her hands in his and looked down at them.
    “Just be careful, baby girl,” he said quietly, finally meeting her eyes. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
    Nervousness flitted through her chest, and Jules shifted uncomfortably in her chair as she realized how serious he was. She considered pressing him further about what he meant, but she suspected she wouldn’t get anything out of him.
    “Well, how is that gonna happen if you’re breathing down my neck all the time,” Jules said, in mock annoyance.
    After a moment, Easy cracked a small smile.
    “All right, baby girl, I hear you. I know it’s your life; you ain’t gotta say the words.”
    Jules laughed. “I know it’s only ‘cause you love me,” she said, pulling him down into the chair beside her and hugging him. “So where have you been anyway? I’ve barely seen you around these past couple months.”
    “Been keeping it on the down low with my Grams. She’s been sweatin’ me about staying off the streets.”
    Easy lived with his grandmother in Regent Park—one of the less stellar parts of the city. Jules couldn’t understand why he still lived there even though he could very well afford to be somewhere else. She thought sometimes, though, that he felt responsible for the younger guys he grew up with who still lived there. He probably thought leaving Regent Park would be like abandoning them.
    “You know, you ought to move out of that mess,” Jules said in a slightly scolding tone.
    “Geez, now you starting to sound like her,” Easy said. “Every day she be on that same trip, talking ‘bout I’m gonna get myself killed on them streets.”
    Jules could understand his grandmother’s concern. In the last month alone there had been three separate gang related shoot-outs in the area that had left several people in the hospital and two people dead.
    “You know she’s right though, Easy. Every day I read something worse about that area in the news. I wish both of you would get on up out of there.”
    “That’s the thing, baby girl. She don’t wanna go nowhere—she just wants me to go. She says she’s too old to be moving into some new neighborhood. So I was like, why you think you gonna be safe here if I’m not? She says God will take care of her.”
    “I thought you didn’t buy into all that God stuff,” Jules said,using a phrase Easy had repeated to her many times before when she tried to get him to come to church with her.
    “I still don’t know