Free Private Lessons by Donna Hill Page A

into Naomi’s eyes and saw his own hopes and uncertainties reflecting back at him. “Listen, I know it will be difficult, but let’s see where this can go. You have my number. I’ll be back in New York in about four weeks. But I promise I’ll call you before then.”
    The burning in her eyes made his handsome image hazy and uneven around the edges, and the grip that sadness had on her allowed her to only nod her head in agreement. Sure , she thought, but didn’t say that if there was any possibility of there being a chance she’d made that impossible.
    Brice took her cheeks in his palms and tilted her face up to his. The warmth of his eyes, like the rays of the sun, was too bright for her to stare into, and she looked away an instant before the heat was cooled by the tears that slipped from the corner of her eyes. His lips kissed them away, and then she tasted the salt of her tears when his mouth covered hers.
    And before she was ready, before she had a chance to confess the only thing that plagued the wonder of their affair, she found herself watching the van pull off—and she waved and cried and offered up a fluttering smile like a war bride watching her man go off to parts unknown.
    She turned away. And when her gaze looked out beyond the horizon, across the water, she knew that her real life was a plane ride away, and that all this would soon become a memory as distant and unreachable as where the earth meets the heavens.

Chapter 8
    A lexis was at the airport to meet Naomi, and one would think she was welcoming home a rock star. She came loaded with a bouquet of flowers and a Flip camcorder to record every moment.
    Naomi walked into her welcoming arms, both of them laughing and hugging and asking and answering questions one on top of another. But it was like that with them, they were always feeding off of each other’s energy. Alexis was Naomi’s one true friend, the person she could be her real self with, quirks and all. And that’s why Alexis knew that the smile and the bright eyes and the chatter was only a cover-up for what Naomi wasn’t quite ready to talk about.
    But she would, Alexis knew that. They were girlfriends. And that’s what girlfriends did.
    Their friendship dated back to college when they were both undergrads at Spelman and then they’d both gone off to New York and were roommates during their graduate studies at Columbia University. They roamed the streets of Manhattan together, burned the midnight oil, encouraged each other, permed each other’s hair. It was Naomi who always cautioned the gregarious Alexis on her array of adoring men and it was Alexis who would slam Naomi’s textbook closed and drag her out on Friday nights. It was Naomi who sat with Alexis in the planned parenthood clinic and cried with her over what she’d had to do. And it was Alexis who pushed Naomi back out into the world after Trevor’s betrayal even when Naomi wanted to bury her head in the sand. They were girlfriends, sisters through and through. Night and day.
    Alexis hooked her arm through Naomi’s as they navigated their way to baggage claim, talked about the latest Bernice McFadden book that was getting so much well-deserved attention, the laundry that Alexis had allowed to pile up. “I just keep buying new clothes,” she’d joked, and that made Naomi laugh. Clothes were Alexis’s Achilles’ heel. She’d been known to blow an entire paycheck on new outfits, rather than take the mounds of clothes that she had to the laundry and the cleaners. Naomi simply tossed it off as one of Alexis’s quirks. She loved her anyway.
    â€œHow’s mom?” Naomi asked, as they watched the luggage carousel go around for the third time without Naomi’s bags on it.
    â€œShe is doing so much better. Got the home attendant in place. The doctors say she is a miracle woman. But it was scary, Nay. Thought I was going to lose