Sweet St. Louis: AN Urban Love Story (No Series) - Softcover

Tyree, Omar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684856115 ISBN 13: 9780684856117

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

New York Times bestselling author Omar Tyree's seductive, insightful novel exploring the age-old question: how do people fall in love—and stay in love?

When Anthony "Ant" Poole, a young auto mechanic with a creative approach to the mating game, tries out his latest line on Sharron Francis, he has no idea of the impact it will have. For Sharron, an ordinary girl in search of companionship and happiness, Ant's words are filled with mystery and allure. Would she really be getting an actual piece of him, or just a piece period? The more Sharron contemplates Ant's line, the more it confounds her. When she decides the only way for her to discover its meaning is to discover Ant for herself, both her life and his are turned upside down.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Omar Tyree is a New York Times bestselling author, NAACP Image Award winner, and professional journalist from Howard University, who has written fiction and nonfiction, hard news and op-eds, screenplays and stage plays, and many other forms of writing. He is also an excellent lecturer who has been invited to speak at more than eighty American colleges and universities. His present and ongoing goals include the continuation of developing, writing and publishing great literary content, as well as adapting and producing exceptional films, music, and educational events worldwide.

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A sultry-sweet, old-fashioned love story with a contemporary edge from one of America's bestselling authors.

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Chapter One

St. Louis, Missouri, placed right smack in the heart of America and left of the Mississippi River that flows from north to south and through the midwestern region like a major artery, was sizzling hot in the month of May 1999. So hot was the city of St. Louis in the springtime that younger women were already wearing suffocating shorts with pockets so tight you could barely stick a dime in them. They wore thigh-high skirts and stomach-length shirts with those look-at-me-right-now colors: bright greens, luscious oranges, cool blues, bleached whites, bumblebee yellows, and whatnot. And these young women were showing far too much skin for the guys in St. Louis to handle, too much, in fact, for young men anywhere! Especially in the springtime when the hormones jumped Double Dutch on the brain. Maybe it was the heat of those outfits that drove the young guys insane. Then again, they were not supposed to notice, I guess. Or maybe not acknowledge that they noticed. At least not with their immature whistling, X-ray-vision stares, verbal expressions of rawness, and plenty of other things they felt so desperate to scream from their slow-moving cars, or from the well-worn corners that they loved to stand on from sunup to sundown.

"Haaay, sweet lady! Whoooweee!" some of the men shouted as the midday sun forced them to routinely check the sweat on the back of their roasting necks.

Ant and Tone fit right in with that overzealous crowd. Both young, shiny brown, and male, they were just as eager to peel off those two layers of clothing and get naked with the young brown women who walked the hot, springtime streets of St. Louis as the much older men admitted to. But at ages twenty-seven and twenty-eight, respectively, a separation of philosophy was apparent. Ant, while letting Tone drive his 1979 cranberry-colored Chevy, was becoming more creative in his approach to the mating game. In his field of work as an auto mechanic, he had enough thinking time on his hands to come up with a few new lines. Lines that would stop a curious woman in her tracks. Or at least he hoped that they would. So he practiced them. Sometimes to his partner Tone, but mainly to himself, to figure out a perfect rhythm of entrapment, like a young lion in training, leaping through the high grasses of Africa, over and over again.

"Man, I love the springtime!" Tone expressed to his partner, watching everything as they cruised the forever busy Kingshighway Boulevard with the windows rolled down. It was lunch hour, and shapely women were everywhere! Tone was in heaven as he drove, decked out in a bright red St. Louis Cardinals baseball jersey.

Ant, still in his work clothes, a short sleeved denim jumpsuit, didn't allow Tone to drive his car every day. He wanted to make certain he wouldn't look back on the experience as a big mistake.

"Yeah, well, just make sure you pay attention to the road," he warned, protective of his car.

Tone said, "Look, man, your car is in good hands. Aw'ight? Damn! You act like this ride is alive or something."

Ant looked at Tone's dark brown hands on his wood-and-chrome steering wheel and smiled. "She is alive. And her name is Bernadette."

Tone chuckled. "Yeah, that sounds like an old-ass name for her, too. She about twenty years old. That might as well be sixty in human years."

"She in good shape though," Ant countered. "That's why everybody be ridin' me to get in."

"You spent about a million dollars on her," Tone said. "She done had a face lift, lippo-suction, and every damn thing."

"That's ly-po-suction."

"Whatever."

Tone grinned and considered his friend crazy, while catching something interesting on the sidewalk to his right.

"Go 'head, Ant. Say that line you been workin' on to this one?"

Tone was smiling for miles. But he just didn't get it. Ant didn't want to waste his choice words and creativity on just any two legs walking by. He had big plans for his new material. The way he looked at it, it was like having one bullet left inside a six-shooter with a murderer in hot pursuit of his warm body.

Ant was shaking his head before he even looked at the woman.

"Naw, man, you just don't say it to anybody."

Then he looked her over, as she walked down the sidewalk to his right. She was just as shiny brown as he was, and tall. Ant never liked tall women. It was something about the way they walked, almost as if they were falling over; uncoordinated. On the other hand, if they walked tall and straight, they seemed like giants to him, like those Russian and German women in the Olympics of the seventies and eighties that he had watched with his older brothers and uncles. Those extra-long superwomen. Yet, this brown sister walking down Kingshighway was nowhere near that tall! Ant just didn't want to use any of his lines on her. She wasn't climactic enough on the Johnson scale. He didn't feel it for her down low. Or not as strong as he wanted to.

"She too tall anyway," he complained to his partner.

Ant was only five ten, and Tone was even shorter at five nine. But Tone loved tall women! It was all in the long brown legs, feeding his freaky visions of tree climbing.

"Man, go 'head and say it, and stop making excuses. She right there. Look at her," he challenged.

Ant took another peek at her. She was right there; he could probably reach out and touch her arm with his right hand, which rested atop his passenger-side door. She was even close to their age, a young working woman. They could see it in her face and in her outfit: a conservative blue knee-high dress with soft leather shoes and flesh-tone stockings. Even her hairstyle was conservative, straightened and curled at the edges with no artificial coloring. She had class and full maturity. However, she was walking as if she had a schedule to hold but was trying her best to ignore it. In fact, her pace was too calculated, almost as if she was expecting someone to stop her. That was the only thing that made Ant want to talk to her. She seemed ripe for practice.

Before he realized it, he opened his mouth in her direction while his Chevy eased alongside her with his friend Tone, full of expectations, at the wheel.

"Hey, miss?" Ant waited to catch her eyes, like a fish to the worm. Only then would he finish his precious line. "You wanna make a trade with me?"

That's when his heart rate increased. He had done his part, and now she had to do hers, while Tone prepared to burst in half from all of the tension involved.

First she looked at the car, which had a brand-new paint job and shiny chrome rims. She just knew he wasn't referring to trading that car for something. It looked as if they had put a lot of work into it. Yet, she was curious. Game bait.

"A trade? Trade for what?" she asked him.

"A piece of me for a piece of you."

The world just stopped and stood still for a second, like a dancer on freeze. Then she smiled, shook her head, and decided that it was time to cross the street.

Tone looked into Ant's dejected face and burst into laughter.

"I told you that shit wasn't gon' work!"

"Aw, man, first you said it was genius."

"Genius? I don't even use that word. So you know I didn't say that. You told yourself that shit."

Ant was disappointed. It was the wrong woman for his line. But at least he got her attention long enough to say it. And she smiled. What did that mean? Was she at least impressed, or simply amused? Nevertheless, she had walked away, and his originality was wasted.

"Take me back to work," he pouted. "I'll drop you off on Grand."

Tone continued to laugh and went on to tease him. "Awww, the little girl mad now 'cause his...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0684856115
• ISBN 13: 9780684856117
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Van Ditmar Boeken, VDB Sales; sales@vanditmar.nl; ; Hondiuslaan 44; Utrecht; 3528 AB; Niederlande