For The Love of Bilal

{one}

“Ohhhhhhhh girllllll,”

The first thing that I thought was 'Are my eyes deceiving me? Or is that a sweet and tall glass of hot chocolate ten feet away from me?'

A man so close that I could have reached out and touched him if I was as talented as Elastic Girl.

Good lord it had to be because I knew that man. Certainly I knew that man over there posted up against the wall like he had no care in the world. I knew those long and B2 colored dreads, that strong jaw, and smooth brown skin. And those full lips of his that appeared to have been especially sculpted by God when he'd set out to make the Beautiful People. Beautiful, yes indeed he was as he stood there beneath those oddly matched colored lights. The very lights that seemed to dance around his handsome features as if they were asking him to spare a moment of his sweet time to look into their pretty little orbs.

And I enamored by the mere image of him heard the buzzing of sweet honey bees in my ear like Janie when Johnny had dared to lean over and give her a forbidden kiss. My palms grew sweaty and the neckline of the scoop necked blouse I wore didn't seem to be low enough because Lawd I was fainting underneath all that heat.

Amanda, my bestfriend since the very first day of hell that I liked to call college pushed my hand away. I’d managed to clamp my claws onto her shoulder in the process of ogling down Mr. Fine As Hell when I knew that she had a thing about people touching her for too long. It was a pet peeve of hers for someone to allow there hand to sit on a certain area of her body for too long. She gave me that look, her wide racooned rimmed eyes turned into slits and her lips pulled into a straight line, even though my hand had long since fell to my side in it's sweatiness.

“I want to know what in the absolute hell you think is so fine that y-----“ her head moved from side to side, and she angled her body in a way that obviously indicated she was on the search for somebody. Her shiny black slip of a dress moved with her, her long weave did too and when her eyes settled on something directly in my line of vision she touched my shoulder, no...she slapped my shoulder, “Oh damn. “

What’s that the preacher told the church the week before? Something about your Eye Gate getting in the way of your salvation and stirring up hell for you?

My eyes were certainly doing that to me. And my hell was in the form of a man who reeked so much suave that he had no need for the foolish quality that those ten years his junior refered to as swag. He didn't need swag...he had air's as my grandma liked to call it. Good 'airs'

“Thank you.” I replied smugly as I held my bare arm out with my palm leveled upward to the ceiling, the many lights of the nightlight, orange,blue, green and red danced across the light beige of that very palm, “now give me sum.”

Give me sum as in give me my props for having scoped out someone as fine as him.

“Take twenty,” she breathed back with a quick slap on my wrist instead of my palm, her eyes locked onto the laughing man, who was surrounded by other laughing men equally as handsome.

But Lord not as handsome as my Bilal.

We both stood there practically drooling for a few minutes while the clubbers around us swayed and grinded to the slow tunes. Jeremih crooned from the surround sound system of the tiny dinky club and goodness those men in there made the most of it. Clubs weren’t my scene, hell I didn’t even want it to be my scene but as celebration for Just Because me and Amanda had decided to check the area out.

It was Friday.

We were off.

We had nothing to do.