Page 157 of Duty and Desire
And Mo smiled back.
Much later,Mo stood on Lottie’s back porch, feeling his jaw get tight.
Lottie was upstairs, horsing around with her sugared-up nephews.
The entirety of the “Hot Bunch” and “Rock Chicks,” including Blanca, Eddie and Hector’s mother, and two gay dudes named Tod and Stevie, had arrived, and they were having what could only be described as a party.
It wasn’t a rip-roarin’ one, loud and obnoxious.
But Lottie had given them the cue that they needed to be business as usual, so Mo was guessing this was that.
He was also guessing, since the more of them who came over, the more business as usual they acted, the more herself she seemed, this was exactly what she needed.
What was loud and obnoxious was the TV he could hear from the neighbors’ place.
If Lottie was out there, trying to have a moment of quiet to find some peace, it couldn’t happen because her neighbors seemed to want to hear their TV not only from any corner of their yard, but any corner of any of their neighbors’ yards.
“Yo.”
He turned his head and saw Eddie step out on the porch with him.
“Yo,” he replied.
Eddie came to stand next to him and it took a millisecond for his brows to draw together and his head to turn toward the neighbors’ yard.
“So this is gonna be you, not Tex?” Mo asked.
Eddie’s attention came to Mo.
“Learn now, that man is a woman’s man,” Eddie shared. “After she lost it earlier, Tex is strugglin’ with bein’ five feet from her. Any other time, he’d be out here. This time, no fuckin’ way.”
Mo nodded.
He’d gotten that impression from Tex.
Though anyone who’d heard anything about Tex MacMillan knew that was the way already.
“She’s deep for you,” Eddie pointed out.
“Good to know, since I’m there too,” he muttered.
“Noticed that,” Eddie replied in a mutter.
Mo didn’t mind he did since he wasn’t hiding it.
Eddie continued.
“I probably don’t need to tell you we’ll put the hurt on you, you do that to her.”
That message had already been made clear.
“Nope,” Mo stated, hearing the channel change next door, now it was some baseball game, then he could swear he heard a door close.
“And—”
“Hang on,” Mo said, turned, walked across the porch, into the house, through the people in the house, out the front door, across the lawn, to the neighbors’ front door.
He knocked just as he felt Eddie come up behind him.
