The Things We Do for Love Read online

  Copyright © 2008 by Xavier Knight

  Reading Group Guide copyright © 2008 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: March 2008

  ISBN: 978-0-446-51190-2

  Contents

  Raves for the Novels of

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue

  Reading Group Guide

  Raves for the Novels of

  XAVIER KNIGHT/C. KELLY ROBINSON

  The Strong Silent Type

  “Compelling.”

  —Booklist

  “Remarkable . . . Four-and-a-half out of five stars . . . I absolutely loved the characters and the . . . mystery and suspense.”

  —RAWSISTAZ Book Club

  The Perfect Blend

  “Fast-moving, true-to-life, and most entertaining . . . Robinson is a wonderfully talented writer who captured my attention on page one and kept it until the very end.”

  —Kimberla Lawson Roby, New York Times bestselling author of Too Much of a Good Thing

  “A winner! Terrific and entertaining, with a rhythm that draws you in . . . Robinson is truly one of the most gifted new writers in the industry today.”

  —Victoria Christopher Murray, bestselling author of A Sin and a Shame

  “A perfect blend of humor, drama, and emotion.”

  —Gloria Mallette, bestselling author of Shades of Jade

  and The Honey Well

  “One read you will not want to miss . . . What a story! . . . Robinson flaunts his literary skills and spins a tale of love and family that is emotionally riveting and highly entertaining.”

  —Tracy Price-Thompson, bestselling author of Chocolate Sangria and Black Coffee

  No More Mr. Nice Guy

  “Robinson handles his subject matter with plenty of attitude. As in his debut, brisk plotting, snappy vernacular, and resilient characters keep things entertaining . . . this spunky title will please fans of E. Lynn Harris and Omar Tyree.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Highly recommended.”

  —Book-Remarks.com

  Between Brothers

  “Not since Spike Lee’s School Daze and the much-loved sitcom A Different World has the black experience on campus been this intriguing and, at times, funny . . . Between Brothers is a spirited tale.”

  —Essence

  “Robinson shows a willingness to take on complex social issues, and his storytelling skills could give Omar Tyree a run for the money.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Good, resourceful characters fight back in a vivid narrative . . . a refreshing variety of characters in a low-key redemptive tale.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Robinson has skillfully painted three-dimensional characters that reflect our rich, often misunderstood diversity. Rarely have I read such real, true-to-life portrayals of middle-class black men.”

  —William July, author of Brothers, Lust and Love, and Understanding the Tin Man

  “An exceptionally well-written and consummate novel of character studies . . . an engaging, compelling story set in the very real and contemporary world of the black community.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  Dedicated to the memories of Victor Robinson and Winzle Wilson, beloved uncle and grandfather

  Acknowledgments

  An odd sensation hums inside as I write the acknowledgments page for my sixth published novel. Am I thanking everyone as “Xavier” or as “C. Kelly”? I guess at the end of the day, I am simply God’s creation, brought into the world through Chester and Sherry. So as I try to follow the KISS rule, here goes.

  I give thanks to Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior, for giving me the opportunity to now write books that openly portray characters struggling to reconcile their human frailties with their faith. My career in publishing has often reminded me to lean on my faith in you, but there is no greater privilege than to use my God-given gift for your glory.

  Kyra, my partner through so many growing pains, a wonderful mother to Miss K, for constant support and love from day one. Kennedi, you are a walking, giggling, and beautiful answer to prayer, and Daddy now knows that no book can compare to the joys you bring! Alexis, for paving the way to parenthood for “Uncle C and Auntie Ky”—we are so proud to see you growing into such a talented little lady! To Mom, Dad, Russ, Barrett, and Shelli, what can I say that I haven’t said in past publications? I love y’all! Russ, thank you for sharing a journey that opened my eyes and helped inspire this story. My thanks for years of love and support, as always, go out to all members of the Robinson, Alford, and Grimes families.

  Pastors Daryl and Vanessa Ward of the Omega Baptist Church, thank you for providing spiritual nourishment to our entire church family, even during a crisis that may have stopped other pastors in their tracks. Many thanks as well to the hundreds of Omega members and personal friends across the country who continue to support my work.

  My career has continued in large part thanks to the ongoing support of book clubs, journalists, readers, and publishers. You know who you are, and you are not forgotten. To the dozens of authors who helped welcome me into the industry, you are always in my thoughts and prayers. Some of you are still riding the bestseller lists with what looks like ease (I know, it’s never as simple as it appears), while others like me have faced temporary or even permanent “sabbaticals.” May we never forget that as long as we write our best work and pursue our dream, we win regardless of what the “in crowd” or chattering classes say.

  My specific thanks to those in the industry who specifically helped get this book into your hands. Elaine Koster, for loyal service and insightful advice. Karen Thomas, for believing in my talent. Latoya Smith and the Grand Central Publishing team, for having a little patience when the pace of life keeps me from answering your questions and reminders as quickly as I should. Victoria Christopher Murray, your enthusiastic validation of this book, when it was in proposal form, was clear proof that I was on the right track. Kimberla Lawson Roby and Jacquelin Thomas, thank you both for recent exchanges that helped me realize that I was “gone but not forgotten” during my vacat
ion from the literary scene.

  Finally, if you have purchased this book, thank you for spending precious dollars on the fruits of my labor. May you be entertained, enlightened, and most importantly, blessed!

  Prologue

  In the days after the truth about their son was revealed—the type of truth that takes lives and destroys marriages—Dionne and Jesse Law had plenty of time to dwell on memories. Happy, humorous, heartwarming memories, the ones that keep you moving forward when your heart asks if it could just stop beating and be done with it all, please. Though neither spoke a word to the other in those darkest, bleakest hours, they each drew on one shared moment in time.

  Jesse Law and Dionne Favors met three times before either had a romantic thought about the other. Their second run-in occurred in the community bathroom of Truth Hall, one of the freshman women’s dorms on the campus of Dionne’s alma mater, Howard University. It was eight minutes after five on a dark fall Thursday morning. For her part, Dionne, who had been awake all of three minutes when she stepped into the shower room, wore a loose, rumpled housecoat painted with images of clouds and sunlight, a favorite she’d received from her father on her fifteenth birthday.

  Jesse, on the other hand, was buck naked.

  “Ohmigod! E-excuse me!” Stumbling backward, preparing to run from the shower room, Dionne squeezed her eyes tight and clawed desperately for the nearest towel rack. She knew it had been right there, just to her left when she first stepped onto the shower area’s greasy tile floor. She hoped it hadn’t gone anywhere.

  “Whoa, sis!” The naked man’s shout told Dionne she’d missed the mark, a hint confirmed by the sudden sensation of flight as the grip of her flip-flops gave way and her feet went out from under her. Her eyes still shut—she wasn’t prepared for another flash of the brother’s forbidden if admirable birthday suit—Dionne instinctively held her hands out, hoping to slow her fall.

  “I got you.” The mystery pervert’s voice had a hoarse, scratchy sound, and it was literally in her ear now. It helped, though, that his tone was so calm and soothing. Realizing she had never smashed into the tile, Dionne slowly released the pressure she’d exerted on her right eyelid. Once she had a limited view of her “savior’s” face—his eyes and nose were plenty—she stopped, keeping the other eye slammed shut.

  When he had her fully right side up, the brother took a step back, his eyes full of laughter as he peered at Dionne through the humid, steamy air engulfing them. “You’re okay, right?”

  “Um, yes, yes, um, yes.” Dionne scolded herself as she nodded her head like an obedient child, one eye still closed and her arms folded as if she were the one showing off her goods right now. She just wanted this . . . thug . . . to get to stepping and get off the dorm’s premises. As a senior resident assistant who had never once entertained a male in her room, Dionne took great pride enforcing the dorm’s rules about fraternization. All men had to be off the premises by midnight, and in recent years security cameras had been placed throughout the halls to ensure that violators and their hostesses were captured and appropriately penalized.

  For most of the administration, the curfew was simply a quaint device to encourage respect between the freshman males and females, but Dionne liked to think that anything she did to dampen her peers’ sex lives was to their spiritual benefit. Many of these girls who currently had little use for God would someday fall to their knees, say the gospel prayer, and walk the aisle of a church. If she could minimize their fornication, at least they’d have a little less sin weighing them down on that special day.

  All the more reason why she had every reason to be disgusted and indignant with this show-off who’d accosted her, treating himself to a shower in the girls’ bathroom just because he could. Dionne knew the type; not only had he probably spent the night banging headboards with some misguided coed, he was happy to further flaunt his “creeping” abilities by rinsing himself off in plain sight of everyone, including women like her who respected themselves.

  Dionne decided she had no business cowering like some wallflower in front of this brother. He was in the wrong, not her, and it was time to act like it. “Do you have a towel?” she asked suddenly, snapping the words purposefully.

  “Aww,” the trifling brother replied, his tone taking on a rebellious edge. “I’m not harming your virgin eyes, am I?”

  His perceptive language caught Dionne off guard and she inhaled sharply, unable to breathe until she heard him turn and grab something off the very rack she’d swung for and missed. “I’m decent now, beautiful,” he said, pointing to the beach towel wrapped snugly around his hips.

  “You have no business being in this facility at this hour, least of all in the bathroom,” Dionne said, an index finger aimed toward the man’s Adam’s apple. She had both eyes open now, and kept her tone steady and firm while fixing her gaze—for the most part—to his light brown eyes, high cheekbones, and thick, tapered eyebrows. “Whose room are you staying in?”

  “Hey, baby,” the brother said, fanning the air with his hands. “Be cool, okay? You don’t need to worry about that. Look, I’m not even a student at Howard, all right? I wasn’t hip to this curfew business in the first place.”

  “You’re not a student?” Dionne nearly took a step back in self-defense. There had been rapes in the dorms before, primarily by men from outside the HU community, vagrants who had broken, entered, and done unspeakable things. Dionne had gotten up early this morning to meet an evangelism team over in Southeast DC; she had no intention of becoming a statistic today.

  Reading the anxiety on the sister’s face, Jesse had raised his hands over his head. “It’s not that kind of party,” he said, his voice lowered further. “Seriously, all you need to do is let me roll out of here ASAP. My tour bus hits the road in an hour. I miss it, my manager will kill me.”

  Dionne first cracked a smile, both relieved by the brother’s assurances of innocence and amused by his claim of having a “tour bus,” but then the stranger’s familiar features finally hit her. “You’re kidding,” she said, her arms crossed and her insides frosting over again. “Are you Jesse Law?”

  He grudgingly assured her he was, and Dionne found herself reliving the previous week, when every “worldly” girl she’d known chattered on about the young hottie the Homecoming Committee secured for the week’s biggest concert. At the time, Jesse Law was an undeniable star—as he and Dionne faced off in the shower, two of his recent singles were perched on Billboard’s R&B Top 10—but he wasn’t exactly keeping Usher up at night. His albums reliably went platinum, his videos got play on both BET and MTV, but odds were that wouldn’t be true five years from now. Whether Jesse Law realized it or not, his songs—and from what Dionne could see, the boy himself—just weren’t all that special. Like most church girls, she had fallen as a Howard freshman for one of his early singles (“I Got It All”), but had found his musical charms much easier to resist than true-but-twisted talents, such as Prince or R. Kelly.

  Having mentally cut the brother down to size even as her eyes flitted over his hairy barrel chest, broad shoulders, and tight waistline, Dionne pulled her housecoat tighter around her. “I’ll make you a deal, Brother Law—”

  He cleared his throat, twitched as if annoyed. “Brother?”

  Dionne cracked a smile, glad to feel the balance of power finally shift. “Come on, Jesse, it hasn’t been that long since you stepped foot inside a church, has it?” Around the time she bought his first CD, she’d been into Jesse Law just enough to know that he was the baby brother of the Laws, one of the most talented families in gospel music. A trio of his older sisters—predictably named the Law Sisters—had recorded and toured the country regularly for the past fifteen years, and his older twin brothers, Larry and Harry, spent the Eighties giving the Winans a run for their money before Larry left to pastor a Nashville church. “I know you haven’t forgotten your church home training,” she said, her tone playful, although she was serious.

  Jesse had lost pa
tience with this sister. Before she’d signaled her knowledge of his family history, he’d viewed baby girl with a charitable eye. She looked a hot mess at the moment—her rumpled housecoat looked like it had been stored in a time capsule, and her misshapen pink shower cap was proof this girl had no boyfriend to impress—but she was tall, long-legged, robustly built without being overweight, and her piercing brown eyes had an intriguing power. Then, of course, there’d been the glimpse of breast and nipple she’d inadvertently flashed when she lost her step. Her spiritual taunting, however, drained such lovely sensations from Jesse’s memory bank. She didn’t know him like that; he was a hot second from pulling rank and telling her to get out of his way. “You letting me go or not, Miss—”

  “Favors,” Dionne replied, extending a hand as she heard her parents’ northern Tennessee accents reflected in her own. “Sister Dionne Favors. The deal I’m offering, Jesse, is that I’ll let you go your merry way if you’ll let me pray with you. Promise I’ll make it quick.”

  Jesse cursed under his breath, then ran both hands through his fine waves of jet-black hair, which were cut into a high, rounded fade. He didn’t have time for this silliness; not only would it be a pain to call for a cab from an undesirable part of DC, but he knew the girls he’d spent the night with were still in their room awaiting his professions of love, and that would require a few minutes of finessing itself. Eager as he was to bolt past Dionne, though, some force—either the God whose existence he now doubted, or his stepmother’s loving influence—took hold of him, told him to humor this square but cute girl. “Go for it,” he said, taking her hands.

  As they drew closer, Dionne felt the tight brown curls atop her head dampen beneath her shower cap, but she ignored the sweat beading on her forehead, plowing into her prayer. “Lord,” she said, suddenly feeling self-conscious about the deepness of her rich alto voice, “we thank you for the very real talents you have blessed Brother Jesse with. We know that you gave him those talents, along with such a blessed and spiritual family, Lord, for a reason. Father, help Jesse to eventually see that you’ve called him to do more than shake his butt on stage and sing about the flesh. Show Jesse his way, Lord, so he can serve you in a way that makes you, as well as his family, proud. Amen.”