The One That Got Away by C. Kelly Robinson Read Free Book Online

family tree.
    â€œI know you can do this,” he replied, scratching suddenly at his neck. Still climbing the learning curve, he wasn’t yet expert at this big brother role. Given that their mother had never properly introduced them, he’d known his half sister for only ten months.
    Gripping his hands suddenly, Zora glanced at the worn carpet below. “I just wish that she would be supportive,” she said, her own voice lowered now. “I still can’t believe she wouldn’t come tonight.”
    â€œWell, just remember—her problem’s with me, not you,” Tony said, embracing his sister in a gentle hug. For a day at the most he’d hoped their mother would break down and drive in from Schaumburg to support Zora. Of course, that would have also meant meeting him face-to-face for the first time in thirty-two years, so he wasn’t surprised when she took a pass. This was the same woman who handed him to Wayne Gooden, three weeks after his birth, and returned to her own husband. Zora’s father.
    A surge of adrenaline shot through Tony as he held his sister. Before the day Zora called to introduce herself last year, blithely mentioning she’d enrolled at Loyola in order to be near him, Tony had never felt a protective instinct toward another human being. All of the significant females in his childhood had been older, self-possessed women—his grandmother, his stepmother, Stephanie, and his three aunts. By baptizing him into the role of Big Brother,Zora had brought a deeper, more complex texture to Tony’s daily life.
    She shrugged her way out of his hug. “All right. Let me get dressed now.”
    He stepped back, snapped his fingers, and pointed toward her confidently. “I’ll be back in five minutes.”
    As Tony paced the perimeter of the seating area, now teeming with laughter, shouting, and tables sagging with food, a doughy brother with dreadlocks tugged at his elbow. Stopping to make conversation, Tony extended his hand. “What’s up, bruh?” As Zora’s publicist and informal manager, he was all about keeping the crowd happy. “You ready to have a good time tonight?”
    The last word had barely left Tony’s mouth before the man yanked him to within an inch of his own lips. “I’ll have a better time,” he said, his beer-spiced halitosis stinging Tony’s nostrils, “if Miss Zora apologizes proper for the way she dissed J. T. Dog.” He looked up at Tony, his upper lip rigid with anger. “You might tell her that. It could save you both a cap in the ass.”

5
    T ony decided not to play along with the would-be hoodlum, turning away as the brother’s threat hung in the air. Not this J. T. Dog shit again. From the moment of Owen’s earlier warning, he’d known he had reason to worry. He’d quickly learned that while the “ghetto life” novel was a booming art form, the market carried a little more risk than writing Harlequin romances.
    Despite the fact Zora had never met him, J. T. Dog’s handlers had convinced him that D. Money, a pivotal character in One of the Boyz, was based on him. Seeing how D. Money was a drug lord who used his profits to buy a rap label, J. T.’s fans assumed this was a reference to similar rumors about him. In hip-hop lit, this was apparently the equivalent of calling out a rival on one of your rap songs. Coming from Zora, Tony figured it felt like a double insult to J. T. Dog; here she was telling women to exercise power over the no-good men in their lives, all while exercising public power over J. T.’s own image.
    Tony also suspected J.T. Dog’s anger at Zora was fueled by their respective book sales. Boyz had knocked J. T.’s recent novel, Gots to Get Mine, out of the number one bestseller spot at black bookstores across the country. With each passing week, as Boyz took a larger slice of the urban novel pie, J. T.’s