Page 9 of Pulse of True Soulmates

I accepted her offer before I sat at one of the free chairs at the dining room table. “How long did it take for you to train him? Those communicator buttons are cool.”

“Oh, I trained him on the buttons, and it took about six months. It’s an ongoing thing. For him to be my service dog, it took about two years. That is an ongoing thing as well. My parents paid for an organization to train him,” she told us.

My mother asked her how much the training cost. When she said twenty thousand dollars, I almost choked on the lemonade that I drank out of the cup. “Damn, it really cost that much? Yeah, I would have taught him to communicate with me too. He would hold all of my deepest secrets.”

They both laughed, but I was serious as fuck. I’d sit on my couch with a glass of Yak, he’d have a bowl of water, and we’d chop it the hell up. “Boy, shut up,” my mama said with a laugh. “Aeon, baby, we’re going to get out of your hair. Give Declan your phone number so we can check in with you.”

I tilted my head with tight eyes in my mama’s direction and sucked my teeth. I couldn’t let Aeon know I wanted her number, so I had to act like my mama was doing too damn much. Like I said, Princetta got what she wanted. Aeon didn’t fuss with my mama; she just asked me for my phone. She called herself from it once she put her number in. We said our goodbyes, including Midnite, and we were on our way.

“I appreciate you, Mama.” We were on our way to her house. When we got there, I’d have a little bit of time to help her put this stuff up.

With a smirk, my mother said, “Oh, I already know. You will never be able to get anything past ya mama.” She was right. It’d been like that since I was a little boy. She was the best wing woman today.

A LITTLE TIME LATER . . .

“I told your ass to not get that shit on your foot. You wanted to think you were tough shit. Now you’re in here crying, about to pass the fuck out,” Derrick fussed at his wife.

You couldn’t do shit but laugh at his goofy ass. He and his wife finally brought their asses in here for their matching tattoos. The first day that they were supposed to come in, something came up that forced them to cancel. After I finished their matching tattoos, Iesha decided that she wanted a foot tat to match her best friend, Leydi’s. I warned her ass about the pain. She said that she could take it, but now her ass was in here crying.

“Shut the hell up, Derrick, before I get out of this seat and beat your ass,” she said through sniffles. “You get on my damn nerves. You gonna talk yourself right out of some pussy.”

When they got like this, all you could do was grin and bear it. I normally wore earbuds, but I wanted to talk to their ignorant asses today. “Aye, Iesha, my mama thinks your ass is pregnant.”

Derrick let out a hearty laugh. “I told her ass she was pregnant. That’s my boy for sure.”

“Ain’t nobody pregnant, Derrick.” She waved him off. “Why does she think that?”

When I told her it was because of those black forest cakes, she rolled her eyes. Derrick shook his head, then said, “Her ass is in denial like a muthafucka. This dick knows when his pussy is pregnant. I’ll let her stay in denial though. When that belly starts to grow, she’s gonna know something.” His focus turnedfrom her to me. “Aye, I was over Auntie’s house the other day, and she was talking about some girl named Aeon to Unc.”

Leave it to my mama to tell my business. “Man, Aeon is this chick we met a lil over a week ago in Sams. Her ass was in there laying on the floor with a damn dog on her chest. My mama made me stay with her until she was ready to get up. I did, then I helped her get the shit she needed, then we took her home.”

“Oh my God! Was she having a seizure?” Iesha asked. I knew she wanted to be included in the conversation so she would have something other than the pain to think about.

I shook my head before I sprayed a paper towel to wipe the tattoo to get a clearer work area. “Nah, she wasn’t. She said she has some shit called POTS. Something about the condition makes her heart rate go up more than other people’s when she does everyday activities. When it does, she has to sit or lay down to get it down. I guess her dog, Midnite, can sense the shit and help her,” I told them.

“Did you look the shit up?” Julian asked. He worked on a client in the seat that was right next to me. It was a big piece that he’d been working on for at least three hours now.

When I told him that I hadn’t, Derrick pulled out his phone. “Let’s look that shit up.” He pressed on his phone screen for a minute or so. “Alright, this article says that it stands for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. Shit, that’s a lot to say. Yeah, it says that the heart rate increases abnormally from regular shit like standing up. Damn, I wouldn’t want to have this shit.”

I lifted the needle gun from Iesha’s foot. I took in what he said. “Is there like a cure, or is it like a forever thing?”

It took him a minute before he answered me. Iesha was still squirming in the seat like someone was killing her. It was almost done. “From what I’m reading, it seem like it’s a forever thing. There’s different kinds and shit.” He looked up at me. “Did she tell you what kind she has?”

“Nah. When we talk, we don’t really talk about that. It must be like bad though since she needs a service dog and shit.” I thought about Midnite and chuckled. “Her dog uses those communicator buttons. He better since she paid twenty thousand dollars to have him trained.”

The buzzing from Julian’s tattoo gun stopped. “Say the fuck what? I know you just didn’t say twenty bands.”

I chuckled. “I did. He a cool lil black lab though.”

“So, we just going to skip over the part when you said that y’all talk? Do y’all text, talk on the phone, or video calls?” Derrick asked.

After I pulled the needle up because I was done, I responded. “We do all three. Why?

“Why haven’t you asked her out yet?” Julian asked. When I asked him how he knew if I wanted to ask her out, he gave me a knowing look. “So, are we going to act like I don’t know you? Declan, you would never do all that calling, video chatting, and texting if you weren’t feeling her. Stop fuckin’ playing. What’s holding you back from asking her out?”

He was right. I never wasted time with bitches that I couldn’t see myself being with. Aeon was cool as fuck, sweet, funny. I could tell from some of the stories she told me about herself that she was loyal. There was definitely sexual tension between us. She was a slim girl, but her ass was thick with a jiggle when she walked. All of that was important when you thought about the woman that you wanted to be with. If we got to the point where we had sex and that pussy was what I thought it would be, her ass was going to be stuck like fuck with me. “You right. I don’t know what’s holding me back.”

“You think that POTS shit is holding you back?” Derrick asked. “From what this shit on here says, it’s manageable. There’re just certain things that she’s gonna have to be carefulwith.” He hadn’t stopped reading whatever he was reading on his phone.

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