Actor Blair Underwood’s steamy new novel

A lilac business card materialized on the table in front of me.  Casanegra Productions, read the black embossed script, which I could see was modeled after the script on the Casablanca movie poster.  Classy.  I also recognized the name on the card:  Devon Biggs.  He was from Serena’s old neighborhood, a friend she and Shareef had known since elementary school.  Apparently, Biggs was the gatekeeper to her empire.

“Call him today.  Tell him I told you to call,” Serena said. 

“Nah, girl.  I was just playing.  I’m doing fine.”

It didn’t feel right.  Don’t get me wrong:  I gave up the luxury of pride long ago.  But both times I’d met Devon Biggs, back when I was hanging with Serena, he’d looked at me with a combination of pity and scorn that set my teeth on edge.  I’d chew my leg off before I called that smug SOB.

“Don’t hurt my feelings, T.  I’ve got two or three things popping I could use you for.  Speaking parts, too.  Good parts, and I need someone who can fight.  You have to audition, but this is the short line—and I know you hate lines.  Talk to Dev.”

A snap of her finger, and she could change my life.  Maybe it was a combination of my usual insomnia the night before, an empty stomach and the pile of unpaid bills stuffed in my kitchen drawer, but I wanted to hug Serena like a sister right then.  I don’t know why the hell I didn’t.

There I go, wishing again.

I was down to one of my last cards, since I’d been leaving them all over town.  In my hand was the card I was saving for my chance encounter with Steven Spielberg outside of Mel’s Drive-In or Spago, but instead I gave it to Serena.  Nothing special—just my name, head shot, cell number and P.O. Box.  Tennyson Hardwick—Actor at Large.  

Serena smiled when she saw it.  If I’d had more to spare, I would have given her a dozen to coax out that smile again.

“You look like you’ve got your own stories, Mighty Afrodite.”

I knew Serena would never take the bait, but for some reason I gave it a try.

Serena lived far behind her eyes, and always had.  Sure enough, she only shrugged as if she hadn’t heard me.

I was hungry as hell by the time the waitress came to ask what I wanted, but I noticed that Serena’s plate was empty and her check was already waiting, so I only ordered coffee.  I didn’t want Serena to think I expected her to sit while I ate my meal, and I didn’t want to be sitting alone at the table when she got up and walked back into her life.  I didn’t have room for any more empty spaces, not that day.

“How’s your dad?” Serena said once the waitress was gone.

I felt my face harden into steel.  I wasn’t going to talk about my father, especially on an empty stomach.  “Same old same old.  What’s up with your sister?”

I got steel in return.  “Same shit, different decade.”

Small-talk had never been our forte, I remembered. 

“Do you know how to use those espresso machines, T.?”

“Why?  You got some restaurants you’re hiring for, too?”

Serena gave me the finger.  The gesture would have been coarse from anyone else, but I appreciated how slender her finger was, how smooth the skin, how delicate the pearl coloring on her nail; it seemed more like a bawdy promise.  Serena took that same finger and dabbed from a pool of syrup on her plate, then gently kissed the pad clean.

“Because, T., I was thinking…somebody I work with gave me one of those machines—a housewarming gift.  And it’s been sitting up on my kitchen counter for six months because people I came with on can’t even pronounce `espresso.’  And if you’re not too in love with that cup of coffee you just ordered, maybe you could skip it and make yourself a cup at my place.  Like a virgin voyage.”

It took my mind a second to register that she had just invited me to her place.  I expected her to break out into a laugh, to own up to the joke. 

She didn’t.  She was waiting for my answer.

As if a sane man could utter any answer except one.

Gabe could barely contain his smirk as I held the door open for Serena.  She walked out into the mid-morning sunshine, brightening the day.  “You take care, Ten,” Gabe said with a wink.

“It’s not what you think, man.”

But at that moment, I wasn’t sure what it was.  And I didn’t care.

Outside, Serena and I almost ran headfirst into a man who looked like he might have been a linebacker in his younger days; broad from the neck down.  Serena’s not an inch more than five-foot-two, and in his shadow, she looked like an acorn that had dropped from a tree.  The man’s smallish eyes were locked on Serena’s face.  Whether he meant to or not, he was blocking our path.

“Hey,” the man said, dumbstruck except for the single word. 

“I get that a lot,” Serena said.  “It’s not me.  We just look alike.”

The man raised his pointing finger, his head drooping down so low to the side that it almost rested on his shoulder.  “Oh, uh-uh,” he said, not fooled.  “Afrodite.  Hey, it’s Afrodite!”  He was shouting, raising the alarm like it was his civic duty.

Back when I knew Serena, she was still dusting off the asphalt of Crenshaw and Jefferson, taking diction and acting classes in a quest for refinement so Hollywood would see her as more than a famous face with a lucrative demographic.  In The Jungle, if someone had stepped up on her like this fool, Afrodite would have cussed him out, then   kneed his groin if he didn’t take the hint.  But not this day.  I felt Serena shrink against me as if she thought she could vanish.

Yeah, something was wrong.

“Hey, playa, give us some room,” I said.  The man had a good four inches on me, but no one would have known that by my eyes.  “My lady says you made a mistake.”

The man was ten years my senior, probably in his mid-forties, but he was still thick and solid.    I’d much rather negotiate with a two-hundred-thirty-pound man than fight.  Wouldn’t anybody?  But I’d already made up my mind that if he didn’t take two steps back to let us by, I was going to break his instep.  Something about Serena’s trusting weight against me made me feel like taking chances.     

A light went out in the man’s eyes.  I could see that he was a big man who sometimes forgot his size, and he hadn’t meant anything by it.  He backed up.  “My bad.  She sure looks like her, though.  You got a twin, baby-girl.”

I took Serena’s hand as she led me down Sunset, where her downy white Escalade was parked at a meter.  I knew it from the rear plate: CASANEG.  I felt her tiny fingers tremor against mine.

“It’s not like the old days, Serena.  You need a minder.” 

“I got one.  He’s off today.”

“Then you need two.  You can’t be out alone.”

As she zapped off her car alarm and the taillights flashed a greeting, Serena looked up at me with irritation and something else that made my stomach queasy.  A shadow cut her face in half, and a single brown-green eye, glimmering in the sun, was searching me in a way she never had.  “You looking for that job too?” 

“I’m not working today.”

“Who said you were, Tennyson?”  Hearing her voice wrapped around my Christian name made me remember that my mother had named me for a poet. 

A wall of heat rose with her as she stepped onto her Escalade’s running board to bring us to eye-level.  There was only one thing to do:  Right there on the street in front of ten other witnesses, I kissed Serena Johnston as though I had the right. 

Excerpted from “Casanegra: A Tennyson Hardwick Novel” by Blair Underwood, Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes. Copyright © June 2007 by Blair Underwood, Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes. Excerpted by permission of Atria Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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