“Oh, girl. You don’t have to be so formal with me,” my mother’s voice booms through the line. And my nerves.
“But I do, Mother,” I object with a sarcastic tone. “This is my business and I’m at a client’s house.” I leave out the part where he was about to get a happy ending.
My mother still refuses to take my business venture seriously. She seems to find a way to downplay what I’m building and the condescension is starting to grate on my nerves.
Luca steps closer, his blatant erection be damned. “Is that Mom? Splendid! I’ve been dying to meet her.”
I grab the vacuum hose and swat him with it. “Get you and your dick fifty feet away from me!” I whisper-command.
“I’m sorry,” my mom continues, oblivious. “My big girl with her little business and whatnot.”
See?Little business.
“Mom? Did you need something? I really need to get back to work.”
“Don’t you be rushing me off the phone like I’m nobody!”
“Bertha,” I warn, using her fake name to signal my dwindling patience.
She sucks her teeth. “Clarissa says you haven't RSVP’d for her shower yet. Is everything alright? Can you no longer afford togo since you started this business? Do you need money for a ticket?”
I squeeze my eyes shut, feeling the heat of Luca’s presence and the antagonistic persistence of my mom. “I can pay for a ticket, Mom!”
“Then what is it? We used to do the Vineyard every year when you were kids. It’s going to be just like old times.”
It will not be like old times because Clarissa is a first-class bitch who brags about her beautiful Black life and her beautiful Black love every chance she gets. My mother, however, salivates over it.
“Did you break up with your boyfriend, honey? No one is thinking about that promise you and Clarissa made to be married by thirty anymore. Even if she did win that bet.”
I can’t believe she’d even bring that up.
When you’re raised in a Black church, at least the ones in my neighborhood, you’re fed the idea that becoming someone’s wife is the only thing that matters. They would hold shut-ins and prophecy lines where you literally paid for a husband or fasted for forty days and forty nights just to find one. It was treated as the natural order of things to marry young and throw your entire life away just to be called somebody’s Mrs.
I fell right in line back then, praying to God that I’d be married by thirty. Clarissa and I even made a pact about it. Needless to say, she made good on hers. By the time I hit thirty, my prayers had changed. Matured.
I didn’t necessarily lose the desire for a husband, I just lost the urgency. I wanted to be more for myself before I was forced to share who I am with someone else, or several other someones. My mother, clearly, has never made peace with that.
But as she continues to poke and prod at my reason for not wanting to go to this gender reveal, the petty, competitive fire in my chest finally boils over.
“Hey, so, Mom? I am going to Martha’s Vineyard. I will be bringing a date, and by the way, I’m already married! See you in a few weeks, K? Bye!”
I hang up with dramatic flair and immediately want to burst into tears. But I save those for my Stand-Ins. This was not at all how I planned on telling my mother about my marriage. Or my impending divorce.
I turn back to the shirtless, smirking man standing in the center of the room. I let out a rough breath and offer a look that is half-delirious and half-deadly.
“So. About this marriage,” I say, cautiously.
Luca smiles. “Yeah. About that.”
Chapter Twenty-Two:
Offside, Overtures + the Las Vegas Pact
Luca
Ihave to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from grinning like a lunatic. Since Aspen walked back into my life, I’ve been spiraling, trying to engineer a way to get back into her good graces. I’d considered every desperate, questionable tactic in the book. I thought about “accidentally” bursting a pipe in her apartment to force her to move in with me temporarily. I even had a fleeting, dark thought about locking her in my house until she finally agreed to hear me out.
Then I remembered how many Netflix specials begin exactly like that. Usually with a man staring at a camera or talking to the detective saying, “No one was supposed to get hurt.” So, I decided against that particular felony.
