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As I sank down into the bed, reality fell on my shoulders like a ton of bricks. My best friend was my husband’s mistress. While I had been crying on her shoulder, taking her advice and appreciating her attentiveness, I was the one who had it twisted. Not her. Not Titus. Me. They knew exactly what they were doing and were content on stabbing me directly in the center of my back with the precision of a surgeon. Careful to keep me alive, but injuring me nonetheless. With this incision, they went for blood, though. Knowing if I ever found this out, it would take all I had in me to keep my head up. I was cut deep. I wondered how long they had been slithering around on their bellies like the snakes that they were.
“No!” I screamed into the closest pillow I could find to muffle the sound. “How could Ronnie
do this to me? I’ve loved her since we were kids! And Titus, there is no way he could love me the way he says he does. I knew he wasn’t true, but with Ronnie?”
The way they played me, they both could have bought and sold me for a quarter, which was how cheap I felt. I’d been played like a twenty-five-cent video game, and they both had the controllers. If it had been any other woman downstairs right at that moment, I’m sure that I would have had the backbone to snap and confront the situation head on, but hearing him say Ronnie’s name in the way that he did threw me for a serious loop. Rhonda was blood.
When Rhonda was sixteen and her mother kicked her out of the house because her stepfather didn’t want her there, it was me that convinced Mama to let Rhonda move in with us. I shared whatever I had with her from that day on. Apparently, I was still sharing things with her, whether I liked it or not!
Eventually, Rhonda’s mother chose her husband over her and never did allow her to come back home. If we were close friends before then, we were practically sisters when she moved in with us. Whenever she had a problem, we both had a problem. I looked at Rhonda’s picture that sat in a frame on my dresser and tried to imagine why she would betray me now? If she thought she was going to ride of into the sunset with my husband, she had another thing coming. I screamed into my pillow.
“Ugh! I can’t believe her! I guess she thinks screwing my husband is worth losing a sister for life. If she thinks for one minute I’m going to sit around and watch her ride off into the sunset with my husband, she has the whole situation messed up. I will leave him on my own terms, not hers or his.”
Situations like this provided a definition for the phrase, “I found love on a one-way street.” I loved them both, but neither apparently shared the same love for me. Someone please tell me how is it that I chose two grimy ass people to love.
After spending a few agonizing minutes in prayer, the uncontrollable anger that had attempted to overtake me gave way to tears that flowed freely for the next few minutes. Feeling as though I were having an out of body experience, I finally found the strength to rise and went into the bathroom to freshen up and rejuvenate my face. I was on autopilot, and with nothing but God holding me up, I managed to put myself back together. I stood at the top of the stairs in my pink negligee, and even though I knew exactly what was holding him up, I collected myself, steadied my voice, and called out, “What’s taking you so long, baby?”
“Uh. Just getting us some wine for you, Shay. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Turning around, feeling like a zombie, I walked back into my room and sat on the bed waiting for my husband to ascend the stairway. For the first time in our entire married life, I felt numb and detached from my own feelings. For one crazy moment, I pictured him bringing Rhonda along, suggesting a threesome. I shook my head to erase the insane thought away. No, this was my game now. My husband and his wench weren’t calling the shots anymore, despite what they might think.
The famous poet, William Blake, said it best – in love, there is a smile of love and there is a smile of deceit. Then there is the smile of smiles in which those two smiles meet.
Chapter 13
Gladys
“Honey Love?”
The warmth from the baritone whisper against my ear sent chills up and down my spine warming my entire soul from the inside out. I stood frozen, trapped in a moment of time, yearning for that moment to transform into years earlier when those two words meant safety and security. I was frozen as the familiar smell of mahogany overtook my senses. I didn’t want to turn around and face the owner of that sensual whisper and delightful warmth, because to look into the eyes of the owner of that voice would send me to a place that would be detrimental to my livelihood as I knew it. Oh, but how I’d craved to go wherever this man’s voice led the way to.
“You’re still as beautiful as you were the last day I laid eyes on you,” he said with his customary sultry swagger. He placed his right hand on the small of my back and gently massaged the tension building there.
Internally (at least it felt internal) my entire body had formed into a beautiful smile – the kind of smile that starts with your cheeks and works its way down to the skin of your feet perking up every muscle along the way. I knew my face had to be perfectly rosy from surprise. I could feel myself slipping into a passionate fury, because this man – the man blowing his hot alcohol-tinged breath into my right ear – I have loved for years, even in his absence. Especially in his absence.
“Maverick?” I took a long breath and slowly turned to face my past lover. And boy was he as stunningly handsome as he was eight years ago at Albany State. Still, I was taken aback by how much he’d changed for the better. Once tall and slender, he was now tall and muscular with stout muscular shoulders showing even through his buttoned-down shirt. He looked as if he could have walked on as a starter for a NFL football team. As I allowed my eyes to slowly survey every inch of his body, the one thought that continued to cross my mind was how he sexy he was.
Seemingly oblivious that being in such close proximity to me was affecting me, his full and sumptuous lips began to move. I knew he was probably speaking words that I needed to hear to hold a normal reunion conversation, but I was tone deaf for the moment. His words were lost in the sauce as I took in another sip of my drink and glanced over his body taking longing surveys of the man that I had once called mine. He was dressed leisurely in a blue buttoned-down shirt, blue jeans and white tennis shoes, but his physique would look fabulous in anything. He was definitely sporting the ensemble he had chosen well. As I nervously held onto my drink, I imagined the mounds of beautiful skin underneath his clothes. Before I knew what had happened, the drink was completely gone, and I was sipping on air. The loud gurgling sound from my straw snapped me back into reality. It was then I could finally hear the words coming out of his mouth.
“Dang girl, I’ll buy you another drink. You don’t have to sit here slurping on that one until all the bubbles are gone out of it.” As he spoke, his dimples sank in on either side of his chiseled face. I melted into the floor. He let out a loud chuckle, and I couldn’t help but join in. I was positive that I had been making a fool out of myself, sitting there mesmerized and gawking over the sexiness that he exuded, without realizing the power he still had over me. I couldn’t help it. The man was fine enough to become somebody’s drug habit. I could see myself becoming addicted to him all over again. Not only that, I had received the pleasure of getting to know him intimately. I remembered our kindred spirits dancing as one, and how attentive a lover he was. I had not forgotten his tender touch, his passionate stare as he loomed above me, exploring my nether regions with his own.
I remembered how nice and considerate he could be for absolutely no reason at all. Flowers on Tuesday, just because, was nothing for him to do. I remembered how much he had loved me, once. More than that, my heart had never forgotten how much I had loved him. Some mistakes from our childhood we pay for with our entire lives.
Speaking of how good he once was to me, I realized that his sexy self had to have a woman somewhere. There was just no way a qualified chica had not snatched him up with the intentions of never letting go. No, not this hombre. He had ‘TAKEN’ written all over him.
Then my mind went there. I didn’t want to go there, but I did. Maybe it was the woman that he cheated on me with in college, I somberly thought. Even though I had never even met her, a vision of the woman I had dreamt up way back then found itself in my mind. I had pictured her to be an Asian woman with long jet-black hair down to her waist. Maverick had spoken a few times about wanting to study abroad in Asia, and I could just see him with an ornamental oriental on his arm. Suddenly, my mood was sour – like hot ‘n sour soup.
“I’m sorry, Maverick. You really caught me by surprise. Seeing you after all of this time, let’s just say it’s overwhelming.”
He took a step closer to me, tucked a stray curl behind my ear and said, “When I saw you sitting over here I thought my mind was playing tricks on me, because I was beginning to think I would never see you again.”
The words he spoke were completely innocent, but the passionate undertone that burned at a nice simmer in his eyes spoke in volumes. Volumes I was in no way prepared to handle. The way he said “…beginning to think I would never see you again,” sounded to me like he’d wanted desperately to see me again during this lifetime. However, I didn’t want to read too much into his statements. After all, I was a married woman so I couldn’t, in good conscience, follow up on statements like that. Attempting to turn the heat between us down a notch, I said, “Well, here we are. We meet again. What kind of business are you in town for?”
“I live in Miami now,” he said, taking a seat in the empty barstool beside me.
“Wow! What is the chance that the two of us would end up in Miami, at the same hotel, on the same weekend?”
“I come to this bar quite often, because they have the best bourbon chicken wings in town. But as far as chance, if you remember correctly, then you already know my theory on chance.” He nonchalantly smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
