AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I rolled my eyes up in my head. Paris and Porsha glanced over at me, shaking their heads for me not to get into it with her. “That’s old news.”
“Old news?” she repeated in disbelief. “What in the world do you mean, it’s ‘old news’? It’s new news to me. And y’all know how I am about gossip and rumors.”
Yeah, you like dishing it, but can’t stand to be on the receiving end of it. “Well, what we do isn’t a rumor,” I informed her. “It’s a fact. I thought you were gonna say some mess about one of us being pregnant, or having a disease or something.”
Porsha and Paris snickered.
“Oh, good Lord,” she said, getting up from her seat. “Say this isn’t so.” She looked around at each of us, waiting. “One of you had better open your mouth and tell me right now that your aunts have been calling here with a bunch of hot trash lies ’cause I know damn well none of my daughters would be so goddamn trifling to do some ho-ass shit like that.”
My sisters and I blinked, blinked again. It was very rare that we heard our mother use that kind of language. Out of her four sisters, she is the prim, proper, prissy one, despite being born in Newark
. Despite being raised in the projects. She was the one who made sure her three daughters went to private schools instead of public schools, and moved us far away from the hood because she wanted better for us. Always a lady; always turning the other cheek—for most things, we knew she was pissed about this. But we also knew that, whether it struck a nerve with her not, we were okay with what we were doing.
“Mom, Persia’s right,” Paris stated. “It’s true.”
Our mother threw her hand up over her mouth, shocked that we were open about it. She stared at us, long and hard. It was almost as if she would have preferred we’d denied it. “Why in the world?”
“Because all three of us...” Porsha tried to explain, pointing at Paris and me, “...have been in relationships with guys who have either cheated on us, or tried to, so we decided to take matters into our own hands by allowing any man we become involved with to have more than one woman—the three of us.”
“And on top of it,” I added, grinning, “he gets to experience some of the greatest, freakiest sex he’ll ever experience in his lifetime.”
I’ll never forget the look on her face when I told her that shit. It looked like she was on the brink of a heart attack. All the color in her honey- brown complexion drained from her face. She was flabbergasted. She shook her head in disbelief. “So, let me get this right. My three daughters,” she glared at us, “like fucking the same men. Is that what the hell I hear y’all saying to me?” We nodded. “Ohmygod, I can’t believe I’m hearing this shit.” In melodramatic fashion, she clutched her chest, shaking her head. “Oh, so I guess y’all down between each other’s legs licking each other, too, huh? Just doing all kind of sinful shit.”
We frowned. “Ugggh,” we said in unison. “We share our men, Mom. That’s it. We’re not lesbians and we aren’t licking each other.”
“And we always use condoms,” Paris added like that would make a difference.
“Besides...” I walked over to where my sisters were sitting. I stood behind them, placing one hand on each of their shoulders. “You always told us to never fight over anything, and to share everything.”
She looked at me incredulously. “I taught you girls to share material things, to share your secrets, and your fears, not share your goddamn men. I want this nastiness to stop, today. You hear?” Although the question was directed at all three of us, she stared at me, knowing I was the culprit behind it all. And she was right. I was. It took some coaxing—okay, and a little bullying—but not much since we had been known to play pranks with our boyfriends and friends in high school—to get Paris and Porsha to consider it. But, they are my sisters, and we’re all cut from the same freaky cloth, so I knew once they experienced it, there’d be no turning back.
I kept my eyes locked on hers. “We’re not stopping. You may not like what we’re doing, and that’s fine. But, we’re grown. And you can’t tell us what to do, or who we should be doing it with.”
She slammed her hand down on the table. “What do you mean, you’re not stopping? Paris? Porsha? What do y’all have to say about this?”
“Persia’s right, Mom,” Paris meekly said. “Sorry. But we enjoy it. And we don’t wanna stop.”
“It’s not like we’re hurting anyone,” Porsha added. “What we do in the privacy of our own bedrooms is really no one else’s business.”
“Well, it becomes everyone else’s business when you flaunt your nasty ways in public,” she snapped. “Do you girls have any idea how embarrassing this is? I done cussed your aunts out, and now I gotta go back and apologize to them for being right.”
“Mother, really,” I said, rolling my eyes up in my head. “Why would you really care what anyone said, especially Aunt Lucky and Aunt Fanny? It’s not like they don’t have dirt of their own to worry about. At the end of the day, we’re still your daughters.”
“Yeah, who are sharing and fucking each other’s men. And nothing any of you have said has made any damn sense as to why you would want to stoop to some nasty shit like that? I can’t believe y’all out there carrying on like a bunch of hot-ass hoes.”
Paris’s mouth popped open in shock. “Mom, we’re not hoes. We’re uninhibited, and we like experiencing new things.”
“It’s nasty,” Mother said, rapidly shaking her head and turning her lips up in disgust, “and sinful.”
I forced a laugh, knowing there was nothing funny about what I was going to say to her. “And what do you call a woman who knows her man is cheating on her, but continues baking and cooking and cleaning and sexing him up, knowing that the first chance he gets, he’s going to sneak his ass across town to the next woman? What do you call that?”
She huffed. “Stupid. That’s what it is. And watch your mouth.”
I rolled my eyes. “And what do you call a woman who is crying and begging for her man to stop running out on her every time she catches him cheating on her, but still keeps taking him back? What do you call that same woman who will leave her kids alone in the middle of the night while she goes out looking for her man all over town?”
She looked at me, perplexed. I could tell she was cautiously treading to see where I was going with this. “I don’t know,” she said, getting agitated. “Desperate.”
“No, Mom, it’s you,” I said, glaring at her. Contempt dripped from my voice. She had a look of shock on her face when I said that. “You were that woman for as long as I can remember. Do you think we were that naïve to not know that Daddy was out cheating on you? You really thought we never overheard the hushed arguments, or your whispered phone conversations to Aunt Lucky and them? Do you not think we saw you crying over him? Well, we did.”
