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“I am.”
“Have you told him?”
“Who?”
“Tobias,” my therapist asked from her New Jersey office.
I shook my head, giving her a definitive ‘no.’ “Not in direct terms, no.”
“Which terms did you use?”
“Ummm…” I rubbed my lips together, thinking back to four, cloudy mornings ago when I left his big body on the floor of a strange home. I still felt like shit, and still hadn’t heard from him. “It was time for me to leave…to go to the hotel so I could make the airport on time. He said he had something to show me. I told him he’d be able to soon.”
“Soon,” she echoed. I nodded. “Just soon?”
Suddenly, I felt insecure. “Yeah.”
“And by that you meant leaving your marriage?” I answered with a nod. “And have you told Kelvin?”
“Indirectly. When I got in on Sunday, the last thing I told Kelvin, before handing him almost three hundred dollars, was him taking it would be for the last time.”
“And that was your way of announcing your divorce?”
I readjusted myself in the leather seat. “I thought you were in support of this. Why do I feel like you’re alluding to me doing something wrong here?”
“I am in total support of your decision. I’m just assessing your communication on it and seeking clarity. Have you heard back from Kelvin since Sunday?”
“In a way. He came home that night. More like the early morning hours, which is typical. I heard him go down into the basement. This morning, he watched from the living room window when the tow truck finally came for his totaledBeamer.”
My therapist nodded. Taking in a deep breath, she exhaled when mentioning, “Yeah. And there’s that. You should be more direct with Kelvin. Is there a reason you can’t do that?”
I considered it for a moment.
My husband was a full-blown addict. Threats and warnings had been hurled his way by all who loved and hated him like missiles, mine included. I’d done everything I could think of and was reasonably advised to help him down his dark descent into drug addiction, including neglecting my own mental health.
I met Kelvin at nineteen, in my sophomore year of college. Mya and I attended aPrinceton Universitybasketball game one night on her wild search for a rich man. It was her thing since I’d met her, even after she’d been dating Derrick. She always wanted bigger and better, always preparing for her real adult life. Mya felt owed the glam life, and had been in serious pursuit of it since I’d met her. She used to say she wished we attendedBlakewood State Universityso she could be guaranteed good stock on her very own campus. I never understood that because what did it say thatshewasn’t enrolled there? If she wasn’t “good stock,” why did she feel she deserved a man who was? But hey, I was young and floating through life.
I’d been into a guy we’d met atGarden State Plazamall months before, but hadn’t committed to being his girlfriend at the time. So, when we managed our way into the afterparty of a game they’d won, I didn’t get excited when we found ourselves encircled by the top guys of thePrinceton Tigers. Kelvin was there, smoking weed and drinking while sitting on the back of a sofa, feet planted on the cushions of the seat. While I was returning texts to the guy I’d been liking, Mya had sparked up a conversation with the jocks. By the end of the night, she felt accomplished leaving with two telephone numbers.
The next day, she came to me with odd news. The captain of the team, Kelvin, wanted us to hang out with him and his friends that following Saturday. Initially, and against Mya’s impossible attitude, I declined. I’d had enough of playing her wing-woman. But the guy I’d been “dating” was a budding musician, and had a gig in the City that Saturday night, so I relented.
When Saturday rolled around, I talked to Kelvin a bit. He couldn’t stop telling me how pretty I was, complimenting my curly hair texture and the unusual color of my eyes. Similar to that, all topics were surfaced, but I did discover how attractive he was. The guy was six-feet, seven-inches, had fine hair, and hazel-green eyes. His smile was picture perfect in spite of him being a little asshole’ish. Okay. Kelvin was very handsome, but his personality yielded very little endearment. That night, after chatting for a bit, he asked me to a back room. The same “back room” invitation Mya had consented to earlier. I froze.
No.
There was no way I’d do it with this Kelvin Richardson guy. I didn’t know him—now… Granted, I’d only been knowing the musician guy for a few months, and I, uncharacteristically, had sex with him…twice by this time. But that was different.Thatguy was really cute as well—thicker—but also extremely sweet, patient, always around, and closer to my age. His fixation on me was more than I’d ever felt from anyone, including my, recently released from prison, father and Grandmother combined. This Kelvin guy was a senior atPrinceton. He was three years older, which wasn’t old, but I was only nineteen.
And sex? Did he smell I was easy? Is that what the musician guy felt, because it definitely felt easy with him. The only other guy I’d had sex with before him was a guy I’d dated for three years in high school, Dayron. And that took a while.
That night, when Kelvin asked me to go to a back room, if he thought I was easy, the musician likely thought I was easy, too. That made me wonder if my grandmother sensed the same thing. And God help me if Pastor Williams believed the one young woman under her tutelage—in her home—was fast! I couldn’t have that. Needless to say, I was repulsed and turned him down. Kelvin abandoned the conversation and me minutes after.
About a week later, Kelvin called me. I’d forgotten about giving him my number when the conversation was good before the sexual invitation. He asked if he could take me out. I’d just learned horrible news about the musician guy and told him I needed space, much to his chagrin. To distract myself from the ache of the musician’s “sloppiness,” I agreed to go out with Kelvin. I’d go out with Kelvin lots after that initial date. In fact, thePrincetonjock had begun to grow on me. He intrigued me once I got over his slight arrogance. Eventually, I grew smitten enough to sit through an “interview” with his “team” where I was complimented on my “beautiful” features. It felt very “audition’ish” or, more specifically, like the models experience in “go-sees.” See, Kelvin Richardson was on his way to the pros. He was a promising draftee for theLeague’s draft that summer.
Oh, yeah. Richardson was big time back then. He was rolling over into a stratosphere the average guy I grew up with could only imagine. What I didn’t know was that I was being vetted for optics. They knew Kelvin had rogue tendencies, so they curated an image for him. That image included sobriety, focus, dedication, safety, and me.
When he met my grandmother, it was a wrap for me. She fell in love with the guy before meeting him. He attended her church one Sunday, and the whole congregation were instant basketball fans, declaring their loyalty to whichever team that drafted him. It all happened so fast, nauseatingly so. I didn’t see Kelvin outside of what I now understood was him securing our future. Perhaps I didn’t understand the play because, simultaneously, I’d been nursing a broken heart thanks to a starved musician who’d been trying his damnedest to re-earn my trust and affection.
Kelvin proposed to me a week before draft day. I was torn and jaded by the advice and hard push by Grandmother. The musician was visibly wounded when I met him at a local pizzeria and broke the news to him. He begged me to give it some time before making such a permanent decision. My hurt from his betrayal made it difficult to heed to his wisdom. Then Grandmother and her cohort of clergy girlfriends were the icing on the cake in my unwise judgement. My father, whom I’d never had a real relationship with, tried to intervene. He didn’t agree with the pace of the decision. But I didn’t trust him enough to take his advice either. He was a virtual stranger, one I’d seen about a dozen times before he’d been released from prison that year.
