Terrill got up and walked out of the room without saying a word and every eye in the room, including Maritza’s, followed him out.
It didn’t look like Terrill was ever going to come back from wherever he went. And Maritza was starting to think he might have left for good. She didn’t know what made her blurt out that she was marrying Andrew. In fact, even though she’d told him she would think about his offer, she had pretty much decided she was going to tell him no.
Now because of Terrill and all these lost-in-love Hightowers she was going to have to marry a man she didn’t love. Maybe it was for the best. Love couldn’t hurt you if you didn’t feel any…
She got up and went to the restroom since all of the Hightower couples seemed to be dancing or off smooching somewhere and Terrill must have taken off.
Good riddance!
As soon as she made it to the restroom door, an arm reached out and snatched her back.
“Were you seeing him the entire time we were together?” Terrill snapped.
She pulled her arm away. “We haven’t been together for close to a year, Terrill. Which is all your doing! And shut up before someone hears you.”
“How could you do this to me? How could you be so callous? So cold? I wanted to marry you. And now you’re just slapping me in the face with the truth, huh? I wasn’t good enough?”
“My marrying Andrew has absolutely nothing to do with you at all. Why can’t you just get that through your head? The world, certainly my world, does not revolve around you!”
You are such a liar! He is your world. You have been miserable without him. Stop this madness and tell him!
“You are not going to marry him and you know it, Maritza,” Terrill snapped.
“I am so going to marry him, Terrill. And it’s none of your business anyway.” Maritza hissed.
“You’re not going to marry him because you love me, Maritza. And I’m done playing with you, girl. You’re not marrying him.”
“I—” Maritza started.
Before she could finish he silenced her with a soul-penetrating kiss. If there had been any doubt before that this man and this man alone owned the key to her mind, body and soul, there wasn’t any now.
She was appalled by how easily she melted into his embrace and opened to his kisses and caresses. She wrapped her arms around his neck and held him close, like she never wanted to let him go.
And his mouth, his tongue, his lips…to have them on hers again felt like a soothing release she hadn’t even realized she needed. Before she could really enjoy the homecoming the bathroom door swung open and they were busted. They broke free from the embrace only to see little miss goody-two-shoes standing there.
Maritza wanted to growl but settled for glaring at Aisha instead. She wondered how much the other woman had heard.
“Oh, sorry…excuse me…” Aisha stumbled over her words.
“You aren’t marrying him, Maritza.” Terrill gave one more pointed stare and then left the two of them standing there.
Aisha tried to make a run for it as well, but Maritza grabbed her arm.
“Please don’t say anything to the others about what you saw. No matter what they all think, I am marrying Speed-Lo. So you can see why I wouldn’t want this to get out.”
Aisha just nodded and darted off.
Maritza went to the restroom and tried to compose herself, but something told her things were only going to get worse.
You don’t love him! You love me!
Maritza let the slowly warming water splash over her body in waves as she threw her head back and squeezed her legs trying like hell to quell the increasing heat that refused to leave her body ever since Terrill had screamed those words at her and kissed her senseless.
She placed her hand over her mouth and stilled the half giggles, half sobs that threatened to escape and awaken the man sleeping in her hotel bed, sleeping like a man who had just finished giving her body more thrills than a trip to Great Adventure at the height of the summer.
What have we done?
What have I done?
She couldn’t go down this road again. It had hurt too much to let him go the first time. And yet somehow when Terrill ended up at the door of her hotel room looking just as wounded as she felt, she had let him in.
One minute she was announcing her possible engagement to the white rapper…and the next minute Terrill was uttering those words that should have never been uttered after a year of them being apart, words that there was no going back from, words that she had been running from since the first time she set eyes on him…
And to make matters worse he’d kissed her, so hard, so deep and so thoroughly that she couldn’t think. And if that wasn’t enough he had made love to her until her mind, body and soul took their rightful place in the universe and became his, until her body became a quivering mass of jelly and she couldn’t run from him anymore.
“Now this won’t do at all…”
She turned around at the sound of Terrill’s deep, masculine voice just in time to see his long honey-complexioned frame stepping into the shower with her. For a second she drank in his toned and sturdy swimmer’s build, with legs so hard and sculpted he would make the perfect nude model. Her gaze traveled up his thigh and she imagined herself with a pointer, showing anyone who would listen, “This is what the perfect abductor longus muscle looks like.” She moved to his chest and almost became lost in pectorals.
Pulling herself away, she eyed his throat and remembered how lovingly she’d kissed it the night before, how she let her tongue lave his Adam’s apple. And then she moved to his face, his handsome face. That honey tone with those hazel-green eyes that she swore could see down to her soul threatened to undo her every time she looked at him.
That was why she’d worked so hard to stay away from him this past year after breaking up with him. And then look at how quickly she had undone all that hard work with one romp in the sack.
“Just as I thought, you’re in here overthinking things and trying to backtrack. That won’t do.” Terrill shook his head as he frowned. He pulled her body flush with his and took her mouth in a demanding, take-no-prisoners kiss.
Her mouth opened as if it didn’t have a will or want of its own besides wanting to please him and willing to do whatever it took to make sure he was well pleased.
Their tongues tangled and dueled until hers was finally tamed and following his lead. A soft sigh escaped her lips before she could catch it and she had no choice but to wrap her arms around his shoulders and lean into him, pressing her body to his as if she were trying to mold him to her. His hands grasped and held her closer still until she couldn’t tell where he ended and she started. Her legs tried to tangle themselves up in him and he lifted her up and pinned her against the wall.
He pulled his mouth away from her and she moaned.
He grinned and planted seductive kisses all along her neck and breast.
“You can’t marry him, Maritza.”
She threw her head back, unable to fight the inevitable.
“I can’t marry him,” she muttered as she took a shuddering breath. His butterfly kisses were turning her insides into jelly.
“You don’t love him.” Terrill licked her then, sending thrills of passion through her in shock waves.
“I don’t. I don’t love him.” God, she didn’t love…
But what happened to the woman from just a day ago who would have asked, what does love have to do with it?
He lifted up his head and stared her in her eyes then. His gaze was so intent and intense that he didn’t even have to repeat his words from the night before.
You love me.
She loved Terrill.
God help her, she did. But he hadn’t said he loved her. He’d just proclaimed that she loved him and she hadn’t confirmed or denied it yet. She wouldn’t, because her heart was too fragile and pink and girly where he was concerned.
If she allowed herself to love him, to publicly proclaim her love f
or him, and he didn’t love her back, it would break her into too many pieces to ever put back together again.
He picked that moment to thrust into her and she shattered from the inside out. Her body vibrated and her mind burst into a thousand points of light. And then all reason and rationalization were gone. All she could do was feel. And it felt so damn good to her.
He stretched her to the point of aching and then stretched her some more. His hips powered forward, thrusting as if he was trying to speak to her body in some kind of special code.
He rocked her.
He shook her foundations and her walls came tumbling down.
She cried out as her love for him came pouring out of her, making her shake and convulse and hold on to his muscular shoulders for dear life. The shower wall at her back couldn’t possibly be sturdy enough to hold her.
Only Terrill could do that. Only he could hold her together because he was the one tearing her apart.
She clutched his sex with hers and swiveled her hips, trying to answer the code his body was sending and what they couldn’t say, what they wouldn’t say with words became a mating dance as primitive as time. A discussion that the first men and women to walk the earth must have perfected got a remix in the shower and Terrill’s thrusts and Maritza’s swivels came together as one.
And when she cried out her last gut-wrenching scream and he followed her with a soul-stealing grunt, she realized she needed to find a way to contain this new and wonderful thing that Terrill had pulled her into before it consumed them both and there was nothing left…
Terrill eyed Maritza as they sat in her hotel room and ate the dinner they’d finally stopped making love long enough to order. She looked like she was going to take off running any minute. He didn’t know what had come over him last night. After a year apart, he would have thought that he would have been over her by now. But he was just as sprung as he was then and clearly she wasn’t any more ready to go public with him—but she was willing to marry another man.
The more he thought about it, the angrier he got.
“What are you going to tell Lace? I mean…you don’t have to worry about me saying anything to her, but if the two of you are planning to get married, then you probably should tell her that you had a moment of weakness or whatever you want to call it.”
“Lace Monroe? Who in the hell said I was marrying Lace Monroe? Do I look crazy to you or like I want to be a chapter in her next book? That saying ‘you can’t turn a hooker into a housewife’ comes to mind. That’s definitely not the marrying kind…”
You can’t turn a hooker into a housewife… She had heard those hurtful words before and now she was hearing them from another man she loved. Sure, he wasn’t talking about her now, but what about in the future when he heard about something from her past?
She got up and walked over to the window. She couldn’t look at him and get through this.
“This isn’t going to work, Terrill. No matter how many times we backslide and end up in bed it won’t work between us. I’m going to marry Andrew because he is a better match for me in all the ways that count. I need you to leave.”
The silence in the room was deafening.
“Back to this again, Maritza? Seriously? You really need to miss me with all this bull, because I am sick and tired of doing this with you.”
“You think I like doing this over and over with you? I don’t. This ended for me over a year ago.”
“Fine. You want to marry a man you don’t love and throw away what we can have, then fine. I’m tired of trying to prove to you that I am good enough for you, Maritza. If you think he’s the better man for you then by all means marry Speed-Lo.” He got up and walked over to her.
She didn’t turn around because she didn’t want him to see the tear trailing down her face.
“I have spent my entire life trying to prove that I am good enough. Good enough to be best friends with the Hightowers’ baby boy even though I came from a single-parent household and never knew my father. Good enough to take care of my best friend’s girl and make sure that no harm came to her even though everyone thought I had stabbed my best friend in the back. Good enough to make it through college even though I didn’t have the same amenities as my classmates who weren’t there on scholarship. Good enough to make it in the music business, to run the damn company and be the boss. I have to prove that I am good enough every day just by virtue of being a Black man. And even though you are without a doubt the love of my life, Maritza, I can’t keep proving I am good enough for you.”
She wanted to turn around and tell him that he was more than good enough, that he was too good and that was the problem. But she couldn’t do it. If she did, he would try and make her believe in what they could have, what they could be together. And she already knew.
You can’t turn a hooker into a housewife.
“Just leave, Terrill. Andrew is the man I deserve.”
She heard his sharp intake of breath and it felt like a knife had been slammed into her own chest. The only thing she heard after that was him walking away and the hotel room door closing.
She dropped to the floor but this time she didn’t have any more tears left to cry.
Third Interlude
Ready for Love…
“Wow. I always said Terrill seems like one of those guys that will be down for his woman till the end, no matter how jacked up she treats him.” Aisha Hightower had her hand covering her mouth and she looked like she was going to break down crying for Terrill any minute.
Since Maritza had long since developed a fondness for Patrick’s wife, the little miss goody-two-shoes, and since her heart was breaking for Terrill and the pain she had caused him as well, she only nodded in agreement with Aisha.
The look on Penny’s and Celia’s faces said everything she was feeling. She could feel the disappointment coming off of them in waves.
“You have to fix it, Maritza. You better fix it. You broke his heart.” Penny actually started crying. “He doesn’t deserve that. He’s a good man. He deserves to have all your love. How could you make him think he wasn’t good enough?”
“Because I wasn’t good enough for him and one day he was going to figure that out and leave me! Don’t you get it? Eventually my past was going to catch up to me and then he would have to leave me. I just wanted a piece of his love while I could have it and then I was going to let him go when he was ready. It killed me, but I let him go.” Maritza found herself screaming at Penny with just as much passion as Penny was throwing out.
“Terrill is like a son to me. And he’s a good man. He wouldn’t judge you by anything in your past. You were a coward. Don’t put that on him. He was ready, willing and able to love you. You were a coward!” Celia Hightower shored up her shoulders. She could barely look at Maritza. “Penny, I think we should all go to Terrill’s now. I’m sure he needs as many friends as he can get now.”
Carla hopped up off the sofa, trailing popcorn all over the place. “Y’all tripping. Brat, you act like you never messed up where a man was concerned. I know you’re not talking the way you and Terrill broke Jason’s heart all those years ago. And Celia, hmm…I don’t think Sophie pops all that nonsense without just a little bit of cause… Y’all need to back up off Maritza. She messed up, yes. But it ain’t the end of the damn world. People make mistakes!” Carla gave Maritza a hug.
“Keep your head up, mamasita! And remember Carla got yo back. If anybody questions that, they should know that I will sure enough set it off, set it off, Jada Pinkett!” All of five foot and some change, you would have thought that Carla was a heavyweight champion the way she was selling wolf tickets.
Maritza shook her head. And watched as the other Hightower women all got up to leave her house.
“Thanks, Carla. I appreciate it.”
“That said, I’mma head on over to the mansion with them because you know I want to stay in that big ol’ mansion of Terrill’s. This is cute and all, but I’m trying to live in the lif
estyle that I want to become accustomed to living in. Y’all wait for me.” She took off after the other women.
Soon the only people left in her house were Maritza and her mother.
“So you danced in some videos, maybe had sex with a man or two that you regretted. Tell me why the hell that makes you think that you aren’t good enough for Terrill?” Sharon Morales was gone and the protective mama bear was in her place.
Maritza didn’t know what had kept her mother quiet for so long, but she was happy for it. The last thing she wanted was for her mother to curse out Celia or Penny.
“Our soror was right. She didn’t have to say it like that, but she was right. You have been a coward, baby girl. And all I want to know is what turned you into a coward. Now I think it has something to do with whatever happened to you when you were in college and your brother Victor came out here to visit and ended up moving here to protect his baby sister. He said you would never talk about it, but it had something to do with a lowlife named Herbert Jackson. After some digging around, your brother found there were rumors around about Jackson drugging video girls and setting up gangbangs, all kinds of horrible things that no one could ever prove because the girls were always too traumatized or too threatened to talk about.”
Maritza closed her eyes and tried to move away from her mother. Sharon grabbed her and held her close.
“No, Mom. I can’t do this. Please, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You don’t have to talk about it with me, baby girl, your reaction is enough to tell me our suspicions were right.” Sharon’s voice choked and she held Maritza tighter. “You don’t have to tell me and you don’t have to relive it. But you have to stop letting it get in the way of your happiness.”
“Mom, I was living so wild and I thought nothing could touch me. I didn’t do drugs like the other girls. I didn’t even drink a lot, but I didn’t let a man I liked get past me without trying him out, letting him buy me things, take me places, share my body with him. I was so casual about my body because I thought I could control everything. All it took was one slip and trusting the wrong person once to have it all come crashing down around me.”
Ready for Love Page 13
