by Mara White
“You liked it?” Jaylee asks. His face breaks into an irresistible smile.
“Hold on. Of course I did. I’ve enjoyed every time that we’ve been together. I wouldn’t mind some advance warning, maybe a run down of the plays. You have a tendency to sort of spring things on me.”
I take his other hand and guide it inside my underwear. I want him to see that I’m wet; to know how much he turns me on. He moves his fingers quickly and gracefully inside of me and presses his mouth onto mine.
“I’m not even going to touch the coercion thing. That’s acute dysfunction. You need serious therapy,” I say through the kiss.
“I want you,” is Jaylee’s only response. He pushes me back against the wall and yanks my underwear down to my knees. He pulls my skirt up and is inside me so fast and hard that I wonder if it’s not drugs instead of youth that are fueling his stamina. He lifts me up so that I’m straddling his waist, my feet off the floor, my body weight sustained by his biceps. He’s only just entered me and already an orgasm is building. Jaylee carries me the few feet to the sink and places my bare bottom on the edge. I don’t want to imagine what the sink has seen and I’m sure Jaylee and I are not the first couple to christen it.
“Do you bring all of your dates here?” I say. I want to lighten the mood, but it’s impossible. I’ve already told him I’m leaving him. This may be the last time we’re together. It kills me to think of not being with him. I am helplessly in love with my lover.
“Don’t leave me, baby,” Jaylee whispers into my ear.
With those words my body explodes into thousands of points of receptiveness and I cry out in ecstatic pleasure. I wrap my legs around his waist and hold him to me as the echo of complete fulfillment washes over me and erases all of the dread and disappointment of last night.
No man has ever complemented me physically like Jaylee does. How can I say no to him when it feels as if my body were made for his?
Jaylee increases his speed and slips a hand under my ass. He tilts my pelvis up so as to enter even deeper inside me. As soon as he begins to climax, my body responds to him and I lose myself again in another powerful orgasm that obliterates my mental faculty. I weave in and out of awareness, my body a receptacle of pure sensation. I’m so physically sensitive that Jaylee’s gentle kiss is almost too much for me to bear. He pulls back and looks into my eyes expectantly. The physical fireworks between us leave me like a bombed out shell. I can’t speak because he’s left me incapable of forming thoughts. I lay my forehead on his chest and shake my head back and forth.
Jaylee slips me off the edge of the sink and pulls my underwear up and straightens out my skirt. He clasps my bra between my breasts and slowly buttons my blouse. It comforts me to know that he’s capable of such tenderness. I look down at the gun lying on the sink and then into Jaylee’s warm and compassionate eyes.
“Have you ever used it?” I ask.
“I don’t wanna talk about that. I want to talk about us, ‘bout you and me,” he says.
“Okay, but ‘you and me’ apparently includes things like that,” I say nodding toward the gun.
Jaylee smacks the gun with the back of his hand and it slams onto the cement floor and slides toward the toilet stalls.
“No it don’t,” Jaylee yells. “The gun, your age, your husband, the money. None of that shit matters! I’m asking you to be with me. Do you want to be with me?”
My heart surges with love for him. I want nothing more than to say yes and throw my arms around him. Unfortunately, I’m older and wiser and I know just how much all of those things really do matter.
CHAPTER 14
(6 months later)
Despite feeling confident sometimes that I’m over Jaylee there are nights like tonight where I can’t stop thinking about him. Long, sleepless, agonizing nights like tonight. I wonder if he’s seeing someone, if he’s serious with anybody. If I can still love him but maintain my marriage with Robert, I imagine it would be easy for Jaylee to start another relationship. I want him to be happy but the thought of him with another woman still slaughters me, it stabs right in the heart. She would be a girl, in fact, not a woman. Maybe Jaylee tells her about me and they laugh together and she says ‘thank God you got out of that one!’ Maybe he’s with not just one but a lot of different women. That sounds more like his style. He might have a girl for each night of the week, a whole menagerie of beautiful girls who are all madly in love with him and waiting at his beck and call. Our love would just fade into the ghost of many, a repertoire of women, short and tall, fat and thin, young and old. I am just one of many and he still has a lot of time for that collection to grow.
I fantasize about him a lot now. Both waking and sleeping, I imagine him with me. It soothes the sting of the loss. It helps fill the crater that’s left in me since he’s gone. I can live like this, if I have to. When I close my mind off to him completely I’m overtaken with anxiety. I feel like I can’t let him go entirely. I hold him close in the phantom form and I stay in love with the memories I have. When I do sleep I can hear his voice clearly in my mind and taste his divine skin on my tongue.
I haven’t seen him in the six months or so that we’ve been separated. It leads me to believe that he is making a concerted effort to avoid me. Whether or not his evasiveness is due to anger or consideration – I guess I’ll never really know. When I walk past the places where I built memories with him I can feel his presence weighing down everything around me. I see his charming smile, I remember his impassioned touch. For a while I do double-takes at every young Dominican man I see from behind, only to have my heart crushed with disappointment when they turn around and aren’t him. For months, I searched him out desperately in crowds of young people, groups of corner boys and, reluctantly, in kissing couples. Now I no longer look because I’m sick to death of the false hope. Anyway, I’m convinced that if he were near I would know. I would be able to feel his current.
Robert and I have mended what we can of our marriage. I’m guessing that he no longer trusts me like he once did, but maybe it’s better that way. Sometimes I get the impression that Robert has more respect for me since the affair. It’s almost as if it made me more autonomous and now it’s harder for Robert to take me for granted. He is genuinely trying to work less, to join in the family life more. We’ve both become much better at communicating. The sex is better too. It’s as if Robert’s desire for me were renewed via Jaylee’s. Robert likes to win and now he’s enjoying the spoils of the war.
Despite the improvements there are still sore spots. Certain things set Robert off. He hates it when Stephani babysits because he still thinks Jaylee is her cousin and I haven’t had the guts to tell him differently. He gets testy when I feel like being alone and God forbid a man, especially a Dominican, catcalls me on the street when Robert’s with me. Whereas before he wrote them off as losers, now he looks at them as a viable threat. I should tell him that I’m not necessarily attracted to Dominican men, or even younger men for that matter. It was the chemistry I had with Jaylee and nothing else that drew me into an affair. But that would be inviting a conversation I never want to have, so I just let him think what he wants. Chances are I’ll never again encounter another connection like the one I had with Jaylee, bringing the likelihood of infidelity on my behalf to a screeching halt. I often wonder about Robert though. I wonder if he feels like he has a free pass since I cheated, but then I remember how entitled he can act and I realize that he’s probably always felt like he has a free pass, solely by being who he is.
The girls have never once peeped his name. Pearl knows that he was the source of the tension between her parents and she has always steered clear of the subject. Ada either spoke to her older sister about it or she can sense the distress and unconsciously erased all memories of Jaylee from her mind. Carmen, too, is silent on the subject, despite being an enthusiastic gossip. Jaylee’s absence is immense in its effect and it feels like a death. It’s a death we aren’t allowed to talk about because givin
g it a voice would make it too real, so instead we stuff it and gag it and each shove it into our own subconscious. I’m the only one mourning. I’m the woman behind the perpetual, secret, black veil.
On nights when insomnia has me wrestling with the bed sheets, I use every drop of creative juice my mind can conjure to recreate my fantasy of him. I often drift between sleeping and waking dreams. In this state, Jaylee becomes so real to me that I can often feel his body next to mine.
This is perhaps why, on a cool, March night, where sleep has been as evasive as a skittish cat, I’m neither scared nor do I react when I find Oscar in my bedroom. I see his shadow first as it’s picked up by the girls night light in the hallway. Instead of screaming intruder and shaking Robert awake, I think of Peter Pan and watch the shadow grow miraculously bigger as it moves down the hall and closer to the bedroom. Most good mothers would dive out of bed to protect their daughters from kidnappers or killers, but my gut tells me that the shadow is coming for me, not them, and I lie still, in waiting.
When the shadow skips up to the ceiling, Oscar rounds the corner and our eyes meet instantaneously. He looks relieved to find me awake but his eyes are also round with fear and I throw back the covers without giving thought to Robert’s sleeping form. Oscar puts a finger to his lips and gestures for me to follow him. I grab my robe and we fly down the stairs. Oscar reaches for the front door but I point to the backyard as it’s farther from the bedroom and I know how Robert would react were he to awake to a strange young man in his house with his wife.
Out on the back deck Oscar starts to apologize for breaking into the house. I wave away his protests. I know he’s here because Jaylee is in trouble and I need to know what’s happened before the worry blossoms into full-blown panic.
“Jaylee gave me the security alarm code. He wouldn’t come to you if he had other options,” Oscar says.
“Fine, fine! What’s going on? Is he hurt?” I can’t stop the onslaught of horrific images that flood my mind, Jaylee’s body cut up or riddled with gunshot wounds, him being held captive by rivals and tortured or traumatized.
“No, not hurt. He’s in mad trouble. He got in with the wrong people and got ripped off in a deal. He owes a shit load of cash to some bad people right now.”
“How much cash are we talking about?” I ask. Oscar ignores my question.
“They threatened him – said they’d go after Janinie if he don’t make the payments. He got the first one just by hustling, but now they want the second and he’s dry. They’re Colombians. They take their shit serious.”
I’ve calmed down since Oscar started talking. At least Jaylee isn’t hurt or missing. Owing money is the most straightforward of problems. This can be fixed. Jaylee must be torn up about them threatening Janinie. I don’t even want to imagine the emotional storm he’s in now.
“How much?” I repeat my question to Oscar.
“He’s got to make weekly installments of five grand, it’s fifty grand all together, or forty-five if you subtract last week’s. The payment is due tonight. We don’t have it.”
“Why the hell did you wait until now to ask me? How am I going to get that kind of cash in the middle of the night?”
“I made him ask you, Kate. For Janinie’s sake. Believe me, he didn’t want to have to ask you. It was my idea.”
I have some jewelry. I know that there are twenty-four hour pawn- shops in the city. How many diamonds would I have to pawn to get 5K? They pay you a small fraction of what they’re worth. I’ll have to take everything I own. 5K in cash! The number feels too familiar. Why does this seem like deja vu?
It dawns on me that I have exactly 5K, in cash, in the safe behind the landscape painting of fox-hunters in Robert’s study. It’s precisely 5K in hundred dollar bills stored away with our important documents. After 9/11 part of the family emergency plan that Robert and I forged was to have a significant amount of cash in the house at all times. I barely remember withdrawing it, it was so long ago now. It seemed overly-cautious at the time. Why would we need 5K when our neighbors would likely have nothing? But Robert insisted on the amount and I stashed it there, twelve years ago. It’s too much of a coincidence, too good to be true. What if Robert has since moved it, or more likely, spent some of it? Fate has a sense of humor indeed if the money has been sitting there for over a decade waiting for tonight.
“He’s still in love with you, Kate.”
I ignore him. I can’t acknowledge it now or I’ll fall apart.
“I do have cash. It’s in the safe. Wait here for me.”
Relief washes over Oscar’s face. There’s satisfaction in his expression too. He made the right decision coming to me. Jaylee will thank him later when he’s done being furious. They’ll come out on the other side of this. Janinie will be safe. I tell myself these things too as I climb the stairs to Robert’s study. Of course tonight is the perfect example of why I can’t be with him. But it doesn’t mean that I’m no longer in love with him. Quite the contrary I’m finding. My love for Jaylee is dormant, a sleeping giant, an unlit fuse. I’m more than ready to run to him.
The painting is almost too heavy for me to lift off the wall. My arms barely reach the expanse of it and I wonder if Robert helped me before. I have no memory of putting the cash in the safe. I’m asking for small miracles tonight to find it inside. There’s a little display light above the painting so I turn that on, preferring to leave the overhead light off. If Robert were to find me doing this, he’d think I was leaving him. If I can burgle my own house, he never has to know.
The cash is there, inside a folded yellow envelope. Five grand feels surprisingly small. I don’t need a duffle bag. I can fit it in my purse. Some assholes were going to hurt Janinie for this handful of bills. The burgle gives me a bit of a high. That, coupled with my usual physical reaction to thinking about Jaylee has me feeling invincible. I boldly re-enter the bedroom. Robert is a mound of blankets that rises and falls with even breaths. I yank off my nightgown and jump into a pair of jeans and throw on a cashmere sweater. At the bottom of the stairs I stuff my feet into a pair of leather ankle boots and the envelope of cash into my purse. Oscar is waiting on the back porch, blowing his breath into his hands. The night is crisp and the sky cloudless. If not for the light pollution we could see the stars.
“Yeah?” he asks, the tension making creases in his young brow.
“Yes!” I say. “It’s exactly 5K. I mean, I didn’t count it but that’s how much it was when I put it in there.”
Oscar looks less than thrilled. I see he’s examining my clothes. Oh, he thought I’d just hand the money over to him? He wants me to go back to bed? Not happening.
“I know what you’re thinking. There’s no way. He would fucking kill me.”
“I’m supposed to just fork it over? Absolutely not. If he’s in trouble, I want to be there.”
“If it’s a trust thing, Kate. I’ll leave my license, I’ll give you my fucking green card.”
“It is not a trust issue, Oscar. If the money goes, I go. If I stay, the money stays. As simple as that.”
“I’m so fucking dead. Even if nothing happens to you – I’m fucking dead. Kate, I can’t let you come.”
Oscar eventually gives in to my demands, but only because I give him no other choice. I repeatedly refuse to give him the money if he won’t agree to take me. I feel powerful tonight, like a strong inner force is carrying me. There was a time when I would have just given Oscar the money and waited by the phone. If there is fear inside me it’s coming across as excitement. The serendipity of the 5K lends legitimacy to tonight’s mission. If it weren’t meant to be then why was the exact amount of cash patiently waiting all these years to be claimed?
“Where exactly are we going?” I ask Oscar, who’s driving tensely in silence. “Can we listen to some music? You’re freaking me out.”
Oscar adjusts the radio to a Spanish station and says nothing.
“Is Jaylee already there?”
“He shoul
d be, if everything is going as planned. You seem happy, like you’re enjoying this.”
“I am.”
“If just thinking about seeing him makes you feel so damned good, then why the hell aren’t you with him, mujer?”
“What’s it to you, Oscar?”
“He’s my boy, I want him happy. Not all mad crazy like you got him.”
I just shrug my shoulders in response.
“I don’t get you two – at all. Wanna be together more than anybody I ever seen, but you just torture yourselves instead. I don’t get it.” Oscar mutters to himself.
A few minutes later, he pulls up in front of a six-story pre-war building on 171st Street. The place looks dark and the street is quiet.
“Any chance I can talk you into waiting in the car? I bring up the cash, and me and him will be down before you know it. They’ll let him go soon as they count it.”
“They’re holding him?”
“Yeah, and they got one of their sicarios over at Jaylee’s crib.”
“I’m going in,” I say and throw open the car door and hop out onto the sidewalk.
Oscar gets out slowly glaring at me and slams the door to let me know that I’ve pissed him off.
“If anything happens to you, jamás me perdonerá.”
“If anything happens to me, it’s happening to all of us.”
At the door to the building Oscar takes out his phone and scrolls through texts from Jaylee. When he finds what he’s looking for he presses a buzzer. Immediately someone says ‘diga’ over the intercom. Oscar tells him he’s here to make payment and the Columbians buzz us in.
The building is in a terrible state of disrepair. It smells like mildew and roaches and I begin to wonder if it’s not abandoned. The halls are dimly lit by fluorescent bar bulbs and the walls are painted a dirty, mint green. On the second floor the light is flickering and buzzing. I feel like I’m trapped in a lizard terrarium.
