by Kiki Leach
“Then I guess I’ll have no choice but to show her just exactly why her boyfriend’s number has been sitting at the top of my phone list for the last five years.”
She flipped open the envelope and pulled out a revised version of the article, now including his name, as well as a picture of them standing together outside of the building in which they first met.
Maurice ripped the paper from the table, then slammed it back down. Swiping his tongue across his bottom lip to keep from losing his cool in public, he sat back and ran his hand down the front of his jacket, tugging at the lapels. “Who the hell did you find to take that picture of us from back then?”
“Don’t worry your pretty face about that. All you need to know is that it exists.”
He opened his hands and shook his head, glaring at her. “Why are you coming for me now? You’ve had ample time over the years to get what you wanted, when I wasn’t attached to anyone or anything except random pussy. If you wanted it that bad, why didn’t you come around then?”
She waited, thinking.
“I suppose I could’ve,” she said. “And I probably should’ve. But other men have come and gone before you, Maurice. And at the time, there were no stakes where you were concerned and thus, no fun. Running through random pussy is one thing. But running through pussy like mine is like an experience you will never have with anyone else. Because I can promise that after a single taste, you will be begging for me to stop, while at the same time wanting more, and more, and more and more.”
“I won’t be begging for shit,” he said, tossing his napkin on the table and rising from his chair. “Except for you to stop riding a dick you’ll never get to see in person.”
“Is that a promise?”
He placed his hand down on the edge of the table and bent down to her face. “Lady, that’s a fucking guarantee.”
She sat back and sighed as he stood up. “Well, that is indeed your choice. One night with me and your troubles about the past could easily fade away. You run the risk of her learning the truth if you choose not to take me up on this. And I have a feeling that she’s not the kind of woman who will ‘stand by her man’ once she’s learned that he has done her wrong the way that you have. Didn’t you learn any lessons from my article?” She picked up her coffee again and took a few more sips. “Hell hath no fury like a bitch scorned.”
“Vanessa will forgive me for this,” he said. “Once she realizes that it was all for her.”
“Are you sure about that? Or is it just something that you’re hoping before she drop kicks you to the curb? When she does, just know that I’ll still be there waiting for you.”
“Like any good whore, right?”
Maurice glared at her before tossing some change onto the table and hastily exiting the café. She laughed to herself, convinced that he would come back around soon enough.
They both knew it was only a matter of time before Vanessa learned the truth now.
The only question remaining was, who had the means to spill that truth first?
Part Four
While frantically strolling back and forth across her living room and drinking one mimosa after the other to keep from plummeting off the deep end, Vanessa reached out to every person in her rolodex that she knew, who also knew Nathan, and questioned his whereabouts.
Unfortunately, not a single person, including his former high school teammate and current coworker, Eddie Gallagher, had heard from him since before he left town.
The few times she had tried calling Nathan without interference were unsuccessful as well. His voicemail was completely full and thus taking no more messages. She wasn’t sure if it was because of Sheila leaving so many of them or if he had managed to trick his phone into completely ignoring calls from certain people with her being at the top of the list.
At the same time, she felt he had no right in hell to be pissed. They were done long before she ever gave Adrian a second glance, long done before she knew a man like Adrian even existed. If anyone had a right to be pissed at her about the entire situation involving Adrian and the baby, it was most certainly her current love, Maurice. He was probably going to be livid too, but not enough to leave her. Not enough, she hoped.
When her phone started ringing, she placed her mimosa on the table and raced over to the couch where it landed after she had earlier tossed it across the room. Hoping like hell that the person calling would be Nathan or someone with news about having heard from him or knowing where he was, she was more than slightly pissed when she noticed another name flashing across her screen instead. One she had no interest in having anything to do with at the moment.
“Damn it,” she muttered, staring down at that name. “I don’t have time for you right now.”
She clicked the red button, sending them straight to voicemail, and tossed the phone back onto the couch.
As she traipsed back over to the table and grabbed her glass to take a few more sips of her drink, the phone immediately started to ring again. She tried ignoring it and when it finally stopped, hoped that would be the end of it.
But then her doorbell rang, and she was seriously starting to consider what life would be like living in a monastery. At this point, the only downside she saw was not having sex on a regular basis, if at all.
Certain that the person violating both her door and bell had absolutely nothing to do with Nathan, she drank the rest of her mimosa, wrapped her robe around herself as tightly as she could and headed for the door.
“I’m coming!” she called out to the impatient person waiting for her on the other side.
When she looked out the peephole, their back was turned to her. All she could see was that it was a woman, with long wavy hair sitting just above her waist. She was wearing a pink Dior suit with a matching fedora and Louboutin heels with thin spikes that were too damn high for her height.
And then suddenly, she got a sick feeling in her stomach and turned back to the living room. She immediately eyed her phone as it remained on the couch, then closed her eyes and shook her head.
“Aw, shit.”
Grabbing onto the knob, she unlocked the door and pulled it back hard. It swung so fast, the wind blew back the strands of her hair.
Spinning around on the back of those spiked heels was none other than her older, and now more polished sister, Felicia.
Smiling and tilting her head, she removed a pair of white gloves from each of her hands and held on tight to the black clutch bag she had beneath her arm. The spitting image of their mother right down to the tip of her slightly bubbled nose, high cheekbones and catlike brown eyes, Vanessa wanted to keel over the moment she stepped forward.
The good one was back in town, she thought. The faultless daughter returns.
“Baby sister,” said Felicia. Her voice was raspier than she remembered hearing on the phone a few months ago, as if she had been yelling about something or at someone nonstop ever since. Eyeing Vanessa up and down in amusement, she smirked and slapped her gloves into the palm of her hand. “I see some things never change.”
“No they don’t, like you calling while standing right outside my damn door.”
“Why are you speaking to me as if I just live down the street from you, Vanessa and came by to borrow a cup of sugar instead of traveling from another state?”
“How the hell should I be speaking to you instead?”
“Gee, Vanessa, I don’t know. How about first starting with being happy to see me--”
“I’m not, next.”
Felicia was taken aback; shaken but not stirred and didn’t let her little sister overwhelm her need for being there. Tension had been brewing between them since they were children seeing as Felicia was always considered a ‘better daughter’ so to speak. In opposition to Vanessa, she never drank, never smoked, was never arrested for so much as jaywalking and lived her life according to the book of ‘good and obedient children’.
In the words of her sister, she was ‘fucking perfect.’
/> “Alright,” she continued, “then how about asking me a few things instead. Such as how I’m doing--”
“I don’t care,” Vanessa snapped back.
“Or if I would like to come in and sit down?”
“I don’t want you inside my house.”
“Then how about my flight?”
Vanessa shook her head and stuck out her bottom lip. “Don’t care about that either. Glad you didn’t die, that’s about it.”
“Alright.” Felicia placed her gloves inside her clutch and snapped it shut. “Then how about asking why I’m here in the first damn place?”
Vanessa crossed her arms and hovered her lids over her eyes, feeling defeated. “Okay. You’ve got me with that one, why are you here?”
“Alexis called me,” she confessed.
“Shit.”
“After we discussed my coming to visit for the summer and bringing the girls to see her and Alexander, I decided that it might be best to come on my own first to test the waters. But I hadn’t told her that just yet. As luck would have it, she called me first and asked me to come out and see about you.”
“Why would she do that?”
She sighed and lifted a soothing hand to her sister’s hair, running her fingers through every strand. Her eyes saddened and her face fell to a numb expression that even Vanessa couldn’t understand.
“Because Rodney and I are splitting up,” she said. “And our mother wants me to tell you in person just how, and why what happened to me will no doubt happen to you too if you don’t get your shit together and tell your man the damn truth about this Adrian Samuels situation.”
Felicia pushed past her sister and moved into the house.
Vanessa turned back to her, her mouth open from hearing the news of her sister’s crumbling marriage, and closed the door.
She followed Felicia into the living room and kept her eyes on her as she removed her hat and Dior jacket, placing it on the back of the couch. She tugged on the pink tank she was wearing underneath it and shook out the natural curls of her hair.
“This place isn’t as big as I remember it being,” she said.
“That’s because I have more stuff filling up the blank spaces. The last time you were in here, this place was barely furnished.” Vanessa walked over to the couch and leaned against the back of it, slapping her hands down against her legs. “Since when the hell are you and Rodney splitting up?”
“Since three months ago,” she told her while pulling back the curtains and staring out of the window. “When I found out that his lies were worth much more to him than our marriage. We’ve kept it quiet until now for fear the press might get wind of something, but…”
“And Alexis knows about it?”
“She knows. I was reluctant to tell her when it all happened, but when she kept pressing me on the entire family coming for a visit last month, I eventually had to let her know something. For a while, I could keep up with the ‘everything is fine, we’re happy and still madly in love with each other’ shtick to keep her off my back, but I could only keep up with that for so long before I cracked.”
“What’d she say when you finally told her the truth?” asked Vanessa.
“She was pissed, as expected. I had drawn up an entire fairytale when it came to Rodney, which is the only reason she was fine with me leaving the city with him in the first place. But once I told her the reason why our split needed to happen, she started to understand. Now I’m just trying to keep her from giving him grief because it’s the last thing that we all need, especially the girls because they have no idea what’s going on yet and we don’t think it’s a good idea to tell them.”
“That might be for the best. But, what exactly happened?”
Felicia turned to her sister and sat down in the frame of the window. “He started taking more money from our joint bank account. When I initially questioned him about it, he would throw things at me about the money being for certain repairs around the house, repairs for things that never got fixed or needed fixing in the first place. After nothing but one lie following another, I finally hired a private investigator because it got to a point that certain bills weren’t getting paid on time. That is how much money he had been taking out, or rather stealing. The PI followed him to the bank one Thursday morning, watched him take out almost three thousand dollars and tailed him to another woman’s house in Studio City.”
“What the hell was he doing stealing your money and giving it to this other woman? Was he screwing around?”
“No,” she said. “Not then, but he had, which is the reason why he needed the money.”
“I’m confused here, Felicia, was the money for this woman or not?”
“It was for her.” She closed her eyes as her stomach knotted. “And the child they share together.”
Vanessa wildly shook her head back and forth and lifted her hand. “Hold up, SAY, WHAT?”
Felicia nodded. “A son,” she said. “Named Emmanuel. He was born the same day as our oldest inside the same damn hospital.”
“Oh my God.” Vanessa jumped up from the back of the couch and crossed the room. “You’re telling me that Rodney had an entirely different family that you didn’t even know about, and he was using the money that you made together to support these people?”
“Yes. Two years after Saleena was born and when Kimira came along, he had convinced me that living within a lesser means was good for our family. Knowing how we had grown up, I was appreciative of that and was fine going along with it, at first. Little did I know that he had only suggested it because he was using those means that we needed for our family to support another one.”
“Is that why you walked up in here wearing Dior instead of something from a craft store or handmade by a bum off the beach?”
Felicia didn’t answer, and instead held back a chuckle while crossing her legs one over the other.
Vanessa sat back down, this time on the edge of her bookcase.
“Does this other woman know about you?”
“She’s known about me since the very beginning. I was the fool throughout this entire mess who chose to remain in the dark.”
“You’re not a fool,” Vanessa said under her breath. She stood up from the bookcase and moved over to another window. “But is this what prompted Alexis to tell you about me and Adrian?”
“Yes. The first time she mentioned it, she went on about how you were sleeping with this man during your freshman year of college and how that asshole Harold Kramer from the NYDN was ready, willing and able to leak that information to the press if she didn’t hire him first. She also showed me a picture from his days as a professor. And, he’s pretty fione.” She smiled, and then pointed. “But not more than Maurice, who also loves you, which I’m guessing this one didn’t.”
“No,” replied Vanessa. “I’m not sure he’s even capable of knowing what the word means – at least he wasn’t with me, which is fine because I didn’t know it much with him either. That’s why I had worked so hard to block that time out of my life. The experience with Adrian helped me to grow up as a person, and more importantly as a woman, but it was also something that I never wanted to relive again. But no such luck. Thanks to Nathan and Sheila, it got dug right back the fuck up and thrown in everyone’s faces before I even had time to know what the hell was going on.”
Felicia crossed her arms. “Those two have never ceased to amaze me.”
“Yeah,” she mumbled. “I was hoping that when they left for California, it would be the end of them. But I guess that was just too damn much to ask. Since they’ve been back, my world has flipped inside out in ways you can’t even imagine.”
“No imagining for me, baby sister,” she said. “Alexis has sent me every article in every paper in which you have been featured over the last few months.”
She rattled her head and yanked the front of her robe. “Of course she fucking did. Why the hell am I not surprised?”
“You shouldn’t be.”
&nb
sp; “Did she call you while we were in the Hamptons?”
“Mm-hm. The same night the shit hit the fan and Nathan brought Adrian out in the open. She also mentioned something about Nicole dating William? But I’ll save that for another time.”
“Please do.”
“Oh trust me, we are coming back to that,” she said. “Now Alexis told me that she has been trying to convince you since the moment she found out that you were dating Mo to tell him the truth about all of this because she fears that you’re going to lose him to your lies.”
“I’m not going to lose him to my lies,” she said, stepping away from the window and crossing the room.
“And just how the hell do you know that, Vanessa? Look at me, look at yourself and what you’ve already been through. Lies is what busted up your relationship with Nathan back then.”
“His busting inside of Sheila is what ended that. Don’t get it twisted.”
“I’m not and that wasn’t an image I needed inside of my head,” she snapped. She got up from the window and stepped toward her. “Regardless of the incident behind what happened or the why, the fact of the matter is that lies are what ultimately brought you two down. It may have been for the better considering how toxic you two were, but the point of the matter is that his lies are what sent you on a downward spiral. Alexis and Alexander wanted to send you away for a while because they weren’t sure if they could even control you anymore, do you remember that?”
“How can I forget it, Felicia?”
“Then you know what lies can do to people. How they can destroy them – relationships. Maurice was the first and only person truly there for you during all of that,” she said. “He was the first and only person you really let in once it all became public.”
“I know that.”
“Then why the hell don’t you think that you owe him the truth?”
“I know that I owe him the truth!”
“Then why don’t you give it to him?!”
“Because I’m afraid if I do, that YES, I AM going to lose him! I was with Adrian not even a month after Mo and I ended whatever the hell it was we had back then. If he finds out that I went to Adrian so soon after him, he may not look at our relationship the same way again. As far as he knows, I was completely celibate during that time. I had convinced him of it because I wasn’t ready to be with him, and said I wasn’t ready to be with anybody as a result. Now imagine being in his shoes and finding out that everything you thought you knew about a relationship you could have had, has been nothing but a lie.”
