by Kiki Leach
“Stop it, Nik.”
“Fine. I just thought that I should let you know that I talked to Vanessa before coming in here, and--”
“V?”
Maurice’s entire cocky demeanor suddenly diminished. Just the mention of his woman’s name turned the fiery blaze he had for her, one that would forever ignite his system and burn deep, into a towering inferno.
He immediately adjusted himself in the booth and ran his hands through his hair. Nikki frowned as he fixed his tie and cuffs and tugged on his jacket and dress shirt.
“She’s not here,” she told him. “I meant I talked to her on the phone.”
“Oh.” He slumped down and grabbed his mug, taking another drink of coffee. Gradually, he sat it back down on the plate and tapped the table with the edge of a spoon. “How is she?”
“Why don’t you go to her and see for yourself.”
He nodded. “When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Just know that I have. And when I don’t see her, we’re constantly talking on the phone.”
He dragged his hand down the side of his face and around to the front of his throat. “If I see her again, Nik – if I actually go to her and see her face after all this time of being apart, everything I’ve wanted to do and say to her over the last month becomes real.”
She leaned down on the table and squint. “What’s so wrong if it does?”
“Nicole.” William placed a hand on her shoulder and nodded to Maurice. She looked up at him, regrettably, as she had been unable to hear the rest of what Maurice had to say. “I’m finished over there,” he said. “Are you ready, or do you need more time?”
“Um.” She peeked around William and saw Melanie finally coming back from the bathroom. “We should get going before I’m late.” She stood up fast and turned her attention back to Maurice. “Whatever you want to do or say to her? Regardless of Page Six? I don’t think she’d mind. In fact, I think it might be long, long overdue.” She took William by the hand. “Let’s go.”
They hurried out of the shop the moment Melanie returned to the table and sat back down.
“Wow, sorry that took so long,” she said, ignoring Maurice’s swift disorientation with regard to everything and everyone around him. “They only have one stall working and apparently I picked the wrong time to go in.”
Maurice gave her a quick smile and nodded, though he remained aloof.
It was the first time since they had officially established a sort of ‘friendship’ so to speak, not long after he moved out of his house with Vanessa, that he appeared to not even notice her entire existence. She couldn’t understand what suddenly turned him away from her and was almost too afraid to ask, knowing the possibility of the answer would be equivalent to the reason her husband had still chosen not to come back home.
Maurice glanced down at his watch and drank the remainder of his coffee. “I should get going,” he told her. “I’ve got a meeting with my boss this morning and I’ve--”
“Okay,” she said. “Are you still wanting to hang out later tonight? Remember I told you that Oscar’s mother is supposed to be taking the girls and I’ve got--”
“Um.” He closed one eye and scratched the side of his face. “You know, I think I’m going to spend some time in tonight, alone. I have a deadline with an ad that I’ve been working on for far too long.”
“Okay. I understand that.” The reality was that she didn’t understand but believed she had no choice but to pretend. “Maybe tomorrow night, then.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” He pulled out a few tens from his wallet and dropped them on the table. “I’ll see you.”
“See you,” Melanie told him as he sprinted out the door.
He couldn’t get out of there, or away from her, fast enough.
Part Twelve
Adrian sat on his couch in the living room watching the World Wide News when he heard a soft knock at his door.
Muting the television, he wasn’t originally sure of what he had heard until the tapping suddenly got louder and was more frequent in rhythm. After flipping off the set, he reached for his shirt on the arm of the couch and slipped it on. Then he got up and walked over to the door.
“Who is it?” he called out.
“Sheila,” the voice said from the other side.
It was a voice more beautiful to him than any other he had ever heard before. It was also a voice he had vowed to forget, seeing as he hadn’t seen or heard from her since they had both decided that it was best to go their separate ways over a month ago.
But damn, did he miss her like crazy. He didn’t even have a picture to look at to help ease the pain of being without her. All he had was his memory of her, of her face, of her scent, of her lips and thighs.
Any other woman would’ve been pushed aside the moment she entered his life around the time he was still pining for Vanessa. But Adrian knew that Sheila wasn’t just any woman.
After opening the door to her, he stared directly into her eyes just as she had his.
There were so many things she wanted to say.
So many things he needed to say.
So many things she felt he had to know.
So many things he was certain she deserved to know.
So many things they were both convinced that had to wait.
He took her face in his hands just as she dropped her purse to the ground.
And he kissed her. Softly. Slowly. Deeply. Sensually.
Within a matter of seconds she felt herself getting too caught up to the point that her entire body was giving out beneath his grip. He draped his hands around her waist, then down to her ass and lifted her up so that she wouldn’t fall too far away from him.
As he pulled her into his apartment, he kicked her purse inside with them, and then kicked the door shut.
Tonight wouldn’t be just any night for them.
It would be the beginning of everything.
And the end of a nothing they never hoped to know again.
Part Thirteen
Vanessa was standing in the kitchen scrubbing down the ‘good’ dishes her mother had lent to her in preparation for her sister’s upcoming birthday dinner, and trying like hell to get her mind off of what Nikki had told her earlier in the day regarding Melanie and Maurice, when she heard an abrasive knock at the door.
She ignored it at first, thinking that it must have been a mistake, but couldn’t deny when she heard it again. Annoyed, she sat a plate on the edge of the counter near her stove and went over to the table to grab her cell phone. When she looked down at the time, she noticed that was almost 11pm.
“Shit,” she said to herself. “Who the hell is this?”
When the knocking turned to banging, she slammed her cell phone down next to the towel she had been using for the dishes and rushed out to the foyer, waiting a few seconds until the person on the other side started banging again.
She stood as far back from the door as she could in case the person was a complete maniac and asked, “Who is it?”
“It’s Nathan, V. Open up.”
She didn’t realize until that very second that she was only semi correct about the maniac part.
“Nathan, who?” she grumbled.
Slowly stepping forward and pressing the palm of her hand down against the door, Vanessa lifted to her toes, closed one eye and peeked through the peephole.
When she actually saw her ex standing there, his face clear thanks to the light from the lamp shining down above his head, she grit her teeth, flared her nostrils and muttered all while shaking her head.
“Shit.”
“I can still hear you from the other side, Vanessa. The doors aren’t made of concrete.”
“Which is a damn shame right about now.” She dropped back down to her feet and snarled. “When the hell did you get back to town?”
“A few hours ago. This is my first stop.”
“Lucky me. What the hell do you want at almost eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night?”
“We need to talk about some things,” he said. “I might’ve been MIA but my mind never left the city, or you. Which means I’ve done a lot of thinking--”
“Yea and I’ll just bet that you’ve had a hell of a lot to think about.”
“What?”
“Please don’t play stupid with me this late in the game. Sheila came by here a few weeks ago and told me everything, from your meeting with Joan, to your disappearing act which took place right after she let it slip to you about --”
“You being pregnant with Adrian’s baby?”
Vanessa frowned the minute she heard his tone switch from moderately civilized to downright hateful as soon as the word ‘baby’ escaped his mouth. She stepped back even further from the door and crossed her arms.
“Me losing Adrian’s baby – my baby,” she corrected, her response now hard and burning with indignation. “What the hell do you even want?”
“You don’t want to know where I’ve been?”
“I know that you weren’t in Queens. Otherwise, Harold would’ve blabbed weeks ago and it would’ve been splashed across the front cover of the NYDN within the same damn day, like everything else in my life. So aside from that, no, I don’t really give a damn where you’ve been over the last four weeks. I only want to know what the hell you want now.”
He sighed heavily. “Like I told you, we need to talk. You’re right, I didn’t go to Queens, which means I didn’t see Adrian. I wanted to, even thought about traveling out there this morning after coming back from my parent’s townhouse in Connecticut. But I held back and decided to come home instead, to see you.”
Nathan stepped forward and rested his hand on the doorknob. He swallowed hard and focused his eyes down on the cracks in the ground, the ants crawling back and forth across his shoes, the shadow of the moon as it landed directly behind his head and reflected off the light above it – anything to keep from busting that entire door down and entering her house unwanted.
Vanessa shifted her stance and exhaled nosily. “If you’re going to give me shit for what happened with him back then, during a time when you weren’t even around--”
“I’m not!” he shouted, cutting her off.
She was startled by the sudden boom in his voice but not completely unnerved. She folded her arms even tighter across her chest and peered.
“I’m not here to give you the third degree for what happened back then, alright?” he said, though Vanessa remained skeptical thanks to how harsh he sounded. “I just want to talk to you about the here and now. More specifically about the part I played in bringing Adrian to the Hamptons in the first place.”
That made something inside of her snap like a twig.
“The part you played?” She reached forward and unlocked the door, purposely yanking it back as hard as she could. Nathan stumbled forward but quickly straightened himself and cleared his throat. Vanessa rested one hand on the door and arched a brow. “You mean the sole reason he was even able to find my house on a map in the first damn place. Are you here to apologize for the bullshit stunt you pulled in parading him out in front of us like cheap cattle?”
He shifted his eyes to the corner and with a somewhat guilty look plaguing them, tilted his head and soured. “Not exactly.”
“Then goodnight, Nathan.”
As she attempted to slam the door in his face, he stopped it with the toe of his shoe. “V, wait,” he said, kicking it back. “I said ‘not exactly’, I didn’t say I wasn’t here to apologize about what happened at all.”
“What you did has really fucked things up for me again, do you realize that?”
“I figured that it would, and I’m sorry about it,” he said. “I wasn’t before, but I’ve had time to reflect on what I did to you. Now can I come in so that we can talk about why I did it in the first place?”
“I know why you did it, because of my relationship with Maurice. No need to talk any more about it when it was clear the moment you showed up that night that you were looking for a fight between the both of us. You found it in me and rightfully so. Now, goodnight.”
She tried slamming the door again, but this time, Nathan shoved it back with his hand.
“Vanessa,” he said, stern. His eyes bore down into hers and she quickly dropped her hand from the door and took a step back. “You need to hear the exact reason why I felt pushed into doing what I did that night.”
“Felt push--?” She stopped almost immediately and pinched the bridge of her nose to keep from backhanding him across the face and forcing him right down the stairs and into oncoming traffic. “You know what, if it will get you the hell out of my house and one step further from my life, then fine. Come in and tell me what you feel like I need to hear then get the hell out.”
He moved past her and shuffled into the living room. Vanessa watched as he moved and shook her head. He still looked damn good in a pair of fitted slacks and a white button down; his body remained as sick as ever.
Nevertheless, she wasn’t in any mood to deal with him or his shit.
After closing the door, she made her way into the room and leaned back against the frame of the wall. Nathan took a seat at the center of the couch and bent forward, resting his arms on his knees and interlacing his fingers. Vanessa glanced over at the clock. It was almost 11:15 now and she was more than annoyed at how much time had already been spent in dealing with him before even making it inside.
Nathan nervously fiddled with his hands and stared up at her, deliberately waiting for her to speak first. She could feel it in her bones and tell from the look in his eye that this wasn’t going to go as smoothly as she would’ve liked.
She groaned at the thought of him spending more time there than necessary and clucked her tongue.
“You said that you wanted to talk, right?” she told him. “So talk. Why did you see it fit to fuck up my relationship with Maurice, or at least attempt to?”
“Because I was angry.”
She knit her brows. “No shit. It still doesn’t give you the right to be an asshole about it.”
“That’s not what I--” Growing frustrated with her blatant flippancy, he sat up straight to readjust himself at the edge of the couch and dragged his hands down his face and to his throat. “When I first realized that you two were together, it made me feel some kind of way about it. Maurice and I may not be much now, but he was my boy at one time when we were kids. I knew he always had a thing for you – everybody did. But I never thought that you two would actually become something solid.”
She scrunched her face and shook her head, confused. “Why is that?”
“Cause I thought, maybe, that you’d always belong to me.”
“What, like I was your property?”
“V… Shit.” He dropped his face in his hand and exhaled. “You’re making this difficult as hell.”
“I’m not the one being cryptic as hell,” she replied.
“Alright.” He sighed, straightening himself again. “What I meant in saying that is, even though we weren’t together and I was with Sheila, I still thought there was a chance for us to be the endgame of this story.”
“Nathan, we are a walking, talking Grimm’s fairytale, which is probably something I should’ve realized long before you came back. Besides, you already knew that this wasn’t happening again by then so what the hell made you suddenly flip your shit to the point that you needed to prove just how much of an asshole you can truly be? Not only to me but to everyone else who told me so from the very beginning?”
“I’m getting to that,” he snapped.
“Well make it snappy.” She bent forward and popped her fingers. “I’ve got a deadline, a photoshoot in Central Park that I need to organize since I won’t be there for it, and I still need to finish cleaning the dishes for this stupid dinner I’m forced to give for Felicia on Friday. I don’t have all night to play a damn game of charades with your ass.”
Nathan jumped up from the couch and roamed around the room. His
fingers grazed everything from her bookshelf to the silk curtains covering her floor length windows.
He slapped his hands together and rubbed them back and forth, then took a deep breath and spun on his heels.
Vanessa was turned away from him, her eyes much like her mind now on something else entirely. But Nathan couldn’t help staring at her. Even with her hair a mess, and wearing another man’s shirt, she was still the most beautiful woman he had ever known.
“I wanted to destroy you that night in the Hamptons.” He nervously chuckled and pressed the palms of his hands together as hard as he could. “I was so angry that I couldn’t see straight…” He stopped and rubbed his index and thumb across his eyebrows, using the method as an attempt to keep his shit in check and from completely blowing his fuse. “Do you remember our first date back in high school?” he asked. “The first time I actually took you out to a dinner that wasn’t cooked by Alexander?”
Vanessa’s eyes shifted toward him and she sneered. “Not anymore, not like I used to, no.”
“I took you to a sushi restaurant in SoHo that’s closed down now, The Wok, or something. You wore a blue silk dress that a designer friend of your mother’s made especially for that night. You told me about that dress all week over the phone and said that you couldn’t wait for me to see it ‘cause it showed off your legs, and you wanted me to see just how good your legs looked in that dress.”
He cracked a small smile, as did she.
“And you had on a pair of black platform shoes that were covered in glitter or some shit. You said they belonged to your mother, and that she had never let you wear them before our night together. Your hair was down and around your face, and you were wearing the necklace that I had gotten you for Christmas the year before as your ‘Secret Santa’. I remember the look on your face when you opened that box and saw that diamond in the center. And the way you kissed me after I told you that I was the one who had bought it for you…” He paused and crinkled his brows recalling that exact moment between them. He’d never say it aloud, but it still took his breath away. “I remember that night like it was yesterday and I’ve been playing it over and over and over again in my mind since coming back here.”
