by Kiki Leach
“Everyone knew but me?”
Vanesa rattled her head. “It’s like a big fat fucked up game of telephone. But my mother is still in the dark about it, and I plan to keep her there for as long as possible.”
“That might be a good idea,” said Nikki, glancing at her from the corner of her eye. “But when the hell did Sheila find out?”
“When we were in the Hamptons, which is apparently the new place to go if you have a damn good story to tell and want everyone, and no one, to know all about it within the same night.”
“You’re not afraid she’ll tell Adrian after blabbing it to Nathan?”
“No. She told Nathan on an impulse, or so she claimed, before he skipped town. But with Adrian, she doesn’t exactly gain much of anything in telling him. Because he would leave her for knowing and keeping it from him, and I know that’s the last thing she wants. Especially since I think she eventually plans to leave Nathan for him.”
Nikki soured. “It’s vergonzoso that she can’t stop having sex with men that you’ve been with first.”
“It is,” said Vanessa. “Especially when you put it like that.”
“Lo siento.” She followed Vanessa as they both went back over to the table and sat down. “How did Maurice take that when you told him about losing the baby?”
“He was pretty devastated that I didn’t go to him about it first, either time – back then and now. I just hate that it’s what prompted him to even tell me about Page Six.”
“At least you two don’t have any more secrets now,” said Nikki. “Everything’s out in the open.”
Vanessa tilted her head. “Yeah.”
Nikki squint. “That sounded pretty weak, V.”
“I don’t know – I just have a feeling that something else might come out before it’s all said and done.”
“From him or you?”
“Both, maybe? Him? I don’t know.”
“Well is the feeling a good one or a bad one?”
“That’s what scares me, because I don’t know. But look, I don’t want to think about this anymore. I’m tired and this day has been shit.”
“I can relate to that,” Nikki mumbled. “By the way, how do you think Nathan is going to react to Sheila finally deciding to leave him?”
“A woman who worshipped the ground he walked on for five years finally deciding that someone else’s dick felt better than his? I’m guessing a firebomb? A hand grenade? To be perfectly honest, I’m not only sure that I don’t ever want to find out, I don’t want to be anywhere near this entire city once it does.”
Part Twenty-Six
After spending most of the day and afternoon in bed and bliss with Adrian, Sheila decided to visit a local diamond shop, Simmons Jewelry, the moment he went back to his apartment in Queens, to determine the exact cost, value and worth of her engagement ring.
It’s wasn’t as if she was actually looking to sell it off once she broke things off with Nathan in order to be with Adrian, but she was curious to know – and had been for years but tried ignoring the nagging thoughts that came along with it – just how much his ‘love’ for her had been worth the entire time. Now was a better time to find out than any, she thought, to learn the truth. God knew that even up until then, he had never managed to show what he felt for her in his actions, unless it was through sex, which often occurred after a fight. Or through his yelling, which was often followed by sex.
At any rate, she was hoping that he had mustered up enough emotion during the time of purchase to pour it all into the price of that flawless 2.1 karat gold diamond.
While waiting on the results and hoping like hell that they were worth the hustle and bustle to Midtown at that time of night, she began exploring other items that the shop had to offer, and instantly became fixated on a 2.1 karat gold diamond tennis bracelet sitting at the very front of a case near the corner. She became so fixated in fact that her face started to hurt from smiling so much. She moved down a little closer to watch it shimmer and sparkle against the tiny light the case had to offer, and kicked her foot up behind her as if she had just been kissed with tongue for the first time ever.
Or felt up in the back of Nathan’s old Escalade.
When the owner, Mr. Simmons returned with her ring in hand, she flagged him down, waving and popping her fingers and pointing down at the glass case beneath her.
“Yes?” he asked dryly.
Mr. Simmons was around his late sixties with slick white hair in the manner of George Washington and eyes as black as coal. People like Sheila were often his favorite kind of customer because they never came out of there with less than they entered with.
As he got closer to her, she bent over the case and tapped down on the glass. “That right there,” she said. “It matches my ring, right? How much is it?”
He placed the ring on a velvet booklet, then grabbed his keys and carefully opened the cage. After inspecting every part of the bracelet, he looked Sheila directly in the eyes and told her, “Fifteen hundred.”
“That’s it? Hm. Maybe I should wait to break things off with Nathan until after my birthday so that I can have this matching set. Because Adrian seems too practical to buy something like this for me, or anything that he probably didn’t make. You can’t really count on someone who’s spent years helping people in the Congo to be into something like this, can you?”
“From my experience,” he said. “No. But you don’t necessarily need someone else to purchase something like this for you. You’re always free to purchase it for yourself.” He waved his hand across the top of the case; wrinkles formed around the corners of his mouth as he smiled.
Sheila laughed aloud. “I don’t do that, especially when it comes to something like this. Just, put it on hold for me. I might come back to it – with someone else’s money later.”
He did as she asked and took down the necessary information to keep the bracelet out of the eye of the public for the next five days.
“Now,” she started. “Onto the actual reason I came in here.” She flicked her finger toward the ring.
“Well.” He placed an eye loupe over his glasses and lifted the diamond to fully inspect it beneath the light. “As you know, a diamond neither increases nor decreases in value overtime. However, after learning that this ring in particular was in fact purchased here--”
“Wait a minute.” Sheila immediately thought she had misunderstood the old man and put her hand up to stop him from talking. “Purchased here? As in your shop – as in Manhattan?”
“Yes,” he said. “In order to learn the exact pricing of the ring at the time of purchase, I searched the serial number. If you look inside the band just behind the diamond cluster and to the right of the ‘K’, you can see it right there.” He lifted the ring to show her, but she was less than interested. “I remember selling this ring to a young man, very young.”
Sheila lifted her hands and spun them back and forth around each other as if she had placed them beneath a faucet. “Was he around eighteen?”
He thought a moment.
“Yes,” he replied. “As a matter of fact, I had to ask for his identification.”
“And I bet you can’t tell me his name?”
“No, no. That little bit of information is confidential.”
“I thought as much,” she said. She dropped her hands on the case and sighed. “What year was the ring purchased?”
“Nearly six years ago--”
“Six,” she muttered. She rattled her head. “Son of a bitch – son of a bitch!”
“Is there a problem, Miss Harris?”
“Hell yeah, there’s a problem, there’s a big motherfucking problem and his name starts with Nathaniel and ends with Asshole.” She snatched the ring from Mr. Simmons and inspected it for herself. “Nearly six years ago today, is that right?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“And on this day nearly six years ago, a bastard was officially born.” She slammed her purse down hard on the glass case,
watching as it cracked at the edge, and tossed the ring down to the bottom where she felt it belonged.
Mr. Simmons draped himself over the glass and cursed. “That will be something you’ll need to pay for.”
“I’ll give you my father’s information for that,” she said. She pulled a piece of paper form her purse, quickly wrote down the number and handed it over to him. Then she got a glimpse of the bracelet from the corner of her eye and snarled. “And you can keep that damn tennis bracelet. There’s no way in hell I’m interested in getting it now.”
She stormed out before he even had a chance to confirm the information given.
Sheila was fuming. Steam blew out of her ears and she ran past people up and down the sidewalk like a raging bull on a mission to spear the matador rather than chase after the red cape. When she finally reached the hotel, she raced to the elevator and pushed the UP button so hard that it almost collapsed inside the hole.
After learning from Mr. Simmons that Nathan had purchased the ring long before he had even planned to propose for her, she realized almost too quick that it was meant for someone else. That someone once again being Vanessa.
“Son of a BITCH!” she screamed as she jumped on the elevator. People around her stared and made faces until the doors closed. She kicked the wall and slapped her purse against the doors a few times as it raced up to the top floor. “If he’s here,” she told herself, “I’m going to tell him about Adrian. I’m going to tell him about how many times we fucked and where and when, and I’m going to enjoy it.”
As soon as the doors dinged and opened, Sheila sprinted down the hall and to the room they shared. Once she shoved the door open, she noticed a strange smell floating throughout the room. Then she looked toward the bathroom and heard the water for the shower running.
After weeks of being away and without a single word to her of his whereabouts, Nathan was finally home and showering with a foul smelling shampoo. She wasn’t sure if the smell of the room thanks to him pissed her off more or less than the fact that her ring was nothing more than a hand me down. The ring won by a landslide, but she was hoping even by then that something as minor as the bad smell of a room could take her mind off of it, at least for a little while.
When the water finally stopped running, Sheila tossed her room key on the dresser and slammed the door hard, hoping that he would hear without her having to call out his name.
“Sheil’s?” he yelled out.
She pressed her lips together and clamped her teeth down tight. “Mm-hm.”
“Oh damn, Sheila, I missed you! Hearing that voice again, baby, it does shit to me that you don’t even know.”
“You’re so full of shit,” she muttered. “Mm-hm, yeah, I missed you too, baby! And that voice. And the lies and the bullshit that seem to float right out with it every time you open that damn mouth.”
“What, baby?”
“Huh? Oh, I was just saying how much I missed you too, and your hands and eyes and everything.”
When the door to the bathroom swung back, Nathan stood just outside the frame with water dripping down every inch of his skin.
Sheila was all but drooling at his build.
Even beneath the size and shape of the bruises caused by his fight with Maurice, his caramel skin looked as smooth as a Hershey bar and probably tasted just as sweet. Staring at him, or rather gaping at him, she started to remember what that taste felt like on her tongue, how it moved against her lips as he did. Every ounce of anger she had about that engagement ring was suddenly starting to melt away the longer he remained in her presence.
And he stared right back at her, knowing that looking the way he did was getting to her in the best way. It was exactly what he needed in order to make things right between them for the first time ever.
“I missed you,” he said, his voice seductive. Tempting.
But with those three words, despite how they made her shiver in her own skin, she snapped back to the reality of the situation.
“You missed me so much that you couldn’t bother to call me while you were away? To answer my calls and let me know that you weren’t laid up someplace dead?”
“I needed to clear my head after what you told me about--”
“Yeah, I know. It shocked the hell out of me too, but that’s no excuse to leave me high and dry without a word of where you were going. I didn’t have any idea of if and when you were ever coming back.”
“You had to know I was coming back.”
“You were gone for a damn month, Nathan! How the hell was I supposed to know anything? Even during all this time of us being together, you barely let me know you. And after what you did in the Hamptons, and all because of Mo and Vanessa’s relationship? Then you take off after finding out that she was pregnant with another man’s child?” She held back in telling him about the ring. She knew she needed to get her frustration about the other things out in the open before dropping that little bomb.
“I guess I can understand after hearing all of that why you’d think I could have been gone for good. I didn’t want you to worry. And I might not have called you when I was away, but I did call you earlier today to let you know where I was.”
“When?”
“This morning. You probably didn’t recognize the number on your phone because I was calling from the police station, but I took a chance in thinking you might answer anyway.”
Her eyes grew in size and she turned to face the floor. Oh. Shit.
She walked over to the bed and sat down at the edge, holding her face in shock, though she hoped he wouldn’t understand much of what it was about.
“I called Vanessa first,” he told her, though by now she was hardly paying attention to anything he was saying, “but only because I needed money to bail myself out and I assumed that my wallet was someplace inside her house. I wasn’t sure if she was going to bring it up there, but she did.” He moved over to the bed and sat down beside her. “I hated being up in there but the isolation gave me a lot to think about. And one thing I realized was how much I need you.”
She kept her eyes straight ahead, her mind racing in circles as she thought back to that morning, as she remembered being in that same bed with Adrian and how good it felt.
Nathan slid one hand up her thigh and between her legs, hoping to get her mind off of whatever the hell it was she had been thinking, and back onto him.
When he leaned in to kiss the side of her throat, she pulled back and shoved him away.
“No.”
He opened his hands. “I’m not allowed to kiss my fiancée now?”
“Your fiancée?” She sneered and moved her head back and forth. “As if that means shit to you now?”
He laughed from being confused rather than from the enjoyment of the actual conversation at hand. “What? Didn’t you hear a word I just said?”
“Do you honestly think that you can just sit there and try to kiss me when we’ve barely discussed shit? Do you think that everything can be just as it was before you stepped out?! Your ass got sent to jail last night, Nathan. That is a big damn deal! And all because you can’t stop sniffing up Vanessa’s ass like some curious dog!”
“I went there to explain about the Hamptons because I felt she needed to know.”
“And then you got into a fight with Mo and she called the cops to have you arrested and STILL, you call her FIRST. Before the one wearing your damn ring, to help you out.”
“I told you that she had my wallet in her house -- !”
“A house you should’ve never been inside in the FIRST damn place. AGAIN. And what if she didn’t have your wallet? Let’s not act like she wouldn’t have been your first call any damn way, because you’re so obsessed with her that even when she forces you OUT, you still find a way to weasel yourself back in. I feel like a broken record, but when are you gonna get it through your thick damn skull that she is in love with MAURICE?! Even knowing he’s the reason that ALL of our lives got publicly fucked, she still loves him and
wants him back. There is no place for you inside her heart anymore. There’s no room for you to make--”
“What about your heart?” he asked, standing.
Flustered and confused, she was taken aback and unsure of how to respond. Here she was ranting about his continued obsession with Vanessa, which now seemed moot, because there he was asking about her, wondering about her heart and essentially them.
“What?” she asked. It was the only word she could manage to speak without becoming tongue tied.
“You say there’s no place in her heart for me anymore. I know that Maurice is in there. He’s made his claim on it and it is what it is. But what about your heart, Sheila? Is there still room for me inside there?”
She gulped. Her skin suddenly felt hot, her breath was shaky. What the hell was he doing? What the hell was he doing?
“You just called me your fiancée, right?” she asked, not really expecting much of an answer in return.
“Yeah. But I noticed that you’re not wearing your ring.”
You mean Vanessa’s ring? she thought.
She looked down at her left hand and splayed her fingers. She could have told him the truth. She wanted to. She wanted him to feel the same pain and suffering she continued to feel throughout the entirety of their relationship. But something deep inside her compelled her to keep quiet, and to lie instead. She didn’t know what part of her that was, and she couldn’t discern whether or not she even liked it.
“I’m not wearing my ring because it’s being sized,” she said.
Skeptical but sincere, Nathan bobbed his head. “You need it smaller?”
“I’ve lost some weight,” she said, staring down at herself. “Some of it in my hands. Most be the constant stress you’ve been putting me under.”
He lowered his eyes, then glided them up and down her trim body. “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I’m sorry that I keep doing things to you and putting you through shit that you don’t deserve. Especially since I know that I can count on you to be here for me the most.”
