“Why would she do that, Simone? Leah likes you.”
Rolling my eyes, I laughed at that assertion. “Sure she does Roman. You’re not really that naive are you?”
He scowled. “It’s the truth. Leah encouraged me to try to get back with you when we broke up, she’s suggested places for dates, she asked about you every day after the miscarriage… she doesn’t have anything against you.”
“Yeah, other than the fact that I’m taking you from her. Or did you forget about the whole “I thought we were friends” thing?”
“Taking me from her?” Roman scoffed. “I wasn’t hers to start with.”
“In her mind, maybe that wasn’t the case.”
Shaking his head, Roman leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Simone, I’m telling you Leah is not interested in me romantically.”
“Roman, I’m telling you that I call bullshit.”
“She has a boyfriend.”
“What’s your point?” I asked, laughing. “If she were so into him, she wouldn’t be sweating you about a friendship. Now that’s the truth. What grown ass woman who doesn’t want him back move into her ex’s apartment to “get back on her feet” and stays for damned near a year?! The last time we had this conversation, you said a few more months… it’s been five, Roman. When is she moving out?”
“So that’s what this is really about?” Roman sat up, shaking his head. “You’re still expecting me to kick the mother of my child out onto the street?”
“I’m expecting you to not make it so damned enticing for her to stay. She’s been there a year Roman. Getting mail there, buying new throw pillows, having you pick up — what was it this last time — “butter, so we can have pancakes for breakfast”. How do you think that makes me feel? Her ass is making you breakfast after you lay up over here for half the night, like she’s the main girl, and I’m some …. jump off. And then you sit here and defend here. It’s not like that Simone, she just wants us to be friends again. Please. Please.”
I rolled my eyes, disgusted as I stomped my way into the bathroom. I was standing in the mirror, brushing my hair into a ponytail when Roman appeared in the door. He leaned against the doorway with his shoulders drooping as he sighed.
“So… tell me what you expect me to do, Simone. You want me to alienate her? Ignore her when we’re in the apartment together, act like she’s not there? You want me to force her to let you come on a family trip to the aquarium for her child’s birthday?”
I scowled at him in the mirror. “No. I don’t even like aquariums, I was only going because Zahra asked. But there it is. Family. Your little family, you, Leah, and Zahra, going on a road trip. How… cozy.”
“Wow. Here I was thinking I was doing the right thing, by having a healthy relationship with the mother of my child, but it’s somehow a problem for you.”
Tossing the brush onto the sink, I rounded to face him. “I don’t have a fucking problem with you getting along with Leah, my problem is these blurry-assed boundaries. My problem is her texting you at all hours with things not related to your child. My problem is her throwing the miscarriage in my face, rubbing it in that she gave you something I couldn’t.”
With a dry chuckle, Roman pressed his head into the door frame. “Come on, Simone. Leah didn’t do that shit, that doesn’t even sound like her.”
“So I’m lying on her?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“The hell it isn’t. I get it though. You’ve known Leah longer, you live with her. I’m just the hysterical girlfriend, right? It’s nothing to me to lie on her.”
“Simone, what the—”
“You should go. If you’re gonna stand here and take her side over mine, you don’t need to be here, Roman. One thing I’m not gonna do is compete.”
Roman stepped into bathroom, sliding his hands around my waist. He lowered his head until his forehead was pressed against mine, looking me right in the eyes. “You’re not competing with her. I do not want Leah. I want you. I love you. Tell me what she said to you.”
“Bringing up the miscarriage at all, in the middle of the day, while I was at work was insensitive in general, but as she was leaving, she made sure to point out that Zahra was your one and only child.”
Roman’s jaw clenched, and he briefly closed his eyes as he swore under his breath. “I’ll talk to her.”
“Don’t bother,” I said, pushing him away from me. “She’ll just say whatever she’s been saying for the last few months that has you convinced it’s reasonable for her to still be living there. Besides, I don’t want her to know she got to me.”
“So what do you want me do, Simone?”
“I want you to stop being so blasé about her. She doesn’t want to be “friends” with you Roman, she’s biding her time until I get sick of this and move on, so she can make her move. I want you to give her ass a deadline and some boundaries. We’ve been dating for seven months, Roman, and we say we love each other. I shouldn’t have to send you home to another woman at night, especially one who's confused about her place in your life. That’s not unreasonable.”
“... You’re right. It’s not.” He sat down on the edge of the counter and grabbed my hands, pulling me between his open legs. “I dropped the ball with this, but… I’m gonna fix it. Okay?”
I met his eyes, staring at him for a moment before I finally nodded. “You’re lucky I love you,” I said, closing my eyes as his hands covered my breasts.
“I know. You put up with it longer than you should have had to, because I didn’t feel like having a big blow up with Leah, and her crying and shit.” He paused to kiss me, dragging his hands down to my waist. “I’m sorry.”
I nodded— even smiled a little— as he nudged his face into the side of my neck, kissing and biting until I broke into full-fledged giggles. “You make me sick,” I whispered, brushing my lips against his. “I’m supposed to be mad at you.”
He flashed those dimples at me as he pushed his hands into the seat of my panties and gripped my butt. “Don’t let that bullshit ruin our night, Beautiful.”
“Mmhmm. I’m getting in the shower.”
Shamelessly, I stripped out of my underwear, avoiding his lustful gaze. I stepped into the tub and turned the shower on, yanking the curtain closed for emphasis. After a few moments, I peeked out, and Roman was still in the same spot, staring expectantly in my direction.
“Well, don’t just sit there like a bump on a log, Roman. Are you coming or not?”
— & —
When I woke up the next morning, I didn’t feel good. Physically, I was fine, but something just felt… off. The first thing Roman did after brushing his teeth was bury his face between my thighs, and that helped a little, but the uneasy feeling hung with me long after he was gone, off to have his “family day” with Zahra and Leah.
Even though we’d made up the night before, there was still an unspoken thread of tension between us, regarding Leah. I could ignore it again for a little while, but this was the last time I was going to make myself clear about my displeasure. Roman was a smart guy, he could figure this out. If he didn’t, it was because he didn’t want to, and that opened a whole other world of possibility I didn’t want to think about before I had any evidence to support it.
But he said he would fix it. If nothing else, Roman was absolutely a man of his word, so I believed that. I could give him time. A little time.
That wasn’t it though. The stuff with Leah, however annoying, wasn’t the source of the persistent feeling something was wrong.
The phone call came at 10:53 that morning.
— & —
I wanted to call Roman.
I needed to call Roman, or I would go crazy, walking around this house filled with palpable grief. Still, I let my phone stay in its place in my pocket as I wandered the rooms of Logan’s house.
Logan’s house.
Anger crept up my spine as I came to the back porch of the house — India’s dream house that
was no longer hers. Logan was sitting back there on the porch swing, hands propped behind his head. I sat beside him, remembering I’d told myself I wouldn’t say anything out of the way. When we were separated by hundreds of miles, that was fine. The entirety of our correspondence consisted of him giving me rare updates on India’s condition, and frequent updates on the well-being of my godchild. Now, with just a few feet between us… it was much harder to not rail into him for breaking the vow of fidelity he’d made to my best friend.
I was furious with him for his weakness, livid over the fact he could move on so easily from India. But that was unfair. Especially when I knew for a fact Logan loved her. After all, he’d shelled out who knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars in doctors, and specialists, nurses, medical equipment, etc in an effort to help India recover. And there was no denying that the grief radiating from him was real.
Still. He’d gone out and gotten himself a girlfriend. I supposed it was inevitable, after two years of your wife being in a coma, that a young, attractive guy would start to want some companionship. Her name was April, and he liked her a lot. And she was good to Asia, which to me, was more important than anything else.
This wasn’t information Logan gave me. No, I heard this all from India’s mother, who was confusingly okay with it. He’d actually asked for her blessing, and she gave it. I was less forgiving though, much less gracious than India’s mom… which is probably why he didn’t tell me himself. Besides, how do you even approach that topic? When do you tell your wife’s best friend you have a new girlfriend?
Certainly not when there was a funeral the next day.
“Can you stop considering the money for Posh Petals a loan now? I’ll have the rest of what she left for you deposited into your account.”
Logan’s voice broke me out of my musing, and I turned to him. His handsome face was lined with mourning, and his thick blonde hair was greasy, like it hadn’t been washed in a few days, most likely in conjunction with the sudden tanking of India’s condition. I tried not to hold it against him that he hadn’t called to tell me that, and had waited until the morning after she passed away to let me know. He was grieving. I had to respect that.
“Yeah, Logan. I won’t send another check. And… thank you. For everything.”
I glanced down at the screen of my phone. Roman had texted me several times, but I didn’t read them or respond. What could I say that wouldn’t be an instant giveaway to my current mental state? It was his daughter’s birthday. He was where he needed to be.
“She wanted you to sing.”
My eyebrows shot up as I turned back to Logan. “Absolutely not.”
“It was written into her final wishes. You know how she was, a plan for everything. You should see the stack of “contingency plans” I found.”
“No.”
“It’s on the program, Simone. We’re doing it in the way she said she wanted it done.”
“I don’t even know what song to do… what music? No time to practice… what if I’d been sick?”
“Are you sick?”
“No.”
Logan shrugged, then stood to go inside. “She had a list, with lyrics and music, all of that. You can choose what you want to do.” He pulled a smartphone from his pocket and put it into my hands, closing my fingers around it. It was an early model, nearly obsolete compared to the one in my own pocket. India’s phone.
He went in, leaving me swinging alone in the fast-approaching darkness to absorb the fact that the next day, I would be singing over my best friend as we prepared to bury her. She was gone. I’d grieved India before. When she first slipped into the coma, and honestly… every day after. But that had been accompanied by the gradually fading hope that she was still there, just waiting on some specific occurrence that would make her wake up.
I turned the phone over in my hands, squeezing the power button until surprisingly, it turned on. Logan had charged it for me. It was one of the few — and strangest— requests I’d made of Logan, to keep India’s phone in service, so I could maintain some semblance of a connection to her. When the phone was done powering on, I went into her text messages and scrolled through the two, almost three years of one-sided correspondence from me to her. These things chronicled my life.
Failed dates, business triumphs, lonely days, and near the end, my new love with Roman. Something inside of me broke when I came upon one of the last messages I’d sent, right after I lost the baby.
“You’re closer to my baby than I am… Please watch out for him/her. - Simone”
I turned off the screen and rushed up to the room Logan had designated for me. I sat on the bed and pulled my knees up to my chest. All day, I hadn’t shed a tear, holding as tightly as I could to numbness instead. Now, they flowed freely. I cried, and cried, and cried until I threw up. And then I cried some more.
— & —
Simone was tripping.
The whole day had gone by without a single response to any of my texts or calls. This last one from an hour ago, a request for clearance to stop by when I got back to the city had gone unanswered as well. The only thing I could assume was that she was still annoyed about this whole thing with Leah.
Not that I blamed her.
Truthfully, it was time to move things along, and I’d already decided the best course of action for that. The tricky part was getting Leah to agree with minimal fuss. As we walked through the door of my apartment, after dropping a sleeping Zahra off with her grandmother, I ran over the idea in my head. Leah headed for the kitchen, and I followed, taking a seat at the counter. I was just getting ready to start speaking when she pulled out two glasses, cola, and a bottle of Jack Daniels and sat them on the counter.
“I don’t know about you, but after a total of eight hours in the car with our chatterbox, and spending the day surrounded by wild, screaming kids at the aquarium, I could use a drink. You?”
I nodded, then watched as she prepared the drinks. We both needed one for the conversation we were about to have. She slid mine to me across the counter then took a big gulp of hers, squinting as the liquor went down her throat.
“So we need to talk,” I said, taking a sip from my drink after she’d placed hers back on the counter. I saw why she’d reacted to it like that— she’d given us both a heavy serving of liquor.
“Uh-oh. What am I in trouble for?”
My mind flashed to the look on Simone’s face when she told me the miscarriage comments Leah had made, but she’d asked me not to bring it up. I wouldn’t now, but if it happened again, I was setting that shit straight.
“You’re not in trouble… you just have to find an apartment.”
Leah lifted an eyebrow, then took another long drag from her glass, prompting me to do the same. “So… you’re kicking me out?”
“No,” I replied, shaking my head. “I’m bringing us back to the agreement that was made in the first place. A few months has turned into a year, Leah. It’s not that hard to find a place around here.”
She drained her cup, then placed it back on the counter to pour another. “No, it’s not, but I was trying to save up enough from my new job so this would never happen again. I’m trying to build an emergency fund, I told you.”
“Yeah, and you should have plenty by now. The only thing you pay for is your personal bills and occasional groceries.”
“So you’re counting my money now?”
I sucked my teeth. “Hell yeah, I’m counting your money when you’re living here rent-free, with the agreement that you’re saving up to get your own place. It’s been long enough, Leah. If you need a little extra buffer, just tell me, and I’ll deposit it in your account. But… it’s time for you to go. You’ve got a month.”
Leah stared at me for a second before she rolled her eyes, and again drained her drink. She rolled her eyes when I held out my glass for a refill too while she fixed hers, but she did it anyway. “Okay. A month,” she agreed, handing my cup back to me. “Let me guess though… th
is is coming from Simone?”
“No.” I took the glass and took a swig. “This is coming from me. We had an agreement of a few months when you moved in— before I even knew Simone. It’s time to get back to how it was before, with the custody schedule and all. I’m ready to have my own space back.”
“Mmhmm. A month,” she repeated. “I’ll be out of your hair, except for what relates to Zahra. Okay?”
“Okay.”
From the look on her face when I left it at “okay”, I knew Leah was looking for more than that, but I was in no mood to give it. I really was tired, and the last thing I felt like doing was getting into another circular conversation with her about the state of our “friendship”. Since the first time she brought it up, we’d had a similar conversation two or three more times, each time more draining than the last.
“Come watch TV with me?”
My eyebrow lifted at her sudden change in demeanor, but the request — and her expression— seemed innocent enough. I suspected the liquor was kicking in, which meant she was going to be her laid back, bubbly self — not this new Leah I’d been living with for the last months.
“Yeah… we can do that.”
It’s all I would have been doing anyway, vegging in front of the TV, trying not to be in my feelings about Simone ignoring me. It wasn’t a big difference to just do the same thing in the living room, with Leah beside me. I laughed when she picked up the cola and the liquor, thought about it, then put the cola back as we headed into the living room.
We found a comedy special on cable, but soon the TV was going completely ignored as we talked and laughed, reminiscing about years past.
“Do you remember when you and Aaron almost got arrested for climbing up on that billboard?”
I shook my head. “Hell no. I remember you almost getting us arrested after we climbed up to save you and your ditsy ass friend cause you got up there and got scared.”
“That’s what I said,” Leah replied, giggling as she took another swig from the bottle. She offered it to me, but I declined. We — mostly Leah — had already gone through most of the brand new bottle, and my head was starting to swim a little.
A Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Serendipitous Love Book 1) Page 14
