by Love Belvin
Raj did not, and neither did I. I didn’t get the joke.
“Good for her,” was all he contributed.
“Get the hell outta here, Raj!” Myisha laughed with one arm crossed over the other and using one to hold her wine glass outwardly. “You know you were sick when you heard she was dating the internet tycoon!” She regarded me. “Girl, this man has had the biggest crush on that Williams girl!” She snickered again. “What’s crazy is he could’ve had her, but she was too damn aggressive. Ol’ girl made it clear what she wanted from Raj. That was going on for like…four or five years. Remember she came to your party in the Hamptons with her girls?” Myisha winked, as she sucked food from her teeth. “I think Kelly was down; fuck her fiancé at the time. She wanted Ragee!”
Raj snorted, sitting back in his chair. I could tell he was done with his food. This time, I was undisputedly jealous. It was illogical, but very much real. Ragee the singer could have any woman he wanted, layman or celebrity. Even with two degrees and no baby daddies, I couldn’t fuck with a tennis star and a popular girl band music star.
Raj tossed his chin my way. “You know she got a slot in L.I.T. Music’s training camp. Right?”
Myisha’s eyes met mine. “Really? That’s what’s up.” She took a sip of wine, and I nodded. “When does it start?”
“In a week,” Raj answered.
“In the City?”
“West Coast, mostly Arizona.” He yawned, stretching his shoulders while seated. “They got property out there with a studio. Lord the only one doing his class off the property. She’ll fly to L.A. for that one.”
Her regard was on me when she responded to him. “Damn. Lord running L.I.T. now. That’s a big deal, getting his time and knowledge.”
Feeling uncomfortable at the prospect, I swallowed. “I’m grateful for the opportunity.”
Myisha nodded then asked, “What does Mike have to say about that?” She rolled her eyes.
I considered that for a minute. “I haven’t heard from him since Super Bowl.” My gaze shifted to Raj. “He tried calling when we were sick, but I didn’t touch my phone.” He was the last person I thought to call back once I felt far enough from death again.
“Hmmmm…” Myisha hummed.
“I need to take a leak,” Raj murmured.
“Send the waiter back. I need another drink,” Myisha was able to relay before he was out of earshot.
I mentally noted it was her fourth glass.
Raj announcing he needed the bathroom snapped me out of my head. He scooted back from the table and I grabbed my water, gulping down remnants of the salad I couldn’t taste. My pitiful regard was with him, as he sauntered away. The pathetic…cowardice in me wanted to be with him instead of being left here alone with an affiliate with whom I once shared companionable chemistry. Stealth. Hiding. Leaving loved ones in the dark. I hated keeping secrets. How long would this affair propagate itself?
“You fucked him,” she breathed melodically to my profile, her revelation seemed so sound.
I couldn’t face her. Instead I rolled my tongue over my teeth and gums to clear the debris of the salad ingredients. My eyes blinked successively and I pushed my lips out, an act of distraction.
“You had to. I peeped the way he looked at you when you came from the damn bathroom. His pride was in owning your body not trimming it.” A wave of arousal coursed my spine, and I rolled my eyes hating it. “And I know the cues of a cheater.” That comment got my attention and I turned to Myisha, finding her leaned into the table, head angled. “That’s what you’ve been acting like: someone who’s betrayed me—cheated on me.”
I went for my water again, eyes skirted all around the room, over her—except for on her. “Can’t cheat on you if we’re not in a relationship.”
“You basically did when you fucked my cousin.”
“He’s a big boy.” I snorted. “Trust me.”
“In the biblical sense?” Myisha hiked her brows.
No matter the reflection of my disposition, I felt horrible. Like shit. I knew this wouldn’t go over well. And no matter how crazy her claim, I did feel I betrayed Myisha. It didn’t matter that I’d gotten to know Raj far better in the past few months than I did her before she left the country. Myisha was nice to me, generous when everyone else was devising this fucked up ruse to make me feel like an outsider, an employee. She finessed it to appear as though we were “loose” girlfriends.
To abate the impending emotions, I cleared my throat. “You should speak to your cousin, Myi—”
“Bitch,” she murmured sharply. “I’m talking to you.” Her eyes pinned me for a time longer than I could measure. I swallowed hard, not knowing what to do. I would not argue with anyone over my sex life. It would not go down. But Myisha… She made it hard not to care. Her shoulders dropped and her face flashed pain. “He’s not that type of dude. Raj ain’t a come up kinda guy. If word get out that you’re using him, it’ll rattle the damn press for years to come.” My chin dropped. “He won’t marry again, and now the damn narrative’ll be it’s because he got burned by a basic bitch.”
“That’s better than the one where he participated in a fake marriage to prove he isn’t gay.” I cocked my head to the side, ready for her rebuttal.
Instead, I watched as Myisha cringed at that age-old fallacy. It pained her to hear as much as it did me to say it. She shook her head, shoulders dropped again. Long gone was the garrulous Myisha, who couldn’t stop yapping if we paid her to. Here was the bruised one.
“Look,” her tone was that of a battered soldier. “Now that you got something outta him, I hope you’re done. You can go to the camp and he can go off on his tour, and the story can be the scheduling ruined it for you two. You can be gone and he’ll be out of your hair.”
“What if I don’t want him out of my hair?”
“Why? So you can squeeze more opportunities from him?”
That hurt. Like…an actual fucking prick in my heart.
“Why can’t I genuinely care about him? Have a real connection with him? He is a fascinating man, by the way. A real good guy.”
Myisha pinned me with a stare of incredulity, shaking her head. “Fucking ain’t knowing. You don’t know him.”
“I’d like to think I do, to a large degree, Myisha.”
She scoffed, “Yeah. You bugged the hell out. Now, I know it for sure.” She waved me off. “The fuck you know about my family,” she spoke under her breath, going into her purse.
That rattled the hell out of me.
“I know if your momma wasn’t dead, I’d kill her myself.”
Myisha’s head flew up. Her wild eyes speared me and the spell of time she did twisted the blades. For countless seconds, we warred with our eyes, Myisha’s glare was far more lethal because once again, a new secret had been revealed. She’d just confirmed it was, in fact, her mother who’d molested Ragee. That jarring fact kept me in the fight. I wouldn’t back down. Assault is assault, and I wouldn’t dance around it.
“Y’all done or do you want dessert?” My eyes flew to Raj sauntering back into the private room, oblivious to the gunplay taking place. A faint smirk awakened on his face. “Wynter, I know you eatin’ like a mouse tonight and don’t want no sweets.”
When we brushed eyes, he immediately noticed my ill-disposition. I watched his regard go directly to his cousin, who, while she dug through her purse, hissed, “I’m good. Ready to go.”
Raj’s brows pinched and he questioned me through his eyes. Annoyed by it all, I shrugged with my face and reached for my clutch, needing a distraction.
I hate fucking secrets!
“Aye, yo, Mykee.” He spread his legs, opening his stance, and pushed his hands in his pocket. His head angled and he sucked his lips into his mouth, and I sensed something was coming. Myisha hesitantly gazed his way. She was struggling to keep her shit together. Raj sidled up behind me. “Wynter still staying in my room—and from now on,” he clarified.
And that was it. It w
as all that was needed to paint the picture of our new relationship. Our new arrangement.
“Yeah,” she muttered, gathering her things to stand. “So I see.” With hardly any regard, Myisha stood to leave the table.
Raj moved to grab her arm, concern dancing on his face. “What’s that all about?”
She tossed head back toward me. “You spilling family business to strangers?”
He glanced over to me again, reading me. I had nothing for him. I did nothing wrong.
He let her go and stepped back. “Who I tell what to is my business. I ‘on’t need nobody’s permission to do shit.”
I recognized that alpha move. He was shutting her out, shrinking her significance, and claiming his lane. It didn’t sit well with me at all. Too many times, I was the recipient of that ill-regard.
Myisha and Ragee warred silently, just the way we had moments ago. Her mouth went slack as she processed his move, his repositioning her on the chess board. Then her incensed regard hit me, and I caught a flash of betrayal in it.
“Yeah,” she hissed. “I see now.” Myisha jerked her body away and careened out of the room in her high heels.
Raj peered over to me with stormy eyes and did a reverse nod, gesturing it was time for us to go. My eyes fell as I grabbed my things and rose from the table to leave.
Once we made it back to the house, I scurried to the bathroom in the master suite to wash off my makeup and take a warm, calming shower. Once done, I tossed on one of Ragee’s t-shirts and a robe. When I came out into the room, Raj was sitting on the bench, half-dressed and appeared preoccupied with his head hung. I knew right away the weight looming over the room—the house.
“I’mma take a shower, too,” he murmured dejectedly. “And I’mma go downstairs and talk to her.”
“No.” I took a deep breath, my fingers found their way to my scalp, rubbing distractedly. “I think I need to talk to her.” He peered up to me with the same stormy eyes brewing since the restaurant. “Listen, I know you guys are close, know you two have a bond I wouldn’t dream of penetrating, but woman to woman, we have to get along. We have to pull this off, and I don’t like the way things went down back there. I feel like I need to be the one who initiates some type of reconciliation here.” I let go of air holding in my lungs. “Myisha and I may not be real girlfriends, but she was an on-time friend when I felt my world was crumbling as a consequence of an impulsive, deceptive decision I made.”
Raj’s eyes darted around the room as he considered it. But before he could respond, I was ambling out of the room. I didn’t trust him to make this call. Already, it was established he liked compartmentalizing information and emotions. In this instance, it was wrong.
“Aye,” I heard him call behind me. I turned to face him over my shoulder. “We good?”
I took a few moments to consider his question. Was he regretful? Did he care if we were on good terms? The man was so damn confusing—complex. I nodded my answer, feeling confident about my position.
I left for the main floor of the house and after a considerable hike, I was knocking at Myisha’s suite door.
“Come in,” her vocals dragged just as dejectedly as her cousin upstairs looked.
I turned the knob and pushed the door in. Right away, I located her across the massive room, sitting on the back of a sofa chair, gazing out the walkout door leading to a gallery. She wore a pink silk tank and short set with one strap hanging from her shoulder. In my approach, I could see she puffed on a cigar, a glass of wine not far from her reach. Myisha tossed a nasty, indifferent glance my way before going back to her nighttime gazing and puffing.
I rolled my eyes behind her back as I scratched my nose. “Listen, I didn’t deserve that earlier.”
“How the hell you think you didn’t?” She kept her back to me.
“Because I’m a consenting adult and so is Raj. Yeah, I can see you were caught off guard, but by no means should you feel betrayed. We’re healthy adults, good looking people, we have chemistry…it happens.”
“Yeah, but the shit you said about my family…”
I began to nod although she didn’t look at me. “Yeah. And I apologize for that. That isn’t my business…I don’t even want to make it my business. But what you did was equally wrong. You accused me of being a gold-digger, and Myisha, I know you’ve been gone just about the same number of days we spent getting to know each other, but I know if you thought really, really hard you would know I’m no gold-digger. Like…” My eyes danced as I conjured the words. “I came into this situation consenting to it all. And yes, I was in way over my head and expressed to you back then I had regrets in doing it.”
“Who’s to say since I’ve been gone, you haven’t thought about renegotiating the terms?”
I shook my head. “My agreement is not with Ragee; it’s with Mike Brown. Raj’s name is nowhere on the paperwork. If this thing were to go public, he wouldn’t be implicated. It would be my word against Mike’s.”
“Yeah. Exactly. So now you want more out of the deal. More money!”
She wasn’t using her damn noodle. “Myisha, Raj isn’t paying me anything. I bargained a deal with Mike.”
She finally turned to face me, cocking her head to the side as though I was the slow party. “Now you want more from my cousin. What Mike does ain’t enough.”
My blood boiled and I switched hips to rest on. “I’mma be honest with you: I don’t need Raj. I never asked him for anything. Yeah, he helped me lose weight. Yeah, he agreed to help me with my music career, but I never asked for either, neither are they monetary. We just had a connect—”
Her whole body swung around. “What the hell— Why do you keep talking about this connection? What chemistry? Where the hell did you ‘connect.’”
My head swung back and chin dipped. “Well…” I blew out a breath, “…for starters: with your grandmother, who apparently ran a house more suitable for strangers than her own kin. She comes here, oblivious to the debauchery taking place underneath her roof all those years ago at the expense and exploitation of innocent kids, and carrying on with her ‘ministry’”—I used air quotations—“she practiced in his safe place. Raj needed a shield from the demons that lurked with her when she came around. I had to be that in your absence. I had to sit through hours of her sermons, hours of her praise and worship. And when I learned what happened under her nose all those years ago, I had to bite my tongue and not address it. Not ask her why was her nose so in between the pages of her Bible that had her turn a deaf ear and blind eyes to what was going on around her. The rampant sexual abuse going down in her house.”
“I don’t know what Ragee’s told you, but you don’t know shit about what went on in my grandmother’s house.”
I shot my palms in the air. “You know what…” I shook my head, “I’m not trying to come down here and start a war, dig up old dirt, or peel back any scabs. I just want to make sure you and me are good.”
“Why?” she demanded.
“Maybe because I’m not a bad person. Maybe because I actually like you. I like your cousin!” My arms leaped in the air. “Is that the worst thing in the world? You two aren’t the only people you can trust.”
“Yeah,” she breathed and turned to put out the growing ashes of her stogie. “I can’t tell.”
“Really? So, out of all these months you’ve been away, gadding about the globe with your Ukrainian lover, you’ve not seen you can trust other people and let them in? You sure as hell have been away long enough to discover that level of intimacy!”
Myisha’s unbothered gaze went back out to the gallery. It was unbelievable! How can a vibrant, healthy woman like her just experience a deeper connection with a man, and not understa—
Oh. Shit.
That’s when it hit me.
I backed up until my ass hit the bed post. Coincidentally, Myisha’s narrow gaze roved back over to me.
“You’re still a virgin,” I breathed, unmoving. “You didn’t do it. You never h
ad sex with him. It didn’t work out.”
“Yeah,” she began, tone drily. “Well, that narrative hasn’t changed.” She referred to our nasty exchange back at the restaurant. “You know how I’m sure you and Raj ain’t make this “magical” connection? Some of us ain’t built for that. We just ain’t got it in us.” Her narrowed eyes were red and possessed-like, reminding me of palpable pain I’d seen recently.
With her cousin.
Oh. My. God!
Bile shot up my esophagus and I audibly gagged, quickly swallowing back the liquid. Myisha’s head then body swung to face me.
“What?” she asked.
With a heaving chest, I straightened. “You were assaulted, too.”
Immediately, first one then two streams of tears raced down her face. Her lips trembled when she raised her arm and pointed her index finger. “Please. Get out,” she could hardly speak.
I obeyed, quickly walking backwards until I could sync my feet with my brain and turn ahead for the door. My body trembled halfway to the master suite, mind haunted with images of a gang of demons violating innocent kids. I was here again. Back here. Once again surrounded by broken, troubled, and damaged people unable to shake their darkness. It’s the life I’d left last year when I quit my job. It was why I opted for this stupid ass masquerade in the first place. Yeah. It was time to go. Next week couldn’t get here fast enough to put much needed distance between me and the McKinnons.
The next few days passed by similar to the ones just after Myisha left the country and when Raj and I returned from Saint Justin. A cloud of stagnant emptiness rested over the estate. At least for me they were. For Raj, they were glorious and filled with hot sex, a few dinner dates, and long talks by the fireplace in the living room. Me, on the other hand, when I wasn’t working out or visiting Van, I jogged back to the ranch and spent copious amounts of time with Arnie. He was my love in no time. Apparently, I was his, too, to his little brother’s frustration. Several times, Raj drove back to get me after dark for dinner.
