“But you know what, J, you are trying to erase it by replacingit with other men, and you more than anybody knows that is not going to work.”
“I’m not trying to replace it with men. I don’t want these men or anything from them. I’m sick of men,” Jordan blurted out.
“Jordan, you barely had men. You have been with more men these past few weeks than you have your whole life,” Dakota said, laughing.
Her smart but true comment broke the tension, because all three of the ladies were laughing for a second. Chrasey began to rub Jordan’s back.
“You are going to be OK, Jordan.You have everything you can ask for.Your love life just fell apart these past few years, and you are a little shaken.You are not the first, and you are not the last.You will be fine, with or without a man. All I’m asking is that you don’t lose yourself just because you lost him,” Chrasey said.
Jordan’s eyebrows raised when she heard those last words.
“Don’t lose myself just because I lost him,” Jordan repeated. “That’s deep,” Jordan added.
“Don’t tell her that. She already thinks she is Dr. Phil or something,” Dakota said.
“Shut up,” Chrasey said with a chuckle.
Chrasey stood up and headed out of the living room. “I’ll be right back. Going to use the bathroom,” she said.
Jordan remained and tried to pull herself back together. She was upset with herself for getting to this place, but at the same time she was happy she had her girls to bring her back to reality.
“I appreciate you guys coming over tonight,” Jordan said to Dakota.
“Please, we had no choice. It was either this or find your raped body somewhere. You’re playing with your life, and I can’t have that. I’ve been down that road many of times, many, and I was built for it.You are not.”
“I am too built for it; you see my weight’s up, right?” Jordan said with a smirk.
“Please, girl, and you see you’re over there crying like a baby too.You’ve never seen me cry over getting some pipe unlessit was because it was good to me.”
Jordan burst out laughing. “You are a nut,” she said.
Chrasey was walking back in the living room at that point. “What’s so funny?”
“Dakota was telling me how I’m not built for this behavior and she is.”
“Jordan, you are not.You are thirty-four and had been with three guys before your little splurge. One before your husband, your husband, and one after.You think you’re built to be jumpingin and out of people’s beds?” Chrasey asked while putting her hand on her hip.
Jordan just put her head down with a grin. She knew that they had a point.
“It’s that damn Tayese. She got you thinking you’re doing what you’re supposed to do by moving on this way,” Chrasey added.
“No, it’s not her. I just don’t feel like having rules anymore. For what? Where has it gotten me? Nowhere. I have been strict and moralized for nothing.”
“For you, Jordan, that’s for what,” Chrasey snapped. “What’s wrong with having your rules and morals strictly for yourself?”
“They are for me.They can’t be for no one else, because no one agrees with them but me.You both have told me to give my stuff up many of times, said I hold on too tight. No one applaudsit; I get knocked or get judged. So it’s only for me.”
“So then, that’s it. Let the men come and go, but you do what you are happy with,” Chrasey added.
Dakota was just sitting back listening. She knew she had been a home wrecker and was recovering from promiscuity herself. She wasn’t going to sit there and be too hypocritical.
“Did you know that Jayon told me once I think I’m better than everyone?” Jordan asked Dakota.
Dakota started to laugh. “I think you told me that story.”
“I commented on this girl we knew who’d had sex with this guy within a few days of meeting him. He got all defensive, saying how it was unnecessary that I would just say that about her for no reason and all this; and then he said ‘you think you’re better than everybody.’” Jordan’s neck was turning with each word as she used a “can you believe him?” tone.
“You are a little bougie,” Dakota said.
“Whatever. We all have an opinion, and we are entitled to them. Somebody in the church thinks they are better than me because I don’t go to church three times a week and I got a divorceand so on. It’s no different. We all try to be the best we can in an area. It can be morally, workwise, or overall. Either way, if you are trying to be better, you think that you are better than someone in some area.That’s each person’s own opinion.”
“That’s true, but can we let this go?” Chrasey said out of nowhere.
Dakota looked over, confused as to what was wrong with the topic.
“Jordan will go on about this forever. She was pissed off when he said it then, and she has never let it go. I don’t want to hear about it anymore,” Chrasey said to Dakota.
“Forget you too,” Jordan said to Chrasey. Then she looked over to Dakota and added, “I used to tell your butt you were a slut too.”
“Whatever. Well, now you are one too,” Dakota jabbed.
Chrasey started laughing, and so did Dakota. After Jordan gave Dakota her evil eye, she began to snicker as well.
“I hate you both. Supposed to be making me feel better, not worse.”
“Hey, you want to be grown. You want to screw your neighbor in a day, sleep with clients, meet people in cabs and bring them home.You a big girl now; you can take it,” Dakota said.
“Leave her alone,” Chrasey interjected.
“Listen, I am not proud of my recent behavior, I am not. But I can’t say I regret it, either. I know it’s pathetic, but it has been the one thing that has kept me from going over and poppingJayon’s tires and egging his house.”
“Honestly, you probably would’ve been better off doing that. It would’ve just been out of your system and you could have taken time to cope and move on. This way you’re going about it is only prolonging the whole situation.You are giving Jayon a lot more power than he deserves.”
Once again, touching on the topic of Jayon brought Jordan to tears.
“I walked away from my marriage for him. I loved that man with every piece of me. I would’ve done absolutely anythingfor him, and he wasn’t my husband nor did we have a child together. I just loved him, for who he was. I loved him since the day I met him,” Jordan poured out.
“We know,” Chrasey said.
“I have heard everything from ‘he is just a man, it doesn’t matter he didn’t love you’ to ‘that girl probably didn’t mean a thing to him,’ but you know what, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t ask for much at all, but I gave all that I had. If he was capable of cheating on me—not once but twice—risking bringing me an STD, and lying to me in my face over and over again, I could never forgive him. It just hurts so badly.”
“I know. No one thought Jayon was that type of guy.”
“That’s my point. There’s no way to tell, so why bother. It’s easier to just love them and leave them than stick around to get hurt.”
“Jordan, stop it.You are doing it again.You can’t think you’re getting Jayon back with this. He doesn’t know nor does he care. He is doing the same thing, but he is OK with it.You, you need to stay your butt home and take care of Jason.You are going to get hurt if you keep this nonsense up,” Chrasey said, seeming frustrated.
“I am going to stop sleeping with these guys. I will. I admit that it’s not helping anything, because no matter how good the sex is, I still feel just as awful the next day,” Jordan said.
“J, deal with this Jayon thing. Move past it. Talk to him, burn his memories, do what you have to do. But you can’t just internalize all that pain and anger, because you, as you see, are only hurting yourself, and he doesn’t deserve that. He was a good friend to you once, but he is not worth all this drama,” Dakota said.
Jordan finally just took it all in and didn�
�t respond. These were her girls anyway; she knew they were only telling her what was best for her. It just always seemed easier than it actuallywas, to just move on and let it go. She had moved on, but letting it go wasn’t quite as easy. Sitting there on that couch, Jordan knew that her whirlwind of one-night stands and rule breaking didn’t prove anything. It didn’t prove that Jayon lost a good thing; it didn’t prove she could live without him; and it damn sure didn’t prove she was a strong and successful woman who didn’t need anyone. All she was doing was showing just the opposite, and she realized then, with her friends giving her a dose of real talk, that in order to move on she had to gain her self-esteem back and say a big fat “f—you” to Jayon. That was exactly what she planned to do.
39
Enough was enough. Jordan walked inside her house and all she could see was her reflection in the mirror in the foyer. She didn’t even want to look at herself, so she quickly looked away. She walked directly into her living room, dropped her purse on the couch, and went upstairs to her bedroom.
She was still devastated by what had happened today, and she had just been waiting to get home and be alone. This was one of the few nights she was happy that Jason wasn’t home yet. She just dropped on the bed. There were clothes and differentobjects on her bed that didn’t belong. There were lotion bottles, cocoa butter, and panty hose she decided against when she was getting ready in the morning, and she just scooted them over as she sprawled out on the bed. She just lay there staring at the wall and all the black-and-white photos hanging up beside her bed. She looked carefully at each one and tried to remember what made her decide to choose those very pictures.One was of a black woman holding a child, and Jordan instantly thought of the way she thought having a child would be what fulfilled her life the most. She started remembering how happy she was when she got pregnant, how she felt like her life was finally about to begin. Then as she thought about how much Jason had grown, and how much her life had changed since he was born, she remembered her scare last year. She thought about when she thought she was pregnant last year by Jayon, and all the emotions that ran through her body at the time, and the emotions he pretended to have.
The beep from her alarm clock broke Jordan’s train of thought. She looked over at her Sony CD alarm clock, and it was 9:00 PM. It beeped every hour. She thought to herself that she should get up, get undressed, and call her son to tell him good night. She wasn’t pleased with herself; the charade had finallycome to an end. She’d told herself these past weeks that she was able to handle this, but on the inside it was killing her. She couldn’t lie to herself anymore. She tried, but she knew that it wasn’t working for her. Those nights lying alone in her bed became more and more difficult, realizing how she was throwing her self-respect away because she was too weak to deal with what happened with Jayon. In the beginning, she told herself it had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her. She told herself that she was tired of living by rules, that they got her nowhere but divorced and alone.
The more Jordan thought about it, the angrier she got at Jayon. She was mad at herself, but he was to blame for throwingher life into this whirlwind. Before he did what he did, well before he got caught, her life was as it should be. She still believed in herself and that her morals were valuable. She was working every day and living her life in hopes of one day enjoyingmarriage with him, her son Jason, and hopefully more kids. He claimed that they were going to get engaged this year, but he had been saying that for years, that he was ready to get married, and nothing ever came of it. Jordan just wanted to believe that they were meant to be, and when things were bad they would get better. She never considered that he might turn out to be like any other doggish man. Not her Jayon. Not the man she knew for so long.
She was done reliving it. She had been through this in her mind a million times. She couldn’t make excuses for her actions.No man should be worth your self-respect. Jayon didn’t deserve that much credit, enough to erase all the self-respect that she gained in her thirty-four years on this earth. Yet, she had sex with more men in the past month and a half than she had in all her years before then. She knew each guy was taking a piece of her with them, but at the time, the way she was feeling,she didn’t want the pieces anyway. That was until today, when she realized that that was not the woman she wanted to be, regardless. It was about that time for her to truly face the situationlike a grown woman with integrity, even if it was a bit late.
Jordan was still extremely upset that things played out the way they did. She knew her rule never to see a client on a personallevel wasn’t just one of her rules—there was meaning to it. She was never single long enough to think the rule through, but she had gotten it from somewhere. Jordan made that a rule when one of her old colleagues, Cheryl, told her about how it bit her in the butt, and now Jordan was going through the same thing. Her colleague’s situation was a little different, but it still would’ve been avoided if she didn’t date clients. This woman was seeing her client when one day she bumped into some woman who caused the guy to start pretending it was a business lunch. By the time Cheryl caught on, the woman had introduced herself as his wife. It was hard for Cheryl not to react in a surprised and displeased manner, which was probably what led the wife to snoop. Sure enough, three days later, the client called to say that he was going to hire another lawyer, and so were the three other referrals he had given her. Cheryl lost her boyfriend and four substantial clients, and she couldn’t even call to curse him out, because it was unethical according to the bar in the first place. One complaint from his wife and she would have to appear before the American Bar Association and it wasn’t worth all of that.
Jordan’s mistake didn’t affect her pockets just yet, but it was affecting her reputation, and at one point that meant more to Jordan than anything in the world. Darren had called the office today and asked if he could come by that evening, but since he requested an evening meeting, Jordan lied and said she was busy and out of the office all afternoon until the next day. She didn’t want Darren thinking her office was some late-night motel all of a sudden. She wasn’t feeling him like that anyway. He was a fine, successful brother that technically would’ve been a great catch, but Jordan wasn’t ready just yet to be lookingat anyone for more than a little fun. Her heart was still broken,and her attitude toward men was still very much tainted. It was going to take more than looks and money to get her nose open wide. Someone was going to have to come real correct.She didn’t think anything of her lie, until she was finishingup some paperwork and her assistant informed her that the next client was already there.
Gerome, Darren’s partner, came walking in with his cell phone to his ear moments later.
“Yeah, she is here. She is just dodging you,” he said as he walked in.
Jordan forgot that she had an appointment with him scheduled for six, way after the time she told Darren she would be gone. Gerome ended the phone call quickly, as if that’s all Darren was waiting to find out.
“My man said you’re dodging him, and there’s nothing to be afraid of,” Gerome said as he sat down.
Jordan could tell that Gerome knew what had happened, and it made her feel real cheap to know she was the subject of someone’s sex tales. She tried to carry on like there was nothingto it, but the way Gerome kept licking his lips and looking at her, it felt as if he thought it was his turn. She wanted to know what exactly Darren told him and how he portrayed her. It didn’t really matter, though. Just the simple fact she did what she did with him, with no relationship at hand, on her desk, and hadn’t spoke to him since, probably said enough. Wham, Bam,Thank you, Ma’am.The ma’am that Jordan never wanted to be.
The entire time Gerome was there for the meeting, Jordan felt like a piece of meat. He was treating her totally different, and the professionalism for the meeting was totally not present.He kept saying things like “you know what I’m saying,” and “fo real though.” It was like he was trying to have his club swagger on versus the normal business man p
ersona he was usually in there with. He complimented her more than once, and all in all it was making Jordan uncomfortable. She wasn’t sure if Darren told him to get a piece for himself and that she was easy and just to press her, or if he was trying on his own based on knowing that she gave it up to his boy so quickly.
When the meeting was finally over with Gerome, her assistantbrought her messages in. She looked through them really quickly, and the message from Marcus was overshadowed when she read the message that Darren left that read, “I’m jealous.”What was she thinking? She had to ask herself.This wasn’t somebody that she could just avoid without considering the income that she’d be losing. For all she knew, Gerome may get upset because he couldn’t get some action and still try to pull their account. She knew she wasn’t about to have sex with eitherof them just for their account, but she also didn’t know how much longer she could act normal when she knew what the two of them were thinking.
40
Jayon had reached out a few times in the past few weeks, but he hadn’t reached out in over a week. Jordan didn’t know what else to say to him, so she hadn’t bothered to respond. She had so many things she wanted to say to him, but she didn’t think it made sense considering he should have known how she felt about him.There were several times she laid in the bed and just cried. The life that she had known for years and years had vanished. Some of the things that she had done in the last month she could never take back, and that’s what hurt more than anything.
It was the first time in days that Jordan didn’t find herself wondering what Jayon was up to, if he was seeing someone, or if he was feeling any of the pain and regret that she was. She wouldn’t admit it to herself that what got to her the most was the thought of Jayon wifing up Randi. She told herself it didn’t matter and that she could have him, but the reality was that Jayon was a man that had once owned her heart entirely, and the thought of him being with another woman didn’t sit well with her. She wasn’t that strong. Not strong enough not to care about him at all. She heard from his cousin that he seemed to be going through it too, but she couldn’t tell if his cousin was just saying that to make her feel better.The only choice Jordan had was to not care, to ignore all her thoughts of Jayon, to ignoreall her feelings of pain, and to erase all her memories of joy with him.
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