“Yes, Jamie, it really did just happen. I promise. I would never intentionally hurt you.”
His eyes darted back and forth across my face, like he was trying to determine if I was lying to him or not. I was prepared for a comeback. I was prepared for him to question me more, but what I wasn’t prepared for was for him to kiss me. I wasn’t ready for the aggression in his kiss, like he was trying to prove a point. It was like he was trying to show me why his kisses would always have more meaning than any that Aric could give me. I might not have been ready for it, but I didn’t fight it. If it was what he needed to get over my act of betrayal, then so be it. It wasn’t like I didn’t like the aggression. Jamie had never been aggressive like he was at that moment. It reminded me of the way Aric would come at me when he wanted sex.
I cried out when Jamie’s hands squeezed both my breasts so tightly that it caused just as much pain as pleasure, like he’d heard the mistake I made of thinking of Aric. For some reason my breasts and nipples were extremely sore. I didn’t have time to think about that, though. Jamie’s hands had pushed my dress up around my waist as his mouth moved to my neck. He bit down and sucked hard, causing my hips to buck underneath him. My panties were soaked. I loved what Jamie was doing to me. He tore at my panties, snatching them away with ease. My hands pulled at his locks, scratched at his back while my lips sought his again. I felt when he released himself from his underwear. My voice got caught in my throat, and my back was arched so far back that my head was hanging over the arm of the couch.
Jamie roughly pushed into me. There was no finesse, no warning, and he growled as he did it. He caged me between his arms. My eyes were closed, but I could feel him gazing down at me while he roughly took my body over the edge.
“Oh . . . my . . . oh . . . Jamie.”
Those were the only words I could formulate. With one hand I dug into his back with my nails. I pulled my own hair with the other. Jamie put my legs over his shoulders, lifted me from the couch, then flipped us so that I was on his lap. I might have been on top, but he was still in control. He bounced me up and down on him . . . each time harder than the time before. I lost count of how many times I orgasmed.
Gabe
My father and I were back on nonspeaking terms. After that whole talk, he’d still gone and flown Cecilia in, and my mother was still receiving phone calls from him. That shit pissed me off to no end. I was pissed at her too. I couldn’t understand why she would continue to allow herself to be subjected to such bullshit. That was something she and I would discuss, and I was prepared for whatever she had to say. Pulling into my mom’s neighborhood made me smile. I had always felt a sense of peace when I could be close to her. She lived at the end of her street in a quiet, picturesque neighborhood. The neighborhood had ranch-style Tudor homes, along with two-story single-family homes.
Every lawn was manicured to perfection, and the neighborhood was so quiet that you had the impression that no kids lived there. I could see her as I turned onto her street. Her hair was braided back into cornrows that hung down her back. She had gardening gloves on and was on her hands and knees, planting flowers. She had a green thumb and loved to keep her yard picture perfect with flowers.
At fifty-eight she looked every bit of twenty-nine. People were always shocked when they found out her age. Her butter-toffee skin was flawless and still had its youthful appeal. She exercised daily, so her body could put any younger woman’s body to shame. She was into eating mostly like a vegetarian, so her health was above standard. When she saw my car, she stood and smiled, using a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. Her smile beamed at me as she waved. I parked and got out, placing my keys in my pocket before I walked over to hug the woman who’d given birth to me.
As always, she smelled of lavender and roses. “Hey, baby. How are you?” she asked.
I had to bend down to hug her. “I’m okay, Mom. How are you?”
She pulled back from the hug and looked up at me. “I’m doing well. Came in third at the marathon. Your mama still got it,” she bragged with a smile.
I chuckled. “You never lost it,” I complimented her.
“Flattery will get you everywhere, son.”
She kneeled down to pick up her garden sheers and tossed them in the wicker basket sitting to the right of us. My mother had the kind of flowers in her garden that bloomed even in winter. She made quick work of pulling off her gloves and tossing them in the basket as well before picking it up. I jogged up and opened the screen door for her, allowing her to walk in ahead of me. She’d had on Reebok running shoes with pink yoga pants and the pink top to match. She was very much into yoga and believed it kept her young and sane, as she’d put it once.
“It smells good in here. What are you cooking?”
She sighed and gave a light giggle. “You mean what did I cook?”
I nodded and looked around after she put the basket atop the wrought-iron table sitting by the door. There was a vacuum sitting by the wall in the hallway, along with an umbrella stand. We made it to the front room, and a newspaper lay on the coffee table. It was a sure sign that my father had been there. My mom’s antique-style furniture gave the front room a classical appeal. She had vintage Marie Antoinette–style settees in a cream color and trimmed in gold, along with a pair of Italianate gold side chairs with leaf details. The forty-two-inch flat-screen on the wall over her fireplace was in stark contrast to the period decor. The hardwood floor shone like she’d just mopped it with Murphy Oil Soap.
“Yeah. What did you cook?”
“Some collards, and I smothered some steak with onions, bell peppers, and potatoes. Made some homemade corn bread and a blackberry cobbler,” she answered.
“So Dad was here.” I said that more as a statement than a question. That was his favorite meal. My mother didn’t eat steak.
She sighed and turned to look at me after dropping the paper into the recycling bin in the corner of the room. “Yes, he was here.”
“Why?”
“He just stopped by to check on me, Gabriel,” she said and made her way to the settee to sit. “I know about the fights you two have had.”
I sat down across from her in one of the chairs and crossed one leg over the other, resting my ankle on my thigh. “That’s between him and me.”
The look she gave me was somewhere between “Don’t sass me” and “So what?” “And you two are into it because of me?” she asked.
“Something like that.”
“What’s your issue with what he and I have?”
“What exactly is it that you and he have, Mom? He’s a married man.”
“He’s your father.”
“Yes, but he’s my married father.”
“And you act as if this thing is new to you.”
“No, it’s not new to me, but until now I’ve just never said anything about it, out of respect.”
She didn’t respond as she stood and headed to the kitchen, across the hall. I didn’t know what that meant, and the last thing I wanted was to offend my mother, but Cecilia and Stephanie had made both of our lives a living hell, and if you asked me, the entire thing was my father’s fault. I’d just come to the point where enough was enough, but it was futile for me to fight the battle of demanding respect for my mother if she wasn’t going to demand respect herself. Cecilia had to know that my father was still carrying on this relationship with my mother. Quite frankly, I’d started to feel that they were all too old for that love triangle thing to be going down. My mom and I had become my father’s pseudo family. How’d my mom go from being a woman my dad wanted to be with in every way imaginable to being a woman he saw on the side when his wife wasn’t looking? Outside pussy? That still pissed me off.
I could hear cabinet doors open and close in the kitchen. The whistle of her old-fashioned teapot sounded and alerted me to what she was doing in the kitchen. Oftentimes when my mom was angry, she would go make herself some tea to relax her nerves. I stood and was walking over to the fireplace
when a picture on top of the mantel caught my attention. It was a photo of me at seventeen with my mom and my dad, a family picture. It was taken during a visit that Dad had made to New York.
The way he had his arm protectively around my mother’s waist told a thousand words. We were all smiling as we stood on Wall Street, in front of the big bull. Some random person had stopped and offered to take the picture for us. We looked like the perfect family. The smiles on our faces told of how happy both I and my mom were to have my dad around. It was when he would leave that Mom’s smile would often turn to tears. It was when she thought I wasn’t looking that she would break down.
“Do you want some tea, Gabriel?” she asked, walking back into the room.
I turned and watched her with a tray in her hand, which she placed on the mahogany coffee table.
“No, ma’am.” I walked back to the chair and sat down, observing her as she drank her tea.
“Your father doesn’t like to fight with you, Gabe,” she said after a while.
“I don’t like to fight with him, either.”
“Gabriel, you’re an overgrown man. You’re not a kid anymore. Don’t make your father pay for the things you never got to say to him then.”
“I said to him what you should have said years ago. The day after spending the night with you, he’s sitting in my front room, talking about flying Cecilia, his wife, in. What the hell?” I replied with a frown, shaking my head.
“First of all, don’t ever assume because your father spends the night here that anything is going on in my bedroom. Second of all, if it does happen, it’s my business, not yours. Third, she’s his wife. He can do whatever he wants when it comes to her.”
“Are you serious? You’re okay with the position Dad has placed you in?”
“Gabriel—”
“No, Mom. I’m seriously just asking, because I was under the impression that the tears you shed when you thought I wasn’t looking were because it hurt to know that the man you loved, loved another. Was I wrong? Was I wrong to think that you wanted more, deserved more?”
She kept her onyx-black eyes on me as she sat her teacup down. “I love your father, Gabriel, and that’s not something I will ever apologize for. I’m at the age where I’ve begun to let the chips fall where they may. Just because you saw your father in our home those times didn’t mean anything sexual was going on. There were plenty of nights when he would just lie there and hold me. There were plenty of nights when we would talk about what if,” she said, clarifying the matter.
She went on. “You know your father isn’t a bad man. Yes, you’ve even heard us fighting, but that was because I refused to be loved out of pity. Then there were those times when I cried because I knew when he left my bed, he was going back home to his wife. Hell, I even cried because I lost my best friend in all this madness.”
I shrugged and spoke. “But that wasn’t your fault. If anyone is to blame for that, Cecilia is.”
“We’re both at fault, because while I did like your father back then, it was she who ended up with him. Did she do it in spite of knowing I liked him? Yes, but he went for the one who gave him the attention he wanted. After that, Gabriel, I just went about my way. Things happened that brought him back into my life. If I could go back to the day of my father’s funeral and not end up in bed with your father . . .” She looked off toward the window for a second, like she was contemplating her answer. “Let me not lie about that. No, I wouldn’t change that day, Gabriel,” she told me.
She was silent for a moment. “We created you that day, and our story has been never-ending since then. I was scared and alone. Your father came in and fixed that. Then I pushed him away again, because I didn’t want to betray my best friend any further. Then I found out I was pregnant. I didn’t know what to do, so I called him and I told him. The first thing he did was rush over to my house and beg me to keep you. He was a happy man. I’d never seen him as happy as he was that day. While I’d been crying and worrying about what to do and about the fact that my best friend was going to be crushed, he was elated, like he hadn’t even realized the position we’d put ourselves in. He’d married her, and there I was, pregnant on the sidelines.”
She huffed, shook her head, and gave a light chuckle. It was a remorseful one, though. One that hid the pain of all she was feeling. I knew the preface of the story, but not all the base details.
“Your father didn’t seem to care, though. He was adamant about me having you. So much so that when he went home to tell Ce-Ce, he couldn’t even have the same reaction when she came out and told him she was pregnant too.” She stood and walked over to her bay window. “It was all a mess, one big mess. He finally got around to telling Ce-Ce I was pregnant with his child too. And that was all she wrote for me and Ce-Ce. Our friendship was done. She didn’t want to hear anything I had to say.” She got quiet after that, like she was reliving every detail in her head. She folded one arm under the other, then turned to look at me.
“I was about six months pregnant and she was around seven when she showed up in my parents’ driveway, because I’d still been living in that house after they passed. Already knew Ce-Ce and the way she thought. She wasn’t coming to talk. She was coming to fight. She never took any shit from anybody, grew up in the ghetto. I was in no mood to talk myself, to be honest. She’d been calling me, playing on my phone, and telling anybody she could that I’d whored around with her husband.
“We fought right there in the driveway, both of us big and pregnant. I didn’t want to fight her, but I wasn’t about to let her whup my behind, either. She threw the first punch, and that was her last one. Two of my neighbors came to break us up. Later on that night Xavier was knocking on my door, telling me she’d just lost their baby. He was stillborn. I still loved her, and that hurt me too, because I felt like it was partially my fault.”
“You didn’t start the fight, Mom.”
“Yeah, but you can say I did in a way. I slept with her husband. Humph. Funny how history is repeating itself with that sister of yours.” She finally walked back over and sat down on the sofa.
“Stephanie brought all of this on herself. She didn’t have to do what she did,” I said.
“I agree. That was just awful. I can’t imagine what Ce-Ce must be going through to have her daughter do such a horrible thing.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she told her to do it,” I retorted.
“Gabriel!” My mom called my name like she was shocked I’d said such a thing.
I wasn’t sorry about it. The things I’d seen and heard firsthand compelled me to believe what I’d said.
“You didn’t see and hear the way they went after Chyanne when she brought Aric those paternity papers,” I told my mother. “They damn near beat her into the ground with words, and had I, Dad, and Aric not been there, they probably would have physically attacked her.”
“Well, she was sleeping with the woman’s husband, son.”
“Yeah, but she didn’t know that until Stephanie showed up and attacked her. She should have whupped Aric’s ass for that one.”
My mother laughed and rolled her eyes. “That boy has always needed an ass whupping. How is he, anyway?”
I had to chuckle myself. “He’s well.”
“How’s he liking fatherhood?” she asked.
My father and I had always said my mother was smooth in her transitions from one topic to another. When she was done talking about something, you knew it, because she wasn’t going to say anything else about it at that moment.
“It’s been good for him, it seems, although he seems to not want to leave the mother of his child alone.”
“What do you mean, leave her alone? Is he stalking her or something?” she asked with a laugh, then picked up her teacup.
“No, but he knows she loves him, and he preys on her with that knowledge. She’s moved on to a whole new relationship, yet just the other day I saw him kissing her.”
“Aric has always been an arrogant
something. That’s why you two became best friends so fast. You’re arrogant like your father in a sense, and Aric is arrogant too. You both think women should worship at your feet.”
I laughed at my mother. She and I had always been able to have candid discussions together. It was what had made us so close.
“That’s not true. We just think they should at least bow,” I joked with her.
She laughed, and we kept the rest of our conversation smooth like that. She knew where I stood on the whole thing with her and my father, and I also understood her position. I just wished she had gone out and found love somewhere else. I wished she had found it with a man who was hers and hers alone, because she deserved that, a love of her own. I loved my father, but that didn’t mean I had to continue to look the other way when I felt he was clearly in the wrong. I debated whether I should tell her about the outside pussy term, which my father had thrown around. I didn’t want to see the look on her face. I knew she would be hurt if she heard the things he said, so I just kept it to myself.
Gabe
I’d been sitting outside my sister’s home for all of ten minutes, trying to decide if I wanted to go inside. I had parked my car outside of her home in the new gated community she’d moved into after she and Aric’s divorce became final. Call me crazy, but I loved her, anyway. I loved her regardless of the fact that she saw me as her enemy. I loved her in spite of all the hell she’d taken me through. I loved her as my sister because I knew she wasn’t all there at times. I blamed her mother for turning her into the woman she was. She could be blamed for the fact that Stephanie was confined to her home and on her way to prison. She had been fitted for an ankle monitor to ensure she didn’t leave the state again. That happened after she’d flown to New York when Aric and Chy took AJ to see his parents.
She lived on a cul-de-sac, and her house was the last one on the block in the exclusive neighborhood. My father had pulled strings to get her into the invite-only neighborhood. That meant that the neighborhood HOA had to invite you to live in the upscale neighborhood in order for you to even be able to view houses for sale there. She lived in a two-story single-family brick home. The landscaping was a work of art, with blooming flowers that fit with the season lining the walkway. Architecturally, the home boasted a Spanish-style theme. The orange and yellowish brick and stucco exterior stood out in stark contrast to that of the other houses but blended in well with the orange, brown, red, and orange fallen leaves.
Tell Me No Lies Page 10
