Tell Me No Lies

by Nikki- Michelle

  “Thank you,” I told her.

  “No problem. You should go back and lie down. I’ll stay here with you until Jamie gets here.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Kay. I should be okay.”

  She looked skeptical as she pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “You don’t look like you will be. Chy, can I ask you something?”

  I nodded as I sat down on a stool.

  “Do you think you may be pregnant?”

  My head jerked up at her. “No. Why do you ask?”

  “You been saying you haven’t been feeling well for a while now, and remember how you told me that your jeans had been fitting tighter? You thought you’d been gaining your weight back?”

  I nodded, sighed, and laid my head in my hand. The thought of me being pregnant hadn’t even crossed my mind. After a while I let Kay talk me into allowing her to go to the CVS down the street to get me a pregnancy test. I told her to get two, just in case. I gave her my house keys and went to sit on the couch. I was feeling weak and didn’t want to get back up to open the door. I was so weak that I fell asleep on the couch while waiting for her to get back. When she shook me awake, I grabbed the bag with the tests in it. I looked around the room one more time and then walked into the bathroom.

  When I got inside, I just sat on the closed toilet seat for a minute. I thought about all the symptoms I’d experienced before I found out I was pregnant with AJ. To be honest, half of them I couldn’t even remember. I remembered the fight with Aric. I remembered the pain. I remembered the stomach churning, the vomiting, and waking up in the hospital. That was about it. I thought back over the last couple weeks. I had thrown up after my and Jamie’s failed attempt at sex, but that could have been because of stress. I had been eating a hell of a lot too. I stopped wasting time and ripped open the boxes before standing to pull up the toilet seat.

  I quickly urinated on the sticks. Once I was finished, I wiped myself and washed my hands. As I did so, I looked down at the sticks and almost immediately a positive result showed up on both tests. Four pink lines had appeared and were just as clear as day.

  “Wow,” was all I could say.

  Jamie and I had barely mentioned having kids, although we hadn’t been doing anything to not have them. We’d been together since AJ was about three or four months old, and we had been having sex without protection the entire time. We’d had no pregnancy scares, so we’d just continued to do what we had become used to doing.

  Kay knocked on the door. “What do they say, Chy?”

  I slowly pulled the door open and looked at her. I just nodded. There was nothing else I could do. I didn’t know whether to be excited or sad. I guess it all depended on Jamie’s reaction. I had no idea how he would feel about it.

  Two hours later, and after Kay had left, Jamie came home. Aric had called back and had said he would be keeping AJ since I was sick. The last thing either of us needed was for AJ to get sick. When he had in the past, it had always entailed countless trips to the emergency room, breathing treatments, and late nights.

  I didn’t say anything as I watched Jamie walk in. He came in with bags of food from Copeland’s Cheesecake Bistro. Any other time the smell of the steak and potatoes would have made my mouth water; this time it made me sick to my stomach. He walked into the front room with a smile on his face and kissed my lips.

  “Hey. I’m going to change, and then I’ll fix the food. I know I asked that we eat out, but I got caught up at the Lenox store,” he explained.

  I gave him a faint smile. “It’s okay. I don’t feel too well, anyway.”

  He kissed me again. “Give me ten.”

  I nodded as I chewed on my bottom lip. I sat there and tried to think of all the ways I could tell him. I got up and walked upstairs. When I walked into the bedroom, Jamie was putting on a pair of jeans. He glanced quickly at me but then continued on with what he was doing. I was nervous, and I knew he could tell, because of the way he stopped pulling on his socks and looked at me.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  There was no need to beat around the bush. It wasn’t like we were teenagers, and although I was a bit nervous, I did love the man standing in front of me. So I didn’t feel there was a need to delay the inevitable.

  I walked over to where he was standing and showed him the tests in my hand. “I’m pregnant, Jamie.”

  Jamie

  As soon as the words left her mouth, my eye twitched. She was pregnant? I didn’t know what to think, and I didn’t know what to feel. I wasn’t sad about it. Just wasn’t all that happy about it either.

  “Say something, Jamie,” she said to me after I’d just stood there and looked at her for a long while.

  I moved around her and pulled my shirt over my head before grabbing my wallet and my car keys to lay them on the table by the door in our bedroom.

  “We need to go to the doctor as soon as you can to be sure.”

  She made a sound that sounded like a gasp. “Is that all you have to say?”

  “For now, yes.”

  “So you’re not happy about this news?” she asked in a low monotone.

  I licked my lips and stopped moving around to stare into her eyes. I didn’t exactly know how to explain to her what I was feeling. If I said the wrong thing, then I was sure she would feel some type of way.

  “Can we wait until we get you to a doctor to be sure? I don’t want either of us to get too excited before we know for sure. Is that okay?” I asked her.

  She didn’t respond immediately. She tossed the tests in the stainless-steel trash can beside the door, walked over to the bed, and sat.

  “I guess so, but all the symptoms point to the fact that I am.”

  “I’m not saying they don’t,” I said to her as we both regarded each other with caution.

  I could tell she was trying to figure out if I was upset and why my reaction wasn’t a happier one.

  “We never really talked about children together, I know, not in depth at least.”

  I walked to the dresser and pulled my belt from the top drawer. “We kind of let the chips just fall where they may. I mean, we never said we wanted it to happen, but we didn’t prevent it, either. So I guess we were both subconsciously leaving the door open to the possibility.”

  “I guess so,” she said.

  I could still feel her eyes on me, and I knew she wanted a more definite answer from me about how I felt about things, but I just couldn’t give her what she wanted at that moment. Ever since the first time Jessica, Ashton’s mother, had told me she was pregnant, I’d been fearful of what could happen to my children. When she told me, there was no joy. No jumping up and down in celebration. I just looked at her, never told her whether I was happy or sad about it. During the months she carried my son, I did all I was supposed to as a father, but it was because of how I was raised. There was no way I would have left her to go through that alone.

  Still, I showed no emotion about the situation. When we found out it would be a boy, I just walked out of the room. I was in conflict with my emotions. It was because I wanted to stay in my son’s life every step of the way, to protect him and keep him from harm, that I decided not to go into the NFL. I didn’t give a fuck what statistics had shown. There would be no way that history would repeat itself with my son. In the delivery room when he was born, I knew right then that come hell or high water, if any person violated him, I’d kill them with no questions asked.

  “I’m going to fix the food,” I said to her, but I didn’t move.

  Her eyes held me in their gaze for a long while. I’d hurt her feelings in a sense. I could tell. That hadn’t been my intention, but it was all I could give her.

  “I love you, Jamie.”

  I opened the bedroom door and looked back at her before walking out. “I know. I love you too.”

  The look on Chyanne’s face was not something I wanted to see. I’d never put that look on her face for as long as we’d been together. The last time I’d seen th
at look was when she finally came to the realization that Aric really didn’t want to be with her anymore. About a month or two later she finally opened up to the idea of us being together, and I vowed never to have her look that dejected again. Yet there was that look on her face. I wished I could be in the right frame of mind to give her the comfort and security that she needed, but I wasn’t.

  Neither one of us touched our food that night. There was silence in our home. No TV, no radio, just the loud silence. Late that night, Aric knocked on the door. AJ was asleep in his arms. I didn’t like the man, and he knew it.

  “Chyanne awake?” he asked.

  “No.” I moved to the side to let him in so AJ wouldn’t be in the cold.

  Had it just been Aric, he could have frozen to death and not a single fuck would have been given. AJ was bundled up from head to foot. He even had a ski mask on to protect his face from the cold. Aric looked like he’d just rolled out of bed and walked out of the house.

  “Will you wake her for me?”

  I had a good mind to tell him, “Hell no,” but I knew it had to be an emergency for him to have brought AJ over from his house. She was still asleep on the couch. I walked in and gently shook her awake.

  “Chyanne, wake up. Aric brought AJ home,” I told her.

  She frowned and sat up, then looked at the clock. “At this time of night?”

  She quickly jumped off the couch. She had nothing on but a tank top and shorts that hugged her ass like a latex glove. I didn’t even think she noticed. My eyes watched her ass as she briskly walked ahead of me.

  “Aric, what’s going on?” she asked as she took AJ from his arms.

  “Hey. I wouldn’t have brought him out, but I just got a phone call from Gabe.”

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  There was concern in her voice and something else I couldn’t quite explain.

  “His father was killed in a car accident earlier today.”

  “Oh my God,” Chyanne said.

  One hand went to her mouth as she bounced AJ around. He was starting to stir. I walked over and took him from her arms. I cradled him in my arms, and he snuggled close to my heart. I felt like the oddball out, so I walked away with AJ and carried him to his bedroom. I left Chyanne standing there with a man whom I would always detest, but I knew he needed some kind of comfort since Gabe was his best friend. After I put AJ to bed, I walked into the hall and stood there a while.

  “Tell Gabe I’m so sorry for his loss,” Chyanne told Aric.

  “I will. I’ll call you later to let you know how everything is going.”

  “Okay.”

  I walked over to the banister and looked down to see her embrace him. They held the hug a little longer than I would have liked. Once she had locked the door, she walked back into the front room.

  “You okay?” I asked her when I walked in.

  She quickly looked up at me. She had been scrolling through her phone. Before she answered, she placed her phone next to her thigh.

  “Yeah, just feel bad that Gabe has lost his father. I know that feeling.”

  I had a mind to ask how it had happened, since we’d never spoken of her parents, neither her mother nor her father. I thought better of it, though, and decided to save that conversation for another time. What I needed at that moment was for Chyanne to understand what my mental state was when she told me she was pregnant earlier. I knew she was probably still feeling disappointed about my reaction to the news, but maybe when I explained myself, she would understand better. I at least owed her that much.

  She’d been trying hard of late to understand and to help me stay my course. I’d watched as she would get on the Internet and look up things about my condition so she could get a better understanding of what was going on with me. She would faithfully ask me daily if I’d taken the pills I was supposed to take. There were a few times when I lied and told her I had when I hadn’t. Sometimes I needed the pills, and sometimes I didn’t. Her phone vibrated. She looked down at it, then glanced over at me. She slid the phone back next to her thigh without responding to whatever had come through. I didn’t think anything of it at the time and sat down next to her.

  “So can we talk for a second?” I said.

  The clock on the wall read one thirty in the morning.

  She nodded. “Yeah, sure.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about what happened earlier.”

  “Earlier?” she asked.

  “Yeah, about the baby.”

  She quickly closed her eyes and shook her head, like she’d actually forgotten. “Oh yeah. Look, can we talk about it later, Jamie? It’s late, and I still don’t feel well.”

  Her request surprised me, since she’d been about to cry when I didn’t want to talk about it earlier. But I let it go, anyway. I just pulled her close to me, and we lay on the couch in silence. About thirty minutes later, when she thought I was sleeping, she grabbed her phone and made her way to the bathroom. She stayed in there a good twenty minutes before she came back out. She crawled back on the couch with me after laying the phone on the table by the couch.

  My intuition was telling me that something was going on that I was missing. It didn’t take her long to fall asleep, and this time I grabbed her phone. I tapped the icon for her text messages and scrolled through. To my surprise, the only messages there were from Kay and Shelley. It wouldn’t have been a surprise if I didn’t know that she had received a text message way after Kay sent the last one in her phone at six thirty. I looked down at the woman lying in my arms, wondering why she’d started to hide things.

  Aric

  When I got the phone call that Mr. Williams had been killed, it wasn’t from Gabe, as I’d told Chyanne. It was from Stephanie, but I didn’t want to mention her name in front of AJ or Chyanne. Anytime I had in the past, Chyanne would make it a point to tell me never to do it again. So I had told a small lie. Stephanie had called me, belligerent. She had barely spoken understandable English. It took me yelling at her for her to calm down and speak clearly enough for me to understand just what she had been trying to say. My first thought had been not to answer the phone. So I hadn’t at first. I’d figured she was just calling to do what she did best, try to fuck with me mentally. It was after the fourth call came into my cell that I decided to pick up.

  I pulled into her driveway and started to question why I was even there. We had been divorced since a month after she tried to kill me, but after twenty years of being together, I knew that she needed me in that moment. I wondered whether I should even step out of my car or not. Stephanie had been very close to her father. So I knew that her pain was real. Still, I’d called Gabe to confirm the news. I parked my car and walked up to the door.

  Before I could even ring the doorbell, Stephanie pulled the door open and barreled into my arms. Since it was still raining, I moved us back into her foyer, then closed the door behind me. It had been a while since I’d held her in my arms with sincere caring about her emotional state. Don’t get me wrong; I had absolutely no romantic feelings when it came to Stephanie. I was there because Gabe was my best friend and Stephanie was his sister more than anything else.

  “Stephanie,” I said. I didn’t think she could hear me over her sobs. “Stephanie, let’s go and sit down. You need to rest and relax.”

  “Aric, I can’t believe he’s gone,” she said, weeping louder. “I can’t believe God just took him away from me like this.”

  I didn’t say anything. She was beside herself, so I scooped her up in my arms and carried her from the foyer. By guessing, I figured out where her living room was. Once I placed her on the couch, I stood there, looking down at her. I finally saw that she was wearing cream-colored flowing silk pj’s with the robe to match. Her long hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her hazel eyes were red , telling of how long she’d been mourning. There was a bandage still on her nose, where I’d punched her.

  I listened as she cried about how he was on his way to see her and how she never
got a chance to say good-bye. That same woman had tried to end my life, just as a drunk driver had ended her father’s life. She’d tried to take both of AJ’s parents, and in turn, fate had taken one of hers. A few months ago you couldn’t have paid me to step foot in the same room with Stephanie. When I’d gone to court to testify against her, I’d done so with no shame and no remorse. I wanted them to lock her ass up and throw away the key.

  “They just took him,” she sobbed. “A drunk fucking driver. Fucking drunk son of a bitch took the only man who has ever loved me, flaws and all. He took my damn daddy away from me.” She kept on venting. Each time she would say something, she would also slap tears away from her face.

  “Have you spoken to Gabe?” I asked her.

  Her head jerked back, and she looked at me. “No. Why would I?”

  “He’s your brother, Stephanie. You both need to lean on each other right about now.”

  “No,” she snapped and looked at me like I’d offended her. “He and his whore of a mother had the nerve to show up at my mother’s door, bragging about how the police had thought she was his wife. My mother didn’t even so much as get the common decency of a phone call to let her know her husband, my father, had been killed,” she said sternly, then pointed at herself. “But they go and tell Dixie and her bastard son? No. I will not be calling him.”

  For a brief moment I’d hoped that their father’s passing would bring them closer or something.

  “I’m sure it was a mistake, Stephanie. For once, just this once, why can’t you act like you have some damn sense and talk to your brother like he’s a fucking human being? You know damn well there was no ill intent—”

  She stood abruptly. “Don’t do this to me right now, Aric,” she fussed, pointing a long finger at me. “Don’t fucking stand here and tell me how to react. Just because my daddy is dead doesn’t mean I have to accept his slut and her illegitimate son.”