Tell Me No Lies

by Nikki- Michelle

  I threw my briefcase on the bed, then snatched off my suit jacket. Anger rode me because as much as I would have liked to believe that Chyanne loved me enough not to cheat on me, my gut was telling me otherwise. I was paranoid when it came to her, stressed about the possibility of what if. What if she was cheating? Then what? I flipped on the light switch to my walk-in closet. The black-and-white Chanel rug that Chyanne had bought greeted me. It needed to be vacuumed to remove the light lint that covered it. Checkered black-and-white marble flooring reflected the light back up at me as I walked in the closet, taking off my cuff links. Her side of the closet looked just as it always did. Her clothes might be in disarray, but her shoes were never out of order.

  I paid attention to what was missing, because that was just the way my mind worked. I knew where everything was and what wasn’t there just by looking around the room. If she was going somewhere on business, then her suits would have been rifled through. They weren’t. Her jeans were still neatly folded. Her stylish shirts were still hanging there. No heels were missing. Red flip-flop sandals were missing, along with black yoga pants and a white long-sleeved T-shirt. Chyanne owned ten pairs of yoga pants, four of them were black, and one pair was missing. She always hung her long-sleeved cotton T-shirts up across from where her jeans lay folded. Out of the four white ones she had, one was missing. She’d done the laundry the day before. I was guessing that since she was wearing flip-flops, she was in a hurry. After I pulled off my work attire and put on a pair of designer jeans, Tims, and a red scoop-neck sweater, I sat at the foot of the bed and dialed her cell again.

  I looked over my shoulder after I felt the bed vibrate. Standing, I thumbed my nose before moving a haphazardly thrown pillow and finding that Chyanne’s phone had been left on the bed. She’d left it. What in hell could she have been in that much of a hurry to get to that she would leave her phone? I put pride and ego to the side once again. They said men didn’t check phones or snoop on their women. They lied. I tapped her touch screen to see if what I was thinking was true. I’d bet money that the last message she’d gotten was from Aric. I scrolled through her text messages, looking for one from Aric, ignoring the ones from Gabe, until an “I miss you” caught my eye.

  I stopped and scrolled back through the texts from earlier. He told her his flight was getting in at five, and he wanted her to meet him at his house. My head tilted, and I frowned. He asked her not to stand him up, and she promised she wouldn’t. He’d missed her? My head reeled as my brows furrowed. Why in hell would he be missing her?

  A few calls came through from Aric, and I sent them to voice mail. Anxiety swept over me as I kept reading. I looked for messages from him, but there was none. It didn’t take rocket science for me to put the pieces of the puzzle together. I didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know what to think. I had to chuckle at the absurdity of it all. I had never even seen this shit coming. My vision blurred. I couldn’t think straight for a minute. I had to really take a moment and try to discern what the hell was going on. She was cheating on me. I felt that strongly in my heart now. Nothing could take away that feeling I felt in the pit of my stomach when the realization hit me.

  But what hurt worse was that she had used my trust in her and slapped me in the face with it. I had trusted her when she said that all she and Gabe were was friends. She’d told me they’d shared a brief encounter months before she and I got together and nothing had come of it. I didn’t think anything of it, because I and a few of the female friends that I kept had shared some sexual contact months before she and I got together. I’d believed her when she told me . . . My thoughts stopped when there was a knock at the bedroom door and I slipped Chyanne’s phone into my pocket.

  I pulled it open to find Anne standing there. For a moment she simply looked up at me. I thumbed my nose, not really trying to do anything to curb the anger written across my face.

  “Someone’s at the door,” she told me.

  “Thanks,” I said to her, then moved past her to get the door.

  I could feel her watching me as I stormed down the stairs. One thing I’d learned about Anne was that she was very perceptive. She could tell something was wrong with me, but didn’t say anything. Since she’d been here, she’d always been able to pick up on whether something was wrong with me or not. We’d had plenty of conversations. It was during those conversations that I’d found out about Chyanne’s father and how he died. Anne was a unique woman to me, and she was quickly becoming the mother I had never had. I cherished it.

  That didn’t matter to me in the moment, though, especially when I opened the door and saw Aric standing there. He was dressed to the nines in business attire. AJ reached out for me. For a long while I’d thought he was the man I’d have to do bodily harm to for going after Chyanne again. I’d been wrong. Chyanne’s phone rang in my hand. I looked down, not even realizing I still had it in my hand. My house number showed up on the phone. Anne was trying to warn her daughter that something was off with me.

  I reached for AJ, but Aric didn’t let his son go.

  “Chyanne here?” he asked me, keeping his eyes locked on mine.

  He was a smart man. He could tell a man who was about to snap when he saw one. It showed in the skeptical look on his face.

  “No,” I answered.

  “You know where she is?”

  I ran a hand down my face and then absentmindedly looked at her phone in my hand. I knew where she was, if I put two and two together. I knew very well where she was. I might not know where he lived, but I knew . . . where . . . my woman was. I looked back up at him, and the look that passed between us was one of knowing. I was about to say something when Anne walked up behind me.

  “Hello, Aric. I can take AJ if you want. He’ll be just fine here with me,” she said with a bright smile.

  She stretched a delicate hand forward and rubbed AJ’s back. AJ laughed and reached for his grandmother, like any excited child would.

  “You sure?” Aric asked her. “I don’t want my son in the middle of—”

  “Trust me, Aric. He’ll be okay. Chyanne should be here soon,” she reassured him.

  After Aric kissed AJ and told him he loved him, Anne took AJ from his father’s arms, along with his bag, then walked away.

  “You knew?” I asked Aric as soon as she had disappeared upstairs.

  He shrugged nonchalantly. “Knew what?”

  “About Chyanne and Gabe?”

  He turned his lips down into an exaggerated frown. “No idea what you’re talking about, my man.”

  Aric didn’t say anything else to me. He turned and walked toward his new-model black Escalade truck. My brain was rattled; my nerves were fried. I still didn’t want to believe what I suspected to be true.

  “Oh,” Aric said just as I was about to shut the door. He turned and looked at me as he buttoned his suit jacket. “Just in case you wanted to know, I’ll be in a business meeting with Gabe down at the InterContinental Buckhead in about twenty minutes or so. Won’t be hard to find us. We’ll be the only two black men at a table full of white men kissing our asses.”

  He’d known. That was all I kept thinking. Even though he’d claimed not to know what I was talking about when I asked him. Aric’s arrogance and cockiness just wouldn’t let him walk away without saying something. Sure enough, he could have told me about their whereabouts just so he could make it seem as if Chyanne was with someone else. But not Aric. Nah, Aric still wanted Chyanne. I knew that because he’d kissed her. Not to mention the look, the knowing look on his face that said that his best friend had betrayed him.

  I took his information and stored it in the back of my head. He’d told me that and then hopped in his truck to drive away. I wasn’t even sure what to do with the information. I sat in the dark in the front room for about ten minutes, just letting my mind take everything in. I didn’t know what made me take her phone from my pocket, but I pressed the call button and waited.

  It rang a few times before Gabe answered
. “Keep the pussy wet for me. I should be done in a few.”

  I frowned as I pulled the phone away from my ear to look at it like it had offended me. That was what she liked? She liked for a man to speak to her that way? Chyanne sometimes came off as a prude. It was easy for me to say things that would make her blush, but that was how he talked to her?

  “Hello?” he said, after realizing he’d gotten no response to what he said. “Chyanne?”

  I hung up the phone, grabbed my car keys, and headed out.

  Aric

  Rule numero uno about Aric McHale: I was no fucking fool. The one thing nobody would do and get away with was cross me. I believed in respecting rules of the game. Who played games with no rules? Only a fool. Gabe and Chyanne had to do a better job of playing the game to stay one step ahead of me. What made me a good businessman was my ability to pick up on certain things when people didn’t think I would. For weeks I’d been sitting back, simmering in anger, trying to make sure I didn’t do something that would get me taken away from my son, or worse, have my son taken away from me.

  When Gabe had called, wanting to know if I’d go in on this buyout with him, my first instinct had been to call him on his shit then. But I didn’t for a few reasons. He was still my best friend, had been a damn good friend for years. His father had just died, and I wanted to respect that. Business was business, and personal was personal. Why would I cut my nose off just to spite my face? The deal he was offering was not only sensible, but profitable. At first he’d wanted me to buy in at a lesser value than he did, which would give him more control over the company. What the hell did I look like, letting that happen? So I negotiated. It was what I did. I wasn’t called a shrewd businessman for nothing. I had some money in the bank. I could afford to match his buying price. So I talked him into allowing me to purchase equal shares with him. We met with our attorneys to draw up some paperwork, putting the deal in writing.

  Then we called the board over at B&G. I convinced three more members to sell, and now we were sitting at the table with them, celebrating the fact that we had just signed the papers to buy the company. I’d made sure the papers were signed, because I knew that any minute all hell was going to break loose. I had to make sure the deal was signed, sealed, and delivered. Business was business, and personal was personal.

  One look at Jamie earlier, and I could tell he was a hurting man. I knew that pain, because I’d been there. Stephanie had taken me there. To be honest, Chyanne had taken me back there. I couldn’t believe she would do it. I didn’t think she had it in her to fuck around like that with Gabe. I’d always ignored the looks he would give her, because in my mind Chyanne didn’t have the guts to fuck my best friend. I’d underestimated her. The fact that she was pregnant again had set me back too. She was pregnant . . . by another nigga. I shook my head as that thought sank in deeper for me.

  I sat at the table as we all made idle chitchat. Gabe kept checking his watch and saying that he needed to get back home because he was tired from his flight. Since Chyanne hadn’t been home, my only guess was that she was at Gabe’s crib, waiting for him. My fist balled as I took a shot of the bourbon that had been placed on the table. I had no idea what kind of bourbon those old-ass white men had ordered, but the shit tasted like somebody had dipped burnt toast in water with some liquid smoke, then added some molasses and alcohol. The acquired taste of the brew could do nothing to take away the rancid taste of betrayal on my palate.

  To be honest, I hadn’t felt this kind of anger since finding out Stephanie had cheated on me the first time. Chyanne had crossed me. Nobody crossed me and got away with it. I gave a fake chuckle at something that had been said. I didn’t even know what the fuck it was. I checked my watch, then looked at the entrance to the establishment. We were at the Southern Art & Bourbon Bar. It was attached to the InterContinental Buckhead. All you had to do was walk through the hotel lobby to get to the main entrance of the restaurant. It had the vintage yet modern-day vibe to it. It was an inconspicuous kind of fancy. It wasn’t posh, but it had an expensive ambience and price, which made people flock to it. There were huge colorful paintings hanging from the ceiling, but they were not what had my attention.

  “We couldn’t have sold to a better group of guys,” Tom Macklin said as he raised his glass in the air.

  “I tell you, Aric. You and that damn Gabriel sure as hell know how to do business,” another board member complimented.

  Half of the whole table of white men had already had too much to drink, but I would be celebrating too if I were them. The pressure of keeping a company like B&G afloat could take its toll on anyone. They had to be glad to be done with it.

  “Thank you, but the pleasure of doing business is knowing when to hold them and when to fold them,” Gabe chimed in.

  I laughed loudly. “You got that shit right,” I said.

  Gabe excused himself and walked back over to the bar to order another round of drinks. I looked back over toward the entrance. Jamie had walked in, just as I had assumed he would. I knew a crazy motherfucker when I saw one. Chyanne’s pussy had the power to do that to a nigga, make him crazy. That was evident in the way Jamie searched the room until his eyes finally fell on Gabe. Jamie was out of place. He was there in Timberland boots, baggy jeans, a red sweater, and a leather jacket. The restaurant was an upscale one that required a certain attire.

  He spotted me at the table, and I gave a head nod to let him know he was in the right place. Shit, there was no love lost between me and Jamie. He’d walked into my damn place of business and tongued Chyanne down. He knew who I was because we’d had words a month before about Chyanne. But, see, I didn’t know that nigga, so my beef wasn’t with him at the time. I took that shit up with Chyanne. Now my beef was with Gabe, but I had other key players who I had to think about. I couldn’t kick ass and take names like I wanted, because of my son. My son was the most important thing in my life at the moment. So I waited and watched. I saw when Jamie picked up the heavy wooden stool as he moved in the direction of Gabe.

  “Hey, Gabe?” he called out above the droning noise of the establishment.

  Gabe never even saw the shit coming. As soon as he turned around, Jamie broke the bar stool over his face. Gabe’s head jerked back so hard, I was afraid his neck had snapped. Drinks fell and crashed around the bar. Patrons scattered like roaches. Women screamed and hid behind the nearest man or table. I stood, looked on as Jamie threw punch after punch at Gabe’s face. That hit with the stool had rocked him, dazed him, so it took him a minute to realize he was getting his ass whupped. Bob and weave, my dude. Bob and weave, I thought, mocking him.

  “Say, McHale,” Macklin said as he stood and strained to look over at what was going on. “Isn’t that Gabriel?”

  I looked down at my phone, then glanced back up like I was interested. “Not even sure.”

  There was a fight going on. Gabe had finally gotten his bearings about him. I knew he was no easy feat, but he couldn’t win this fight. Jamie had drawn the first blood. The only way Gabe could get Jamie off of him was to try to tackle him to the floor. That didn’t seem to be working, either. I laughed to myself at the thought of these uppity-ass people trying to decipher what was going on. A woman was already on the phone with 911.

  “Two black men are fighting. What? A description. Well . . . oh, dear Lord Jesus! You guys need to send someone quick! There is one in a suit, and one looks like a thug off the street. They both have those dreadlock things the blacks like to wear,” she explained in horror.

  If the shit hadn’t been comical to me, I would have checked her lily-white ass about “the blacks” comment. I waited a minute more. Watched Gabe land a few punches that made Jamie stumble backward. It was when Jamie knocked Gabe to the floor and started stomping on him that I put my phone away. I’d seen enough. I tapped Macklin on his shoulder and told him that it was Gabe, just as he’d thought. Macklin was a pretty stocky dude, so I recruited him to come help me try to break up the melee before the cops
got there. Macklin grabbed Jamie, and I picked my best friend up off the floor.

  “Get the fuck off of me!” Jamie snapped at Macklin as he snatched away from him.

  Looking at Jamie’s face, it was clear that although Gabe had lost the fight, he’d delivered enough blows to draw blood. The cops were already outside. Jamie was going to jail too. I’d known that would happen. Kind of like killing two birds with one stone. Jamie was just a casualty of war. He wouldn’t stay in jail long, though. I’d already set it up. Placed a call to an old sheriff friend down at the Fulton County jail. All I needed was for him to be gone long enough for me to set my other plan in motion.

  “Motherfucker caught me off guard,” Gabe fussed after everything had calmed down.

  He and I were standing in the main hotel parking deck. After all the police questions and witness statements, and after Jamie had been handcuffed and placed in the back of the police car, Gabe was still pissed he’d lost the battle. Gabe was a fighter, like his father had been. He didn’t lose fights, had never lost a fight, not even when we had fought one another. It was a draw, but not this time. He ripped his suit jacket off, then tossed it on the backseat of his car. His nose now matched what I’d done to Stephanie’s nose, and his eyes were swollen and bloodied. He was so outdone that it hadn’t dawned on him that I might question him as to why Jamie had attacked him out of the blue.

  “I was going to stand out here and play the whole ‘What was that about?’ bullshit game with you, but I won’t,” I said to him. “Doesn’t feel good to be caught off guard, does it?”

  He finally stopped his angry pacing and looked over at me. Shit clicked for him then. I crossed my arms, then stood with a wide-legged stance. I regarded him closely. He was still amped, adrenaline on ten from the fight. If you mixed that with the fact that his ego and self-worth had taken a beating along with the physical one, then you had a recipe for disaster.