The Pride

by Wallace Ford

  One thing on his mind was the e-mail he’d just received on his Smartphone, from the woman who’d been trying to seduce him for the past two years. He’d met Joyce Witherspoon in the clubhouse after a golf outing. They’d exchanged business cards because she’d told Adam of her plans to start an event-planning business and her desire to contract with Taste of Soul as one of the catering partners. Her e-mails had slowly gone from strictly business to potential pleasure, even as she launched the successful, high-profile business that kept the Taste of Soul catering arm busy, Adam was flattered, and Joyce was attractive, but he had told the sistah that he was happily married. Joyce’s response had been quick, and witty. “You’re married, but are you flexible?” Even after assuring her there was no room in his bed for a third party, she’d continued her erotic banter in various phone calls and e-mails. Adam reread Joyce’s detailed description of what she wanted to do to him with her mouth, and then pushed delete. He had always been faithful, but could no longer ignore the fact that Joyce’s constant flirtations and rapt adoration were wearing him down. I’ve got to do something about this … and soon. Adam picked up the Atlanta Journal Constitution and pulled out the sports section, determined to swap thoughts of Joyce’s mouth with those of his wife’s thighs … the ones he’d be eating at the dinner table soon, and in the bedroom later.

  Candace Long-Livingston poured melted butter into the baking pan, and then sparsely coated each buttermilk biscuit with the warm liquid before spacing the dough out evenly in the bottom of the pan. She loved cooking, especially now since she didn’t do it often. It was a love she’d inherited from the grandmother who’d help support a family of four by cooking for an affluent family in their hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,”Amanda Long would tell Candace as she whipped up a slap-your-mama pound cake or an oh-no-you-didn’t peach cobbler. Candace smiled at the memory of those kitchen counseling sessions. Adam may have thought it was her small waist and big booty that had captured his heart, but Candace knew it was those candied yams and collard greens she’d fixed while they were dating. But somewhere between the birth of their first son and the opening of their second restaurant, the thrill had gone. She’d worked long, arduous hours at the Buck-head location, the same tony suburb where they lived, and while it had been a labor of love, her joy for fixing food had been replaced by repulsion. There’d been days when she’d thought that if she fried, smothered or baked another anything … she’d lose her mind.

  Tonight she cooked with love, purpose … and guilt. Love for the fact that when it came to cooking, she knew she could “throw down.” Adam loved food, and her fried chicken was his favorite. Purpose because she thought Toussaint’s latest idea was a stroke of genius, that the timing for said idea was perfect, that Adam would surely be against it and that if anybody could change his mind, she could, by using various types of thighs. And guilt? Guilt because after months of harmless flirting with Q, the personal trainer she’d hired to help tone the very thighs her husband admired, they’d taken their relationship to another level. During her last two sessions, sit-ups, squats, and running on the treadmill weren’t the only reasons she’d sweated. And while Candace knew she should stop the madness, should never even have started down this road, she honestly didn’t know if she could heed the red light and make a U-turn back into monogamy. There was no doubt that Candace loved Adam. But thugalicious cocoa cutie Quintin Bright, who was younger than Toussaint, had turned a sistah out for the second time in as many weeks—with sixty minutes of working out followed by nine inches of love.