by Mark Anthony
After dancing through three hip-hop songs I grabbed him by the hand and began to lead him out of the party.
“Where you taking me to?” he asked.
“Just come on.”
I didn’t tell Kwame at that moment, but my plan was to take him back to my apartment and sex him. Although he was a bug-a-boo, he had piqued my interest ever since he had called me prior to school starting. To me there was no sense in beating around the bush and dragging things out. I knew what he was really after and I was curious as hell to see what he was working with. Plus, I figured the best way to ditch him without him getting offended would be if I took him back to my room and fucked him and then dropped him back off at his place when we were done. That way I could make it back to the party and everything would be all good.
So we made it to my Benz and got in. Kwame was still questioning me as to where I was taking him.
Nigga, is you that slow? I wanted to ask him. “We going back to my apartment,” I said while turning on the radio.
Kwame didn’t say anything as he sat in the passenger seat in his tan Timbs and dark blue jeans. He also had on this nice-fitting black shirt that showed off his muscles. I couldn’t wait to see him with his shirt off.
That vodka still had my head feeling nice and I rocked my body to the rhythm of the music. Kwame was still not saying anything and I wondered if he was still feeling intimidated by me.
“Kwame, I’m sorry, I should have asked you if you wanted to drive.”
“Your car?” he asked.
“Yeah, you want me to pull over so that you can drive?”
Kwame shook his head no and he continued to sit in silence. We were only about twenty blocks or so away from my apartment and I wanted to hurry up and get there. I didn’t feel like messing up the buzz that I had by playing psychologist to Kwame, but I could sense that something was eating him.
Maybe he heard what Kenya said to me, I thought
“You all right?” I asked him as I turned down the music.
“Yeah, I’m okay. But can I ask you something?”
I nodded my head and I just knew that he was gonna ask me about what Kenya had said about the cute Q-dog.
“Were you drinking?”
“Yeah. Why? You wanna stop by the liquor store?”
Kwame chuckled and shook his head. Then he began to sort of lecture me about drinking and how I need to be careful.
Oh, here we go, I thought.
“So you don’t drink?” I asked.
We were just pulling into my apartment complex and I was attempting to maneuver my car into my parking space.
“Oh, that’s cool. I can respect that,” I said.
I put the car in park and let it sit idle. I paused before turning the car off. I could just feel my buzz totally leaving me.
I turned the engine off, I took the key out of the ignition and opened my door. Kwame didn’t move and he stayed in his seat.
“Come on,” I said to him.
I couldn’t believe how the nigga had been all up under me at the party and now at the moment of truth he was dillydallying around and taking his time.
“Shayla, I can’t go inside with you.”
“What are you talking about? Just come on.”
“Nah, what I’m saying is, you was drinking, we already kissed, and I know if we go inside your apartment right now that something is gonna go down.”
I wanted to sarcastically say, you think?
But I smiled and I shook my head. I was trying to figure out if this was part of Kwame’s game. I didn’t know how to respond because I had never been in a situation before where a guy was making it seem as if he was trying to not get in my pants.
“Kwame, just come on. I’m sorry if I intimidate you or something, but trust me, everything is all good.”
“Nah, Shayla, everything ain’t all good. I mean, I really like you, you attractive and all that, but the thing is, I can’t get with you like that.”
My pussy had stopped throbbing and now Kwame had managed to not only ruin my buzz but he also was ruining my sexual appetite.
“Wow. You really playing me right now,” I said to him as I sat back in the driver’s seat.
“I never told you this, but my father is a pastor and I’m really into the church and going upstairs with you to your apartment and having sex with you would just go against everything I believe. Honestly, it has nothing at all to do with you.”
I sat and I didn’t say anything.
Kwame broke the silence. “But I still want to get to know you and I still wanna hang out with you and go out with you. I just want us to have an understanding that sex can’t be an option. And hopefully soon you can start to see things the same way I do and look at your body as a temple of God, a temple that should be respected and a temple that reserves sex for marriage.”
What the hell are you talking about? I wanted to ask. I almost started laughing in his face.
“So are you a virgin or something?” I asked while holding back smiles and laughter.
Kwame nodded, indicating that yes, he was in fact a virgin.
“Wow! So you like never had sex? Like never ever never? Never masturbated or nothing?”
Kwame shook his head no.
“Wow!”
A part of me looked at Kwame as a challenge and made me really want to fuck him that much more because he was a virgin, but another part of me couldn’t have cared less about his religious convictions or his purity so long as he worked that out by his lonesome. Unfortunately, that latter side of me took over and I was ready to kick Kwame to the curb. I started my car back up and I headed in the direction of his apartment.
“Okay. I respect that. But I’m gonna drop you back off and I’m heading back to the party.”
“Well, let me go back with you,” he asked.
Nigga, you already wasted my time as it is and you damn sure ain’t gonna be cramping my style anymore if you ain’t giving up no dick.
That’s what I wanted to tell him, but I was more cordial with him than that. I respectfully let him know that I wanted to go back to the party by myself.
When I dropped Kwame off at his place I told him that I would call him and that we would go out again. In my heart I knew that that probably wouldn’t be the case. Kwame wasn’t ready for me and I damn sure wasn’t ready for his ass. I mean, he probably would have been good for me, but I had to be honest with myself. Where I was at, at that point in my life I knew that I had to live and do me and experience life to the fullest as a college student. And as far as I was concerned, I knew that my college experience was gonna include sex and a whole lot of it. So there was no sense in me tying myself down with a religious virgin during my freshman year. Nah, forget that, it was time for me to party and have fun.
I headed back to the Delta party and I immediately tracked down Kenya. I told her how the bug-a-boo had dissed me and didn’t wanna fuck me.
Kenya was beyond shocked because she thought that I had already fucked Kwame and had him whipped. She told me to brush it off because there were bigger and better things that I had to attend to. Namely, she wanted me to meet the Q-dog who had been inquiring about me.
His name was LaMeek. He was one of the most popular Q’s on campus. He was dark-skinned, muscular, about six feet four and he was also a star on the basketball team.
LaMeek was feeling me right off the bat and I was feeling him as well. Unlike with Kwame and his frontin’ virgin ass, LaMeek was ’bout it ’bout it and he and I ended up fucking each other that night and many other nights that followed.
Fortunately for me, Kwame had remained persistent. He hung around and never gave up courting me or chasing me. Although it would take four years before I would end up calming down and getting complete control of myself and giving Kwame a shot at being my man, he would later prove to be a stabilizing force in my life.
Chapter Twenty-seven
D.E. Shaw & Co.
By the summer of 1996 I had graduated fr
om college and I had decided to stay in D.C. and work full-time for the same brokerage firm that Andrea had originally hooked me up with years ago. The name of the brokerage firm was D.E. Shaw & Co. and they had offices in New York, D.C., and a few other cities. I was hired as a financial analyst with a starting salary of 60,000 dollars a year for a job that I absolutely loved.
Prior to graduating from Howard University I had been working at D.E. Shaw & Co. during all of my breaks from school. In 1994 when I was a junior and had gotten my second installment of 250,000 dollars from my mother’s life insurance policy, I had decided that I wasn’t gonna blow it like I’d done with the first installment of money. I talked to my boss and I asked him for some financial advice on what I should do with the money. My boss told me about a guy named Jeffrey Bezos who was working with D.E. Shaw & Co. and how he was leaving to start a company of his own called Amazon.com. If he was me he would take 200,000 dollars of the money and invest it in Amazon.com before the company went public and was listed on the stock market. With the other 50,000 dollars he told me to just play it and keep it in a money market fund.
At the time I didn’t really know much of the intricate details about finance and investing but I decided to listen to my boss. He worked it out where for my 200,000 dollars I was able to buy 200,000 private shares of Amazon.com.
“Just wait and in a few years when Amazon. com goes public you’ll be able to cash in on your investment,” my boss said. “That’s where I’m putting a large chunk of my money and I wouldn’t tell you to do something that I wasn’t also willing to do myself.”
Although I didn’t fully understand what I was investing in at the time, I trusted my boss and went with his advice. I never thought too much about the money after that point. All I knew was that it had been invested by people who were much smarter than I was, which was definitely a better alternative than blowing it on bottles of champagne at the club.
I had told Andrea what I had decided to do with the money and she thought that I was making a good move. If I couldn’t see and have access to the money she reasoned, it would be less of a temptation for me to touch it and blow it and I would be less inclined to splurge with it and get myself into all kinds of trouble.
Well, by 1997 the whole world had gone dot-com crazy and by that time I had gained real-life practical experience as a financial analyst. I fully knew what I was holding in terms of that 200,000 dollar investment that I had made in Amazon.com. All I could say is that I basically had been fortunate enough and blessed enough to have been in the right damn place at the right damn time! Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that I would be so fortunate to experience what was about to happen me.
What was about to happen was that on May 15, 1997 Amazon.com was scheduled to go public on the NASDAQ stock exchange at a price of eighteen dollars a share. With me holding 200,000 shares it meant that I was gonna instantly become a multimillionaire! By simply multiplying my 200,000 shares by the eighteen-dollar a share stock price, it meant that the shares in Amazon.com that I was holding were gonna be worth 3.6 million dollars and that my net worth would increase by 200,000 dollars every time the stock price increased by one dollar!
I had spoken to Andrea just about every day during that week leading up to Amazon.com going public and she was absolutely shocked by the whole Amazon thing.
“Baby, you see, this is not by accident, your meeting me was no accident, my helping you get that job at D.E. Shaw was no accident, you blowing that first installment of money was no accident, and Shayla, if this isn’t confirmation from God that everything that you ever went through in your life has happened for a reason then I don’t know what it is,” Andrea said to me.
I knew that Andrea was right and I listened to everything that she was telling me. The thing that I respected the most from Andrea was that here she was listening to me telling her how I was about to come into all of this money and not once did she ever ask me for a dime; not even in a joking way did she insinuate that she wanted me to hit her off with some money. In fact, when I would tell her that I was gonna do this and do that for her or give her money, she didn’t wanna hear it and she insisted that there was no way that she could ever let me do that.
“Shayla, when you get that money the only thing that I want you to do is to pray and ask God for guidance on how to best use that money and trust me, He’ll direct you because He’s blessing you like this for a reason.”
Kwame and I had been becoming more and more of committed item with each passing day. He was still very religious and into the church. I was slowly coming along and getting into God, but at my own pace. What I liked and respected about Kwame was that he never spiritually mugged me and forced his views and beliefs on me so that they would align with his. He always just accepted me for who I was and where I was in my life while letting me experience God and religion on my own terms. Like Andrea, Kwame was elated for me and what was going to be my newfound wealth, but he too insisted that that was to be my money and that he wouldn’t feel right taking anything from me.
I couldn’t believe it because for all of my life I had been used to people using me and abusing me and exploiting me to their advantage. Now here I was with Kwame and Andrea proving to be two of the most loyal and genuine people in the world and they didn’t want a thing from me other than my happiness. The way things were playing themselves out, I just knew that it had to be God. It just had to be.
Well, May, 15, 1997 had finally arrived and Amazon.com did in fact go public at eighteen dollars a share. I didn’t sell my shares right away because there was so much demand for the stock. I held on to my shares for another four months until the stock price reached fifty-four dollars. At that point I sold off nine million dollars’ worth of shares and I still had 1.8 million dollars’ worth of the stock left in my brokerage account! It was the best present that I could have given myself for my twenty-fourth birthday.
Just like that, almost overnight it seemed, me, the promiscuous girl who had experienced more than my fair share of heartaches was sitting on top of the world and also sitting on a pile of nine million dollars in cash!
It was unbelievable.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The Truth Shall Set You Free—Late Summer 2002
Kwame and I had been married for four years. My life of promiscuity was something that was now way in my past. I was a Christian woman and fully devoted to God. Despite the fact that I had basically given up all hope of having a healthy relationship with my father, who had chosen to skip my wedding, I can honestly say that those four years of marriage had been the best four years of my entire life. Kwame had become a full-time minister at the AME church that he and I attended in Alexandria, Virginia where we lived. When I wasn’t volunteering at the church-owned day care center I basically stayed home, lived lavishly, and spoiled myself in a healthy way. Since money wasn’t an issue, Kwame and I, traveled and took trips and cruises all of the time and basically enjoyed each other, enjoyed life and what God had blessed us with.
Kwame showed me the way a real man was supposed to treat a woman. He treated me like royalty and he worshiped the ground that I walked on. I wanted nothing more than to have his children. I was also looking forward to raising a child and giving that child the life that I had wished and hoped for from the time I’d lost my mother at the age of five.
Unfortunately, with me looking forward to my twenty-ninth birthday, I didn’t realized that I was about to get blindsided and walloped by two devastating turns of events.
The first thing was that I learned that my promiscuous lifestyle from years ago had finally caught up with me. To my complete lack of knowledge, I had contracted a sexually transmitted disease known as HPV (human papillomavirus), which had never manifested with any visible symptoms but which ultimately led to me getting cervical cancer.
Yes, cervical cancer, which meant that I would never be able to have kids and even more drastic, it meant that I could possibly lose my life.
That wa
s the first major blow that sent me reeling into depression. But I couldn’t stay depressed and sulking and feeling sorry for myself for too long because shortly thereafter, I found out more shocking news.
With the advance in DNA technology—technology that wasn’t available at the time that Antonio Reid was on trial, he was able to request what is known as a post-conviction DNA test. Even though it had been close to eleven years from the time that I had been raped and ten years from the date that Antonio Reid had been convicted, the post conviction DNA test was able to prove with a 99.9 percent rate of accuracy that Antonio Reid was not the person responsible for raping me.
Based on the results of the post-conviction DNA test, Antonio Reid’s lawyers and the Manhattan district attorney’s office, where Andrea had since retired from, filed a motion to immediately vacate his conviction. After ten years of being in prison for a crime that he didn’t commit, Antonio Reid was able to walk out of prison a free man.
“Why me?” That’s all I could say to Andrea and Kwame. “Why me?”
Why did I have to be the victim of such devastating news? Why was God, who had delivered me from so much, allowing me to now go through what I was going through?
“Baby, you can’t question God,” my husband said to me.
“Kwame, don’t give me that shit! You and Andrea both had been preaching to me about how God had put me through what I had gone through for a reason and that He was blessing me because of all that I had been through. So is this so-called God schizophrenic, does He have a split personality or what? How do you explain this bullshit?” I vented.
Andrea and Kwame both sat quiet and they let me vent.
“And Andrea, what do I say to a man whose life I ruined? The man spent ten years of his life in jail for something he didn’t even fucking do? Oh, God, I feel like shit! How can he get those years back?” I said as I started breaking down and crying.
Andrea and my husband both didn’t have any words for me and what could they really say? What do you say to someone who has just found out that they have cancer and who also just found out that they were solely responsible for ruining an innocent man’s life?
