Swing

by Miasha

  “Oh, no problem. It was only about a thirty-minute drive for me.”

  “You’re by the Mall of Georgia, right?”

  “Lawrenceville, yeah.”

  “That’s a hell of a ways for a girl to go every other day for some penis . . . No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “Did your wife stay out last night?”

  Kevin nodded.

  JuJu stirred her coffee. “Yeah, he did too. This time, though, it wasn’t that he stayed out with an old friend who had come into town and lost track of the time. It was fishing with friends and somehow he had too much to drink to drive home. Slept on their sofa until he sobered up,” she sneered.

  “Tori’s excuse is always her mom. She was recently declared legally blind and so Tori would go help her around the house on certain weekends, but now it’s almost every weekend and even some days during the week.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” JuJu sipped her coffee, then pulled some pictures from her tote bag. “The PI I hired took these.”

  Kevin skimmed through them. His eyes watered as he looked at still shots of his wife in another man’s arms. He gave the pictures back to JuJu and rubbed his hands over his face.

  “I didn’t think it was fair for either of us to be in the dark about this,” JuJu explained, “especially after finding out that it’s been going on for so long.”

  “Yeah, since November.” Kevin shook his head in disbelief.

  JuJu looked up at him sorrowfully. “No, since well before November.”

  “What do you mean since before November? That night we met at the club was the first time Tori had ever seen your husband.”

  “I thought that too,” JuJu said. “But do you recall ever catching your wife sending messages to someone on Facebook or texting in the middle of the night?”

  Kevin immediately thought back to a time about five months into their marriage when he was woken out of his sleep by a buzzing coming from Tori’s phone. Plugged into the charging station on his side of the bed, he couldn’t help but glance down at it. It was a text. Who was texting his wife at two in the morning? He reached down to take the phone off the charger. But before doing so, he looked over at his wife. She was sleeping like a baby.

  He picked up the phone and read the text message, which had come from a number that wasn’t saved in Tori’s phone. It read: I need to talk. Are you up?

  Kevin was alarmed. He started to write back but he looked over at his wife again and realized that the typing might wake her. So he got out of bed and moved into the bathroom.

  What’s wrong? he typed back.

  Where were you today? Why did you stand me up?

  Kevin stared at the message before typing a reply. This can’t be happening, he thought to himself. We’re newlyweds. She can’t be cheating on me already. He was hurt, but a little thankful that Tori hadn’t met up with the person texting her phone. Maybe her love for Kevin was what kept her from meeting the person. Maybe she was loyal to him. He took that into consideration and decided to protect his marriage.

  This is Tori’s husband. You let this be the last time you contact her in any way, Kevin typed, then pressed Send. But he had more to say. If I find out you reached out to her or tried to see her after today, I will track you down and make you regret you ever fell for my wife.

  Kevin deleted all the messages, put the phone on the charger, and climbed back in bed next to his wife. He hugged her and kissed her all over her face.

  “Don’t ever hurt me,” he whispered in her ear. “Please. I love you so much.”

  “I won’t,” she whispered back in her sleep. “I love you too.”

  Kevin took comfort in that and held onto the belief that that was where any possibility of an affair between Tori and another man had started and stopped. He let it go.

  Bringing himself out of his memory and back into the present, he looked at JuJu. “Yes,” he nodded, “I do remember one time some random number texted her in the wee hours of the morning.”

  “It was my husband, I bet. He and your wife have been communicating through Facebook and text messages for some time now. I’ve caught him on several occasions. The thing is, I never saw her face. The Facebook profile she made to communicate with him was private and it had no picture, so when we met you all at Puss & Boots that night I had no idea that your wife was the same girl he had been communicating with for almost a year.”

  “Almost a year?” Kevin was taken aback. He had put Tori on a pedestal. Always believed she was angelic. And even when that suspicious text came through he wrote it off as a one-time mistake. “So you’re saying they knew each other before that night at the club?”

  “Yes, and I’m willing to bet the ranch that they planned to meet there. A way for them to get away with sleeping together. Right up under our noses. That’s why I called you here. It’s been going on too long and it’s gotten too deep.”

  Kevin’s eyes watered again and this time the levy broke. He turned his face, trying to hide the tears from JuJu. But there was no hiding his sobs.

  JuJu grabbed a couple of napkins off the small stack beside her cup and handed them to Kevin.

  He took them and held them in his hand for several moments. He dropped his head. Drowning in self-pity, he said, “I’m sorry.” He wiped his eyes with one of the napkins and regained eye contact with JuJu. “My wife is all I got. Her and her mom and her dad were all the family I have ever known. I don’t have a family myself. I don’t have many friends. Her friends are my friends. Without her I have nobody. I can’t lose her.” He shook his head again. “If I lose her, I’ll have nothing, I’ll have no one. I’ll have absolutely nothing to live for.” His sobbing dulled down to a whimper and he used the rest of the napkins to completely dry away his tears. At that point Kevin’s body language shifted. Where he had been worried, hurt, now he was disgusted, devastated. He couldn’t be still.

  “I hope you’re not upset with me.”

  “I’m not upset at you, no. I’m upset at her and at him,” he assured her.

  JuJu reached her hand across the table and put it on top of Kevin’s. She tried to calm his shaking. “I know you want to confront her about this and I want to do the same, but I think it would be best if we did it together, when we are all in the same room. This way, neither of them will be able to feed us bullshit.”

  “Unless you can get us all in the same room together within the next twenty minutes, I don’t see how that’s going to work,” Kevin said angrily.

  JuJu picked up her phone and scrolled to a text message from Mike. She showed it to Kevin. “Just like I had my guy following my husband, I had him tracking his phone calls and text messages. And Ferrari called the Marriott Marquis and reserved a room on the fourteenth . . .”

  “Valentine’s Day?”

  JuJu nodded.

  “So you expect me to wait damn near two weeks to address something like this?”

  “I know it sounds impossible, it feels unbearable. I am in the same position, my friend. But we have to play this smart or else it could just end up being a denial party that starts from now until . . .”

  “Wow.” Kevin couldn’t find any other words to describe how he felt. “This is crazy.”

  “I say we meet them at the hotel. We show up right after they do. There will be no talking their way out of that.”

  “Honestly,” Kevin said, giving JuJu her phone back, “I cannot bite my tongue for that long. There’s no way.”

  “I understand, but if we confront them now, they won’t go to the hotel and I won’t catch him red-handed.”

  “How much more red do you need his hands to be? What you just revealed to me is enough, isn’t it?”

  “Not in a court of law. I’m worth millions of dollars. If I divorce Ferrari, he’ll get half of everything. Him hugging a woman in a picture won’t stop that. But,” JuJu raised her finger, “if I catch him in a hotel room having sex with that woman, that clause in our prenuptials will be deemed null and void
.”

  Kevin took a deep breath. He thought about what JuJu was asking him to do. He wanted to help her, especially since she was the one making him aware of what was really going on. “Okay, I’ll wait,” he said reluctantly.

  “Thank you!” JuJu put the pictures back in her bag and retrieved her checkbook in the same motion. “I’m going to write you a check for one hundred thousand dollars.”

  Kevin shook his head. “No, that won’t be necessary.” He had already made up his mind. A bribe wouldn’t do.

  JuJu looked at him. “You may be called in to testify if this thing gets ugly. You’ll be the only other eyewitness who can corroborate my side of the story. You’ll be the key to me holding onto my fortune. And for that, a hundred grand is the least I can do.”

  Kevin felt better about accepting the check after that pep talk. Leaving the quaint little coffee house, he had mixed emotions. On one hand, he felt like he had just won the lottery. On the other, he felt like he had just lost a piece of himself.

  JuJu drank the rest of her coffee, then got up and left, saying goodbye to the employees of the place who all knew her. Her plan was in motion, that part she felt good about, but it involved losing her companion of eleven years in a week and five days. There was no solace in that.

  Lyssa & Jacob

  I had just hung up the phone with Morgan, but before I could call Jake and give him the cursing out of a lifetime, a customer walked in with a chip on his shoulder.

  I watched from inside my office as Kelsey greeted the small pale guy.

  “Where is the owner or manager of this place?” I could hear him faintly through the thick glass of my office window.

  Kelsey knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” I raised my voice.

  Kelsey started to tell me what I already knew. The guy wanted to speak with me. I walked out of my office to the front entrance of the club.

  “How can I help you?” I braced myself.

  “I need you to tell me how my partner and I ended up on a porn site after coming here to your club!” he demanded. “What kind of business are you running here where you would secretly record people while they are at their most vulnerable?”

  Of all the complaints I could have gotten, I didn’t see that one coming. I had to take a moment to compose myself.

  “First things first,” I began. “We don’t record anybody in this establishment with or without their permission and especially not without. So maybe you have the wrong club.”

  “I have the right club. In fact, the couple we were filmed with, they have some kind of VIP status with you. They get special treatment and they have their own private room . . .”

  Instantly a lightbulb went off in my head. “Wait a minute, are you talking about Danielle and Stewart?”

  I saw Kelsey nod in my peripheral.

  The gentleman corrected me: “Mrs. Oxford and her husband.”

  “Do you have that video?” I asked.

  “I have the link. And there are people threatening to put it in the wrong hands,” he said, fear in his voice.

  “Would you mind stepping into my office?”

  The man shook his head and followed me into my office.

  I turned on my laptop. “Have a seat,” I gestured to a second chair next to the computer screen. “Pull up the link, please.”

  He did, first having to sift through e-mail messages to get to it. When he opened it and a porn site popped up with membership fees, advertisements, and everything, I was at a loss for words. So this is how they make all their money, I thought. He plays football overseas my ass. No wonder they put so much money into that room—it was a business expense.

  “I had no idea I was being filmed,” the man disrupted my thoughts. “I’m a mayoral candidate in my hometown in Texas, and now I’m being blackmailed because of this.” The words quivered off his thin lips.

  I took a breath. I had to somehow deal with this. “Okay, so when were you and your wife here? When did this happen?”

  “That’s the other problem,” he said. “She’s not my wife.”

  “Do you have a wife?” I hoped he would say no.

  “Yes, and four kids.”

  “Shit.”

  “I just need this to come down off this site immediately!”

  “I can assure you that I will have it taken down, but the couple responsible for this just left town today.”

  “Well, can you get them on the phone, e-mail, or something? This could destroy everything—my marriage, my career . . .”

  “I can try.” I picked up my cell and called Danielle’s number. It went straight to voicemail. Same thing happened when I called Stewart. I didn’t have an e-mail address for either of them, so all I could do was wait for them to return my calls or come walking through the door. “I’m sorry. Both of their phones are off, but I do know they’ll be back on Valentine’s Day. They’re hosting an event here.”

  The man looked hopeless. “Okay, I’ll come back then.”

  “If I reach them beforehand, I will make them take the site down, believe me. This goes against our policies in the worst way.”

  The man left, defeated. I immediately sat down in front of the computer. I needed to see who else had fallen victim to Danielle and Stewart’s scam. And more importantly, had I?

  Danielle & Stewart

  When we landed at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport it was six in the evening. Stewart and I had both missed calls from Lyssa. We were concerned. Lyssa hardly ever called us, there was never a need. We saw each other at the club and talked about everything in person. So what could she possibly want that was important enough to call not one but both of us? My thoughts immediately traveled to the possibility that the girls had come back to Puss & Boots looking to get more money out of us. It was what extortionists did. They bled you dry.

  “Did you check your voicemail?” I asked my husband as we sat on the plane waiting for it to taxi to our gate. A message would at least give us a hint as to what was going on.

  “I checked. She didn’t leave a message.”

  “She didn’t leave one on mine either.”

  “Well, it must not be that important,” Stew said.

  I figured he had to be right. If someone came in there threatening to slice throats, Lyssa would have left a message. I was relieved, but more so because we had decided to make a move. The nervousness and anxiety behind getting missed calls from Lyssa was further proof that we were making the right decision by leaving Atlanta.

  “Should we call her back?” I asked my husband.

  He shook his head, “Nah, we’ll see what she wants when we get back to town. If it’s a problem, well, we’ll just leave right away. If it’s not, we’ll stick to our plan—collect us some videos to keep our subscribers entertained while we settle in and recycle our business plan.”

  I trusted Stew’s wisdom and his instincts. They had managed to keep us on the right side of things for years now. I wasn’t going to go against them now.

  I turned my phone back off and patiently waited to get to the gate. I anticipated seeing what kind of swingers clubs Arizona had to offer and hoped we would find one that made us feel at home again. I was sure going to miss Puss & Boots. But change was ironically the only constant in our line of work so we were simply doing what we did.

  Tori & Kevin

  My alarm buzzed at six forty-five as it did every weekday morning. Usually Kevin would put it on snooze for me so I could get another ten minutes of sleep. But he wasn’t in the bed. He had slept in the guest bedroom where he had spent every night since he stormed out of here to meet some female at a coffee spot.

  He wouldn’t tell me what I had done to piss him off, but he didn’t have to. I knew what I was doing, and whether he knew or not, I deserved the treatment he was giving me. It felt like karma.

  So I dealt with it. I dealt with him not speaking to me. I dealt with him distancing himself from me. Selfishly, I used it as an excuse to continue my bad behavio
r. In fact, that very day, Valentine’s Day, I had agreed to leave work a little early and meet Ferrari at a hotel downtown. He said he had a surprise for me. I planned to spend a couple hours with him and get back home the same time I would have if I left work at my regular time. That way Kevin wouldn’t suspect a thing. And plus, Kevin and I would still make the party that evening at Puss & Boots. Lyssa and Jacob were using the event to raise money for a cause they supported every year around this time, the only reason Kevin was still willing to go with me.

  I rose, got washed and dressed, brushed my teeth, did my hair and makeup, and headed downstairs. Kevin was still in bed for some reason. I could usually hear him moving about by the time I made it down to the kitchen to grab a light breakfast. But not that day. Maybe he overslept or wasn’t feeling well. I decided to check on him.

  I went back upstairs and crept toward the guest bedroom in the middle of the hall. I tapped on the door, then opened it. Kevin was knocked out, laid across the bed in the clothes he had worn the day before, snoring and all. That was unusual. I tiptoed up to him. That’s when I smelled the liquor. It seemed like it was seeping from his pores. He must have gone out late last night. Probably had a hangover. I covered him up and left the room, then called his boss and told him Kevin was too sick to come in to work. He could thank me later.

  I returned to the kitchen, grabbed a granola bar out of the pantry and a bottled water out of the refrigerator. As I left the house a dark cloud of shame hovered over me. What I was doing to Kevin was destroying him and deteriorating our marriage. Today would be my last day being with Ferrari. I meant it for real this time. I felt it in my heart. I believed it in my mind. This was it.

  Chapter 7

  Love Is Cursed by Monogamy

  JuJu & Ferrari

  JuJu was all over the place. She didn’t think she would be so nervous. It was the afternoon of Valentine’s Day, a holiday rooted in love. But she was filled with so much hate. Up to the very last minute, she wanted bad to confront Ferrari about his plans that afternoon. Especially because of how normal he was acting throughout the day.