by Leach, Kiki
Adrian respected him because he was older, but knowing the man’s history after learning more about him and his past life long before he moved in, he wouldn’t have actually called himself a fan of the actual person.
He pushed the chair back and stood up, thinking about his question. “It’s, or it was, nothing.” He wiped his hands against his sweat pants and pointed at the bowl. “Are you going to clean that this time?”
He nodded and leaned his large frame against the stove while dipping his spoon into the bowl. “You good, son?”
Adrian looked down at his phone again, then picked it up and found Sheila’s name in his address book. A quick swipe deleted her from his life, at least physically, for the time being.
“I will be,” he said. “Eventually.”
After leaving his phone on the table and grabbing a book before heading into his bedroom, Adrian’s roommate waited until he heard the sound of his door clicking shut, then walked over and picked up his phone.
The name might have been erased from Adrian’s contact list, but the number itself had yet to be deleted from his recent calls.
When he reached the top, he took note of the first/last number and shoved his brows together.
“Huh.”
After gazing at it for a few more seconds, the memory of the number flooded back like a raging tsunami. It had been years since he had seen it and frankly, he never thought he would again.
As he sat the phone back down on the table and moved back into the kitchen, he dipped his spoon back into the bowl and looked toward the hall.
“What the hell is this cat doing taking phone calls from the likes of Sheila Harris?”
He chomped down on his cereal while considering whether or not asking Adrian or finding out the truth for himself by rolling back into Manhattan, would be the better solution.
Part Six
As the afternoon became the evening and turned into nightfall, Maurice found himself wandering around the city in a haze of what the hell to do about the situation with Olivia. He knew he wasn’t sleeping with her, he had no desire to even if he and Vanessa weren’t together. Sure she was sexy as hell and ballsy to boot, being bold enough to not only proposition him in public but while he was happily taken by someone else.
At the same time, she reeked of desperation, too much to even be considered worthy of a one night stand. And nothing compared to what he had with Vanessa. Nothing ever could, would, or should, at least in his mind.
Now everything he had ever wanted, everything he had always vowed to protect and keep close in this life and the next was threatened with being ripped away from him all within the blink of an eye. He knew one day that either his mouth or his dick would cause him trouble. He never thought that either one would be at the cost of the one and only woman he had ever, and would ever love more than himself.
While taking a seat on a bench in Central Park and contemplating whether or not to come clean to Vanessa at the risk of receiving the wrath she was no doubt bound to unleash upon him once she learned the truth word for word, he heard a woman from a few feet down sobbing into her hands.
Feeling immediately uncomfortable, he tried clearing his throat, hoping that she would either stop or move further away from him. When she didn’t, he begrudgingly looked inside his pocket for something to hand to her so that she could wipe her face, and found a handkerchief.
As the woman’s sobs quickened to the point that she was clutching her chest because she could barely breathe, he rushed over and tapped her shoulder. Frightened, she dropped her hands and looked up at him, her face red and swollen; her eyes grew big in surprise when she realized who he was and quickly turned her head away.
“Don’t look at me like this,” she said between various bouts of blubbering. “Please.”
Maurice frowned. “Melanie?”
She didn’t answer, but he knew even beneath the smeared mascara and blond hair swirling around her blotched skin that it was her. Taking a seat beside her, he reached over and waved the handkerchief in her face. Hesitant to take anything from him at first but unable to stop her tears, she slipped it from between his long fingers and pressed it against her face.
“You mind if I ask what the hell you’re doing out here at night when you’re so upset like this?”
After wiping down her face and catching her breath, she spun her legs to the front and sat back. “My children,” she said. “I didn’t want them to see me like this. I’ve been crying since we got back from the Hamptons and I couldn’t stop. I tried locking myself in my bedroom, but they kept wanting to know why I was so upset. I couldn’t tell them. I still can’t.”
“Is Oscar with them now?” he asked.
She cut her eyes at him before shaking her head and wiping her nose as more tears fell. “No. I don’t exactly know where he is right now, but I have a pretty damn good guess.”
Maurice immediately regretted mentioning her husband’s name.
After a few seconds of dogging her daggers, he was starting to regret having even set down next to her.
But he was still curious.
“Why are you crying?” he asked.
“Because I’m apparently not a good enough lay to keep my husband around or in our marriage, unlike your good friend Nikki, who’s become an expert in having two men wrapped around her finger at the exact same time.” She blew her nose into the handkerchief and snatched her purse from the bench, setting it in her lap. “The minute we got back to the city, Oscar told me that he was leaving me for her, because apparently he can’t seem to live without her. But he can happily live without me and our children and the life that we have built together. All for a pair of half-Latin tits and a pussy that’s become equivalent to a periscope. Or so I imagine.”
Maurice turned straight ahead and reached for the collar of his shirt. To say that he was becoming uncomfortable the longer he sat there was an understatement that even she couldn’t ignore.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I might think she’s a slut, but I don’t mean to dump all of this on you, considering you two are friends.”
“I understand,” he told her. “I’ve never outright called her names outside of being a moocher, but I can see where you’re coming from in a situation like this. I used to listen to V call Sheila some of the same things after she and Nathan broke up.”
“How did she deal with all of this? I know that she was eighteen, but no matter the age, a pain like this runs deep.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and bent his head to the side. “If you heard what happened at the reunion a few months back, then you know she didn’t deal with it very well, even after five years.”
“But she eventually got over it,” she said. “Because she’s with you now.”
“Yeah. But it took a lot of time and a lot of healing for her to move past it. Some days, I still think she may not be over it, but then I often wonder if that’s just my insecurities talking, making me believe that what we have could be ripped from us at any moment.” He smiled up at someone as they passed by, but the expression quickly fell when he thought back on his own reason for being out there instead of back at home with her as he wanted to be.
“I’ve seen the way she looks at you,” said Melanie. “You can’t fake feelings like that. Trust me, I know all too well about feigned feelings.”
Silence abounded until Maurice turned to her and sat up, clasping his hands together and dropping them in his lap.
“You mind if I ask you something?” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“What if you never learned about the affair with Nikki? Do you think you would’ve been better off – ?”
“Remaining ignorant?” She thought about it and tried her best to answer the question as honestly as she could. “Some days, I think so because I wanted to keep my family together at all cost. Others, not so much because as much as I never wanted it to come to this, or to be alone, I also couldn’t imagine being made such a fool of by a man who clai
med to love me. I could just see people laughing behind my back, all while smiling in my face because they knew what he was doing and where he was going and who he was with when he wasn’t with me, and why. The ones you love are never supposed to be the ones to cause you so much pain. And yet here I am receiving more consolation from a virtual stranger on a park bench than I have from my own husband in all the years we were married.”
“We’re not really strangers anymore now, are we?” he asked with a lick of humor in his tone.
She smiled for the first time that night, her brown eyes twinkling beneath the moonlight, and shook her head. “I don’t know how we could be after what took place between all of us this weekend. I’m not sure who was worse last night during all of that infighting, but I can tell you that I’m extremely ashamed of my actions. And I hope that nothing else in my life ever brings me to a place like that again.” She sniffed back more tears, then looked over at him and pondered. “You’ve been asking all these questions to and about me, but is there a reason why you’re out tonight instead of back at home with the love of your life? You two were the only ones who seemed genuinely happy when Oscar and I showed up.”
Maurice kept his eyes straight ahead. “We are happy,” he told her, though deep down he couldn’t help but start to question that notion for himself. “And I’m going to make damn sure that it stays that way.” He turned his eyes up to the sky then, and stood up showing her his hand. “I feel like I should walk you home now,” he said.
“I’m fine,” she told him. “I don’t really need the company.”
“Then how about the presence of a potential friend instead?”
Melanie looked down in his hand and slid her fingers into his palm. As he lifted her from the bench, she fell into his chest. He held her back and laughed while trying to help her stand up straight.
“Are you okay?” he asked, pushing the hair back from her face and getting a better look into her eyes.
As he held onto her, she turned the color of a bright red beet and tried to hide her enthusiastic expression.
“I’m fine. I’m fine.” She eased out of his embrace and bent down to grab her purse.
As they started walking, she stopped for a second to look up at him. He smiled down at her and she did the same.
“Thank you,” she told him.
He shrugged. “What are potential friends for?”
Potential.
It wouldn’t be long before Melanie would come to realize that Maurice had a hell of a lot of that, and more.
Part Seven
After getting Melanie home safely, Maurice returned to his own home with Vanessa and prayed that she wouldn’t be too pissed about him spending most of the day away from her. And considering the circumstances, there was no way in hell he was going to tell her that he had spent one unfortunate part with the girlfriend of her work nemesis and the other, less unfortunate part with the wife of a husband who was apparently still having sex with their moocher of a best friend.
Or in his case ‘friend’.
When he walked through the front door, he removed his jacket and started to call out Vanessa’s name, but stopped when he heard her voice blaring from the kitchen.
“It is too damn HOT!” she said. “Which is why it’s damn near turning black. Meat sauce is not supposed to turn colors like that.”
“This is how I’ve always fixed it for my girls, Vanessa,” another voice retorted. “And they like it just fine. Maybe your stove is the problem.”
This voice, though familiar to him, was one he hadn’t heard so up close and personal in a good few years.
“Fefe?” he asked aloud.
“Maybe your kids are used to unfortunate slop,” Vanessa continued. Maurice walked up to the swinging door of the kitchen and pushed it back to peek his head inside. Vanessa, now dressed in actual clothes, stood on one side while her sister stood in front of the stove with a spoon in her hands, stirring something inside of a large red pot. Vanessa pointed. “What you’re fixing in there is exactly why those girls will marry chefs when they’re older. Maybe then they’ll finally get to learn what good food actually tastes like.”
“You call what’s in that fridge right now good food?”
“I call it edible and worthy of a few reheats. Which is far from whatever the hell it is you’ve got brewing in there!”
Felicia yanked the spoon out of the pot and pointed in her sister’s face. “You know what, Vanessa?!”
Vanessa stood up and tilted her head as if she was ready for the battle of her life and prepared to win. “What?”
“Looks like I might’ve made it back just in time,” Maurice said as he slipped inside to join them.
Both women looked at him and Vanessa rolled her eyes.
“Barely.”
She snatched the spoon from Felicia’s hand and watched with great annoyance as she quickly left her side and raced over to Maurice, who opened his arms in preparation for a warm and welcoming embrace. Vanessa turned down the fire beneath the pot and began stirring the sauce for herself. She seethed watching Maurice wrap his arms around her sister. Not because she was jealous, but because Felicia had yet to be gone by the time he had finally gotten back home.
“It is SO damn good to see you,” she said, pulling back in Maurice’s arms. She wrapped her hands around his face and wrinkled the tip of her nose while staring up in his eyes. “You are still one of the best looking men --”
“Felicia,” Vanessa chimed in, “his head can barely get through the door as it is. Why do you always feel the need to encourage that? He knows what he looks like, we own mirrors all over this house.”
Maurice jokingly nodded. “She’s right,” he said. He passed Felicia and headed over to Vanessa, wrapping his hands around her waist and pressing his lips against her neck. “We own mirrors all over this house, even fucked in front of a few to see what positions we like best.”
“MO!” Vanessa elbowed him in the stomach and spun around.
Maurice started laughing and backed into the counter.
When Felicia’s phone started ringing from the other room, she happily excused herself to answer it.
As soon as Maurice caught his breath, he held onto his stomach and raised a hand to keep Vanessa back. “Your sister knows how sex works, V.”
“Yeah well, after tonight it’ll be a long damn time before your ass remembers what goes where.”
After finishing up the sauce, she moved the pot from one eye on the stove to the other. Then she tossed the spoon on top of the counter and folded her arms.
Maurice stared down into her eyes, a smile never leaving his face. She couldn’t help but react.
“I wasn’t trying to be a bitch,” she said.
“I know,” he told her. “She does too.” He lowered his head and moved it side to side. “But you don’t always have to try.”
“Fuck you,” she responded.
He laughed again and turned his eyes to the kitchen door. “What’s your sister doing in town anyway?”
“Visiting. I don’t necessarily want her here, but she and Rodney are splitting up so it might be for the best that she’s able to get away from him and their issues for a while.”
“Shit,” he said. “That’s got to be tough on all of them. Does Alexis know?”
“Yep. As a matter of fact, she’s the one who suggested ‘Fefe’ come down here.”
“Because of the situation with Rodney?”
Vanessa looked aside. “Among other reasons. But don’t say anything to her about this, okay? I’m not sure who else knows aside from the family.”
“Of course,” he replied, swiping his index across the bottom of her chin. She grinned.
Just then, Felicia pushed back on the swinging door and reentered the kitchen. “That was the girls calling to tell me goodnight,” she said, staring down at her phone.
Maurice stepped over to the stove and stared down at the sauce in the pot as it continued to bubble. “Is this all we’re
having for dinner tonight?”
Vanessa and Felicia glanced at one another. “No,” Vanessa told him. “There’s, um... There’s noodles in the microwave.”
Maurice grimaced. “What?”
“Don’t look at me like that, blame her! She’s the one who came in here and dubbed herself Chef Boyarshit. I told her that we needed to just wait for you to get back--”
“You never said any such thing, Vanessa.”
“I said EVERY such thing and you’d know that if you learned how to shut the hell up and just listened to what I say for once!”
“ALRIGHT!” Maurice bellowed out, raising both hands to them.
Vanessa defiantly crossed her arms. Felicia pressed her hands together and immediately fell silent.
“I’m going to fix dinner,” he said. “How about that? None of this shit is being served tonight. If we had a dog, I don’t even think that he’d eat what’s here. So go in there and do what you do, and it’ll be ready in five.”
After kicking them out, Maurice quickly made another batch of spaghetti as well as the sauce, while Felicia and Vanessa whispered to one another in the living room.
“Does he always cook for you like this?” Felicia asked her sister.
Vanessa shrugged. “He’s been cooking for me since we were fifteen. You know that.” She picked at the lint on her shirt and sank down into the couch.
“That’s right. I remember even saying back then that a man who cooks for you is worth keeping in your life.”
Vanessa glared at her. “Don’t start this shit up again.”
“Somebody has to, Vanessa!” she hissed. “Do you want to know what a damn good man looks like? That’s it! Right there in your kitchen, putting up with all your shit and cooking your meals, THAT is what a good man looks like. You better watch yourself before he finds another woman actually looking to value his worth.”
