When the elevator doors opened, Eminence had hoped Dru would have just shoved her inside the car with Jordie and left the two women alone. No, when Jordie requested that Dru deliver Eminence to her office, she meant that.
On the slow ride up, no one said a word. Tension choked Eminence until she found it difficult to breathe. She coughed to clear her throat and even that sound seemed out of place in the coffin-like elevator car.
When the doors opened to an office, Jordyna stepped out first before Dru shoved Eminence out and then made his way back down.
“That was rude.” Eminence composed herself as she split her gaze between the elevator doors and Jordie, who did look like a mature version of her high school self.
With her full lips even fuller, and her onyx eyes carrying more mystery than a whodunit novel, she looked like a true man-eater. Although Jordyna wore a conservative pantsuit, Eminence could easily picture her with a hot guy in his twenties and playing up the cougar role. Her jet black hair held soft, easy curls that cascaded down her face and over her shoulders. Man stealing and running a business looked good on her.
“Let’s not talk about your behavior right now.” Jordie, not looking like the sorry and apologetic woman that she should be, crossed her arms and squared off against Eminence.
“My behavior? Let me tell you what my night has been like. First your goons, and I’m including Keys in that category, pat me down like some sort of criminal. I’m held captive in a back room and sexually assaulted.”
Jordie raised an eyebrow, a sign that she didn’t believe her story.
Eminence kept going. “Your other guard bumps and grinds with me without my permission.”
“You didn’t seem too upset when I watched you.” Jordie kept her voice cool and calm, something that irritated the hell out of Eminence.
“And now I’m being held against my will again in your office.”
Jordyna shook her head. “Keys was right. You have become so bitter and angry.”
Eminence had to step back when Jordie made a comment about Keys, about her former man. “So you two are talking about me behind my back now? But, then again, there’s so much you two did behind my back.”
“Stop it! Just stop it.” Jordie stomped her foot.
“Or what? You’re going to kick my ass or something?”
To Eminence’s surprise, Jordie removed her shoes and took off her jewelry.
“If that’s what it takes. I can beat your ass again like I used to when we were in high school.”
“Bitch, are you crazy?” Eminence threw her purse onto a nearby chair, but kept her shoes on. With all of the straps, she couldn’t get them off in time.
“No, I’m tired.” Jordie, with fists up and ready, circled around her office as she faced off against Eminence. “I’m tired of you using your anger against me and Keys as a way of you getting to play the victim.”
“You bitch! You fucked my man and have the nerve to try to tell me how I should feel?” Eminence shoved Jordyna’s shoulder.
Jordie wasn’t about to pussyfoot around. Instead of getting into a shoving match, she grabbed Eminence by her shoulders and tackled her to the floor, pinning her arms down and straddling her body.
“I didn’t fuck Keys. I never did. I would never do that to you. You were my best friend.” Jordie hovered over Eminence.
“Oh yeah? Then what happened that day in his bedroom? Why were you two hugging?”
Jordie paused before she blurted out the secret that had kept Eminence away from the two people outside of her family that meant the most to her. “I had found out I was pregnant. I needed someone to talk to, and I went to Keys.”
Eminence stopped struggling under Jordie’s body. “Was it Keys’s?”
“Damnit, Eminence! The world does not revolve around you! I just told you I never slept with your man.” She hopped off of Eminence’s body and paced in her office.
Eminence watched her from her position on the floor. If she didn’t know any better, it looked as though Jordie nearly collapsed. She made it to the couch just before she could crumble.
Eminence stood and strolled to the couch, hesitating before taking a seat next to her. When she glanced at Jordie, Eminence’s mind transported back to her teenage years and the two of them would sit around and talk about boys. She remembered how her belly used to quiver and her mind felt cloudy. Now she experienced those feelings for a whole different reason.
Jordie took a deep breath before continuing her story. “You remember Reggie from high school?”
Eminence nodded. “Your, um, husband.” Although she hadn’t been in touch with Jordyna, Eminence knew the story of what had happened to Reggie Hampton. “I heard about the robbery and what happened. I’m so sorry.”
Eminence meant that. No one deserved to die in an act so senseless. She cried when she’d heard the news from her mother.
Even though she questioned her friend’s loyalty, Eminence knew how crazy Jordie was over Reggie. When the high school sweethearts had gotten married, Eminence started to doubt what she saw that day in Keys’s bedroom. She’d been so committed to the story of their betrayal, she couldn’t accept any other theory.
“Thank you for that, Eminence. I never wanted to be a young widow.” Jordie wiped under her eyes, careless about preserving her perfect makeup job. She streaked black eyeliner across her cheek and smudged her blush. “No one knew I was pregnant when I first found out. Reggie and I knew. It happened close to the end of the school year, so I knew that no one would be able to tell that I was pregnant.”
“But you were on The Pill. How did that happen?”
“You remember the warning on them saying that it’s ninety-nine percent effective? I was that one percent.”
No wonder Keys didn’t want to have sex without a condom. It all made sense now. It wasn’t like he didn’t trust her. He doubted the product. Even years later, Keys kept Jordie’s secret. He had been a man of his word, and Eminence questioned his character. Her heartbeat slowed as that thought hit her.
Jordie sat up taller. She smiled in telling the next part of her story. “We were excited about having a baby. We had planned on waiting until we graduated to spring the news on our families and close friends.”
“You didn’t want to tell me until later? I thought we were close.” A stab of rejection pierced Eminence’s heart.
“I did want you tell you. But Reggie wanted the secret to be a surprise.”
“That still doesn’t explain why I saw you in Keys’s arms that day.” Eminence had to hear this explanation.
She started to cross her arms over her chest, a familiar stance whenever she felt confused or angered, but she stopped herself. Jordie had just opened herself up to Eminence. Eminence had to be just as open to her friend.
“As you may have remembered, Reggie has always been so sure of himself. He was excited about the baby. At first, so was I. Then it hit me. What if I couldn’t be a good mother? What if I was way too young to have this baby? What if I wasn’t worthy? I called you that day because I wanted to tell you and to talk about my fears, but you weren’t home. So I went to my other good friend.”
“Keys,” Eminence said.
“I didn’t know what to do. You two were my best friends. I couldn’t talk to Reggie. He would just say that I was being silly and to get over myself. And I knew Keys knew Reggie from the football team. I thought that Keys could talk to Reggie, maybe shake some sense into him so I wouldn’t have to carry this worry alone. What you saw when you walked in on us was me crying to him about being pregnant in high school and not knowing what to do.”
Now Eminence felt like such a heel. For a fleeting moment, the realization hit her that even Keys knew about Jordie’s pregnancy before she did. Like Jordie had said before, this wasn’t about her. Had Eminence just trusted her friends, she wouldn’t have gone so many years without them in her life.
Eminence put her hand on Jordie’s to comfort her. “I’m so sorry I didn’t give you
and Keys a chance to explain. I feel like such a fool. What I put you two through.”
Jordyna shook her head. “Don’t. I can’t live in the past. You shouldn’t, either. It killed Keys not to tell you. But he knew this was my story to tell.”
“That Keys. He is loyal.” Eminence felt stupid. “So the baby, he or she should be grown about now, right?”
Jordyna hung her head again. As though she had given herself her own pep talk on not living in the past, she raised her head and took a deep breath. “I lost the baby in my third trimester. You had already gone off to college by then and never saw my belly grow. Honestly, no one in the neighborhood did. I stayed in the house the whole summer until the day Aunt Janice had to rush me to the hospital. There was nothing they could have done for my daughter.”
Eminence’s bottom jaw unhinged. “A little girl. You would have had a little girl?”
Jordyna smiled and nodded. “It was hard. I didn’t have you. I lost the baby. Besides Reggie, the only person who stayed by my side was Keys. And every time we talked, he centered all conversations on you, about how much he missed you and how he wished things could be different.” Her smile oozed down her face. “After a while, Keys’s whole mood changed. He stopped smiling. He didn’t hang around us a lot. He became a hermit. He’s a different man.”
Eminence couldn’t dab away the current of tears that flowed from her eyes. “Can you ever forgive me?”
Jordyna slid over on the couch to get closer to Eminence, then wrapped her arms around her. “We all make foolish mistakes. We just have to learn from them, right?”
Eminence nodded. She pulled back from her friend who had a handful of tissues ready for her. “Look at us. We’re drama queens, aren’t we?”
Jordie smiled and laughed.
“I never understood something.” Jordie sniffed. “When I used to go see Reggie after school when he hung out with his boys, they would ask Keys about you. He never did that childish stuff boys do and disrespect the girls they were with behind their backs. He always talked about you like you were something special. I can kind of understand why you wouldn’t talk to me. But why wouldn’t you talk to him? Why couldn’t you give him a chance?”
Eminence had kept a secret just like Jordie had. Unlike Jordie, though, she’d never talked about it with anyone. “The day I came to see you, I had come home from school and caught my father with another woman in our house.”
Jordie gasped. “Oh, my God. I didn’t know that.”
Replaying that moment caught Eminence off guard. She hadn’t prepared herself to expose all her secrets. She wanted to tell off her former friend and be done. So much about her harbored hatred had to do with that very moment catching her father embracing another woman.
“I had called you after I ran from my house, but your aunt said you weren’t home. So I went to see Keys. When I caught the two of you, all I could see was my father’s betrayal being replayed again. So I turned my back on it all. My parents divorced that year. I haven’t spoken to my father since.”
“Eminence, you should—”
Eminence held up her hand to stop her friend from spouting the speech she knew was coming. “I know. I should talk to him. I’m just not ready.”
“So many years. You can’t wait. Things can happen in a second and you could lose a loved one so fast.” Jordie shook her head.
Eminence knew exactly what she meant.
“So?” Jordie waved her hand between the two of them. “Are we good now?”
Eminence wiped her face. “Tell me the truth. How do I look now?”
Jordie stared at her for a moment before saying, “Like shit. No one’s going to buy you a drink looking like that.”
Eminence laughed hard enough to shed more tears. “Yes, we’re more than good. Only a friend would be that brutally honest.”
“Since we’re being honest, you need to talk to Keys. I don’t know what your romantic situation is like right now, but if he’s got a chance with you, you should definitely give him one. He’s so broken and closed off. It’s killed me that I was the reason you two broke up.”
“He wants to, um, talk after work. After what I said to him earlier tonight and the things I did, I don’t know if we can repair what we had.”
“You don’t know unless you try.” Jordie smiled. “He’s only here to help me out tonight. He’s able to go at any time.” She winked. “Did you drive?”
Eminence shook her head. She had plans to get shit-faced, tell off Jordie and go back home without an ounce of regret.
Sober, she now rekindled her friendship with her best friend, she revealed a secret that had been haunting her, and she came to a painful realization about her current relationship. Funny how things changed.
“There’s this guy,” Eminence started to say.
“Oh, you’re seeing someone? Is it serious?”
Eminence shook her head. “He’s not the one.”
Jordie smiled. “I’ll get one of the guards to take you to his ride out back. The employee parking lot is gated, so you’ll be safe.”
“What if Keys doesn’t want to talk to me? I was pretty rough with him. I’ve been hard on him in the past. I never saw him as the type that wanted to do anything with his life. He could never commit to anything, and he never had goals. I can’t be down for a guy like that.”
“Don’t worry. Keys is a lot tougher than you think.” Jordie stood and helped Eminence to her feet. “By the way, why did you decide to come out tonight?”
Eminence smiled. “You.”
Jordie blinked. “Me? Why?”
“I realized that when we were friends, you gave me strength. We would go in the woods to play as kids. You would always just run without thinking about what you could encounter. I treaded lightly, always looking down at the ground or up in the trees for hidden dangers. You wouldn’t get hurt. Not one scratch. I would be looking up, take a step, and get scraped by a broken tree limb on the ground or something.”
Jordie snickered. “You were a bit accident prone. I just like feeling free.”
Eminence shook her head. “No, it was more than that. You would jump over ditches without a second thought. I would be so afraid. I couldn’t do it. I would start to cry and you would say, ‘Just believe you can do it and do it.’ And I would jump. Inevitably, one foot would go right in the water.” Eminence laughed with Jordie this time. “You would brush me off like it wasn’t a big deal and keep us moving. When we got older, you got me into my first club using those horrible fake IDs.”
“Yeah, they were pretty bad, right? Wait.” Jordie put her finger to her lips. “I think I remember. I was Roxanne Dumbroski, and you were—”
At the same time, Eminence said with Jordie, “Angel Finklestein.”
Eminence laughed with her friend. Her lungs opened up and she felt like a whole new person, like time had stopped on them as teenagers and she could pick up from where they’d left off so many years ago.
“I think I have my old fake one packed in a box somewhere at my house.” Jordie smiled as she leaned back on the couch. “So, you accepted my invitation because we used to jump ditches and sneak into clubs?”
Eminence shook her head. “It’s what all that meant for me. I realize now that you gave me strength to do things I was always afraid to do. I wouldn’t try new things for fear of failing. I wouldn’t date a risky guy because I thought the safe ones wouldn’t break my heart. I had sex for the first time with Keys because of you.”
Jordie blinked. “You did? You never told me that. You told me you two did it, but you didn’t say it was because of me.”
“Remember we were pushing your car over to Keys’s house after we hit the club? You kept telling me that you were a heavy sleeper and that once you’re knocked out, you wouldn’t hear anything?”
Jordie laughed and put her hand to her head. “Honey, I said that because you snored like a bear. I didn’t want you thinking you would keep me awake.”
Eminence hit Jordie’s
leg. “I don’t snore!”
Jordie nodded like a bobblehead doll. “Like a grizzly.” Then she simulated the sound, growling like a bear and pushing the sound from her open mouth. “For a skinny little thing, you could certainly make a lot of noise.”
“You are so mean.” Eminence covered her eyes and shook her head. When she brought her hands down, she continued with her story. “Anyway, I took your warning as a sign that you would want me to take that next step with Keys. So I did.”
“Out in the open in the bedroom?” Jordie sat up taller.
Eminence shook her head. “Remember he made himself a little bed in his walk-in closet?”
Jordie opened her mouth and made a big O with her lips. “You didn’t!”
Eminence nodded. “Right there in the closet. Cramped but very intimate.” Just thinking about it now had her clit throbbing.
“Good for you! Get your man.” Jordie held Eminence’s hand. “And, as you can see, you did that all on your own. You didn’t need me to prompt you to do it.”
Eminence bowed her head. “I know that now.” She squeezed Jordie’s hand. “There’s a supervisor job at my work that’s open. My boss wants me to put in for it, but I’m nervous. What if I don’t do well in it? What if I fail?”
Jordie stared at Eminence and cocked her head. “And what if you don’t?”
“What?”
Jordie shook her head. “You have always been the smart, practical one. You have a great head on your shoulders for business. If people around you are telling you to put in for that job, that should tell you something. People see great things in you.”
Eminence felt her throat closing as she allowed Jordie’s words to sink into her mind. Her eyes felt scratchy until she had to fan her face to keep the tears from flowing.
“Don’t cry.” Jordie moved over to her Eminence and hugged her. “Put in for that job, not because someone like me or your boss or your family tells you to do it. Do it because in your heart of hearts, no one could do that job better than you, okay?” She leaned back and looked into Eminence’s eyes.
Eminence nodded. “I still have a lot to think about. The job posting closes on Monday.”
Scandalous Heroes Box Set Page 130
