“What about my money, Jaime?”
She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Bill me,” she hollered out before snapping the shower curtain closed.
Jaime was done with Pleasure. The night he’d chosen Granny over her because she couldn’t scrape two nickels together she knew she had to find her pleasure elsewhere . . . but since she was in a good mood she’d allowed herself one last fuck. Crass but true. A little pleasure and revenge mixed all in one.
It felt damn good to go for hers and leave his dick blowing in the wind. Damn good. “Sooooo relaxing,” she said with a little laugh.
Jaime finished her shower and dressed in the crisp white sundress she’d selected earlier. She freshened up her lightweight summer makeup and stepped back to review her reflection with a smile. “Looking good, girl,” she said, feeling more like the old stylish and sophisticated Jaime, but better. Not just an image but the real deal. Real feelings. Real emotions.
True to herself.
It was about damn time.
Jaime left the bathroom and was pleased to find Pleasure had left the way she’d told him to. Hmph. Deuces.
Pleasure had nothing to offer her but a wet ass.
Her heels clicked against the wood as she walked through the entire house one last time. She had discovered a lot about herself during the months she’d lived here. It was her first place all on her own. The place where she fully gave in and discovered that she had a healthy sexual appetite. The place where she had finally found the strength to walk away from a marriage that had failed a long time ago. The place where she’d learned more about herself than she had her entire life.
Jaime would miss it, but she had to move on. She had no choice. In life you had to play the cards you were dealt.
In the bedroom she bent down to scoop the sweaty sheet from the floor. She allowed herself a moment to inhale the scent of him and their sex. She purred a little in the back of her throat at the memory of all the explosive sex they’d shared. She would miss him—or rather it. His dick.
In truth she didn’t know enough about him to miss him.
Balling the sheet up, Jaime walked out of the house and locked the door. She paused long enough to toss the sheet into the large garbage can on the side of the house. For a moment she considered keeping the sheet, but just like her lust for Pleasure she had no real use for it.
Jaime spared Lucas’s house one last look. He had to have seen the moving trucks and known she was moving. Still, he’d barely spoken when he saw her. She tried to apologize, even sending him flowers and knocking on his door a couple of times, but everything was ignored. So now her attitude was fuck it.
She climbed into the Honda and smoothly reversed down the driveway, giving her town house, Lucas, and the neighborhood a final wave.
Jaime turned the air on full blast as she steered the car onto the Garden State Parkway. She enjoyed the quiet of the car. No music. Her cell phone on vibrate. Nothing but her thoughts and her plans as she drove.
In the last month she had lined up two decorating jobs. They were small, just a bedroom in one home and a den in another, but she was determined that everything she did from here on out was to build her interior design business and brand.
Jaime turned the Honda up to the wrought-iron entrance gate of Richmond Hills. She allowed herself to relish the moment. Her return. It felt damn good.
“Good morning, Lucky,” she said to the portly security guard as she pulled up to his glass booth and entered her security code.
“Morning, Mrs. Hall,” he said, his face already flushed.
“Um, Lucky, I’m not sure if you know, but Mr. Hall and I are divorcing and he is no longer permitted on the premises,” she said.
Lucky made a sad face. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Jaime gave him a smile. “I’m not,” she said before pulling through the now-open gates.
She laughed and blew her horn as she sped around the curve. It was hilarious to her how just a few months ago she would have plotted, planned, and schemed to keep her business from “the help,” and now she really didn’t give a flying fuck who knew that her marriage to Eric was over.
There was nothing but the formality of signing a document dissolving the lie.
“I’m ready to sign them papers,” Jaime sang loud as hell, completing feeling Usher’s ode to divorce.
She waved at her neighbors as she breezed past and eventually pulled into the driveway of her home. Well, for now.
Yesterday her attorney had delivered word that Eric had vacated the premises per their temporary settlement agreement. Their home, her showcase, was hers. As was her repossessed Volvo, a temporary monthly alimony payment, half of his 401K, a temporary income from his architectural business, and shared summer usage of their vacation home in Martha’s Vineyard.
She already planned to invite Renee and Aria down for a mini-retreat just for the ladies. They all could use a vacay to get over the aftermath of Jessa Bell the Jezebel.
Jaime parked the Honda next to her Volvo in the three-car garage. She started to call her girls over to enjoy this moment with her, but decided she wanted to step into her destiny alone. Independent. Self-assured.
Yes, she was wrong for the years she’d snuck away to watch Pleasure dance and even more wrong for cheating on her husband that night on the floor of that back room in the strip club. But discovering that her husband had been fucking Jessa—her friend—for years, long before her affair, she felt absolved and more than deserving of everything she got from him.
Jaime’s step faltered as soon as she walked through the front door. Her mouth fell open, but she had no words. None.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, raising her hand to her fast-beating heart.
Furniture shredded and destroyed. Glass broken into shards. The words SLUT, WHORE, and BITCH painted on the walls in shocking red paint. The smell of pee in the air and the sight of defecation smeared on the walls.
She felt fear like nothing else ever and backed out of the house, not quite sure Eric wasn’t still lurking and waiting to take his rage out on her.
She doubted a hurricane could have caused such destruction. No, this scene before her was pure unadulterated rage.
Aria stuck her pencil behind her ear after making a note in the margin of the book she was reading.
Her research on the adoption process had led to a discovery of the vast amount of women—particularly African-American women—dealing with infertility. The more she read and researched and discovered, the more she wanted to know, research, and discover.
She felt a kinship with the women on blogs sharing their stories about struggling to do something that should be the most natural thing in the world: have a baby.
The more she read the more she wanted to break the ugly stigma attached to it.
“I felt like less of a woman. . . .”
Or
“I told people I didn’t want children to keep from admitting that I couldn’t. . . .”
Or
“Seeing or hearing stories of other women abusing or mistreating their own children when I couldn’t be blessed to have a child ate me up. . . .”
Aria understood it all. All of it.
She was so ashamed of her own infertility that she’d lied to her husband and kept the truth from her own mother. She’d shared with no one the ache or the tears she shed at the thought of never bearing Kingston’s child.
Aria sighed as she closed the book she was reading on herbal remedies to “heal the womb.” She wasn’t sure she believed it, but it was interesting reading nonetheless. If only sipping on false unicorn root once a day could reverse the injury she’d done to her womb.
She looked around at the people milling about the NetCafe, a cozy and comfortable coffeehouse that she loved to frequent to read or write when she needed a break from her house. She eyed her mini-laptop sitting on the round wooden table in front of her but didn’t turn it on. It was intimidating to say the least.
Dr. Kellee
was intrigued by her fascination with adoption and infertility. She felt Aria was using it as a shield or diversion from her personal struggles with herself and her marriage. And so she challenged Aria through an assignment that Aria’s very next blog entry be about her own struggles with infertility. Because of it, Aria hadn’t blogged in two weeks. Was she really ready to put her business out on front street like that? To have people side-eye her or pity her? She admired the women who shared their stories . . . but she didn’t want to join them.
Hell to the no.
Dr. Kellee said she was ready.
Aria begged to differ.
She took a sip of her green tea before she stroked her fingers across the keyboard. The truth is the light, Aria. So step out of the darkness.
Dr. Kellee’s words floated to her. Their sessions were raw and emotional, but Aria left there every week feeling more in control and in love with herself. Little by little. She was learning the power of forgiveness. Of herself. Of her past.
More and more Aria stood on solid emotional ground.
The power of forgiveness was necessary and amazing.
Aria looked down at her wedding band and engagement ring swinging from around her neck on a twenty-two-inch platinum chain. She fingered them with her right hand as she looked down at the bareness of her left hand.
Another of Dr. Kellee’s assignments. She was not to put them back on until she felt completely free of her guilt and completely emotionally sound to be in a fulfilling, open, and honest relationship.
And until Aria felt Kingston felt the same.
That day had yet to arrive. But how could it? How could it?
She’d fucked up. True. But more and more, Aria’s vision of their marriage was shifting. They’d both expected perfection and that didn’t exist outside of fairy tales.
Plus, she was tired of waiting on his forgiveness. Tired of waiting for him to pull himself from his mother’s bosom. Tired of him constantly throwing up her lie anytime they talked. Tired of waiting for him to bring his ass home. Just tired and sick of being tired.
Every week Dr. Kellee was moving her toward emotional health and with each bit of strengthening her will, she was losing patience with her husband, whom she loved and adored.
Sighing, Aria finished the last of her tea and gathered her laptop and book into her Coach satchel. As she strolled out of the busy coffeehouse, she slid on her aviator shades and pulled out her cell phone. She dialed Kingston’s cell number, her heart pounding as she stood outside the coffee shop watching the busy traffic pass her by.
“Hey, Aria.”
She closed her eyes. “Kingston, listen I love you. I . . . I adore you, but I have to take my life off of pause. I have to know where I’m headed. This limbo? This limbo is bullshit.”
“Aria—”
She shook her head. “No, listen. I am sorry. I’ve said that a million times. I fucked up. I’ve said that a million more. But dammit. I can’t . . . I won’t do this. This is ridiculous, Kingston.”
She fell silent and he offered no words. None. She felt weak. “You know, I realize now that I thought you were too good for me. That you were too perfect. But you’re not.”
“What does that mean?”
“You lack the power to forgive,” she said softly, simply and honestly. “You have a flaw, Mr. Livewell.”
“I never said I was perfect, Aria. I just ask not to be lied to and to be accused of fucking around when I wasn’t.”
“I am learning every day how to forgive myself for everything . . . and trust me, Kingston, this probably sounds really fucked up but I have a lot more on my plate that I did to myself than I ever did to you. A lot more.”
“Aria—”
She balled her fist so tightly that her nails pressed into the flesh of her palm. “I need you to get off your Mama’s tit, drink your milk from a cup, put on your big-boy drawers, and bring your black ass home before you don’t have a home to come back to.”
“And you feel you’re in a position to deliver threats?” he asked, his voice low.
She couldn’t distinguish the emotions in the depths. Anger? Annoyance?
Aria sighed. “I need you to learn how to forgive, Kingston. Life ain’t black and white,” she said, leaning her back against the metal lamppost as she ended the call. She pushed her shades up on top of her head as she wiped the sweat from around her eyes and nose.
She felt tired of the back and forth with Kingston. What more did he want from her? She didn’t have shit else to give?
Aria pushed up off the lamppost and shifted her bag up higher on her shoulder as she walked past the tall man standing beside her. She couldn’t wait to hear Dr. Kellee’s thoughts on her ultimatum to Kingston. Too much? Too soon?
Aria sighed.
She felt a hand lightly touch her elbow and looked over her shoulder. She didn’t recognize the older silver-haired gentleman. “Yes?” she asked.
He smiled. “I thought that was you,” he said, smiling and showing off teeth so straight they had to be dentures. He licked his lips. His eyes dropped down to her breasts in the V-neck tank she wore with fitted skinny jeans.
Aria felt repulsed. Her past was back again to fuck with her present. She remembered the last time one of her “tricks” ran into her when she was with Kingston. “Excuse me,” she said, sliding her shades down onto her face as she turned and stepped out into the street.
“Hey,” he called out behind her.
She barely heard over the long screech of tires against asphalt. Aria looked sideways. Her eyes widened just seconds before the oncoming black vehicle hit her.
She wasn’t sure how much time had passed when she moaned and grunted softly in pain as she came to. Every part of her body throbbed or ached. She drifted somewhere in between the wake and sleep zone and she knew she was doped up on drugs.
The sound of a door opening and closing sounded and she tried to open her eyes, but they felt heavy like something weighed them down.
“How she doing?”
Mama.
“She’s doing better. She’s in stable condition. Thankfully she only has a broken leg and some contusions. It could have been much worse.”
A nurse or doctor? She felt like she wanted to sit up, but a two-ton elephant weighed her down.
“Her face is so bruised and swollen.”
Renee.
“I wish she would open her eyes.”
Jaime.
“She’s been out like a light since they brought her in.”
Kingston!
Aria felt like she wanted to cry. Especially when she felt her hand being rubbed. She knew her husband’s touch. She even recognized the familiar weight and coolness of her wedding bands on her finger. Had Kingston slipped them back on?
“Thankfully she didn’t miscarry the pregnancy.”
“Miscarry?” her mother, Kingston, and her friends all said in unison.
A baby? Oh my God. A baby!
“Yes, Aria is eight weeks pregnant.”
The hold on her hand tightened.
“Oh my baby,” her mother sighed happily, sounding like Claire Huxtable.
“We’re going to be aunties!”
Through her haze, Aria felt the tears wetting her cheeks as she struggled to awaken. Suddenly she was enveloped by the scent of Kingston’s spicy cologne just a moment before a kiss was pressed to her lips. Her tracks of tears. Her cheeks. Her forehead. Her ear lobe.
“Did you hear that, Aria? We’re having a baby,” he whispered near her ear. “You’re going to be a mama.”
Aria moaned slightly as she fought for total consciousness.
Her husband and her mother laughed.
Aria felt herself drifting back to sleep.
“I forgive you. I forgive you, Aria,” he said, blessing her with more kisses.
She moaned and grunted slightly just before sleep consumed her.
Epilogue
“Goodbye, Jessa Bell”
Hindsight is twenty-twe
nty.
I know now more than ever how true that is. But it is too late for regrets and what-ifs. The time to make different—better—decisions has passed.
It’s ironic how the thought of stepping forward into my future without my man, my lover, my everything had been hurtful. Scary. Disappointing.
I cannot help but recognize that I drove the car that led my life down this road. I was the maker of my own destiny. The ruler of the domain of my life. Keeper of my pussy.
Now?
Now I know that welcoming him into my life and my bed was the biggest mistake I ever made . . . save for moving back to Richmond Hills at all.
It seemed the more he lost Jaime or lost out to something to Jaime, the more he clung to me and the more I resisted him, the angrier he became.
Vivid memories of messages or actions he took after our breakup shook me. Deeply disturbed me. That masturbation scene outside my windows was just the tip of the iceberg. His moods flipped between hating me and desperately needing me. Smothering me. Stalking me. Like an animal to prey.
“This is all your fault.”
“You need me just like I need you.”
“You destroyed me.”
“You complete me.”
“Both you bitches used me.”
“Anything you want. It’s yours. Just say the word.”
“I hate you.”
“I love you.”
It was such utter madness.
There was no love in his actions. Just obsession. A crazed obsession that I didn’t understand at all. A deluded obsession that I underestimated.
Tonight he bombarded his way into my home. He touched me with a brutality and cursed me with a cruelty.
“Bitch, you’re the reason Jaime divorced me.”
“You helped her take everything from me!”
“You destroyed me!”
Eric . . . this . . . person who paced and paced, his eyes darting about the room as he moved frenetically, was a stranger.
He is not my friend. He is not my lover. He is not the man I thought he was and I welcomed the illusion into my life and now I’m left to deal with the reality.
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