by Janice Sims
Alex turned around in bed to face him. “What?” she asked, astonished.
“You know,” he said. “A wedding in a church. You and I would go on a honeymoon and then spend the rest of our lives together. That’s a marriage. It’s quite common and generally thought of as a very positive thing.”
“But three months ago you were determined to never marry.”
“Don’t hold that against me. I was an idiot.”
Alex kissed his chin. “You were not an idiot. Don’t get upset with me, but I’m going to have to decline.”
“What?” Jared cried, clearly hurt and confused by her stance.
“Let me finish,” Alex implored. “I just think that you shouldn’t ask something that important after making love for the first time. I don’t know about you, but I’m high right now. Ask me again when you’ve had time to think about what you’re saying.”
“You’re the only woman I’ve ever asked to marry me, and you’re turning me down?” Jared asked, incredulous. He sat up in bed and looked back at her. The lamp on the nightstand on his side of the bed was turned low so he could see her beautiful face clearly. He could tell she was sincerely regretful about her decision to say no to his proposal. That knowledge didn’t salve his male ego, though. She was supposed to say yes, no matter when the proposal came. Even though, logically, he knew he should not be hurt by her rejection, he was.
Being this in love with someone was new to him. He’d let down his guard, allowed his usually hidden emotions to come to the surface, and risked getting skewered by her. Now here it was, the big hurt. This was why he’d been a player for so many years. Players didn’t get their feelings stomped on.
He got up and began gathering his clothing, a trail that led him to the living room. Alex slid off the bed and grabbed her robe, which she’d put on after her shower. Getting into it and tying the sash as she followed him to the living room, she said, “Jared, there’s nothing to get upset about. Come on, I’m not rejecting you outright. I’m only asking you to give it some thought, that’s all.”
Jared rounded on her, his jaws clenched in anger. “Why don’t you try a little honesty? You said you’re not holding the fact that I was dead set against marriage before I met you against me, but, in fact, you are! You’re afraid to say yes because you don’t think I can be faithful to you. Tell the truth and shame the devil!”
Oh, Lord, where had that saying come from? Frowning, Jared realized that he’d heard his mother say those exact words to her father when they were arguing about his coming in late after a night of carousing.
He experienced a moment of clarity: Maybe he hadn’t gotten over his conviction that he was just like his father. Alex was probably right to refuse him.
“You’re wrong!” Alex exclaimed hotly. “I do believe in you.”
They were in the living room, and Jared was picking up his jeans from the floor. He’d put on his underwear in the bedroom, and now he pulled on his jeans and retrieved his denim shirt. He met Alex’s eyes from across the room. Tears sat in her eyes, and he knew he was probably going to cause her even more heartache with his next words, but he had to say them. “Maybe the problem is I don’t believe in myself.”
He stepped into his shoes and bent to tie the laces. Straightening, he smiled ruefully. “You deserve better than I have to give you.”
“I’m not going to beg you to stay,” Alex said quietly. “You’re angry now, and maybe you need to be alone. But listen to me, Jared. You are not your father. You’re upset because I didn’t jump at your proposal, and that’s understandable. I don’t get how you came to the conclusion that I don’t have faith in you. I love you. I have the utmost faith in you and I’m not giving up on us. And I ask you not to give up on us, either.”
Jared looked back at her after he opened the door to leave. “Good-bye, Alexandra.”
Alex fought the urge to run to him, fling herself into his arms, and beg him to stay. That wouldn’t accomplish anything except postpone his leaving. He had to dispel his own demons. “Good night,” she said. Not good-bye.
Nine
Jared’s phone rang at ten the next morning. He rolled over in bed and grabbed the receiver. It seemed as if the moment he’d gotten to sleep, the phone had rung. “Hello!” he said gruffly.
“You break my Saturday routine of staying in bed by making me feel guilty because I don’t get enough exercise, and I catch you snoozing when you should be here on the basketball court? I don’t think so, buddy. If I have to be here, so do you!”
Fletcher. Jared had forgotten their standing appointment to play one-on-one. Fletcher and Carena lived a thirty-minute drive away. Jared didn’t think he was up to it this morning. “I’m sorry, Fletch, but I had a bad night.”
“What kind of bad night?” Fletcher asked. Jared could hear traffic sounds in the background, so he knew Fletcher was probably standing on the basketball court in his neighborhood park. The park was extremely busy on Saturdays. It was where the area teens gathered to play some hoops, meet the opposite sex, and shoot the breeze.
“None of your business,” Jared said. “I don’t want you going back and telling Carena. If you tell her, she’ll tell Mom, and the next thing you know, Mom will be on my doorstep calling me all kinds of fools.”
“This sounds bad,” Fletcher said, concerned. “Is it about you and Alexandra?”
Jared sat up in bed and swung his long legs over the side. He obviously wasn’t going to get rid of Fletcher easily. “Listen to me, Fletch. If you tell Carena, I’ll never confide in you again.”
“All right, all right,” Fletcher agreed. “I won’t talk, not even if she puts lit matches under my toenails.”
Jared sighed tiredly. “I asked Alexandra to marry me, and she turned me down.”
“Man!” cried Fletcher. “I have to say I’m surprised. I know she loves you. Carena and I have been talking about nothing else for the past month, how well you and Alexandra have been getting along. And after last night, we just knew you two were in love.”
“We are,” Jared said. “I mean we were. I don’t know what I mean! Apparently, she doesn’t think I’m marriage material.”
“What makes you think that?”
Jared explained his theory about his earlier gaffe. He thought that if he’d never told Alex that he was a confirmed bachelor, she wouldn’t have had that image of him burned in her memory, and then, when he’d asked her to marry him, she would have accepted. But because of his past, she’d been reluctant.
Fletcher was silent for a couple of minutes after listening to Jared’s woes. “Tell me something,” he said suddenly. “Where did you propose?”
This time it was Jared who fell quiet on his end. “We were in bed,” he finally admitted. “We made love for the first time last night.”
Fletcher laughed uproariously.
Jared was appalled by his best friend’s lack of sympathy. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you anything.”
Fletcher got control of himself and said, “What do I have to do, take you by the hand and lead you through this relationship? I tricked you into meeting her, and my sneakiness paid off. Now you’ve gone and ruined it!”
“I don’t get you, man,” Jared said.
“Of course you don’t. You’ve been single too long. But there is one thing a married man knows that a single man has yet to learn: Women might say they want to be swept off their feet by some stud, but they really prefer security. What you did last night did not make Alexandra feel secure. You proposed to her after making love. Sex, Jared. Now, you know men aren’t thinking straight after gettin’ some. What was she supposed to do, accept and then risk you taking it back the next day after you’d sobered up?”
“That’s exactly what she said!”
“But did you listen to her? Or did you go off and lick your wounds?”
“I left, saying something stupid like she’s better off without me.”
“She probably is,” Fletcher said. “But are you better of
without her?”
“You sure know how to kick a brother when he’s down,” Jared told him, but he managed a short laugh. “I did everything wrong last night, huh?”
“Well, not everything,” Fletcher said. “Hopefully the sex was good.”
“The best ever,” Jared said without hesitation. Now they were two buds talking about their favorite subject: women. He felt calmer. He knew what he had to do. The problem was, would Alex give him a chance to apologize?
“I know I have to apologize,” he said. “But how? She told me that she loved me before I left last night and asked me not to give up on us. But I know I hurt her. How do I make it up to her?”
“That’s simple,” Fletcher said. “You’ve got to propose to her in such a way that she would never doubt your sincerity. And Jared, buy her a really nice ring! You can afford it.”
Jared laughed. “Of course I’m going to get her a nice ring. What do you think I am, a cheapskate?”
“No, just an idiot in love,” Fletcher joked. “Talk to you later. I can’t wait to tell Carena about this.”
“Fletcher!”
“Just kidding.”
After Jared hung up, he rose and went to shower. He had a busy day ahead of him, what with trying to come up with the appropriate ring for Alex and dreaming up an idea of how to propose to her properly.
“Alex, what are you doing here?” Mother Maybelle asked when she opened her door to find Alex on the other side. Maybelle was dressed casually in a royal blue silk caftan and a pair of white slacks. Her feet were bare, and she’d apparently just had a pedicure because her nails were neatly trimmed and had soft pink polish on them. Alex had noticed, a long time ago, that Mother Maybelle always took excellent care of her person, making certain that all the feminine touches were given attention.
It was Saturday night, and Mother Maybelle’s girls’ poker night was in full swing. Before Alex had started dating Jared, she’d been a semi-regular. Mother Maybelle reminded them that nowhere in the Bible was drinking forbidden, only drunkenness. After all, Jesus’ first miracle had been turning water into wine. She joked that their gathering was simply an activity to keep bored women out of trouble on a Saturday night. Of course, they should be prepared to lose a few bucks (they played for pennies), and partake of her famous frozen daiquiris. Virgin daiquiris if they were driving.
Alex stepped inside, talking as she did so. “I apologize for interrupting your game, Mother Maybelle, but I phoned Gayle’s and Ruben told me she was over here. I thought to myself, good, because there’s no one better to offer me advice on a man than Mother Maybelle.”
“Sho’ you right!” said Mother Maybelle with a gorgeous smile. She took Alex’s arm and together they walked back to the game room in her spacious home. The game room had a big-screen TV, a pool table, a bar complete with a semicircular counter behind which were bottles with all the potent potables needed to make any drink you could think of, and a genuine poker table. Not a folding card table.
Three women sat around the table nursing drinks and talking all at once, sounding like a room full of women instead of just three. There were Gayle and Sarah Jackson, Ruben’s mother and Mother Maybelle’s best friend, and Cheryl Avery, the reverend’s wife, who was presently winning. They ranged in age from twenty-something to over seventy.
“We’ve got a fifth!” Mother Maybelle announced as she and Alex entered the room. Everyone called hello to Alex. Then, of course, Gayle had to say, “Why aren’t you out somewhere with Jared like any respectable newly-in-loves would be?”
Alex sat down on the empty chair at the table. Mother Maybelle put both hands on her shoulders comfortingly. “Take your time, sugar. Mother Maybelle’s got banana and strawberry daiquiris tonight. Which do you prefer? And do you want leaded or unleaded?”
Alex smiled back at her. “Banana, please. Unleaded.” Which meant no rum.
Mother Maybelle hurried over to the bar, moving with the alacrity of a woman half her age. Alex looked around the table. “Jared and I had our first big argument last night, and I need reassurance that I made the right decision when I did what I did.”
Mother Maybelle was behind the bar pouring the already prepared banana daiquiri mixture into a large round glass with a long stem on it. “Honey, you’re getting ahead of yourself. Start from the beginning.”
Alex paused a moment. She definitely wasn’t going to tell them that she and Jared had made love last night, but she could give them the gist of what went on without revealing too much. “We went to Jared’s mother’s birthday dinner last night. After we got back, we, uhm, spent some time at my place together, and during the course of the evening, he asked me to marry him.”
Mother Maybelle was crossing the room with Alex’s daiquiri balanced on a tray. She nearly tripped on her own feet when she heard Alex’s statement. She arrived at the table without spilling the drink and set it before Alex. Everyone else was in the midst of expressing delight at the news. But Mother Maybelle said, “There must be trouble in paradise if you’re here tonight instead of with him. You didn’t accept his proposal, did you, Alexandra?” She looked Alex straight in the eyes. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
Alex lowered her gaze. “Yes, ma’am.”
The other ladies exchanged curious glances.
“She probably had a perfectly good reason not to,” said Sarah Jackson, frowning. She was a tall, stout woman with dark brown skin, like her son’s, a head full of wavy silver hair that she wore in a bun, and the most lovely pair of brown eyes. “Didn’t you, sweetheart?”
“I don’t know,” Alex said with a sob. “I think I did, but now I’m not so sure.”
Gayle got up and hugged Alex. “Don’t hold back, Alex. Nothing you say will leave this room!” She peered around the table. Mother Maybelle had pulled up an extra chair, and now she nodded her agreement. “That’s right. Word, ladies?”
“You’ve got my word,” Sarah said.
“Mine, too,” Cheryl put in. “Not even the Reverend will get it out of me.”
Everyone laughed at that.
“Well,” Alex began. “As most young people do, we, uhm, got closer last night.”
“You made love,” said Mother Maybelle.
“Did the horizontal mambo,” Sarah said, offering elucidation where none was needed.
“Expressed your love for one another,” Cheryl said, staying within spiritual parameters.
“You got down?” Gayle said, excited for her.
“Yes, to all of the above,” Alex said with a smile. She should have known these ladies wouldn’t be shocked by her revelation. Collectively they’d had much more experience with men than she had.
“Why in heaven’s name did you turn him down?” Mother Maybelle asked. “If you two are that close, the next logical step is marriage.”
“I would have said yes,” Alex said. “I wanted to say yes, but I didn’t think he was serious. But when I told him I thought he should wait and propose at another time, not right after we’d made love, he got upset and left.”
“You wounded his pride,” Sarah said. “Men wear their pride like a bantam rooster, all puffed up. But it’s so easily deflated.”
“Is there something else you’re not telling us?” Cheryl astutely deduced. “It seems to me that most women would have said yes, even after making love. Some men let down their guard at that particular moment and it’s the perfect time to pounce!”
“Cheryl!” cried Mother Maybelle. “I didn’t know you had a mercenary bone in your body.”
“I was a single female once,” Cheryl joked.
“You’re right, Cheryl,” Alex conceded. “Early in the relationship Jared admitted to me that he thought he’d taken after his father where women were concerned. His father was a ladies’ man.”
“Ran around?” asked Sarah.
“Yes, ma’am,” Alex answered. “Anyway, Jared seemed to believe that he couldn’t be faithful to one woman either, so he put it out there right from the start. Wanted
me to be forewarned!”
“I see what you’re saying,” said Gayle. “You turned him down because you wanted him to be really sure of what he was asking you, and not under the influence of some good lovin’.”
“Exactly!” Alex said. “I’ve known too many brides who were left at the altar by grooms who suddenly got cold feet. But when I tried to explain my position, he accused me of not having faith in him.”
“Which you didn’t!” Mother Maybelle accused her.
Alex stared at Mother Maybelle. “I didn’t?”
“You just said that early in the relationship he’d told you he’d never been faithful to one woman. You had the same expectations of him, child. That’s why you hesitated.”
“Oh, my God,” Alex said softly, the truth hitting her full force.
“As someone who’s been married five times, I have to tell you, the worst thing a woman can do is not have faith in her man. It makes him doubt himself. I’ve been unlucky in love. I lost every last one of my husbands to death, God rest their souls. I miss each and every one of them. Now you, Alex, are just getting started. That’s why I’m encouraging you to rethink what you did and give love a fighting chance. If you love him, you should give him the benefit of the doubt. Next time you see him, ask him to marry you!”
“Amen!” Gayle said happily as she hugged Alex again. When they parted, she said, “Honey, get used to arguing. Ruben and I do it all the time. Making up afterwards is sweet though, very sweet.”
“Now those are some precious memories,” Mother Maybelle said with a wistful smile. “Making up after an argument. Some of the best loving you’ll ever get.”
“Who’re you tryin’ to fool?” Sarah asked, looking at Mother Maybelle with a smirk. “Everybody knows about your gentleman caller. Precious memories, indeed. I’d wager you’re still in the making-memories mode.”
“Girl, hush!” said Mother Maybelle, laughing good-naturedly.
The church is alive with energy this morning. Alex felt it when she stepped foot in the vestibule. She needed the energy today. She needed all the strength she could get, because after the service she was going over to Jared’s house to propose to him. For now, though, she needed to be lifted by the spirit.
