Never Again, No More 2

by Untamed

  “Then you further insult me by asking if we could remain friends. I’ve got news for you, Lucinda. I don’t date friends, and I damn sure don’t feel for them how I feel for you. I’m not trying to be your friend. I’m trying to be your man, and I wanted you to be my woman.”

  Talk about floored. Aldris pulled the trigger and unloaded the clip on me. It left me leaking with a huge hole in my heart. Here, this amazingly amazing man poured out his innermost secrets to me about his feelings, and I questioned him. He’d done all of this because he sincerely wanted to be with me. I was wrong all along. I felt like an idiot. Scratch that. I was an idiot.

  Easing up to him, I grabbed his hands. “I had no idea, and it wasn’t for me to know at the time. I should have trusted you, but please understand that it’s hard for me to do that. No man in my life, not even my father, has been trustworthy. I can’t judge you by that, but it makes it hard for me to trust because of that. I’m a rough chica, but I’m crazy about you. I was afraid of those feelings. I understand if you don’t want to deal with me anymore. I messed up, and I have to live with that. I just wanted to give you the opportunity that I didn’t before. Again, I’m sorry.” I let his hands go, and I turned to leave.

  “You’re just going to walk out on me again?” he asked.

  “But I thought—” I turned back toward him.

  “You overthink sometimes.”

  He pulled me close to him and kissed me. When he pulled back, I brought his ass right back for some more of that kiss. That shit was good, and I wanted more.

  “Girl, you better stop,” he laughed, causing me to blush.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, getting serious for a moment.

  “Me too,” he said and pecked me on the lips. “You still leaving?”

  “Not unless you kick me out.”

  He laughed. “Good. You can stay. But we have to get something clear. I am a man, Lucinda, so you’re going to have to work on treating me as such. ’Cause I am damn sure going to treat you like a woman, not some chick or damn Spanish Fly.”

  Damn. I’d never had a real man put me in my place before, and surprisingly, it turned me on! We’d only just begun, and he knew how to handle my ass. I threw my hands up in surrender. “You got it. But I have a question,” I said as we held each other and gazed into each other’s eyes.

  “What’s that, baby?”

  “I’m your baby now?”

  “Yes, damn it, woman. You’re my baby. Didn’t we just straighten all that out? If not, allow me to make it clear for you. You are now in a relationship with Aldris Sharper. You are officially my baby, and I’m yours,” he laughed.

  “Good.” I smiled. “But I do still have a question.”

  “What is it?” he asked me.

  I stood on my tiptoes and whispered in his ear. “Are you ready to get caught in the Spanish Fly trap?”

  He burst out laughing and sat on the sofa. “As long as Spanish Fly only surfaces for me.”

  I laughed. “Only for you, baby. But I thought you weren’t attracted to Spanish Fly,” I teased as I slowly began swaying my hips from side to side as I stood in front of him.

  “Shit, bullshit,” he said, gazing at me with lust in his eyes as he rubbed his hands up and down my thighs. “I just didn’t want my boys to see it. I am a man. So please go ahead and introduce me again to the fly trap, because I have someone to introduce you to as well.”

  “Who is that?” I giggled.

  “Mandingo,” he chuckled. “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice, and you know what they say. Once you go black—”

  “You don’t go back,” I hollered, straddling his lap and kissing him. “Thank you for bearing with me.”

  He held the sides of my face in the palms of his hands. “Thank you for giving us a chance. I know it took a lot for you to come over here tonight, and I promise you, you will never regret it.” And with that, we shared another intimate kiss.

  I didn’t know what I did to deserve a man like Aldris, but I wasn’t going to question it anymore. Thank God I had him. With every touch and kiss, I knew this is where I wanted to be. I also knew I wasn’t going to make it back to my place. As of tonight I was forgetting all of my fears and giving my all to Aldris . . . in more ways than one!

  Chapter Ten

  LaMeka

  I’d been stressed out to the max ever since Kwanzie’s confession, and I’d lost about ten pounds in one week because of it. I wasn’t eating right, sleeping right, and I could barely think right. All that consumed me was worrying about whether I had the package. I’d even been let go from my job at the day care because I called in three days straight. Now I had no job, and I had to worry about paying Pooch’s car payments on top of that. One thing I wasn’t crazy enough to do was miss those payments. If I had to starve first, I would give that fool back his money. If he could fuck Trinity up for being around Dreads, imagine what he would do to me. Even the threat of HIV seemed a little better than pissing Pooch off. At least HIV was treatable. You couldn’t treat crazy. Not his kind of crazy anyway.

  Who was I kidding? As much as I would want to believe facing Pooch would be worse, it wasn’t. One thing I desperately needed to do, though, was get my sister and take her down to the clinic. I may have been pissed about what she did, but she was my sister. She was only 17. I remembered being 17 and making dumb-ass decisions, but my decisions gave me Tony Jr. Misha’s might have given her HIV. More fucked up than anything, the same man could potentially ruin both our lives, and I didn’t know if I could live with that pain.

  “Hi, Mom.” I greeted her with a hug and came through the door.

  “Hey, baby. I’m glad that you wanted to come over and visit. Misha misses you.” I nodded in response as we sat down on the sofa. “Misha is only seventeen. She’s just making mistakes like we both did at that age. One thing we can both agree on is that a man is gonna always be a man, but you only have one sister,” my mom said.

  I didn’t know this woman who had invaded my mother’s body. I wasn’t trippin’, because I was happy for the change in her, and with this news I was about to drop on both of them, this change came just in time. ’Cause right now, Misha and I needed our mother more than ever.

  “Yeah, I know, Mama. I was just pissed off with her. I went through a lot to try to make it better for her. It wasn’t even about Tony. It was about Misha hurting me. I’d never do anything in the world to hurt her. Not even now.”

  She lovingly squeezed my hand. The expression she gave was one of hurt and sadness. The heartbreak felt as if it oozed from her soul. “I know you wouldn’t, and that’s one reason—well, one of many reasons—I owe you an apology. I took advantage of you. Growing up, you were always more of a parent to Misha than I was. It was wrong of me to put that burden on you. I never stopped to think about what I was doing to you because I just assumed you’d always be there for her. But that was my job, and I apologize to you for making it yours.”

  Touched by her words, silent tears flowed down my cheeks. I swiped them away in the hopes of stopping a complete emotional breakdown. My entire life, I’d waited for some type of remorse, a morsel even, from my mother, and the time had finally come. It meant so much to me to get that one apology. This was the mother I’d prayed for, for many years, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I truly had just that—a mother. That feeling alone was enough to erase her past indiscretions.

  “Thanks, Mama. You don’t know how much that means to me.”

  She hugged me. “You don’t know how much you mean to me.”

  The little girl in me soared at those words. However, the grown women in me fought against the genuineness of them. I wanted desperately to take everything she’d said at face value, but a small part of me wondered if it could truly be trusted. The only answer to that would be the “why.” Why after all these years had she changed?

  “Can I ask you a question, though?”

  “Sure, Meka.”

  “What changed? Not that I�
�m not happy about it or accepting of it. It just all seems so, I don’t know, sudden.”

  Nodding, she sat back and sighed. “I understand that, and it’s only fair. Actually, Joe did. Believe it or not. I can’t give his raggedy ass credit for anything else, but he did make me realize that I needed to change.”

  Now I was intrigued for real. Joe? Child-molesting, abusive, using-ass Joe? I had to hear how that bastard was responsible for anything remotely positive, especially life-changing positive. “How?”

  “The day I kicked him out, he was mad because I didn’t want to have… relations with him. He got so mad, in fact, that in the heat of the moment, he admitted sleeping with Misha,” she confided.

  I gasped, covering my mouth. “You know?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Does she—”

  “No, she doesn’t know that I know, and I don’t want her to. He’s not even worth the argument. Besides, Misha is my blood. Joe wasn’t nothing but some dick. I can get dick anywhere,” my mom said as we shared a laugh.

  “True,” I agreed.

  “After he admitted that, I went berserk on him, and do you know that fucker had the nerve to blame me? He said if I had been handling my business, he wouldn’t have turned to Misha. Bullshit. He was a rotten, child-molesting asshole. If it hadn’t been Misha, it would’ve been somebody else’s underage daughter. I might’ve made stupid decisions, but I wasn’t dumb enough to believe that Misha was his first or would be his last. After I kicked him out over that, I realized in a major way he was right. Not about the handling my business part, but for blaming me in general. If I had made better choices, been a better mom to you girls, and made wiser selections in the men I chose, then I wouldn’t have been stuck with a man who beat me, degraded me, or had the audacity to sleep with my child. How fucking nasty was that? I vowed to do better. With the help of the Lord, I pray that I can.”

  It’s crazy that after all those years of running from man to man, and us being scared that those men would take advantage of us, the defining moment of our mother’s change came from exactly that. The one time one of the men she brought home decided to have an inappropriate relationship with one of her daughters sparked her to become a better mother. Not to say that I wish things had been worse, because I’d come to understand that people also come into change at different points in their life. I was just happy to know that somewhere deep down, regardless of how much she loved men, she had a line in her heart that she wasn’t comfortable crossing. It meant the world to know that we at least meant that much to her, after years of feeling like we never mattered. But we did. We mattered to her. And that was a freeing feeling.

  “You will be better, Mama. You have us. Now just have faith.”

  Just as I said that, Misha came through the front door. “Sorry I’m late. I was just studying with my friends. I have exams next week,” she said as she shut the door and set her book bag down. Her gaze finally caught me, and her words stopped just as sudden as she stopped dead in her tracks. Timidly, she waved her hand. “Oh, umm, hi, Meka,” she said sheepishly.

  “Hi, Misha,” I responded coolly.

  Her eyes were cast downward, and I could see the heartbreak all over her face from my lack of emotion. It wasn’t that I was trying to be mean. It was just awkward conversing after what had happened.

  “Well, I guess I better go—” Misha tried to say.

  She stopped speaking again when she saw that I stood up and walked toward her. Like my mom said, I only had one sister. No Joes or Tonys could separate us. I may not have trusted her in this moment, but I’d never stop loving her. This kid was like my kid. More importantly, we all made mistakes, so I had to allow her the opportunity to grow and learn from what she’d done. We may not have been all the way there, but if my mother could try for us, then I was willing to try for Misha.

  “No. We cool, Misha.”

  She looked at me as if she wasn’t sure I was telling the truth.

  “Look, what you did was fucked up, but at the end of the day, you gon’ always be my sister. I’m gon’ love you no matter what and no matter who comes or goes ’cause you my family. Ain’t nobody gon’ take care of family like family,” I explained.

  She gripped me so fast and pulled me so close we nearly tumbled over. No matter what, this crazy little chick had my heart. I hugged her back just as tightly. “I love you so much,” she cried.

  “I love you too, baby girl. I love you too.”

  My mom joined us. “This is how it’s supposed to be. We are all we got. We have to be there for Tony Jr. and LaMichael.”

  This was what I’d always wanted, for us to be a real family. It felt so good to be here in this moment together. This moment solidified our bond forever and gave me the strength that I needed to face anything, even the unfortunate news that I was about to deliver to them.

  Misha was the first one to pull away, and when she looked at us, she began crying. It split my heart in two to see her so emotional. Our mom and I tried to console her as best we could, but she only broke down more. She appeared on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and at this point, I was terrified because I didn’t know what was wrong with her.

  Finally, we coaxed her to take a seat, and she did. Gathering herself, she finally spoke through a quivering voice and teary eyes. “Actually, there is something I have to tell you all. I did something to both of you. I figured that if you all knew your men were foul, you all wouldn’t mess with them no more—”

  “I already know you were with Joe, and I couldn’t bring myself to go behind my own daughter,” my mom interrupted, figuring that Misha was about to admit about Joe and saving her the trouble.

  However, something in what Misha had said stood out to me. “You slept with them to get us away from them?” I asked.

  “Yep, and to get back at them,” Misha continued. “Meka, I need you to know that I had never slept with Tony before that night, and I knew you’d be back home because the pastor had already left you a message that Bible study was canceled—”

  “Why would you intentionally hurt me?” I interrupted.

  “I didn’t do it to hurt you. I did it to help you. You and Mama,” she said. “Remember the dude I used to date, Vince?”

  My mom and I looked at each other and nodded. “I thought you’d be together forever,” Mom said.

  Misha scoffed. “Me too. Until I found out he’d been sleeping with his mama’s best friend,” Misha confessed. “Only thing is I found out when I went to the clinic six months ago that Vince, who was the only boy I’d been with at the time, had given me, umm . . . I have . . . I contracted HIV.” She broke down.

  Thank God we were all sitting down already. If not, I would have to be scooped off the damn floor. My heart sank in my chest, yet I could hear the thump in my ears. My sister was already HIV positive. OMG! I couldn’t believe this shit. How could she not tell us? How did we not know?

  My mom burst into tears. “Are you sure? How did you know? How come you didn’t say nothing?” my mom rattled off.

  “Right! Not to mention you didn’t think that we may have slept with them ourselves. We could’ve forgiven them, gone back to these men, and ended up with HIV ourselves, Misha.” I was in total shock and disbelief of her reckless behavior. “What were you thinking, Misha? Come on. You played with all of our lives.”

  Misha shrugged with aggravation. “Don’t you think I realize that—now? I don’t know what I was thinking, Meka. I was pissed off with the world. Pissed with men. Hurt. Alone. Confused. I just wanted revenge on any man who wasn’t about shit. I won’t lie, part of me didn’t even care about you, Mama,” she said, gazing over at our mother. “I thought you’d choose Joe over me regardless. But it was mainly to give him a dose of his own medicine. He’d been mean to me, and he used to hit me when you weren’t around, and I felt like I couldn’t say shit. He even flirted with me a few times, but I think he was afraid to really try me because I was so rebellious. So when I offered it, he took it. And
for that, I’m sorry. I really am.”

  She cried before continuing. “To be honest, my head wasn’t on straight with any of this. I found out that not only had my first love cheated, but he’d given me the package, and I had no one. No mom. Not even you, Meka.” She pointed at me. “Not that you wouldn’t have been there, but you have your hands full with the boys, and Tony had you so fucked up in the head that I didn’t want to add to your stress. Most of all, I was scared. Hell, I still am. The clinic has been helping me. I’ve been going to counseling, but my life is over, so yeah, I figured I would take some muthafuckas along the way. Vince’s dirty ass already got it, so since I couldn’t pay him back, I decided to pay back y’all’s men. A low-down, dirty bastard ain’t nothing but a low-down, dirty bastard. Joe and Tony don’t deserve y’all. They are a waste of God’s air. So I gave them some of this PYT with a loaded package. Thanks to me, Joe and Tony finally gonna get theirs, so y’all don’t have to hurt no more. Find some men who love y’all so I won’t die in vain,” Misha cried.

  Her revelation took away what was left of my soul. Her actions were fucked up for sure, but they weren’t entirely selfish. Besides, I couldn’t even imagine being 17 years old and learning that type of information. It wasn’t like finding out she had the flu. Hell, it wasn’t even like she found out she was pregnant. That you could deal with or even resolve if that was her choice, but HIV didn’t give that option. She had to feel lonely and despondent. I felt horrible that I hadn’t pried and been there for her. No matter what, I would’ve been there for her. I wished she knew she never had to face that alone.

  My mom’s trembling voice broke my thoughts. “I’m so sorry, Misha. I’m sorry for what he did and how I treated you. I’m so sorry that I didn’t look out for you and put Joe before you. But it’s okay. You only wanted to hurt me, and I deserved that.” We shook our heads, and she nodded. “No, I did,” she argued. “But thank goodness we didn’t sleep with those bastards after you. I don’t care about Tony, Joe, or Vince. I care about you, Misha. I care about making sure that you live, because you ain’t dying. I’m gonna get you the best care,” my mom said between sniffles. “Do you hear me? You’re getting the best care. You ain’t dying on us!”