by C. L. Donley
Before she even knew what was happening, it’d been an hour, and she’d looked through nearly every picture available to her, despite the mutual blocking of the new couple.
She managed to discover that they’d taken a cruise in a month’s time, the same one Kenya wanted to take. The same one she recalled that Cecil never seemed able to get time off for in the past.
She realized he’d done it on purpose. There would be no cruise because there was no them. Not really. “You should,” he’d said when she threatened to go alone, she recalled. The day that was to be their last day together. “You deserve it.”
Kenya felt a lot of feelings at once. She felt the inevitable nail go through the coffin of their relationship and straight through to the floor. She felt ruthlessly killed. That he had killed her. And that it was easy. And that she knew something with great intimacy, something that Lindsey did not yet know: that she was shacking up with a monster.
Viciously she felt the loss of her 20’s. Spent with her killer, and not her lover. He was incapable of the emotion she was sure. Kenya absolutely hated to waste time. She felt the true state of her spirit that was malnourished and cold.
What was the use of ever waiting for her prince charming to come along? Cecil had been a fraud, and she’d given him what belonged to someone else. He’d taken some other man’s love and wisdom and encouragement, some other man’s pussy and mouth and sweat and tender tears. And she wanted to gather up all that love and cum and time and scrape it right off of him with a rubber spatula, see if Lindsey would even look twice at the man he was before her. It was Kenya that Lindsey was fucking, Kenya she was having that baby with.
Kenya felt nauseous. She was suffocating, suddenly claustrophobic. Her irrational fear of running into the couple had been replaced with her absolute inability to stay one more second in her own split-level house. The house she’d bought because his credit had been too shoddy. In the neighborhood convenient to his job, rather than the one that was up and coming and near hers.
She had to get out, had to change her reality and fast. Before she did something drastic.
She went to her closet in a panic. What exactly was she going to do? Have her revenge by putting on yoga pants, going to the grocery store and coming straight back home? Buying a dozen donuts perhaps?
Suddenly she remembered.
Kevin the claims adjuster.
He’d left her a card. Where had she put it?
Shit. Cecil threw a bunch of papers in the house away while she was gone last week. She was sure he thought he was helping, that ignorant fuck. He’d left her and was still causing her grief.
She called the closest Arizona Insurance office, who referred her to the second closest, where Kevin worked. His phone went straight to voicemail.
“Hey, Kevin this is Kenya from… I’m the one that keyed your car? I’m still waiting on a bill by the way, but… we have to talk.”
After pacing for ten minutes, she called again. It went to voicemail.
She called the number right back.
Four rings this time. Suddenly there was an answer.
“This is Kevin?”
“How long have you known?”
Kevin slowly sat straight up in his chair.
“Kenya?”
“How long?” she said again.
“How long have I known about what?”
For a moment, Kenya’s conscience kicked in.
Maybe he didn’t know. And now she was at a point of no return, about to drop a hideous bomb in a way that no one should ever be bombed. Kenya trod carefully.
“The baby.”
“Baby?”
Fuck.
“Your… Lindsey. Are you… friends on Webster?”
“What do you think,” he scoffed.
“Mutual acquaintances?”
“Okay… I take it from the way you’re talking that you have something fucking terrible to tell me that involves a baby. And my wife.”
“Just… don’t do what I just did.”
“What did you just do?”
“Don’t go on Webster.”
In the next instant, her phone warbled. She’d received a friend request from him.
“Kevin…”
“I’ll call you back.”
“I thought you knew.”
“I know. Just gimme a second,” he said as the line went dead.
“Shit,” Kenya said out loud. She commenced pacing around the bedroom, waiting for him to call back. She started to worry. What if he did something drastic? He seemed a little “white boy” fragile.
A few moments later there was a Webster notification. A private message from Kevin.
“Got anything in that crockpot?”
She smiled.
“Beef short rib stew,” she answered.
“Holy hell,” was his response.
This time she laughed. She could see he was typing more.
“I’m coming over. With booze,” he wrote.
* * *
“I think I hurt myself,” Kevin lamented as he lounged on Kenya’s couch. He’d practically licked his plate clean and now they were drinking.
“This is really good wine,” Kenya commented on the other side of the couch, a wine glass lazily in her hand and a microfiber blanket over her lap. She sat cross-legged in a wife beater and sweatpants, her gold “KH” necklace resting in her cleavage. She wore her hair in two big french braids and she looked like the neighborhood tomboy every boy secretly crushed on.
“Kindzmarauli,” he answered. “‘She who must not be named’ bought a ton of it and left it at the house.”
“Sounds… expensive.”
“It was. It was Joseph Stalin’s favorite, apparently.”
“You should’ve saved it for a more appropriate occasion.”
“I did. It doesn’t get any more appropriate than this one,” he said, pouring more wine into his glass.
“It does pair pretty good with short rib stew.”
“I was thinking more about the fact that this seems to be the official beverage of narcissist psychopaths.”
“That’s the spirit,” Kenya encouraged him as she poured a third glass.
“Fuck that fucking… bitch. And her fucking demon spawn. Sorry, no offense.”
“None here. We’re on the same page.”
“What I don’t understand, is that when I found out she was cheating, she went on this whole tirade about how I stole her 20’s.”
“Guilty,” Kenya replied, raising her hand.
“You went on a tirade about your 20’s?”
“No, but I wanted to.”
“Yeah, but you weren’t the one who cheated,” he clarified his point. “She supposedly could’ve been out partying this whole time. So her solution was to what, immediately find another guy, have his baby and commit to him even faster??”
“The heart wants what it wants, Kevin,” Kenya feigned empathy. Kevin replied with a skeptical sneer and a jack off gesture. Kenya laughed and took another sip of wine.
The whole thing was absurd, and the two managed to keep each other as far away from grief as possible for the evening.
“Did your husband want kids?”
“We both did, but it never seemed like the right time. I’ve been on birth control since we were married. Every year I made the appointment to get it removed, and every year I cancelled it.”
“A sixth sense, perhaps?”
“Perhaps.”
“Do you know how many hours we fought about having kids?”
“How many?” Kenya asked.
“That was rhetorical,” he laughed with a snort, sprawled out on the other side of the couch, a goblet full of wine resting on his chest.
“Oh,” Kenya laughed at his laugh.
“How would I know the exact amount of hours?”
“You seem like the type of guy that would know,” she ribbed him.
He laughed again.
“You’re right. I am,” replied Kevin. S
he laughed.
“You’re an insurance adjuster.”
“Which is fucking nonsense.”
“The labor market disagrees.”
“I’m a Marine, did you know that?”
Kenya jerked her neck back.
“What, like a Marine Marine?”
“A Marine Marine,” he nodded.
“A United States Marine Corps Marine,” she clarified again.
“Semper Fi.”
“Get the fuck outta here,” Kenya was aggressively in disbelief as she rested her goblet on the coffee table in front of her. Kevin smiled as he nodded his head, feeling as though he’d just re-introduced himself to her anew. And just as she’d reacted the first time, it was what was left unsaid that was much more intriguing.
“Oh, my, God…” she continued. He watched a whole new knowing about him come over her. It wasn’t all positive. In fact, none of it seemed to be. He was afraid he was about to be kicked out.
“No. I did not know that,” she chuckled to herself.
“Is it all becoming clear now?”
“As mud. What was your MOS?”
“Listen to you!” he grinned wildly.
“What, ‘she who must not be named’ doesn’t talk like that?”
“No way,” he scoffed.
“Well, she’s about to get an earful,” Kenya implied. Kevin didn’t want to think about Lindsey getting acclimated to her new life.
“I was E4 infantry until I went to sniper training.”
“Oh shit, Kevin the badass,” Kenya smiled, genuinely not expecting his answer. Kevin’s chest swelled a bit.
“Hardly,” he downplayed. “Just a lot of waiting. And stress. And… math.”
“Did you kill some people?”
“Yep.”
“Did you ever have to pee on yourself, like that movie?”
“Constantly.”
Kenya laughed and he unabashedly watched her cleavage as she did. Her full breasts hung a bit lower than Lindsey’s small ones, but naturally, they would. They were supple. Youthful, but he wouldn’t describe them as perky. They were… chill. He smiled. She had to be drunk.
“PTSD?”
“Comes with the job,” he said. “Not nearly as bad as some of us, though.”
“Cecil has it pretty bad,” she said. The subject warranted using his actual name, she felt. “Two deployments, the last one unusually long, especially for a Marine. Lost a few more to suicide once they got back.”
“Fuck.”
“He’s a lot better now. Goes to this therapist twice a week. She was a miracle worker.”
“I was a weekend warrior until I got deployed a few years ago.”
“Iraqi Freedom?”
“That’s the one,” he said, feeling a second familiarity emerge between them. “That was my first deployment. I don’t know what I was expecting but… it was a lot. And only 9 months, it should’ve been… I don’t know. She begged me to come home, but I think she liked it better when I was away. It was a lot more… dramatic.”
“Are you back in the Reserves?”
“No.”
“You must’ve liked it?”
“I did. Until I didn’t. And then… I really didn’t.”
“You miss it, though don’t you?”
“Yeah, sometimes. The camaraderie. The sense of purpose. Civilian life shoots it all to hell.”
“Cecil once told me he found it exhilarating, being in battle. For some reason, he felt like he couldn’t tell me that. Like I wouldn’t understand.”
“The first time I took out a high-value target, I did get a bizarre kind of high. Lasted a full 24 hours. I imagine a certain type of personality could get addicted.”
“Seems to me like PTSD is just the result of being built into a killing machine, and then being expected to tear your own self down into a regular person,” Kenya reflected. “Everything in you has to be screaming that it’s just a psychological trick just to get you to die. Get you to lose.”
“That’s… a great way of putting it,” Kevin complimented her, swirling his goblet. “My brother was the one that got me to join, but he never made it to basic training. I’m glad he didn’t. I think he would’ve given his all to it. Plus, I had a job when I got out, thanks to him. What’s weird is I make more money now than I did doing that. It’s like the more I sit around, the more I get paid.”
“Definitely the opposite for me.”
“No shit. You’ve seen more death than I have, I’ll bet. Our incomes should be switched and everyone knows it,” opined Kevin.
“No,” she corrected him.
“No?”
“The only kind of people you want doing my job are the kind that want to be there,” Kenya insisted.
“Touche. It genuinely doesn’t matter who does my job.”
Kenya laughed. “Not true. I could never do your job.”
“Because you would die of boredom?”
“There are some jobs men are just better at.”
“You better not let Voldemort hear you say that.”
Kenya laughed again, swirling her wine glass just as he did, watching Kevin’s clear hazel eyes for the first time.
Was there really a man on her couch right now? A white, non-Cecil man? A fucking Marine? She literally had no clue, like being in a room with Bruce Wayne. It was enough to turn her on.
She could barely remember now the shockwave of arousal that went through her when she found out Cecil was a military man. The whole concept of a young black man in the Marines made her so wet she could’ve crawled across the floor and left a trail like a snail. All the best qualities of manhood in a single human person. Turns out there were certain things that simply couldn’t be instilled.
Kevin seemed like the kind that had those things naturally. Knowing what she knew of the current system, he probably quit because the military was trying to beat those things out of him.
“Mine needs a nickname too,” she said.
“Who, your ex?”
“Yeah.”
“Harry Potter related?”
“If we must,” she sighed.
“What, you don’t like Harry Potter?” Kevin asked, almost galled.
Kenya laughed harder than he’d ever seen her up to that point. It tickled him.
“Why’s that so funny?”
“You’re just… you’re really white.”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
Kenya was beside herself with silent laughter. Kevin continued in an apologetic tone.
“I’m an insurance adjuster from Ohio named Kevin, who loves Harry Potter. Whose equally white wife cheated on him. With a black guy.”
Kenya almost spilled her wine as she choked, alternately coughing and laughing. Kevin took another guzzle straight from the bottle.
“I’m a walking stereotype,” he lamented, chuckling a bit.
“I am too, you know,” Kenya volunteered when she finally recovered.
“How so?”
Kenya rolled her eyes a bit and tossed her head to one side.
“I keyed your car.”
“Well, yeah but…you didn’t know it was mine.”
“Know why I’m not a fan of Harry Potter?”
“Is that rhetorical?”
“No. Why would that be rhetorical?”
“That one is,” he said, pointing the wine bottle in her direction before raising it to his lips again.
“My grandmother was a fucking voodoo… witch. And a lot of weird shit went on in my mother’s house. Didn’t matter that she was using it for ‘good,’ or whatever the fuck.”
“How is that stereotypical?”
“That my grandmother is Mama Odie? Oh, I don’t know.”
“Who’s ‘Mama Odie’?”
“Of course, you don’t get that reference,” she said, taking another drink.
“I don’t think knowing wine pairings is a black stereotype.”
“I’m a charge nurse from Cleveland named Kenya, and my equally
black husband left me. For a white woman.”
“…Okay, now I’m starting to see it.”
Kenya laughed.
“Do you get all sassy at work?”
Kenya guffawed before she answered, “Sometimes.”
“I think I’d like to see that.”
“Come into the ER anytime between 7 and 7.”
“And act white?”
“As white as you possibly can,” she smiled.
“In other words, just be myself, then.”
Kenya laughed.
7
Chapter 7
“Would you like to hear the latest trigger?”
“Hit me,” Kenya replied.
“…She sent me divorce papers,” Kevin divulged, as he finished off his glass of wine.
Kevin showed up on Kenya’s doorstep the next night with a new bottle.
“You seem surprised.”
“I am. She can’t even renew her license on time,” he said. Kenya laughed.
“I’m sure she had help.”
“You get anything yet?” he inquired.
“Not yet.”
He sighed.
“It’s weird seeing it in writing. Sucks.”
“I hate legal documents.”
“Same.”
“Car looks good,” Kenya said.
“Yep, good as new.”
“How much do I owe you?”
“Oh yeah, I meant to tell you, they shaved off $900, so it’s an even $1800.”
“Hallelujah,” Kenya sighed, relieved.
“I went by the hospital awhile back, but I must’ve missed you.”
“Trust me, I know. All the nurses think we’re having sex.”
Kevin didn’t blink, though his pulse went up a few notches. He took a sip.
“Really? Why?”
“Because, you’ve officially come to see me more than my husband had in ten years.”
“Not dating?” he wondered, pretending to be preoccupied with the wine in his glass.
“No,” she answered cryptically, her eyes widening at the answer. He fought his desire to delve.
* * *
“So, back to day shift,” Kevin commented over wine the next night.
“Yep.”
“How’s it feel?”