Hold Me in Contempt

by Wendy Williams

  “I just met you. I don’t even know you,” I said, afraid to look at him.

  “That doesn’t change how I feel. What happened. I’ve never been like that with anyone,” he said. “I was myself. Just me. It was like I was alone but really with someone for the first time when I was with you. I never wanted you to leave me.”

  He wrapped his arms tighter around my waist and kissed my shoulder.

  “It was just sex,” I whispered, but I felt the heat from his lips spread down my side and weaken my knees. “That was all. It didn’t mean anything.”

  He kept kissing me and I was growing weaker. Soon tears were in my eyes and my breathing became labored.

  “No, King!” I begged. “I can’t. I don’t want to do this.”

  He stopped kissing me and whispered softly in my ear, “Do what?”

  I looked up toward the door and answered, “I don’t want to love you. I don’t want to get hurt. Not again.”

  I pulled myself free and walked to the door, wiping my tears. “You have to go! That’s it. I have to stop this now. This isn’t who I am. I am an attorney and I can’t do this.” I undid two locks and held my hand over the third. I could feel King breathing behind me. “You understand?” I said, undoing the third and fourth and fifth locks just as quickly as the first two. “You just have to leave,” I added, putting my hands on the sixth lock. “Okay?”

  “I’ll understand if you can undo that last lock,” King said. “If you can, then I’ll know you don’t feel the same for me and I’ll leave. But I want to say one last thing to you.”

  “What?”

  “I need you to look at me.”

  I kept my right hand on the lock and turned around to look at King. “What?”

  “I did have someone get some information on you. I did know who you were. But, like I said, it wasn’t until after that first night we spent together. I told myself exactly what you just said—there’s no way we could be together—but then, the more I thought about it, the more I knew that there’s no way we can’t be together. I’m not afraid of anything. I wasn’t built that way. But in this short time I’ve known you, I know I’m afraid to lose you. I can walk away from all of this, but I can’t walk away from you. I’m not going to.”

  I didn’t know I’d let go of the sixth lock until my arms were around King’s neck. My lips were going toward his. He was holding me up against the door, the door that wouldn’t open that night. That lock would stay locked.

  Chapter 12

  The next morning, I rolled out of bed on the same side as always. I took the same morning shower. Brushed my teeth with the same pink toothbrush and whitening toothpaste. Put on my same work clothes and walked out into what I was expecting to be the same world. But when I set foot on the sidewalk, the cracking city concrete I’d been walking on all my life, I knew nothing was the same. I was different. My New York was different. And it was all because of the terrible secret I had inside of me.

  As I drove the rental car into Brooklyn early in the morning, the world looked so fake. People and stoplights, buildings and cars were orbiting me like those rolling images in the old Fisher-Price Music Box TVs. Everything was moving along exactly as it should, without question or confusion. Like fire ants building a new colony. And there I was in the middle of it all, not knowing what direction I was supposed to go in, what I was supposed to be doing, filled with questions and confusion. I was off course. And it was frightening because I didn’t want to be in the music box pretending anymore. I didn’t want to be a fire ant. Doing all the same stuff and walking along like things were going to just somehow get better if I worked a little harder and pushed through. How many years had I done that? What had that gotten me?

  Lying on King’s chest in my bed the night before, I kept thinking that nothing was better before him. I’d escaped Harlem. I’d become an attorney—a top prosecutor—but I was still struggling. Hurting. And doing it alone. And here was this man, the most unlikely candidate, whom I felt drawn to like my tongue to the sweet slush on the bottom of a twenty-five-cent Italian ice on a hot July afternoon, saying he loved me and didn’t want to be without me, and for every wit inside of me I knew he was telling the truth. That was just without question. Without confusion.

  I rolled over and looked at King. I whispered in his ear as he slept, “I love you, King.”

  He didn’t move, but seconds later he whispered, “I love you, Queen.”

  I started kissing his chest, and then I sat up and made love to him.

  When I awoke, he was gone.

  After I returned the rental car, I took the train back into Manhattan and got off a few blocks from work. I was headed toward the office from a different direction than usual, but somehow I fell right in line with the same people I always saw walking to work. The interesting thing about morning commutes in New York is that even in a city so packed with humans, if you left your doorstep at the same time each day, you wandered into your day with the same people—the dog walker with the three poodles and one overly sophisticated Afghan, the man talking on his cell phone while padding through moving traffic and always looking like he was about to get hit, the blonde whose long hair was wet even in the winter, the black nanny with the white twins in the stroller. You never waved though, or acknowledged one another. In New York, that would be rude and crazy. You raise your nose into the wind and mind your damn business.

  We were a moving mass of colors too muted for the spring around us—office-friendly grays and browns, navy blues and black. There was an occasional yellow blouse or pink sweater, but mostly we were so uniform, it was hard to know where I started and the next person began.

  I wanted to stop walking, to turn around and go in a different direction. Or just stand there and scream. Tell them all to just try something different. Or let me.

  And then I saw it. Something different in the crowd. Right in the middle of everything, a glimpse of red. At first it was just a sliver moving between two shades of gray, but then it got bigger and seemed brighter, and there was something about the way it moved, something so familiar, that I started skipping around people to catch more of it.

  Soon, the slivers in front of me turned into a red hoodie pulled up over a head that I could tell from the gait belonged to a woman. She was a little taller than me, much thinner, but she walked like me, with her shoulders back and her head tilted to the left like she was thinking about something.

  I kept pulling myself through the crowd to see more of her. I excused myself as I passed between couples and reached past people’s shoulders, trying to get a hold of the red sweatshirt, but it was always just beyond my reach.

  “Wait!” I called out to her back. “Please wait!”

  People around me looked sideways, not wanting to commit too much attention to my outburst—New Yorkers not wanting to get involved.

  I called out once more before lunging forward over the shoulder of a woman holding a cup of steaming coffee.

  “Shit!” the woman cried after the hot coffee sprayed over her arm and chest.

  “I’m sorry! Oh no!” I said, stopping to help the woman, while looking over my shoulder to see the red drift away from me.

  “Sorry? Watch where you’re going! Shit! I just got this shit out of the dry cleaner!” She used a napkin she’d been holding in her other hand to try to wipe up the spill. “Now I’m going to be late!”

  “I’m sorry. I thought I saw someone I knew. Someone I haven’t seen in a long time.”

  She gave me a customary New York eye roll. “Whatever,” she said, walking away. “Just watch where you’re going.”

  When she was gone, I looked up ahead and took a few steps to see if I could find the hoodie again but there were just too many people rushing by. I tried to convince myself to stop and head to the office. I told myself it couldn’t have been her anyway. There was no way. Not in Manhattan. Why would my mother be there?

  I decided to turn around and go to the office but as soon as I took a step in th
e opposite direction, I bumped into someone else.

  Embarrassed as we knocked heads, I said quickly, “I’m so sorry!” before I even looked at the person I’d collided with. I stepped back as a woman’s voice accepted my apology.

  “It’s okay—” she started but stopped when she looked at me.

  “Kim!” we said together.

  “Oh, hell no!” Kim 2 tried to push past me like the other woman had.

  “No wait! Wait!” I said, remembering my dream. “I need to talk to you.” I tried to grab her arm, but she was already out of reach.

  “There’s nothing for us to talk about. You’re crazy and I don’t want to have anything to do with you!” she shouted so loudly that people around us started slowing down to get an earful. “You stay away from me and stay away from Ronald, too!”

  She started to walk away again, but that time I caught her sleeve. “What do you mean, stay away? I haven’t been around you or Ronald.”

  “You call phone calls at all hours of the night staying away? Talking about killing us? That’s staying away?” she asked.

  “Wh-wha-what are you talking about?” I stuttered, considering what she was saying. “I never called you. I haven’t spoken to you since I saw you that morning at breakfast.”

  “No. You’re lying!”

  “No I’m not. You’re lying!”

  Kim 2 reached into her pocket, pulled out her cell phone, then handed it to me with her call log on the screen.

  “See!” she said.

  I looked through three calls with “Kiki” listed. All were from between three o’clock and five that morning.

  “How do I know this is really me?” I said in a low voice but feeling somewhere that it had been me. Some kind of choppy and slow-moving memory floated into my mind.

  “Well, you probably wouldn’t remember calling me because you were so fucking drunk. Blabbering on about me selling my pussy to the highest bidder and being a dick digger and that I was really a fat ass and that’s how I lost my modeling contract,” she said softly with pain in her eyes. She snatched the phone back and stashed it in her hoodie pocket. “I don’t need your shit. Things are hard enough for me.”

  “I didn’t say those things,” I said, but I remembered it. I could hear myself saying them. Sitting up in my bed and saying those things into the phone. Kim 2 screaming back, “I’m calling the police if you keep calling me!”

  I started feeling sick to my stomach, light on my feet, and like my head was floating up and up. I felt myself stagger toward Kim 2.

  “I don’t feel so well,” I said breathily, trying to stay on my feet. “I think I need to sit down.”

  Kim 2 held me up.

  I placed my arm over her shoulder, and she propped me up.

  She walked me to a little coffee shop a few feet away and sat me in one of the chairs out front.

  “Wait out here,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  She returned with a cup of water and handed it to me.

  “Sip some of that,” she said, sitting across from me at the table.

  One of the waiters from inside the shop came to the door and looked at me.

  “She’s fine,” Kim 2 said to him. “Just a little dizzy.”

  “I don’t remember calling you. I really don’t.”

  “You didn’t call last night. And there was nothing for, like, two nights a few days ago. But you do most nights,” Kim 2 explained, her anger now dissolved and her voice sympathetic, while motioning for me to finish the water.

  “I don’t understand. Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. I know you’re angry with—I guess you should be, but I just wanted you to know that”—she looked away—“we were doing the best we could. We tried to stop it, but you kept doing—”

  “Doing what?” I asked.

  She bit her lip before speaking. “The drinking. It started with the drinking. You were so fucked up. And Ron just wanted to help you. That’s how it started—us talking to each other. We were just trying to help you.”

  I put the water down and stared at her. “I didn’t need any help. Yes, I was drinking, but we all were. You were doing drugs. We were all partying. It wasn’t just me. You’re trying to make it sound like it was just me.”

  “Do you remember the first time the police came to the loft? When you came in drunk?”

  “I’d had a few with coworkers. We lost that case. So what?”

  She looked at me and took in a deep breath, released it. “I kept telling Ronald you’d get better and that it was just the work. We could help you. He came over that night before you got home—”

  “I don’t want to hear this shit!” I said.

  “No, you need to, Kim. I’ve been trying to tell you this, and you need to hear it,” Kim 2 replied. “He came over because we were talking about trying to get you some help. Getting you into rehab.”

  “Rehab? Fuck you!” I was about to get up, but Kim 2 placed her hand over mine.

  “You were so drunk that night. He took you into your room and tried to talk to you.”

  “Yes. He did. I lost a case and that dickhead proceeds to tell me it was time to leave my fucking job. Really? That’s helping me? That’s rehab? Saying I could be his fucking secretary?”

  “That job was killing you,” Kim 2 said. “I saw it every day. You couldn’t get through the day without drinking. Ron just wanted you to see that. He was scared, Kiki. We both were.”

  “No, you both were jealous of me,” I shot back. “I was more successful than both of you, and you were jealous, because I’m stronger than you. So you wanted to make me look weak!”

  “I never said you were weak. I know you’re strong. Trust me, I know that, but how can you keep being so strong, Kim? Always? With all the shit in your past? How can you keep it all up?”

  “Right. I’m so strong but I can’t keep it together, so you two decided to fuck each other? That’s was going to save us all? Give me a break.”

  “You hit him! What was he supposed to do? It was bad enough he had to lie to the cops and pretend he’d fallen down. His eye was swollen for days. He had to take off work so no one would see it.”

  “He told me to be his secretary! I’m not a secretary. Do you know what I’ve been through?” I said. “All of it? I didn’t do all of that to be put in my place because he can’t handle my success.”

  “So, what about me? I can’t handle your success either?” she asked. “Is that why you tried to kill me? To kill both of us?”

  Those questions tore open a scab that bled out a past I was reliving in dreams. The memories that were just echoes and shadows came back at me like a boomerang upside my skull.

  “You shouldn’t have let me drive,” I said in a voice that I didn’t recognize as my own. “Not the way things were. You knew I knew. And I was fucked up. Why would you let me drive?”

  Kim 2 told her version of events. That we’d left Diddy’s party. We were drunk. And tired and it was so dark. I was more messed up than she was, and she begged to drive. I agreed. Gave her the keys and then she started driving. There was the Taylor Swift song. We were laughing. Traffic started to thin. The highway got darker. Kim 2 needed to go to the bathroom, so she pulled over at a gas station.

  “When I got back to the car, you were behind the wheel,” she recalled. “I kept saying you were too drunk to drive, but you said you were fine and just wanted to get home. I tried to pull you out of the seat, but you insisted. We stood in front of that gas station for ten minutes and you wouldn’t get out of the car, so I got into the passenger’s seat.”

  She said once she was in the car, I got really quiet. I turned off the music, rolled up the windows, and held both hands on the wheel so tightly, she could see the tips of my nude thumbnails turning red. Something was wrong. She saw tears rolling down my cheeks.

  “You started driving so fast. I told you to slow down, but you wouldn’t. You said you knew everything. That I was sleeping with Ron and that we were
planning to leave you all alone,” she said. “I told you that wasn’t it. That we were just friends and I could explain. But it was too late. You pressed your foot on the gas and said you were going to kill both of us, so he’d be the one alone. I tried to stop you. I reached over you for the wheel, but it was too late. The car started rolling.”

  I felt the pain ticking up my back.

  “We went right off the side of the highway, over the fence, and into some field.” Kim 2 looked like she was remembering something so bad it probably gave her the same nightmares I’d been having. “I was awake the entire time, spinning and spinning, but when the car stopped and I was getting out, afraid it was going to blow up, I saw that you weren’t moving. You were knocked out. Then I heard the sirens. I wanted them to help us, but I started panicking.” She looked at me. “Kim, you were behind the wheel and so drunk. I knew what that would mean for your career. You’d be disbarred. I couldn’t let that happen. I pulled you out of the car and laid you out on the grass. When the cops and ambulance got there, I told them I was driving.”

  “I was driving,” I said.

  “I don’t know what happened. Why you were so pissed. What would make you snap like that,” she said. “I’d never seen you so angry, so split in half.”

  My mind continued to gather the echoes, and I could see Kim 2 walking toward the gas station building. She was laughing. Waving at me from the bumper and doing some stupid drunken dance. “Hurry up,” I yelled. “I need to get home.” She giggled a little more and staggered into the building. I sang along with Taylor Swift. Then Kim 2’s phone clattered in the console between the rental car seats. I looked at it and “Ronald” was on the screen. My heart started pounding. My mind bounced to every single time I’d suspected something was happening between them. I looked up at the gas station to see if Kim 2 had come out of the bathroom. I picked up the phone and put in Kim’s pass code: 1908.

  RONALD: We have to tell her about our plan really soon. I can’t live this lie anymore. I just want it to be over, so we can move on. Let’s do it in the morning when you get back from the Hamptons.