by Kiki Leach
"See, I would buy what you're selling except for the fact that aside from Nikki's party, I don't ever see him coming here to Manhattan for you."
She scoffed. "As if you would've?"
"If I was dertermined to be with you like you once told me that he was, which is why you left me for him in the first place, then yeah, I would've."
Her eyes reddened and she turned away to sniff back the tears she knew were coming. The last thing she wanted was for Nathan to see her pissed off over another man, let alone see her cry. The 'I told you so's' would come flying out of his mouth left and right before she could dodge the first one.
"Would you please give me back my purse?" she asked him, her voice going soft. She held out her hand for it and as he watched her eyes darken in sadness, he handed it over. "Thanks." She dug around for her key again while trying with everything she had inside of herself to keep from thinking about the true reason she had even gone out of her room that day in the first place, and in what was soon turning into a blizzard no less.
"Who the hell are all these bags for?" he asked her.
"One's for me, the rest are for Vanessa," she replied. Nathan arched a brow and then frowned. She glanced at him and rolled her eyes. "Fine, one's for V and the rest are mine."
"What's the gift for? A 'thank you' for inviting you to that Christmas dinner she's having?"
"How do you know about that?" she asked halfheartedly. "Did she invite you too, because it'd be just my luck if she did."
"I'm surprised you landed an invite. But no, I haven't talked to V about it. Melanie mentioned it--"
"Melanie?" Her head snapped up and she grimaced. "As in Oscar's wife and my newfound friend, Melanie?"
He snickered. "You two aren't all that close."
"We don't talk everyday but she's more of a friend to me than she should be to you."
"I never said I was friends with her, Sheila."
She turned to him and crossed her arms, eyeing him with a heavy amount of suspicion. "Then what were you doing talking to her about that?"
His eyes shifted as he thought of an answer good enough to keep her from asking more questions than he was ready for. "I was at The Bean this afternoon getting coffee for Mr. Gallagher," he replied, thinking quick on his feet, "and she mentioned Mo saying something about it when he had come in the day before."
Sheila's eyes dropped and she nodded. "Oh."
After finally locating her key, Sheila stumbled into the room and tossed her purse in a chair in the corner.
Nathan slid in behind her and closed the door. He looked around the room and after placing her bags on the bed, inhaled the rich, peppermint scent it offered thanks to an abundance of scented candles scattered throughout and closed his eyes. "Feels different in here," he said. "Smells different too."
"Feels bigger, you mean? And smells clean? I guess it would compared to that box of funk you're probably living in downstairs."
"The room I've got downstairs might not be a penthouse suite, but it's livable."
"Hm." She walked over to the fridge and pulled out a tiny bottle of whiskey. "Drink?" she asked him.
He waved his hand at her and leaned back on the dresser. "I'm trying to cut back."
"Oh really?"
"Yeah. Seems like every time I have too much, I do some stupid, stupid shit. And with people I probably shouldn't," he muttered.
She laughed while barely listening to the last part of what he had said and twisted the cap off the bottle. She tossed it into the trash, then quickly drank back the whiskey and smacked a hand over her chest as it burned going down.
Nathan crossed his arms over himself and tilted his head. "How many of those do you drink a day now?"
She sat down on the side of the bed and knit her brows. "How often do you watch me come in and out of this room?"
"Enough to know that whatever bullshit you told me about Adrian isn't true."
She spun the neck of the bottle between her fingers and sat it down on the nightstand. "And just how the hell do you know that?"
"Because I've known you too damn long, Sheila. There's no way in hell you're happily going to Jamaica Queens every chance you get, even if it's to be with him."
She chuckled and dropped her head. "I was known for chasing dick all throughout high school, Nathan--"
"You're known for chasing expensive dick and from what I've seen for myself, that man's barely got a pot to piss in."
"Dick is dick as long as it knows what it's doing," she retorted. Nathan grumbled. "The point is, I'm known to go after it, so rich or poor, what would make this time any different?" She looked over at him as a sad smile ticked up the corners of her mouth. He glowered.
"Rich or poor, if he gave a damn like you say, then he'd be the one chasing after you, not the other way around."
"Well, I guess you'd know better than anyone since you spent every day chasing after Vanessa's pussy like a dog in heat. Too bad even after you finally had it in the palm of your hand, she still wouldn't give it up." She picked up the empty bottle and threw it into the trash so hard that the glass broke. She dropped her head in her hand and rattled it back and forth. "I thought I had finally found my forever in him," she said. "Even if he was Vanessa's man first, I knew that it wasn't the same as it had been with you. She didn't love him like I could, which was better. And he didn't love her, not like he thought he did... not like he had fallen in love with me."
Nathan became increasingly uncomfortable, but refused to let up until she finally uttered the words he had long been hoping to hear from her for months now.
"What the hell happened that's got you talking like this, Sheila?" he asked.
She lifted her head and stared directly at the wall across from her. "I slipped up and mentioned his baby with Vanessa."
Nathan guffawed. "When?"
"The night of Nikki's party. We got back to his place and..." She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. "I found Terrence Brown sitting in his living room and lost it."
He scrunched his brows, confused. "Who the fuck is Terrence Brown? Was Adrian screwing another man?"
"No!" Sheila shifted her body to look him in the face and dragged her leg up on the bed. Slapping her arms down, she leaned forward and opened her hands wide. "Terrence. Brown. Does that name not ring any bells for you?"
Nathan thought for a few seconds until the name put together finally clicked. "You mean V's old man?"
She nodded. "He and Adrian met up at some point in the Congo when they were both doing missionary work and exchanged info. But apparently it wasn't enough because Terrence didn't have a damn clue about Adrian and V until that night. Anyway, after he moved back to the city, Adrian gave him a place to stay."
"How the hell long has he been back here?"
"Long enough to know that the paparazzi is scarce as hell in Queens." Sheila turned away and reached into the fridge for another bottle, quickly guzzling it back. "I snapped when I found out Adrian had been lying to me about it and that's when the information about the baby slipped out." Her shoulders shrank. "I thought that you could get angry, but I guess I didn't know what true anger was till I saw the face of a white boy turn completely red."
Nathan shoved himself away from the dresser and joined her on the bed. He placed a hand on her knee, but she snatched it back and slid away from him.
He placed his hand in his own lap and stared at her. "If you know about Terrence and he knows about the baby, how the hell has none of this shit hit the papers yet?"
She deeply sighed. "I promised him I'd never mention anything about Terrence to V, if he promised to never mention anything to her about the baby."
"So you two have kept this shit from her for two months?"
She turned and shoved him in the arm. "Don't you dare sit there and judge me with that condescending as hell tone when you're no better than anybody else in this group. In fact, after all the things you've ever done, you might actually be worse." She jumped up from the bed and crossed the
room, placing one hand on her waist and wrapping the other around her forehead.
The truth of the matter was that Nathan was worse and always had been, which was the problem. For him of all people to judge what Sheila had done meant that she had really, truly fucked up in more ways than one this time.
Nathan got up from the bed and stood behind her, staring at her in the mirror as she kept her head down. "I never said that I was better than anybody else in this group, but I also know what I am. And that person is just shocked that you've never said anything to V about this after trying for so long to get back on her good side."
She slapped her hand down on the dresser and spun around to face him. "Well, maybe if I had a dick, all would be forgiven a hell of a lot sooner rather than later, huh?" She moved over to the window and looked down on the city, watching the snow cloud around the people making their way to and from.
"Vanessa hasn't forgiven me, Sheila," Nathan told her. "She just tolerates me now because she knows I'm never going away again."
"That's not how it looked when I found you two together at the bar."
"Look, when I told you that she asked me to come with her, it was bullshit. The truth is that I blackmailed her into taking me to Nikki's play and that after party."
She made a face and scrunched her nose. "Why?"
"I had my reasons for it. And I'll find out soon enough if the efforts I made were actually worth it."
She glanced back at him and smirked. "Never change, Nathaniel Taylor," she muttered.
"I don't plan on it anytime soon, Sheila Harris," he replied, moving in behind and placing a hand at her back. She flinched and turned her eyes up to him as he kept his focus on the window, but she didn't pull herself away from his partial embrace. "Listen, I just want you to know that I'm not judging you for what you did. In fact, I think that maybe all this shit happened for a reason. Maybe it's what needed to happen."
"What the hell are you talking about?" she snapped.
"You and Adrian."
"So it's my destiny to just be miserable and alone for the rest of my life."
"No. But maybe it's not in your destiny to be with someone like him." He paused. "After you two promised to keep quiet, what the hell else did he say?"
She turned back to the window and sucked in air, remembering back to his words as they cut right through her like shards of glass. "He told me that he needed some space from me and all of this." Her eyes lowered to the floor. "I've seen him a few times since then over the last few months and we've..." She stopped herself from blurting out the truth of what their brief yet private meetings often entailed. "Tried to work things out, but it never ends the way that I want it to. As of right now we're just pretty much stuck in limbo."
Nathan bobbed his head and peered while watching the snow fall. This situation couldn't have worked out any better for him if he had engineered it himself.
"Like I said, maybe it needed to happen. Maybe space is what you need from him, maybe it's more." His hand slid around to her waist; he curled his fingers into her skin and drew her close.
She wanted to ask him why he was being so nice to her, and why he suddenly gave a damn when the man she had known since childhood would've been as happy as a pig in shit in finding out that she had been left alone after basically cheating on him. But as he brought her closer to him, kissed the top of her head and breathed her in, all the wondering seemed to fade. The only thing that mattered in that moment was that she had someone holding her, someone a core part of her still loved very much despite doing her best to deny it.
And even if he wasn't exactly the one she had planned to spend the rest of that night with, or any other one following, she wasn't going to pass up the chance in not spending it completely alone.
Part Three
Nikki's eyes gradually peeled open as the light from the moon peered through her bedroom window and brushed across her face. She was hardly what one would call being asleep, but for the last few hours, she had tried like hell to make it happen; if only because being awake reminded her too much of being alive. And alive was the last thing she wanted to feel right now; it was the last thing she had wanted to feel for the last few months.
As she reached out her arm and turned over in bed, she brushed her hand up and down against the sunken part of her mattress and crawled her fingers up to the pillow, wrapping it around the corner and pulling it close to her face. She shut her eyes, pressed her nose against the silk fabric and inhaled the familiar scent of musk left behind by the man she had grown to love even more than life itself. A man who had promised against every will and ache inside his heart to stay with her despite her lying to his face for longer than he would've liked to have known, about aborting his child. A man, who had he learned the truth from her the moment it happened, would've had no problem walking out and returning to the life he shared with his wife and children on the Upper East Side of the city.
But now was too late. Now he was completely in love with her, mind, body and soul. Now was when he had promised to be commited to her and to them, to what they had and would continue to grow in the future. Now was when he had vowed to follow through on never looking back no matter what.
This was his 'no matter what'. She was his forever. And as much as he didn't want to admit it to himself or to her, he was regretting every promise ever made with every single day that continued to pass them by.
Nikki sat up in bed and pulled her knees into her chest. She wrapped her arms around her legs and turned her eyes toward the window. As the snow continued to pile up around the outside of the sill, a tiny smile crossed her face. It was actually beginning to look a lot like Christmas in New York City, as the song goes. A small something but enough to brighten her mood and dim the spotlight blazing down over her troubles; many of which she knew would only shine brighter than the most flawless diamond the city had to offer anyone, in the new year.
When she heard a light, scratching noise coming from another part of the suite and voices murmuring, she pushed the covers back and slinked out of bed. Taking her time as she walked to the door, she leaned her head out and looked up one side of the hallway and down the other.
"Oscar?" she called out. After waiting a few seconds and receiving no response, she headed in the direction of the noise, which brought her straight into the living room.
The television set was blaring an informercial about no longer needing razors to shave your legs. Semi intriguing for someone who cared, but not so much for a man like Oscar, who with his muscular, hairy legs draped over the edge of the couch, had fallen asleep with the remote tucked tightly inside his hand. Rather than try and take it from him, thus disturbing him, Nikki went over to the set and pushed the 'off' button just below the screen. As the light dimmed across the room, everything but Oscar seemed to fade to black. She kept her focus on him as he moved back and forth against the pillows and knocked one to the floor.
She walked over and as she bent down to pick it up and place it back where it belonged, his eyes popped open and he stared down at her. When she looked up at his face, she jumped back and clutched her chest. A light smile arose on her lips but Oscar's face remained stoic.
"What are you doing?" he asked her, his voice groggy and someone strained.
She stood up quick and fixed the straps of her nightgown. "I just came out here to check on you. I heard the T.V. getting louder by the second and--"
"Sorry." He sat up and dropped his feet to the floor while rubbing his eyes. He shoved the blanket down to his waist and drew his hand down his throat and to his bare stomach.
Nikki shrugged again and shook her head. "You don't have to apologize for it. I was already up--"
"Why?"
"Because I turned over in bed and realized that you weren't there beside me," she replied. "Your scent was there, the warmth of your body was still pressed down hard into that mattress, but you weren't." She sat down across from him, on the table in front of the couch and placed one hand inside the other. "H
ow often do you sleep out here?"
"I don't know, a few times a week, maybe."
"For how long?"
He shrugged and turned his head to avoid eye contact. "A few months."
"What do you do, wait until I fall asleep now and crawl out of bed?" she asked him. Oscar diverted his eyes and clinched his jaw. Nikki's eyes widened the second she realized the truth and sat up straight. "Oh, wow."
"My sleeping out here isn't because I don't want to be in bed with you, Nik--"
"Isn't it?" she retorted. He leaned back and shoved his brows together while watching her inhale a deep breath. "I feel like you're never going to forgive me for what I did. And I feel like what you've been doing is a way of punishing me for it. Sleeping out here, not talking to me about how you really feel... even when we make love now, it's not the same."
"You know I've been putting a lot of work into the new shop, which has been stressing me out more often than not, Nik. It also doesn't seem to help that everywhere I go, women come up to me on the street trying to measure out my dick with their hands thanks to William's video."
"And I'm sorry about that, really. How do you think I feel about my breasts being blurred out on the cover of Page Six, let alone being shown at all? My parent's have barely spoken to me because of this mess. But even with all of that, I realized that how we're treated out there by strangers should be all the more reason to want to come back here to us, though it doesn't seem that way for you." She sighed. "Every time I try to pull you in anymore, I feel like you're pushing me further and further away. When we got back from the bar that night and I explained to you what I had done, you said that you understood because our relationship was barely off the ground, and it was my body, but--"
"It is your body," he interjected. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth to keep from spewing out something he knew he couldn't take back later. "It was your decision and..." He stopped to clear his throat.