by Mary Monroe
He moved from the window and immediately called Teri’s cell phone number. He didn’t expect her to answer once she saw his name on her caller ID. But he left her a message anyway. “Teri, please call me back when you get this message. I want to tell you what really happened. I…I love you and I wouldn’t hurt you for anything in this world.”
He called her home number and left the same message. Then he called Nicole, but he hung up as soon as she answered. She was indirectly responsible for this mess because she had taken Eric from Yvette and now Yvette had to take it out on whomever she could get to first. Because of his relationship with Nicole’s best friend, Harrison had become a victim of Yvette’s retaliation by default. But after thinking about it for a moment or two, he didn’t want to drag Nicole into it until he had done enough damage control to get Teri to at least hear his side of the story. It wouldn’t have done him any good anyway. While he was sitting on his couch in the same spot that Yvette had occupied a few minutes earlier, Teri was on the phone with Nicole, telling her all she knew.
“He did what?” Nicole hollered. “Girl, hold on. Eric’s on the other line. Let me get rid of him.” Teri sat in her car in the parking lot of a liquor store six blocks from Harrison’s condo. This was something that couldn’t wait for her to make it home to call Nicole. “I…I can’t believe my ears! Oh, the man’s got to be out of his mind. There is no other explanation! Yvette? Poor Eric. She’s the worst thing that ever happened in his life. Did Harrison want some pussy that bad?”
“Tell me about it,” Teri said with a painful sigh.
“There is just no telling what all kinds of activity have been going on inside that black hole between her thighs. If I were you, I’d make Harrison cover up with two condoms from now on before I let him stick his dick in me again. Eeyow!” Nicole made gagging sounds, and for a moment Teri thought she was going to vomit all over the interior of the beautiful car that she keeps as neat and clean as a pin.
“Ha! That’s one thing I’ll never have to worry about again!”
“Oh? What are you going to do?”
“What the hell do you think I’m going to do? Do you think I am going to go on like nothing happened? Do you think that I’d let him touch me again after this? I am not going to settle for a man who cheats on his woman, and I don’t know why any woman with half a brain and some self-respect would, either. She’s a damn fool if she does! All a woman is getting when she settles for a man who cheats on his woman is a man who cheats on his woman.” Nicole remained quiet, so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. “Did you hear what I just said?”
“I heard you. I guess that includes me, too, huh?”
“Includes you how? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Eric cheated on Yvette with me,” Nicole said in a flat tone of voice.
“So? He’s not with her now and he’s much better off with you than he was with her.”
“But how is what he did to Yvette any different from what Harrison did to you?” Nicole asked.
This time Teri was the one who got so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Then she said, “I don’t think I like the ugly direction that this conversation is going.”
“I think it’s already there,” Nicole told her with a heavy voice. “I love Eric and he loves me. His relationship with Yvette was doomed from the start. She hooked him by claiming she was pregnant. A month after he moved her in with him and his daughter, she got her period. Then she claimed that the pregnancy ‘must have been a false alarm.’ By then it was too late for him to get rid of her. She had no place to go.”
“Well, despite what I just said about men cheating on their women, I am glad things seem to be working out between you and Eric. He is a good man.”
“So is Harrison.”
“Girl, are you not listening to me? That ‘good’ man Harrison was with another woman. I caught him. I saw him with her with my own eyes! If he’s what you call a good man, I’d hate to think of what you’d call a bad man.”
“Oh, there are plenty of them out there. We don’t even have to look hard to find them, they usually find us,” Nicole said, impressed with herself for sounding so philosophical.
“Listen, I am going to go on home and pull myself together.”
“Where are you?”
“Sitting in my car in a liquor store parking lot like a fool.”
“Call me when you get home if you feel like it,” Nicole suggested.
“This is one fucked-up night. I finally told my grandparents about Harrison and me being back together and they couldn’t have been happier. The first thing Grandma did was pull out her address book to make sure it was current so that everybody would receive their invitations to my wedding on time. Grandpa was even worse. He’s already made plans for him and Harrison to go fishing.”
“Shit. Just tell them it didn’t work out after all.”
“Shit! I just remembered something.” Teri slapped her steering wheel and let out a disgusted sigh. “I just remembered that I told them he’d be coming to our upcoming cookout on the Fourth,” Teri whimpered. “Shit! Me and my big mouth!”
“That’s still a month away. Maybe by then…” Nicole didn’t have to finish her sentence. Teri knew what she was going to say and she didn’t like that one bit.
“No way. I’m too through with that man. There is no way in hell I will let him get away with this.”
“Teri, I know you look at life too critically these days. So do I. But no man, or woman for that matter, is perfect. Shit happens. We deal with it, try to correct it, then we move on. A strong, smart woman can find something positive in the worst situations when it comes to her man. But because she’s strong and smart, and if that man is worth hanging on to, she deals with it. Look at Hillary Clinton. Do you think she’d be happier if she’d kicked ole ‘I didn’t sleep with that woman but I let her suck my dick’ Bill to the curb? Most of the other high-profile women do the same thing Hillary did.”
“Tina Turner didn’t take Ike’s black ass back.” Teri hung up and snapped her cell phone shut.
CHAPTER 50
Harrison had never pursued a woman so vigorously in the thirty-two and a half years of his existence. But Teri Stewart wasn’t just a woman; she was the only woman for him. He had not made that revelation clear to her or anyone else. He was compelled to make her see that now, if she’d let him.
It had been two days since the Yvette fiasco. He had lost count of how many messages he’d left on Teri’s home phone, her cell phone, and her work phone. She had not returned a single call.
Harrison had a lot of male friends that he had bonded with over the years. He had always been quick to share some of his most intimate thoughts and secrets with his boys. But this was one thing that he wanted to keep to himself.
The only reason he didn’t beat a path to Carla Andrews’s office was because her calendar was booked solid for the next two months. It seemed like everybody in L.A. was in need of therapy. She had back-to-back appointments with some of her longtime patients and new patients were crawling out of the woodwork, some on the verge of suicide. Harrison wasn’t that bad off, but he was at a point where he really wanted to talk to somebody about what had happened.
“If I get a cancellation, I will call you immediately,” Carla told him. “But you hang in there. Things are going to be all right.” Harrison had not told Carla the source of his latest stress-induced condition, but he was hoping that if she had talked to Teri, she would know. However, with Teri believing the worst, her version of the events would make him look like the asshole she thought he was. Harrison couldn’t imagine what was going through Carla’s head about why he needed to see her all of a sudden. But he didn’t care what she thought about him, as long as she was still able to give him the professional assistance he felt he needed.
He started to lose hope by the end of the week. He stopped leaving messages for Teri. When Carla finally did call him to tell him that another patient had just cancelled an appointment
and that she could see him right away, he had too many other things going on to take her up on her offer. For one thing, it was too late for him to switch his broadcast hours with Beverly Blue or one of the other DJs. And skipping work to go see his shrink by calling in sick was something he would never do. One of the things he was most proud of was the fact that he had a work ethic that he didn’t want to compromise.
By the second week, he was feeling much better. He had lost all hope of ever resuming his relationship with Teri. This was one personal situation that he chose not to discuss with his friends or coworkers but that didn’t stop some of them from being nosy.
“Man, I’ve been meaning to ask you—what’s going on between you and Teri? I haven’t seen you with her lately, and you haven’t even mentioned her,” Trevor said with a suspicious look on his last visit to the station.
“Teri’s fine, as far as I know. We’re not as close as we used to be,” was all Harrison offered, promptly changing the subject. “I’ve got some extra complimentary tickets to that jazz show at the Staples Center this coming weekend if you want to join me.”
“Yeah…right,” Trevor responded, giving Harrison a sympathetic look. But that didn’t stop Trevor from pointing his nose in another direction. When he saw Teri at a small, private wrap party at Eclectic Records the next evening, he tried to get more information from her. “Uh, how is my boy Harrison these days?” he asked Teri, his sympathetic hand rubbing her shoulder. That little gesture alerted her right away. She knew Trevor already knew that she and Harrison had parted company.
“Why don’t you ask him?” she asked, not facing Trevor as she stood in a corner nursing a flute of champagne. Despite her evasive behavior, she was as cordial and businesslike as ever. Victor had suddenly run off again with his wife. This time to Mexico for a few days to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Teri was glad to be in charge so soon again. The distraction helped her keep her mind off Harrison—and that was not easy. She saw him in her dreams, and several times she saw men on the street that looked so much like him it made her heart skip a beat each time.
The Monday after the wrap party a huge bouquet of roses arrived at the office for her. Despite the fact that roses were her favorite flowers, she was disappointed when she looked at the card and saw that they had come from Dwight. When she called him up to thank him, the first thing out of his potty mouth was, “The drums tell me that you finally ass-wiped that dickless Harrison. When can I see you?” Less than a minute after she declined Dwight’s crude invitation he told her, “Lady, I don’t know who you think you are, but you need a reality check. You know now that Harrison is a punk! I know what you need. You know what I can do for you, and I’ve been trying to give it to you again for eons. But all I get for my trouble is a runaround. Well, this is the last time I try to get next to you.”
“Thanks again for the roses, Dwight,” Teri said calmly, a dry smile on her lips. “You still know the way to a girl’s heart.”
“Fuck that shit. I want to know the way to a girl’s pussy!” Dwight hollered.
“Dwight, I have to go now,” Teri insisted. Nicole occupied one of the two seats facing Teri’s desk. There was an anxious look on her face and she couldn’t wait for Teri to end her phone call so they could talk trash about Dwight. “If things change, I might call you up again.” Now she was teasing him. She had no desire or intentions to call Dwight again. At least not for the reason he wanted her to call.
“When?” Dwight asked, now sounding so humble it surprised him more than it did Teri. “You wait too long, you might not ever be able to reach me again,” he warned.
“That’s good to know,” she told him. She hung up and shrugged her shoulders and let out a gentle laugh. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d enjoyed some humor. Nicole looked like she had just swallowed a canary.
“That was cute,” she told Teri. “It’s good to see you laughing and having fun again. You’ve been too serious lately.”
Teri knew where Nicole was going with this conversation so she didn’t waste any time steering it in another direction. “I saw the sample shots for some of the new CD covers. Eric’s getting so good we won’t be able to afford him someday.” Teri flipped a few sheets of paper, not realizing they were upside down. “Now all we have to decide is which covers we want to use for which artists…”
“Can I ask you something?” Nicole didn’t give Teri a chance to respond. “And please don’t get mad…”
“What is it?”
“Do you miss Harrison?”
Teri nodded and blinked hard.
“I’ve seen him at a couple of parties. Two nights ago, I saw him having lunch at The Ivy. I took Eric there for his birthday.”
“It’s good to know he’s getting on with his life.” Teri paused and restacked the same documents she’d already stacked up three times in the last five minutes. “Uh, how’s he doing?” She couldn’t believe her own words. The last thing she wanted was for Nicole or anybody else to know that she was even thinking about how Harrison was doing.
CHAPTER 51
“He was alone,” Nicole stated. “Well, not alone as in by himself. Each time I saw him he was with one of his male buddies, not a female.”
“I didn’t ask you that,” Teri snapped, glad to hear that anyway.
“He asked about you,” Nicole reported. “Every time I see him he asks about you.”
Teri blinked and cleared her throat, which felt like a fist-size lump was stuck in it. “Did you ever get that polycom machine fixed so people who can’t come to the office in person can dial in and participate when we have staff meetings?”
“Fuck that polycom. If you want to change the subject, I know you can come up with something more interesting than that damn thing. And just to let you know, again, yes, I did get it fixed,” Nicole said in a harsh tone of voice, crossing her recently slimmed-down legs. She had on a denim skirt that she had not been able to squeeze into for more than a year. Thanks to the vigorous bedroom workouts that she participated in with Eric, she had lost fifteen pounds.
“Teri, Eric saw Yvette a couple of nights ago,” Nicole said, proceeding with caution. “They talked…”
Hearing this disturbed Teri. She leaned back in her chair and narrowed her eyes as she studied Nicole’s face. She was surprised to see that Nicole didn’t look as disgusted as she usually did every time Yvette’s name came up.
“Oh? And you let him?”
“I didn’t let him do a damn thing. The only person I have the right to let do anything is my son, and that’s only because he’s still a baby. Eric can do whatever he wants to do.”
Teri looked at Nicole out of the corner of her eye. “What does all this mean? What could she possibly have to say that he’d want to hear? Or vice versa?”
“It means that now that enough time has passed and they’ve both cooled off, they decided to call a ‘truce’ so they could tie up a few loose ends. Eric had some concerns about certain things coming back to haunt him if he didn’t take care of them now.” Nicole paused and looked off to the side. She suddenly seemed unbearably uncomfortable.
“Please don’t tell me that heifer is pregnant by Eric,” Teri said, holding her breath.
“I don’t think so. If she is, she hasn’t said anything about it so far. Besides, I think that if she was, she’d get rid of it in a heartbeat. Just like the other three…”
“Shit. How in the hell did a man like Eric get involved with a woman like Yvette in the first place?”
“You’d have to ask him that. Anyway, he wanted to make sure that he left no stone unturned where she’s concerned. Would you believe that they had a joint checking account? And that Yvette was authorized to pick up Akua from school?”
“I guess that once upon a time he didn’t think she was that bad. But when he realized she was, it was too late. That just goes to show you what kind of man Eric is—too lenient for his own good.”
“I don’t think so. He’s just being fair,” Ni
cole defended.
“Whatever you say. I guess you know the man better than I do.” Teri yawned and stretched her arms high above her head. “I suppose if worms can be tolerated, so can the Yvettes of the world.” She let out a loud breath and gave Nicole a pensive look. “Since you’ve said this much, you may as well tell me the rest of what’s on your mind.”
“Teri, Harrison didn’t fuck Yvette.” Nicole paused long enough to let her words sink in. She didn’t like the stunned look on Teri’s face, but she continued talking anyway. “She ran into him at the club that night after Eric had kicked her out. She’d been drinking, Harrison had been drinking, and things got out of hand.”
“Apparently,” Teri scoffed.
“Stop! Let me finish,” Nicole ordered, holding up her hand. “Anyway, she was hurting so bad that night, she wanted to hurt somebody. Anybody. Isn’t that what Miss Cookson called ‘displaced aggression’ in our eleventh-grade sociology class? Harrison just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If it hadn’t been him, she would have latched onto somebody else to torture that night. Harrison’s only crime was his connection to Eric and me. And, as if you didn’t know this already, you are not one of Yvette’s favorite people. She wanted to hurt you and has for a long time.”
“And you and Eric believed Yvette? Why should you believe her now?”
“She has no reason to lie about it now. She accomplished what she set out to do. But she didn’t gain or lose anything. You and Harrison are the losers in this drama.”
“Did we really have anything to lose?” Teri asked, a dumbfounded look on her face. “We tried to make a life together twice and both times we failed. If that’s not a clear indication that it wasn’t meant to be in the first place, I don’t know what is. So I don’t know what you think we lost.”
“You lost each other,” Nicole insisted.
Teri released a groan as she rearranged herself in her seat, sucking in her stomach. She wondered if she’d gained the fifteen pounds that Nicole had lost. She didn’t know why everything seemed to taste so good these days. Last week when she went to purchase a new pair of leather pants, she was horrified when the clerk informed her that the size 10 she had struggled to try on was actually a size 12! In addition to working longer hours, she killed time shopping everywhere from Rodeo Drive to Wal-Mart. This was what her life had come to.