I get down on my back and stare at my empty ceiling. It’s time to sleep. A part of my heart wants to stay and fulfill my wishes to my girl, but I know I must go and pursue what I truly want. There is no way I can look at any other girl the way I look at her. There is one difference between Jasmine and the rest of the beautiful ladies out there.
I see her, and she sees me.
That’s all that matters; I know it. Even if the distance is galaxies apart, I know it. I turn on my side and feel an oddity in my side. Looking through all my pockets, I realize I don’t have my phone.
“Huh, that’s odd. I’m sure it was in my pocket when I left for Jasmine’s,” I mutter silently. Then again, I was excited to spend the afternoon with her, I must have forgotten. I’ll see her one more time tomorrow, to remind her of my promise.
I’ll never let her go, up or down.
Chapter 4 – Jasmine
This walk, this tempting walk to madness is the only shield I have against my river of emotions, and it is beyond swelling. The only love of my life is leaving the one thing he never should- my life.
He promised never to go, never to leave me by, not for one thing or the other. And now he’s gone. I could say forever more, but that would be getting ahead of myself. I know not of the future, but hope is all I have.
The cracks along the paved cement of the sidewalk laugh at me. Not all of them, though. Some, closer to the edges of the white fences console me, one foot after the next stepping on them. I take care not to hurt my soles, given that I prefer walking barefoot. It’s one thing to feel the sand in your feet while having some mind-blowing sex with the man you love ravishing your insides, but it’s another to feel completely empty inside and forlorn thinking about the same man. His house, the last on the block, sits quietly. I see his mom, Serena, talking with him at the doorframe of the main door, and a yellow cab waits upon its guest to fly him away from me. The engine is running.
I’m late.
I walk a bit hastily in regret. I was to be with him all morning, reminding him of the joys of my mouth on his dick, sucking and playing with it till he wouldn’t dare touch another woman. But in my thoughts of procrastination and dread, I left home way too early and aimlessly walked around. Now he’s leaving and I’ll never get to see him again.
He promised, but I know how those college girls come and go. They confuse the mind and alter the heart. Even with him gone over 500 miles away, I can’t help but feel the connection thinning, even now. I wave at them, and he beams. I love how he beams at me. He sees me. He actually sees me. It makes my tummy coil, and my quirm melt.
Spencer runs to me. “Hey Jazz. You made it; finally.”
“The cab is here, huh? Time to go?”
“Don’t say it like goodbye Jasmine. I promised; I’ll be yours all the way over there. There is no other woman meant for me in the entire world, not even the goddesses from the past or the monarchs from the future. I only see you.”
“Please, Spencer, stay. I promise I’ll be the best. I’ll even cook you breakfast every day, and take you out for walks. Please stay.” It’s my last resort. I can’t feel my chest. Only a darkness and void is left in its place. He isn’t here. He feels like he is here, but I know I’m talking to an apparition. I want to touch him back, to kiss him, but all I want to do is kidnap him and make him stay, even if it means in my room.
“Jazz, I love you, but we both know how inedible your delicacies from the kitchen can be. I promise, my love for you can, and will, hold on. All I ask is for you to do the same for me. Please.”
I can’t stop him. It is clear now. I can only wish him well and wait for him. My face is in a wreck, but not as much as my throat and nose. One is running and the other burning. Arms surround me warm, and I sob into them.
“There, there child. I’m still here for you. I’ll take care of you when he’s not here, and we can always melt chocolate and marshmallows and diss his ass. It’ll be our little secret.”
Serena Winters. She’s the woman of the year, the only mother I can call my own even after mine left. Her bosom is a comfort, and I welcome it.
“Ha-ha, just this once I’ll let that go mom. Jazz, you’ll be golden. I promise.”
The blare of a horn, and the yell of an impatient cabbie.
“We have to go Jazz. Though, I would really love it if you came with…it might be fun. Our own little road trip of sorts…”
I turn to him and kiss his cheek softly. “I love you Spencer Winters, never forget that.”
My heel grabs the end of the sidewalk, and my sandals click and clack together in my hand as I walk away. If I go with him I will not come back; this much I know. By the time I’m at the end of the block, about to turn the corner, the rev of the engine and the smell of rubber on the asphalt halt me to realize I may have just made the biggest mistake of my life.
The trees, whole and broken, with branches swaying from one alto to the next tenor, mourn with me. Despondent and torn, my feet find solace together, closely knit to the back of my thighs. The position of peace, he calls it. Ha, more like the position we are all destined to be in, squatting, like an animal when in the lavatories. It’s the one place he promised we would all go to to think and be alone. And right now, all I need is tons of alone time.
Saucy tears flow when least needed. If theses watery markups of pain would have come when dad detained me in the house three years ago for staring at the boys passing by our house, the defiance then would have been something of a tale. Right now all they are is regret.
If only I…
If there are three wrecking words that can split the entire universe that no man, or anything living, should ever utter, I think I just found them.
*
“Honey, what’s wrong?”
Even his voice seems wrong and extra high. The door creaks shut behind me, and my feet blister at the chill running through the old polished floors up my whined spine. He is atop the kitchen counter, brewing some of his overly expensive coffee, muttering to himself. Most probably he wonders where I have been, given my sorry state of dress. In my blight, I ran.
Faster than I ever have before, I took off into the outer town limits and never stopped. I needed a square of solitude, a mushroom cloud of space to take it all out. It took me hours to get to the Cove, the one place that is always special to us.
Us.
The lighter than air kisses he shared with me, the stories he told me through his eyes as he showed me the stars and their mother sky, all faded through the wisp of an imagination. I thought, even as I saw the narrow road from whence he went a few hours ago, that we were forever. How can we be forever if all I can feel is this?
“It’s him isn’t it? That boy,” he begins, setting down his largely small cup of coffee. He always uses the wrong tools for the job, just as he is now. “He left you didn’t he?”
“Don’t talk about him like that dad,” I whimper, looking away from the window, where the leaves are falling from our maple tree out back and into the green childlike grass on the moor. The field is expansive, enough for a party of ten for a grad party or wedding eng…this isn’t worth thinking about. I look back to him, the man who sired me, with no remorse or feeling for the woman I am becoming. Is he so blind that he fails to see I am growing, emerging, about to fly, that all he can see is this perfect little girl that his wife left him? Even his beard, his oh-so-glorious-spiting-image-on-mafia-boss-like salt and pepper kind, fuels a glitch of hate in my heart for him. Mom did herself a favor for leaving him.
“I know you think you-”
“If all you’re going to do is tarnish what I have with Spencer, then shut up dad.”
He stares silently. Never have I before come at him like that, with no skid marks on the grit. I hold onto the table by the low window. It’s one of mom’s old antiques that she loved collecting, from an old French revolution from ages back. I saw pictures of her once when I was a child, and found pieces of puzzles hidden within its drawers. I loved pla
ying with them, until he took them away, burned her pictures and left me the charred memory of a mourning child. Mourning twice, it seems. Today must be my day.
“I’m sorry Jasmine, but what the hell did you think you were going to do with that boy? Tell me. Were you even conceiving the idea of marrying him?”
Oh the spite, the lust with his self-righteous zeal for Spencer; it oozes like a festering pustule of pus from his incredulously insane mouth.
“YES! Is that what you want to hear, dad? Yes! That I wanted to marry him? Of course you old fool! Who else? Who else did you think I want to spend the rest of my life with? YOU?”
I can’t see him. My eyes are clouded with fear and judgment. My knees collapse, and my nose runs. It is a funny thing, the heat within a pierced living soul. Once it’s been stoked by the grate it can’t be stopped until it’s all gone. The tears run true and fair, till I feel thirsty.
“Jasmine…listen,” he starts, setting down his ego just for a second before pounding the floor with his heavy and ancient footsteps, glazed with his foolish-looking slippers. “I miss your mother more than you do. Hey, just listen okay?”
I hold my tongue amid the want to protest. My nose steers clear of him, to avoid the smell of nicotine and special choice herbs he enjoys smoking, and so do my eyes, to shelter my weakness from him. We are not yet there, at the place, the nirvana, the Amsterdam of comfort where we can call each other father and daughter. Not yet, and maybe not ever in my books, but listen, I can.
“You were young. Very innocent with the dolls you played with and the birds in your hand, your mother cared for you. When we met, all those years ago, we were just like you and that putrid echo of a man,” my scowl finds his aging eyes, “okay, I won’t go that far. Still, we had something…more. It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was a friendship transcended. We knew each other for years before we could even begin going out on dates to hold hands. It was long before we had you, and what a blessing you bundled in us.
Deep inside her, we knew. She didn’t have much time left. The ovarian cancer had taken a really hard hit during your pregnancy, and she only had a few months to live, or so Dr. Gleeman prophesied. It was futile, trying to raise you, but she did. Oh, she did. Not one day passed without your mouth on her teat, and never did she fail to see you, even if she was bedridden from your inception.”
He holds his face bravely with the size of his jaws, feigning strength. The wetness proves to me he is only human. It’s the onset of a conversation we have never shared, never experienced, never felt with the waves of emotion that carry and sweep to the other side with no victory nor loss. I have never seen him cry.
“When she…died,” this leaves painfully, and I am surprised my hand is on his. Veiny, red, and strong it is, “she left a hole in my heart you could not fill. She was my first Jasmine; my first love that always came before anything else. And because of a silly pregnancy she was gone.”
The iciness in his last words cut through me with a rough edge through salty butter. He….I…thought…
“You think because of a measly heart-to-heart we’re going to be good? You really do live in your own little world, don’t you girl?”
“What?” I’m on the floor, fondling my fingers nervously. I can’t even tell if they are mine. It’s the mirror at the end of his study that gives me the spectacularly dim view of a version of me that I do not know, nor own. She looks at me, the world, from her cropped hair and messy face, with the surge of hope that it’s all going to be alright. But deep in our hearts, somewhere in that limbo of paralysis, where there is no gain but pure pain, we know it’s a lie.
He wipes his face with a kerchief from his pants and lays it down on the table. It is cold in here, and not the AC kind. Giving hope to a child who has never seen it in years from the one person she has been hoping to get it from, and then ripping it away like a Band-Aid to let the springs of crushed confetti-like joy stream out in bursts…
We were riding a bike with my dolls at the back. I was going to see mommy, or at a birthday party, the memory is vague. The one thing that is clear is the smile I had on my face then. I can still, if my eyes are closed and the world silent, feel the muscles crushed together in my cheeks and the marrow drained from my blood. Buddy, my red haired guitar remake of Elvis, was by my right hand, smiling at the sun and leaves falling and joining their family on the ground for a new day. It was early morning, and I had just run away from something.
In my pockets, I believe I had dad’s smoking pipe. He had affection for it, not sentimentality, but possessiveness about it, like it was a living thing. I was running from his chasing strides, his long chasing strides that promised a spanking. I was riding my bike to go and show off the pipe to someone, I remember not to whom. In my head, I thought we were playing a game, a rough game that stretched far beyond our house hidden in the meadow. I felt that if he caught me, he would take me out for ice cream and talk to me about whispers and shadows. He finally caught the ends of my flying dress and hoisted me in the air. It was painful and embarrassing having myself spanked in the street like a stray. Confusion was wrought and I was lost. The look on his face when he finally got done with me…I can never forget it. It’s the same face he wears now.
“Now that your beloved is gone and gone for good, it’s time to discuss the matters of your future. I would have preferred it if you had a shower and a change of clothes, but no matter. Here we are,” he utters, quite somber and dark like an emissary of death come to collect. But before collection, a taunt would do him some chuckles first.
“Dad, how could you do this?”
“Do what honey? Tell you about your mother to shut you up and make you listen to reason? Of course I would honey, I made you.”
“I see…”
Time…why can’t she be turned? If only my existence could have happened on another street, to another couple that had both of them alive, this sad sop of a man wouldn’t be here belittling me like an object he bought at the antique store for sport. Then again, who else would handle him? A pet? He’d burn it when the barks got too loud at night. All happens for a reason. Spencer and I had a session on Buddha online once, and I think we got the message.
“What future, oh so gracious lord?” I ask, standing up in renewed strength, focusing on his eyes to glimpse at his fading soul. He beams, warming at the sudden reception given.
“That’s more like it Jasmine! Regard your father with cynicism but adoration and respect,” he’s why I hate church and all affiliations with a ‘Master’, “and listen to what your loving provider has to say. You’re not going to college.”
If a battlefield could be filled with glass casing for every lie or truth that Harvey Turner told me, I would shatter all of it. His thieving tongue, his corrupt manner of life, and his false hip; all are the bane of me. Halfway through my doubt and disbelief, I kinda expected this of him. With Spencer halfway across the county by nightfall, I won’t have anyone to protect me from him. Not even Serena. For a mad man to lead you anywhere you want, you have to make him believe he is driving. It’s a quote I read or heard somewhere, one of great courage and silence that hits me hard when I hear those five words that mean the end.
You’re not going to college.
The end of everything. I stand still, clenching my thumbs tightly till the color inside goes numb. I wait for his madness to ensue.
“No remark? Just silence from the girl with a thousand words? What more can I say, I must have an impact on that lazy promiscuous tongue of yours.”
I burn, but let the flames lick hard and slow.
“Now then, you’re an adult of course. And I respect the absolute obliviousness of the fact. You are still under my roof, eating my food, using up my money. And don’t think for one moment I forget how you used up my money to help those ingrates of a family you so love. You have no respect for hard work, nor do you take into account the pressure I have had to endure getting all those remarks from the neighbors down at the town about
you and Poor Boy. You think that he will give you anything in this life? Do you? Jasmine, my dearest naïve, you have no idea what life is out there. The hunger, the anger, the desolation upon all their faces deep in the black in those streets is enough to make the stuff of nightmares. You think just because of love, because he promised you the end of the earth and most probably heaven too, that he can go to college, study, and never come back for you in all that time only to resume your lives as lovers? Oh bloody yes, I know! This is my house remember?”
The cameras. He must have had one, or several, installed in my room way before he had the rest of the house wired. I don’t even feel the shame. I’m dealing with the nefarious urge to use a knife, or my nails, on him. I listen on, waiting for the chance to spew the poison.
“There is no such thing as love, Jasmine. I know it. Your mother knew it, and even the dogs know it. It’s all about causality and continuance of or race, you see? Without love we would never reproduce and keep the lands sated of walking flesh. No, not really. The feeling you have, that anguish to be with someone, that pain, that yearning, that love, it’s all a farce. Life would be so much better without it. It took me years to understand that philosophy, years. If only your dearest mother and I had been platonic friends, she wouldn’t have died the horrible way she did. I would still be taking her flowers to breathe in and honor, or at the movies to throw popcorn at the screen, or maybe even be book buddies. But because of that stupid love, we had you. And she died. I lost my best friend because of you. You, an ingrate that doesn’t even…ha! No matter.
You’re not going to college because I have found someone for you. Someone who can build your life from down the bottomless pits where your charisma and energy lie wasted and abused, to the top where you will find me and other enlightened souls. Someone for you to marry.”
Triple Pass: An MFMM Reverse Harem Romance Page 37