My own mother hadn’t chosen me over the throng of men she’d paraded through our old apartment in Baton Rouge. Many times, I’d tried to ignore the sounds coming out of her bedroom when I was a kid, but they would still permeate the old wooden walls of the subpar, two-bedroom rat hole. If they weren’t sounds that a four-year old wasn’t supposed to hear, they were the sounds of her begging and pleading for these lowlifes to stay with her instead of going home to their wives.
Then, there was John Ezra.
John Ezra was a special kind of dick. He was a portly man despite his massive height — massive to a kid, at least. He had dark brown hair and dark, almost black eyes. I later learned that he’d lived in Texas, which was why his skin always seemed to carry an orange tint. There’d also been a certain level of malevolence to his expression — a permanent scowl that I don’t know how my mother could have ever found attractive.
John was the only man that I’d ever seen hit my mother. There were times that I’d caught a healing bruise on her cheekbone or a knuckle imprint on her legs, but John had whipped the butt of a pistol across my mother’s face right in front of me after we came home from my first day of kindergarten.
I never forgot the feeling of terror from seeing my mother fall to the floor as I’d stood there with my pet jellyfish — which was really a plastic bag in a soda bottle filled with blue colored water — between my trembling hands. She’d immediately sent me to my room while they continued a loud argument that had brought two uniformed officers to our door later that afternoon.
Later that night, as though he’d known I wouldn’t be able to safely fall asleep, John tugged open my bedroom door and stood glaring at me in the doorway. The light from the kitchen behind him had augmented his monstrous features.
I’d pulled my knees up to my chest and cowered under the thin sheets. Then, he’d walked over to my wall where there’d been a flaking strip of green wallpaper, peeled the strip just a little leaving a patch of an ugly neutral color peeking through, and trudged out. For weeks after that, he did the same thing — peel a little bit of the wallpaper until the end result was a gaping hole. While I never understood his tactic, it was an intimidation strategy that had worked so well that I’d unlearned how to sleep through the night without wetting my bed.
After a while, I confessed to my mother about what he was doing and how much I didn’t like him. She’d responded with a distorted, “It doesn’t mean anything,” then she’d remained with him, off and on, for the next five months. A bit after that, I was placed in my grandfather’s care.
Although I’d told Alexandra that my mother had sent me to New Orleans, after her arrest, I became a ward of the state and my grandfather had been the only family member around to willingly take me in.
Alexandra deciding to be with me over everything else was the first bit of gauze on that old wound. She’d gotten me to go from a man who didn’t really want anyone in his life, an “if it happens, it happens” kind of guy, to a man that couldn’t imagine a life without her.
Knuckles tapping against my window made me realize that I’d been sitting with the car idling for the past several minutes. I looked up to see Kellen cupping his hands around his eyes with his face pressed against the tint. I cut the engine and pushed open the door.
“Go ahead and leave your fingerprints on my window,” I warned. “You’re giving me all the forensics I need.”
He laughed and in that laugh alone, I knew that he’d met someone in Atlanta. He’d only been there a few weeks, but Kellen meeting someone was an extremely easy feat. We’d known each other since our undergraduate molecular biology days at Johns Hopkins, which meant that we often ended up in DC on one of our rare free weekends. Between me, him, and a few other mutual friends, the women were easy pickings.
On one specific night, a female modeling agent had made the mistake of telling him that he reminded her of some handsome actor from a Spanish telenovela. His ego grew so large that night that we could have probably flown back to Baltimore using his head as a hot-air balloon. But, it all ended up working out in the end as she’d offered him a contract, and he spent the next several years taking so many gigs that we both left medical school with zero debt. Unfortunately, good looks, money, and that easy-to-win-over heart of his was another bad combination on his part.
“You don’t want to frame me with the dirt I’ve got on you,” he teased. “Dirt that I’m pretty sure you forgot during several alcoholic blackouts.”
A car horn blared behind us, and we moved out of the way so that Tayler could pull into the spot next to mine. Her slim, curly dreadlocks were in another one of her famous buns piled on her head and adorned by a colorful headband. She was beautiful, extremely beautiful, but she never gave it a passing thought.
Tayler and I initially met in medical school when she’d stolen both mine and Kellen’s attention from our textbooks walking into the Eisenhower Library. She had an amazing reddish-brown complexion that reminded me of a California redwood, and which came from a mixture of her mother’s Ghanaian and her father’s Cuban heritage. Her eyes were the same color as mine, a killer combination when you added their oval shape and her dark lashes, and she’d sported locs for as long as we’ve known her although she never let them grow longer than the middle of her back. As she stepped out the car, I thought about how much I couldn’t wait for Alexandra to meet both her and Kellen.
“Of course you two would be standing in the middle of a parking spot on a busy Saturday evening,” she joked, wrapping me up in a hug. “How are you guys doing?”
“Starving,” Kellen answered.
She eyed him. “What’s her name?”
“What’s whose name?”
“The woman that you’ve fallen in love with in Atlanta.”
He grinned sheepishly and glanced away. Whoever this woman was, she had him by the balls.
“Let’s get inside,” he said, turning towards the restaurant. Tayler and I exchanged glances, laughed, and followed him.
I’d brought Alexandra up in the middle of our conversation three times already; my friends were keeping count. I also need to mention that we were still working on appetizers so it wasn’t as though I’d only brought her up three times during the course of our entire dinner.
“We’ll stop picking on you if you just tell us about her,” Tayler said, scrunching her nose in distaste as Kellen popped calamari into his mouth.
“There’s nothing to say,” I lied, a smile winning out against my battle to keep a serious expression.
“Oh my god, she even has you doing the shy smile?” She pinched my cheek and I pulled away, but the smile didn’t die.
“At least tell us her actual name,” she added, sticking her fork into the shrimp remoulade that we shared. “Have we met this Alle? Have you ever talked about her before?”
“You guys haven’t met her,” I answered. “And I might have talked about her once or twice.”
Kellen chewed on another piece of his fried squid. “Alexandra Miller.”
My head popped up. “How did you know that?”
“I met her.” He turned to Tayler. “Once, when I stopped by his office, we were getting ready to leave to play ball at the park nearby, but then he told me that he had to make sure to say good night to a woman named Alexandra.”
“How the hell do you remember that?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure that was nearly a year ago.”
“Because the woman is beautiful.”
“And you remember her because of that?”
“That and the fact that I came back later to try to get her number.”
I eyed him. “And what happened?”
“Nothing, nothing,” he asserted. “She told me that she had a boyfriend. Some guy in politics. So, I backed off.”
There was the caveat. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to tell my friends, my good friends, that the boyfriend wasn’t entirely out of the picture. Well, yet.
“So, what happened with him?” Tayler asked, leaning b
ack as the server appeared with our orders. She’d ordered Atlantic lobster-tails with butter on the side while Kellen and I had opted for the Angus porterhouse steaks.
I answered with a succinct, “Well…” and then shrugged as I cut into my piece of meat. Kellen’s mouth fell open and Tayler folded her arms. The expression on her face reminded me of the time she’d scolded Kellen and I like children for roughhousing in one of the fountains on campus after board exams before jumping in herself. It was a look that I was pretty sure she’d gotten from her mother dozens of times as a child.
She opened her mouth to begin her lecture, but then looked to the ceiling before slowly letting her arms fall. “Ethan, how do you feel about her?” she asked.
Only a woman knew how to ask a question that could make a man feel uncomfortable and eager to talk at the same time. It was one of the upsides of having a close female friend — you could tell her stuff that your guy friends would laugh off or make fun of you about.
When I didn’t answer, Kellen’s mouth gaped even wider. “Fuck…you can’t be not saying what I think you’re not saying, E.”
“What am I missing?” Tayler asked. “What are you not saying…hold on. Wait, you can’t be not saying that you love her?”
I stuffed my face with a forkful of sautéed mushrooms.
“Oh my God!” Her face lit up. “You’re in love with her!”
They both then started laughing and cheering so loudly that I looked around for the member of the restaurant’s staff that would come and kick us out.
Tayler leaned over and wrapped an arm around me, and I playfully shrugged her off even though that smile had returned again. I couldn’t believe that this was me, grinning like a fool over some woman, but I didn’t want it to be any different. This was the first time in my life that I’d ever associated that four-letter word with someone outside of my friends. I’d never even said it to my mother, nor her to me.
Tayler waved down a server. “Can you bring us a round of Long Islands please? We just found out that we have something to celebrate.”
The woman’s eyes lit up. “Oh really? What’s that?”
“Our best friend is finally in love,” Kellen replied. “And it only took him four centuries.”
The woman giggled and walked off with our drink order. I remained quiet to give them a chance to calm down, and to prepare myself for the barrage of questions that were sure to follow.
“I never thought I’d see the day,” Kellen said. “But, I’m happy for you, E. Love is a beautiful thing. You two make fun of me about it, all the damn time, but finding somebody who feels the same way about you that you do about them isn’t as common as you’d think. I firmly believe in the concept of kismet — that you can be fated to someone. That’s why in some instances, when you thought you couldn’t love someone more than the last, you wind up falling into a connection so deep that it leaves you feeling as though you’ve lost some of your God-given sanity.”
Tayler darted an index finger at him. “We’ll get to your lady friend later.”
The heat from his embarrassment could have melted the polar ice caps.
“How does Alexandra feel about you?” she asked.
“Honestly, I’m not exactly sure how she feels,” I replied, realizing for the first time that I didn’t know if Alexandra’s feelings for me ran as deep as mine did for her, nor did I care.
Tayler and Kellen remained silent, most likely waiting for me to justify why I’d overstepped what I’d once held as a solid boundary.
“But, her relationship is shit and he’s an asshole,” I added. “He, as well as her parents, have certain expectations about how women should act and how she should be.”
“Rich?” Kellen asked.
“Loaded. Both families. You know General James Miller? The former Defense Secretary of the United States?”
“Oh shit, that’s his daughter, isn’t it?”
“If that’s the case, I get it,” Tayler answered. “The way he and his wife carry themselves is enough for me to believe that they grew up in a household where even their rules had rules.”
“They did,” I confirmed. “But, here’s the thing. She told me that she’s willing to risk all of that, the possibility that they might threaten to disown her…for me.”
Tayler’s eyes filled and for the life of me, I didn’t understand how women could burst into tears even when they weren’t upset.
Her grin stretched from our table to the other side of the room. “To me, it sounds like she feels the same way about you,” she declared. “I’m so happy for you, Ethan.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I waved away her words even though I was beaming on the inside. “But, on to other things.” I took a bite of steak and we both turned to face Kellen. “Who’s your lady friend and when’s the wedding?”
He ran his fingers through his hair, lowered his eyes, and grinned.
-----
Alexandra
A typical weekend for Roderick and I usually consisted of him going on a trip out of town, attending a formal event to which I was occasionally invited, or us spending a day around the house doing everything except talking to each other. This weekend, after my two-hour drive back from Eli’s ribbon cutting in Baton Rouge, I’d planned to tell him about me and Ethan. Yet, the minute I walked through the front door, he announced that he wanted to learn how to samba.
Roderick was a Viennese Waltz and maybe Argentine Tango type of guy, but he’d walked into the foyer with a smile on his face and saying that he had a surprise for me in the living room. The surprise turned out to be a dark-haired, olive-skinned woman from Colombia with a smile like Sofia Vergara and hips like Shakira. She was dressed in a tight-fitting single-strapped red dress with curves that could give anyone vertigo. Her heels were high, her calves taut, and her disposition warm and inviting. Her name was Claudia, and she was a professional ballroom dance instructor.
“Are you surprised?” he asked with a look in his eyes that I’d never seen before. “Do you like my surprise?”
“What are we doing, exactly?” I asked.
“We’re going to learn how to samba.” He did a small movement with his hips that could have helped out a lot in the bedroom years ago. “Then the cha-cha, the paso doble, and the…rumba. Right Claudia?”
“Right,” she answered with a melodic, Spanish accent.
A nervous and slightly uneasy titter escaped my lips. “Yes, but why?”
He glided over to me and leaned close to where only I could hear. “You’ve been different, Alexandra. You have been going missing, working late many nights, and we haven’t made love in ages. I was upset, thinking that you were pulling away from me, but then I realized that it was because of my campaign. I was putting so much time and energy into it that I forgot that you hold the number one position in my life. So,” he motioned to Claudia, “I figured that we could have some fun for once.”
Ever have one of those moments where you feel even lower than the first rung on a step ladder? That was how I felt. I could spin it any way I wanted to, even add in the way I felt about Ethan, but that didn’t excuse the fact that I was a cheater. I’d stepped outside of my relationship, time and time again, and had even gone as far as to fall in love with someone that was not the man with whom I’d shared a home and life for the past two years.
“Rick, we have to talk ab—”
“Later.” He grabbed me by the arm, twirled me around, and pulled me into his chest. “First, let’s dance. She charges by the hour and doesn’t come cheap.”
Then he smiled in a way that I’d also never seen — a teenaged-boyish lopsided grin — and I gave in. Truth be told, I wasn’t ready to have the Ethan conversation anyhow. Ethan had offered to be with me when I made my “announcement,” to Roderick, but I’d reassured him that this was something that I had to do on my own. Now, ending things with Roderick no longer seemed as simple as they’d appeared in my head.
We spent the rest of the afternoon learning footwork, ho
w to move our hips in time to the motion of our feet, the difference between samba steps for men and women, and she even threw in some sexy arm styling for me that she’d claimed was sure to “relight” the fire in our bedroom. Roderick had looked at me, winked, and then sent me a Groucho Marx eyebrow wiggle. He was a completely different person.
“So, last one,” Claudia said, stealing my attention from Roderick’s sudden onset of playfulness. “Your turn, Alexandra.”
I looked down at my feet as though expecting them to begin moving on their own. “My turn to…?”
Roderick smiled, the corners of his eyes wrinkling slightly. He walked over, drew my body to his, and took my hands. “It’s our turn to show her what we’ve learned.”
Claudia turned on an upbeat rhythm and we danced around the living room with enough footwork to potentially scuff the old hardwood floors. Roderick laughed and dipped his hands to my hips. I found myself laughing along and straddling the dangerous line between faking my enjoyment and having a genuinely good time.
When we were done with our set, Claudia left amidst a barrage of hugs and thank yous, and Roderick scheduled for her to return the following week. He then retreated to the couch, fell into it, and as I went to plop down in the other corner, he pulled me onto his lap. I automatically cringed because I was sweaty, but he touched his lips to my chest right in the middle of the moisture and pulled back without a grimace or gag.
“Can I say something?” I asked.
“Of course, Buttercup.”
I cringed a second time. “Did you get really good news?”
He tossed back his head and laughed. “Because I was so light on my feet earlier? Not exactly, my love.”
Fated: An Alpha Male Romance Page 11