Lust & Loyalty

by Shelly Ellis

  He then hung up.

  Terrence dressed, ate breakfast, and waited for his phone to ring, but it didn’t. Two hours later, he called her again, only to get her voice message yet again.

  “C. J., please call me back!” he said to her voice mail. “I’m sorry, baby! I’ll . . . I’ll make it up to you, but just . . . just talk to me, okay?”

  He then sent her a text with the same message.

  But she didn’t call or text him back by that evening as he’d hoped. She didn’t call him back the next day, either, or the day after that. She never called him back.

  Chapter 12

  Dante

  “Need any help getting in, fella?” the chartered car driver asked, peering at Dante in the reflection of his review mirror. He had just pulled up to the curb in front of Dante’s building, parking under one of the streetlamps that filled the car compartment with its misty glow. “I know you just left the hospital. If you need help, I can hop out and—”

  “Did I say I needed any fucking help?” Dante spat in a hoarse voice before shoving open the sedan’s door. He climbed out of the car, dragging behind him a plastic bag filled with the rattling bottles of pills he had to take daily thanks to the bullet that went through his side: antibiotics, an anti-inflammatory, and painkillers. When he stepped onto the sidewalk with his bag in tow and shot to his feet, he immediately winced from the pain.

  The doctors had told him he would need some assistance, someone to watch over him and help him with his day-to-day tasks while he recovered. He’d scoffed at their suggestion. Dante Turner had never needed anyone in his life to help him, not since he was in diapers. Why the hell should he start now? But he did wonder how he was going to make it up the flight of stairs at the entrance of his condo building with this lingering pain, let alone to and from work every day. He had assured the partners at his law firm that he would return in a matter of weeks. They were expecting him back in the office with a shit-eating grin, ready to deal and get those billable hours. He would have to make it work; he had no other choice. Thank God for the pills! Thank God for the vengeance that spurred him on, that made him refuse to give up until he saw that bitch pay for what she’d done to him.

  Dante slammed the car door shut behind him before trudging to the concrete stairs leading to the building’s entrance.

  He hadn’t known she had it in her to do something so low, so down and dirty. He had known Renee—his former partner in crime, lover, and the daughter of the woman he had talked into suing Terrence Murdoch—was angry at him. The last time he had seen her, she had been furious when he told her she was delusional to think he had feelings for her that went beyond the bedroom, that he had just been using her to get to her mother. But she didn’t have to shoot him for it. She didn’t have to try to kill him!

  Thankfully, she hadn’t succeeded. Dante wasn’t dead, but he was definitely furious. And he was going to make her pay.

  He closed his eyes with relief as he climbed the last stair before shoving the exterior door open. He walked down the short hallway to the elevator and pressed the up button to take him to his floor. The button didn’t light up. He pressed it again, jabbing his finger onto the button until his nail bed started to hurt.

  “Come on! Come on!” he shouted.

  “Oh, the elevator’s broken, honey,” said a woman wearing dark sunglasses. She was carrying a Yorkshire terrier with a pink bow on its head in her arms as she walked by Dante. “It’s been broken all day. They put in a call to have it fixed, but they probably won’t get to it until the morning,” she explained as she headed for one of the condos down the hall while pulling out a set of keys.

  “Shit,” Dante muttered before giving one last longing glance at the elevator’s metal doors. He then turned and headed to the stairwell to make the long climb up six flights of stairs to his home.

  He had already tried to tell the cops that Renee was the one that had shot him—even if they hadn’t understood what he was saying.

  Soon after Dante had awoken, a detective with a receding hairline and ruddy face had waltzed into his hospital room, looking more eager than a shopper at a Black Friday sale to talk to Dante.

  “We want to bring the person who shot you to justice,” Detective Morris had said after pulling up a chair close to Dante’s hospital bed. “We want to put them behind bars, Mr. Turner, before something happens to you again. But we need your help. Do you remember who shot you?”

  Dante had vigorously nodded, or at least he had tried to. The sedatives had been still in his system, making him listless. The breathing tube had been removed, but it had left his throat feeling raw and dry. His voice was little more than a raspy whisper.

  “Who was it?” the detective had asked, leaning forward eagerly.

  “Re-Renee,” Dante had whispered. “Renee . . . Upton.”

  The detective had squinted his gray eyes at him. “I’m sorry. I’m having a hard time hearing you, Mr. Turner. What did you say?”

  “Renee!” Dante had said again. “Renee! Renee!”

  The detective had shaken his head. “I’m not understanding you.”

  Dante had watched as the detective reached into his pocket and pulled out a small notepad and ballpoint pen. The detective had flipped the notepad open.

  “Can you write it down, maybe?” he had asked, holding out both the pad and pen to Dante.

  Dante tried to reach for them, but his hand shook too badly to grab the pen, let alone hold it and write with it. His arm was still too weak. His hand had collapsed back to the bed and he had closed his eyes, overwhelmed.

  “It’s fine. It’s fine!” the detective had said, though he had looked equally disappointed. He had pushed himself up from his chair. “Let me give you some time to get back on your feet, to get yourself together. When you’re ready to talk, you can tell me everything,” he had said before reaching into his suit jacket again and setting a business card on Dante’s hospital tray.

  It had been three days since, and Dante still carried the detective’s card. He planned to call Detective Morris tomorrow morning, right after he had a good night’s sleep in his own bed. Then he would have a long conversation with the detective. If his voice failed him again, he’d resort to damn sign language if he had to! He would do whatever he had to do to make sure Renee suffered.

  Dante mounted yet another landing and almost cried in frustration when he saw the number four on the metal door in front of him.

  You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!

  He had two whole floors to climb. He didn’t think he could make it.

  Dante gripped the metal railing to steady himself, blowing air out of his clenched teeth in sharp bursts. He was clammy with sweat. The pain in his side was horrific. He shoved his free hand into his plastic bag and yanked out a bottle of OxyContin. He popped open the lid and swallowed one of the pills, then another, even though he had already taken one a few hours earlier. He slumped down on the floor next to the door and waited for the painkillers to take effect. After twenty minutes of grimacing and restraining the urge to scream, he finally felt the OxyContin start to kick in. The searing hot pain abated and Dante released a shaky breath. He pushed himself to his feet and slowly started to trudge up the stairs again.

  “Just how long are we supposed to wait, goddammit?” a male voice whispered above Dante as he stepped onto the fifth floor landing.

  “It shouldn’t be too much longer. She said he was supposed to get out today. She’s tight with one of the nurses there,” another man replied.

  Dante paused at the sound of phantom voices in the stairwell on the floor above him. He peered up to find two men waiting near the sixth floor door. Their shadows fell over him.

  “But we can’t wait here all damn night,” one of the men spat—a big dark-skinned dude with broad shoulders. “I don’t care how fuckin’ much she payin’ or how good that pussy is!”

  “Ssssh! Be quiet,” the other one said. He was shorter, slighter in build, and had dreadlocks.
His back was facing Dante.

  “I ain’t gotta be quiet! Ain’t nobody up here! Nobody’s been up here in two damn hours! And I’m not waiting here forever.”

  “Just give it another hour. We took care of the elevator, didn’t we? That nigga lives on the sixth floor. The stairs are the only way he can get up here. He has to come this way. Just chill!”

  As Dante listened, he frowned, feeling the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

  “We should’ve did that shit outside like I told you,” the bigger one said, crossing his arms over his barrel chest and shaking his head. “We could’ve just waited for him to walk up to the door and taken care of it then. Now we just standing around here like some—”

  “We couldn’t do it outside. We’d get caught! There’s too many people around out there! Shit, I almost got caught when I tried to do it at that hospital. I could’ve gotten arrested. I’m on parole. I’m not doing that shit again!”

  Dante blinked. At the hospital? He stared up at the men, almost feeling faint.

  They’re here for me, he finally realized.

  “Well, I’m telling you one thing, Renee better hook a nigga up when we finally kill this motherfucka! No more dick teasin’. I want my money and I want that pussy!”

  The smaller one sucked his teeth. “You’re gonna get it, man. Just be patient! Goddamn! You act like you never had a piece of ass before!”

  The bitch is still trying to kill me, Dante thought with disbelief. And it looked like Renee wouldn’t stop until he was dead. She had actually put a hit out on him. She had guys waiting for him in his own damn building to take him out. But it made sense, he guessed. He knew she was the one who pulled the trigger. Renee knew if he survived the gunshot that he would tell the cops what had happened, so she made it her mission to make sure he didn’t survive.

  Dante turned and crept back down the stairs, careful not to make too much noise and attract the attention of the two hired thugs on the floor above him.

  When he reached the first floor, he raced out the door and down the flight of concrete steps to the sidewalk below, hoping to get as far away from the building as possible. He gave a paranoid glance around his shoulders to make sure he wasn’t being followed, that some other thug wasn’t lurking in the shadows waiting to shoot him.

  He then headed down the block in a direction unknown, officially on the run.

  Chapter 13

  C. J.

  The audience erupted into applause, followed by a few shouts of “Hallelujah!” and “Amen!”, shaking C. J. from the listless daze she had been stuck in for the past twenty minutes. She raised her gaze from her lap and clapped along with the crowd, although she had no idea why they were all applauding.

  Her father stood at the podium and resumed his speech. She sat in the front row between her mother and brother, pretending to listen. She tried valiantly to concentrate on what her father was saying, but she couldn’t. Her thoughts felt weighed down by muck.

  C. J. heard her phone buzz, alerting her to a new voice mail. She glanced at the phone screen and saw that it was another message from Terrence. That would make the eleventh message in the past four days and the fourth today—he was getting desperate. She dropped her phone back into her purse, took a deep breath, and tried to focus yet again on what her father was saying, but her efforts faltered when her phone buzzed again five minutes later.

  Damn it, Terry! Will you leave me alone?

  Her mother frowned under her wide-brimmed, fur-trimmed hat and squinted at her.

  “Is that your phone buzzing like a bee?” the older woman whispered.

  C. J. frantically dug back into her purse.

  “Your father is speaking, Courtney,” her mother said, scowling at her. “Would you turn that thing off?”

  “I’m trying to, Mama,” she muttered, before finally retrieving her phone. She tapped a few buttons to place the ringer and notifications on mute.

  “Well, who’s calling you anyway?” her mother asked, leaning over her shoulder and nosily peering down at the phone’s glass screen. She wrinkled her button nose. “Who in the world is Terrence?”

  “Nobody,” C. J. snapped, covering the screen with her hand.

  Her mother raised her eyebrows at C. J.’s dismissive tone.

  “I mean . . . I mean it’s no one that you know,” C. J. whispered.

  And Terrence wouldn’t be someone her mother would get to know, even though C. J. had been prepping for the day when she would eventually introduce him to her family. Thanks to Terrence breaking up with her, it looked like that day would never come.

  The older woman looked suspicious, but, thankfully, didn’t say anything more. She instead returned her attention to the stage.

  Meanwhile, C. J. slowly removed her hand and stared down at Terrence’s name, at those eight white letters, and fought the overwhelming urge to excuse herself, disappear into the hallway, and finally call him back. But she couldn’t call him back, not after what he had said to her. Instead, she sighed and dropped her phone back into her purse, blinking back the tears that had been hovering close to spilling over all day, maybe all week.

  What had hurt the most wasn’t that he had said the only thing they had now was sex, or that it was obvious she felt nothing for him anymore. It wasn’t even his accusation about her hooking up with Shaun Clancy that left her wounded. It was the truth behind his words that she still found it hard to recover from.

  Terrence could get downright toxic when he was hurt. She had seen it before; it was his worst trait. But he didn’t lie when he got that way. It was like he would take a sip of truth serum and couldn’t help blurting out everything he felt, everything he had been secretly thinking all along. And she’d had no idea he felt that way, that he thought those things about her. She’d been so in love with him, so eager to make it work. She had even envisioned marrying him one day! C. J. had thought they had an almost perfect relationship, that he understood her better than anyone else. But what did she know about love, about intimacy? She had only been in one serious relationship prior, and that “romance” had been orchestrated by her own father. She’d had nothing to go by when she hooked up with Terrence, and her inexperience and delusions now left her feeling dumb and utterly humiliated.

  I was so stupid!

  C. J. sniffed, starting to tear up again. Dammit, she thought, frustrated at her own emotions. She’d be damned if she’d cry over him, but it looked like that was exactly what she was doing.

  She grabbed her purse to search for a Kleenex, only to come up empty. She sniffed again and wiped at her eyes with her hands, feeling the tears spilling over now. She looked crazy, like a loon, with her smeared mascara and puffy face. Her brother glanced at her in annoyance.

  “What are you doing?” he snapped. “Why the hell are you crying?

  She shook her head then closed her eyes, feeling the tears come down harder. She rose to her feet, making her mother and brother stare up at her in confusion.

  “Excuse me,” she whispered, rushing down the row and to the exit doors before they had to chance to ask her where she was going. All the while she heard her father’s rumbling voice behind her.

  Stupid. I was so stupid. So stupid!

  The chanting only stopped when she burst through the metal doors and ran smack-dab into Shaun, colliding with his chest and getting a face full of his gray suit jacket.

  “Hey now!” he shouted with a laugh. But his laughter tapered off when he saw her face. “Hey, are you okay?”

  She quickly nodded and forced a smile. “I’m . . . I’m fine. I just . . . I think I’m catching a cold or maybe a stomach bug. I . . . I should head home.”

  Instead of letting her go, his hold tightened around her shoulders. “I can drive you if you aren’t feeling well.”

  She stepped out of his embrace and dipped her head. “No. No, that’s not necessary, but thank you. Just tell my family I wasn’t feeling well and went home if . . . if they ask where I am, okay?”


  He nodded as she fled past him to the doors leading out of the auditorium to the parking lot, getting a blast of fall air as she did it.

  * * *

  C. J. sat in her robe and comfortable flannel pajamas, nursing a cup of hot tea and staring at the old movie playing on her living room TV screen. She hadn’t left her apartment in two days. She had made up an excuse to her family to explain her absence.

  “I have a really bad . . . uh, cold,” she’d said on the phone to Victor earlier that week, putting on a fake nasal voice.

  “A cold?” he had asked.

  “Yeah.” She’d paused to bark out a cough. “And it’s really bad! I’m taking medicine, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to be around a lot of people right now. I should be good in a few days, though.”

  “Uh-huh,” Victor had muttered.

  Thankfully, Victor hadn’t asked her any more questions after that, though he had sounded incredulous the whole time.

  The truth was she couldn’t shake off her heartbreak, even though she knew Terrence had left her with little choice but to walk away. She knew this logically, but that didn’t make her ache lessen. It only frustrated her.

  C. J. turned away from her television screen when she heard a knock at her apartment door. She lowered her cup of tea to her coffee table, rose to her feet, and tightened her robe belt around her waist. Her brows furrowed as she stared through her peephole. She hadn’t been expecting any visitors today. She gaped in surprise when she saw who was standing on the other side of the door.

  “Shaun?” she whispered before quickly removing the deadbolt and bottom lock. She swung the door open.

  He stood on her welcome mat, holding a large paper cup in one hand and a grocery bag in the other. He wasn’t wearing one of his suits today but a wool sweater, jacket, and jeans. When he saw her, his mahogany-hued face brightened.

  “Hey!” he said.

  “H-hi, Shaun! What . . . what are you doing here?”