I stopped in my tracks and swiveled around. “Hey,” I yelled above the noise of the eatery to get Michael’s attention.
He turned around. “Yeah?” he called.
“You coming?”
“Nah. I’m good.”
“How will you get back to your room?”
“Taxi.”
With that, he turned his attention back to finishing his food, and I hightailed it out of the place to find David. It was funny how life turned the tables on you. Two nights ago it had been David who had run through a parking deck, trying to find me. Now it was I who was rushing to a parking deck to find him. Thankfully, the karma gods weren’t in too much of a mood to screw me over. David was just about to leave the parking deck as I was rushing in.
“Open the door!” I yelled as I knocked on the passenger-side window.
The wind had chilled me to the bone. Normally, it wouldn’t be an issue for me, but for some reason, that day it was. For a moment, I thought David wasn’t going to open the door. He was behind another car, waiting to turn. I knocked on the window again, feeling hopeless as people stared on. He wouldn’t even look at me.
“David, please open the door. Look, I’m sorry,” I pleaded, no longer giving a damn about making a spectacle of myself. The car in front of him pulled out, and I started to think that he was going to drive away and leave me there, looking the fool. “I’m cold, baby,” I said.
He sat there, staring straight ahead. It was only when another horn blared behind him that he unlocked the door. I quickly hopped in, placed the food and my purse on the backseat, and buckled up. Normally, when he and I were out together, he would buckle me in. Make sure I was safe and secure. That was what I’d wanted him to do when I’d asked him those questions. I’d wanted him to buckle me into the relationship and make sure I was secure. I needed him to do that.
My birth parents hadn’t done that. They hadn’t given me that safety net I needed. I hadn’t bonded with them. Instead, a white lady and her husband had seen something in a black child that made them love me as if they’d birthed me themselves.
We drove in silence. KISS 104.1 and Sasha the Diva kept us entertained. Bloodstone serenaded us, even though our natural high had been all but diminished. David’s body language said he didn’t want to be bothered. He was leaning away from me, his right hand on the steering wheel, while his left hand aimlessly stroked his chin.
“Can we at least talk?” I finally asked after he got on I-75.
“Not in the mood to talk,” he answered.
“Not even if it’s about what you asked me earlier?”
“No.”
“David—”
“Summer,” he said to me sternly. “I don’t want to talk, all right?”
“Okay.”
I’d never been one to make a man do what he didn’t want to do. If he said he didn’t want to talk, then I wouldn’t make him. I kept quiet as we rode along. Maybe when we got back to my place or his, whichever one we were going to, he’d be in a better mood and we could talk.
My mind wandered back to Michael and how he would get back to his hotel room. I wondered if the three of us would get to share one another again. Pondered whether I would once more get to experience pleasure in ways unknown to many women. I glanced at David and wanted to see the look of unmitigated pleasurable torture on his face, all in the name of me. Wanted to make Michael growl and make those guttural groans again as he released. Then I wanted to have both of them stand erect as I kneeled between them and sucked my way back to the promised land, with all their children passing my esophagus to get to my belly.
Then I wanted David and me to talk candidly about what we both wanted from one another. I wanted him to tell me that I could be all he needed for forever and a day after never. I wanted to know if I could love such a man the way my mother had loved my father. Those were my thoughts as I laid my head on his shoulder after he’d leaned back toward me. He put his left hand on the wheel and his right one on his lap. I eased my hand underneath his just to have him touch me. When his hand closed around mine, I smiled.
I was awakened about thirty minutes later, as David parked in front of my townhome. I groggily got out of his truck and realized Michael’s rental was still at my house. For some reason, I’d forgotten it was there. David had my purse and the food. I unlocked my door and expected him to walk in with me, but he didn’t.
“Aren’t you coming in?” I asked him after stifling a yawn.
“No. Going home. I need to be by myself for a minute.”
I was disappointed with his answer. Actually, my feelings were hurt. “I made you mad again, huh?”
“You’re just being you, Summer. I accept that,” he said, handing me the plate of food and my purse. He kissed my lips softly, passionately, and held my waist as he did so, as if he really didn’t want to leave. “I’ll see you later,” he said after he pulled away.
He left me standing there, feeling as if I was letting the secret to my future happiness get away.
For the next two or three hours, I lollygagged around my house, doing nothing. There was no David and no Michael. Just me and my thoughts. I tried to call David at least ten times, and not once did he answer. That was a first for us. He had never intentionally ignored my calls. I was starting to feel like something had changed between us. Was starting to feel hopeless and a little lovesick.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Somewhere in my head someone was knocking on my door. I thought I was dreaming as I lay there on the couch, and it took me a minute to realize that someone was actually at my door. I sat up quickly, not caring that my equilibrium was off. I stumbled a bit like a wino would after having too much wine. I rushed to the door in hopes that David was there. He and I had fought and had had disagreements many times over the years, but he had never stayed away from me. He had always come back and we had always worked it out. I’d been hoping that this night would be no different.
I looked through the peephole and then opened the door.
“Hey,” I said.
“May I come in?” he asked.
I moved to the side and let in the man standing at my door. He brushed past me, and his scent lingered behind him. No one would ever be able to forget the way he smelled. He’d changed clothes since I’d seen him last earlier in the day. Name-brand running shoes, sweats, and a thick T-shirt made up his attire, as if he was going to the gym. I homed in on the print in his pants. I couldn’t help it, because the thickness of the print couldn’t be denied. I closed my door and locked it, then slowly trailed behind him to my front room.
He took a seat on the couch I’d been lying on. I sat beside him. Both of us were enveloped in our thoughts and the loud silence in the room. My TV was on, but I’d muted it hours ago.
“It’s cold as shit in here, Freckles,” he told me. “You should turn your heat on.”
I shrugged. “I don’t like the heat.”
The man who had come to my door wasn’t David. David wouldn’t have suggested I turn on the heat.
“How’re you feeling?” he asked me.
“I don’t know. Can’t explain it.”
“Have you talked to him?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Tried to call him?”
“Yes. You?”
Michael shook his head.
“You think he’ll pick up if you call?” I asked.
It was his turn to shrug. “I don’t know.”
“Will you call him for me?”
“Nah. If he wanted to talk, he would call.”
“Maybe it’s me he doesn’t want to talk to. Maybe if you call, he’ll pick up.” I was getting a little desperate.
“I’m not calling him, Freckles. When he wants to talk, he’ll call.”
I was quiet for a moment. I sighed, then stood to look out my window. I’d give anything to see that black-on-black 2014 Yukon XL Denali roll up in my driveway.
“May I see your phone?” I asked Michael as I sat b
ack down.
“Why?”
“I want to see if he picks up when he sees your number.”
“Freckles, let it go, baby girl,” he told me.
“Just let me see your phone.”
He stared at me for a long time and then passed his smartphone over. “Press number three,” he said.
Speed dial. He had David on speed dial. That jealousy of him that I felt crept back into my bones like a late-night chill. I pressed three, like he had told me to, and waited.
One ring.
Two rings.
Three rings.
Four.
Then I got the automated voice telling me to leave a message. I passed Michael his phone. Tried to call David from my phone again, only to get the same voice-mail treatment.
Summer
“Tell me about you and David.”
Michael was on my floor, pushing his body up and down repeatedly as he counted aloud his progress. He was on his second round of rapid push-ups. The scar on his back was holding my attention. It had piqued my curiosity. I sat lotus-style in front of him as we talked. Since David wouldn’t answer my calls, Michael and I were talking and keeping one another company. I’d gone to my room, but the silence had killed me, so I’d come back downstairs.
His right leg crossed behind the left one while he drew his body level to the floor and asked me, “What about us do you want to know?” His breathing was heavy but even as he continued his random round of exercise.
“How did this thing between the two of you start?”
The muscles in his back and arms coiled and rolled like steel cables. There was a light sheen of sweat on his back, which made his chocolate skin glisten in the dim lighting of my front room.
“Started out as just sex and then gradually turned into something else,” he said as he pushed up and held it.
He blew out a bit of steam as he made eye contact with me, then looked at the print of womanhood on the short gym shorts I had changed into. He looked back up at me again. Then he went down, pushed back up, and balanced himself for several seconds again.
“Everything was cool at first,” he continued. “We didn’t hide our sexuality, but we didn’t make a show out of it, either. There were hotel room stays. Lots of those. Sometimes just the two of us. Other times we’d meet a chick or chicks, take them back to the room, and have fun.”
I butted in to ask, “Sexual?”
He nodded as he pushed up and down. Down, then up. “Sexual entertainment was what we specialized in. Sometimes there would be a dude we knew was bisexual but was trying to hide it. We’d invite him back to the room with us. Had fun that way. We were having fun. No recklessness, though. There was always protection. Kept our dicks clean, like we keep them clean now. I knew he had feelings for me, but I told him up front not to fall in love with me.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I know me. I wasn’t going to be with him the way he wanted me to. Sex with men for me is more about the pleasure I get from it. Nothing more.”
“So you never cared about him?”
“I didn’t say that. I cared. Just didn’t love him like he did me.”
“So where does your wife, Sadi, come in?”
He did another round of push-ups before he stood, grabbed his bottle of water from my bookcase, and took the bottle to his mouth. He leaned against the bookcase and answered, “Met Sadi one night at Morehouse. At a party one of my homeboys was throwing. Shit was like love at first sight, you know. I’d met a lot of women, but none that intrigued me the way she did. So I started talking to her. Got the notion that she was feeling me too. So we exchanged numbers that night. Started hanging out almost every day.”
“Where did that leave David?”
“I stopped hanging with him as much. Started trying to build something with Sadi. Always wanted a wife and kids, you know,” he said, then shrugged before sitting in front of me lotus-style.
We both sat there, backs erect, me watching him as he watched me.
“Did David know that?” I asked.
“Yeah, he knew. I’d told him that more than once. Guess he thought I was just talking, though. I mean, at first everything was cool and shit. I’d still see him from time to time.”
“You two were still having sex?”
“Yeah, we still partook in that pleasure we shared.”
“Why didn’t you tell Sadi you were bi—” I was about to call him bisexual, then cut myself off, remembering he hated to be referred by that term. “Why didn’t you tell her you were into dating guys too?”
“I didn’t date guys. Had sex with them but never dated them.”
“What do you call what you and David had?”
“Friends with benefits.”
“Oh.”
“Everything was cool. David didn’t think I should hide that side of myself from her.”
“Why did you?” I asked.
“That’s a question I still ask myself every day. I don’t know why, but shit was way too deep between her and me to confess it by then. She’s the only woman that I’ve never disclosed my sexuality to. Maybe that’s why God decided to get the last laugh.”
“What do you mean?”
He cast his glance away from me for a second and then looked back at me. For the first time, I didn’t see cocky, arrogant, “so sure of himself” Michael. That part of him had faded in that moment. It had happened so quickly that if I had blinked, I would have missed it.
Michael gave a lopsided grin. “Some shit I’ll keep to myself for the time being, Freckles. Anyway, shit was cool, and then Sadi decided she wanted to get married, and by that, I mean elope. So that was what we did. We decided not to tell anyone, and we eloped.”
“How did David find out?”
“Sadi told him.”
“Why would she do that?”
“She ran into him while he was out a few days later. Told him herself. She didn’t think I would mind, since I’d introduced him as my best friend.”
“Damn . . . Is that when they fucked?”
Michael laughed. “Yeah.”
“So she went from telling your best friend about your nuptials to fucking him in one breath? What kind of hillbilly, ghetto ho shit is that?”
I was being judgmental, and I knew it. Most people would have labeled me a ho for fucking two men at once, one whom I’d met a little less than seventy-two hours prior, but it wasn’t about me. It was about the woman who had come between two best friends/lovers.
“Your guess is as good as mine, Freckles,” Michael said as he pulled out his phone and started to scroll through it like he was looking for something.
“How did you find out?”
“David told me. Came to my apartment, with her pussy fresh on his lips. Her thong in his hand,” he revealed.
I couldn’t believe my David would do something like that. Not the David I’d gotten to know. Not the David I loved. The David I knew and loved wasn’t an asshole.
“I can’t believe he did that,” I muttered in a low voice. “That was a bold move.”
“That’s the reason both of us ended up in jail.”
“You fought him?”
“I tried to give that nigga a kick to the chest that rivaled some shit of a Spartan in a movie called 300. Kicked him through my front door.”
My eyes widened. I sat there, trying to imagine that fight. I imagined the two of them going at each other like male lions in a pride would when they were fighting over a female. Locked in a battle fit to be a fight to the death. I started to feel antsy at the thought of David letting Michael beat his ass. Even though David had clearly been in the wrong, I still didn’t like the idea of somebody laying hands on him. Look who’s fucking talking, I thought.
I looked at Michael, who had stopped scrolling through his phone. Whatever he had found, he was staring at it like it was an enigma to him.
“What happened then?” I asked.
“Then he got up and returned the favor. Some n
iggas there would say he got in my ass. I’d say it was a tie. That would be my story, and I would stick to it,” he said with a chuckle, which made me smile. It took a big man to admit he had got his ass handed to him.
“What happened after you two got out of jail?”
“My wife had already passed the bar and had job offers out the ass in New York. She’d been begging me to move there, anyway. She bailed me out. A few months later, I paid my landlord, packed up, and got the fuck on with my life. About six months later, David found me. Gave me his version of an apology. I wasn’t trying to hear it. Had a pregnant wife who was pissed that I had done three years of law school, only to buy my first auto shop to run.”
“Well, yeah, that is crazy, Michael. Why go to law school just to be a mechanic?”
“My pops is a lawyer.”
I gave him a look of confusion, wondering why that would be his answer. “And?”
Michael gave me a sobering look. “My pops is Jamaican. Him didn’t tek kindly fi him male child being a batty bwoy.”
His Caribbean dialect had snuck up on me. I didn’t know he had it in him, but judging by the way I remembered him moving his hips on the dance floor and while he was knocking my back out, I could see it more clearly now.
“Always wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. Found out I liked men and women and tried to cut the gay part out of me,” he continued.
My mind went to the scar on his back, and I gasped. “Your father did that to you?”
He nodded. “I was walking out of my parents’ house after I’d told them the truth about me. Pops came chasing after me with a machete. Got me good, but Mom Dukes wasn’t going to let him kill her only son, so she and my sisters grabbed him. They struggled to hold him back while my mama begged for me to leave. ‘Just go!’ she kept screaming at me. David’s crib was closer to me than Grady Hospital, so I drove there and passed out in my car in his driveway. Lucky for me, he had a chick over who was leaving, and she saw me. Her scream is the last thing I remember hearing. Woke up about a day later, stitched up in Grady.”
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