by Leach, Kiki
But the other part that was so sure he still wanted her, especially after last night, couldn’t seem to wrap around the fact that he would’ve rather spent time walking around the city alone instead of bothering to be with her, even then. That’s something Nathan would’ve done, and did do to Sheila, which is how they all ended up in the mess that happened in the first place. Disappearing after being released from custody sure as hell wasn’t something Maurice would pull, not with her.
Then again, in all the years they had even known each other, let alone been friends, he had never really been pissed at her before, not like this.
She thought about leaving him alone to possibly wallow or at least cool off before bombarding him with a multitude of questions including when, where, why and how.
But when she caught a glimpse of Melanie of all people from the corner of her eye, sauntering forward from around the other side of the shop and gleefully handing Maurice a bag of fruit along with a newspaper, she stopped again. This time, to keep herself from sprinting forward and tossing Melanie down to the ground where she felt she belonged.
“Son of a bitch.” Her breath hitched and she nearly choked on the air clouding her throat. “What the fuck is this shit?” she snapped. A passerby gave her a strange look but she rolled her eyes and shook her head, waving them along.
Continuing forward, she almost stopped when she heard Melanie giggling and saw her leaning into Maurice while apparently showing him something on her cell phone, or down her blouse. He didn’t appear to be all that interested in whatever the hell it was, which was somewhat of a relief to her, but it sure as hell didn’t cure the fury bubbling up from her stomach to her chest.
“Such a thirsty bitch.”
As soon as she approached, instead of calling either of them out by name, Vanessa cleared her throat. Maurice whipped around the very second he heard her voice and attempted a smile. Up close, she was able to get a better look at the dark circles that had formed around his eyes thanks to the punches delivered by Nathan, as well as his swollen cheek and the black and blue knuckles on each hand.
As Melanie followed, she gave Vanessa a telling smirk which resulted in her tossing visual daggers in both of their directions. But she kept her main focus on Maurice. He was her priority, as always.
When he brought his coffee just a little bit closer to his chest, he realized Vanessa wasn’t smiling and lowered his head. “Hey, V,” he said in a low voice.
“Hi,” she shot back. Her tone was unsympathetic and challenging. She waved her hand back and forth between him and Melanie and leaned her head. “You mind if I ask what the hell is going on? And more than that, what the hell you’re doing out of jail?”
“You wanted me to stay locked up?” he asked.
“What?” she responded, both flustered and confused at his question. “No--”
“Then you’re not happy to see me?”
“Of course I’m happy to see you, Mo, but that’s not the point.”
“It isn’t?” He took a sip of coffee to hide his pleasure at her annoyance.
“No, it isn’t. I want to know how the hell you managed to get out when Nathan’s still locked up.”
The moment his rival’s name escaped from between the lips of the woman he loved more than his own life, his pleasure at her anger turned to fury of his own, and he glowered. “How the hell do you know he’s still locked up in there, Vanessa?”
“Because he just called and asked if I could come down there to bail him out.”
Maurice moved his head side to side and turned away. He wanted to put his fist through something that couldn’t punch him back this time, but couldn’t find anything worthy enough to unleash his anger.
“Son of a bitch--” he spewed between his teeth. “I should’ve knocked that asshole’s teeth clear out of his mouth when I had the chance.”
“Yeah, that would’ve been real smart.” Vanessa sighed. “Look, he didn’t say anything about you not being down there with him and that was only a few minutes ago, so when the hell did you get out?
He breathed in deep and sniffed. “A few hours ago, with some help.”
“Who’s?”
“Um, good morning, Vanessa,” Melanie finally piped in. “I’m here too.” She waved a hand in front of Vanessa’s face and brought her coffee up to her lips, taking a long sip.
Hope the liquid scolds your tongue, thought Vanessa while sneering at her.
Melanie’s high pitched voice was bad enough, but hearing it so early in the morning while watching her stand next Maurice as if she were his new woman just made Vanessa want to rip out her entire vocal box. And then some.
“I see you quite clearly, Miss Thing, however I wasn’t speaking to you,” she replied. Then she stopped and turned her entire body toward Melanie while folding her arms. “But now that I am, I’d like to know what the hell you’re doing here with him.”
She brought her coffee down from her lips and nervously chortled. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Like I said the last time you came to my office, I am sorry that you and Oscar are splitting up, really. But do you honestly think it’s a smart idea for you to continue hanging out with another man like this before the papers are even signed? And how do you think he’d feel about it being so public?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, Vanessa, but why don’t you start with asking him if I’m okay in seeing him out and about with Nikki?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” she asked, sincerely puzzled. “Those two haven’t been seen out together, let alone been anywhere near each other since we got back from the Hamptons.”
She leaned in. “When is the last time you’ve actually spoken to your so-called friend, V?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I speak to her quite frequently.”
“Then you should try asking her about who and what she does when she’s not around her current Sugar Daddy. My husband left me to be with her the minute we got back to town, and considering he’s not hanging around my doorstep and begging me to let him back inside for good to be with our family, I have a pretty good idea of where he’s been spending most of his nights when it’s not cleaning up at The Bean or overseeing the project for his new shop down here, which is just where we” – she nodded toward Maurice – “were headed.”
Melanie slung her arm around Maurice’s and held tight while attempting to move past Vanessa.
But she wasn’t having it.
“Hold up.” Vanessa held up her hand and shoved Melanie back in place.
Stunned, she released Maurice’s arm and sat her coffee down on the counter. “What the hell is your problem?”
“You and that snide as hell, uncalled for bullshit arrogance you’ve got going are my problem, and have been for months now. Just in case you were unaware.”
“I wasn’t,” she grumbled while wiping down the drops of coffee from her shirt and skirt.
“Good. Now you can go on and do whatever the hell you want inside that Crust O Crap taking up space in an otherwise classy building, but he stays.”
Melanie looked up at Maurice with soft, glassy eyes and rested her hand on his arm. Vanessa had the urge to swat her away like a gnat, but tried keeping her cool.
“I really need to get down there to check on a few things before the area starts getting too busy.”
Maurice turned to a fuming Vanessa, then nodded at Melanie. “Yeah, you should give us a few minutes and I’ll be down there in a second.”
“Okay.” She nodded and bypassed Vanessa, gently bumping her against the arm.
Vanessa whipped around and watched her stroll down the sidewalk, all the while struggling to wiggle an ass that didn’t exist, before entering the building. “That bitch has been asking for it for a long ass time now and if she keeps pushing the wrong buttons with me, she’s gonna damn well get it. I don’t care if my mother thinks I made a mistake and wants her back on the cover to ‘tell her story for women everywhere�
�. There is no way in hell that I’m gonna let that happen. Not with her acting the way she’s been and certainly not with her sniffing up YOUR ass like some thirsty as hell--”
“V.”
“What?!”
She spun back around to face Maurice. As his soft yet eager eyes bore down into hers, she rolled the corner of her bottom lip beneath her teeth and timidly lowered her head. Damn, did he still make her nervous, even after all they had been through.
“You need to calm down,” he said.
“I am calm, I’m perfectly calm – I am always calm.”
“I can see that.”
“You’re one to talk after last night,” she said. “It’s bad enough to hear about you hanging out with her, but to actually see it is something entirely different, alright? And it is so damn obvious from the way she can’t stop touching you and looking up at you like something sent straight down from the heavens that she wants to get inside your pants and see if it really exists for herself, Mo.”
He wiped his hand down his chest and groaned. “I told you that no matter what she says or does or wants or whatever, it’s not happening and it won’t.”
“Then what the hell are you doing here with her? What the hell are you doing anywhere with her so early in the damn day? Why not come by to see me instead? Or at least call me to let me know that you got out and how.”
“I was still pissed this morning about what you did in having me locked up with that asshole.”
“Alright, fine. I figured that much, but why turn to her?” She paused. “Why are you with her of all people this morning, Mo?”
He lowered his coffee, then turned and placed it on top of the counter, along with the newspaper and bag of fruit. “Because I needed some help in paying the other half of my bail in order to be released.”
Stumped by his answer, she jerked back and laughed aloud. “Are you shitting me right now?”
“No,” he said. “After we had been in there for a few hours and they told us how much the bail would be in order to get released by morning, I knew I had some of the money on me, but not all of it. I couldn’t call my parents and let my mother see my face like this because she’d start asking questions that I wouldn’t be prepared to answer. And I couldn’t contact our family attorney because he would just push me into pressing charges against Nathan, which would in turn lead to a lot more shit going down between us that we don’t need. As much as I wouldn’t mind seeing that son of a bitch suffer permanently for all the damage he’s caused to us… to you, I knew that in the end it wouldn’t do any good, so he was scratched off the list too.”
“And what about me?” she asked. Her eyes shifted as she feared his response; her breath became shallow. “Was I scratched off the list too? I’m not an option for you anymore?”
His eyes glazed over in disbelief at what she had said. His ears didn’t want to believe what they had heard. “You’re always the first option for me, V, with everything. And you know that. But I was also very aware that just as much as I was pissed about being there, you were even more pissed about all the damage that we had caused to your house.”
“My house.” She tucked her hair behind her ear and nodded. “Yeah, my house,” she said again, her tone almost inaudible.
It was the first time he had ever voluntarily referred to the house they had shared together for so many years as just being hers. It was fitting considering their current living situations, but the shit still burned like hell.
“Nikki wouldn’t have come to help me knowing what happened,” he went on. “Even on better terms, she’ll still be a better friend to you than she’ll ever be to me. Melanie was the only other person that I knew would come through for me when I asked her.”
“Come through for you? Yeah.” She rolled her eyes. “How the hell much was your bail?”
“40 grand,” he said.
“Forty thousand dollars?!” She cackled in disbelief. “Are you actually standing here and telling me with a straight face that she just went down there and gave you twenty grand with no strings attached or a payment plan?”
“She said it was chump change.”
“Bullshit. What woman in her right mind gives twenty grand to a man she barely knows, isn’t screwing, and doesn’t expect at least double that in return unless she’s a complete moron?”
“Don’t call her that, V.”
“Why not? Clearly it’s what she is. Look, I don’t give a damn how well her studio might be doing back in LA or how much money she may have stashed away in some ‘secret offshore bank account’ that Oscar doesn’t know about, it makes her sound insane.”
“She was just looking to help me out--”
She pointed. “Andddd more bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit -- she was looking to help herself out to your dick and hoping that you’d thank her by serving it to her on a gold platter with a bib to match her eye color.”
“Why the hell do you have to be so crass, V?”
“Why the hell do you have to be so BLIND, Mo?!”
“I’m not blind, I can see just fine.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
She focused her eyes behind him and he grunted if only to keep himself from saying something in return that he knew he would immediately regret.
In the midst of it all, neither seemed to notice the gathering patrons, some of who stopped just to stare at them in awe. Others were legitimate customers at the pop-up market, but couldn’t bring themselves to continue shopping once they realized who else had been occupying their buying space.
“Is that Maurice Livingston?” one raven-haired woman whispered to a girlfriend as they carried bags of fruit up to the register. “If that’s him, he is sexy as hell in person. Those broad shoulders – I think he used to play football in high school, right? That’s what I read I think.” Her dark brown eyes flickered back in his direction. “And look at the shape of his ass. You could bounce a quarter off of that thing. The man is God’s gift to women, that’s for damn sure. I remember seeing his underwear ads a few years ago in one of those upscale fitness magazines. Placed cutouts on the bed where my husband usually sleeps. He’s been to the gym every morning ever since at 8am on the dot. The results aren’t even close to being the same, but at least it got rid of the beer gut. So, you think that’s him?”
Her friend, a strawberry blond with thick red rimmed sunglasses lowered them to the tip of her freckled nose to get a good look at the both of them. Her green eyes scaled his body and she parted her red stained lips into a deep smile. “That’s him alright,” she said. “Tall drink he is.” She was practically drooling from both corners of her mouth and had to stop to wipe her face with a napkin that she snatched up from the counter. “I could guzzle him back like a warm glass of milk straight from the stove. I wouldn’t even need to blow to cool it off, I’d take it down as is.”
“Mm-hmm, me too. Me too.”
“And is that…?” She removed her sunglasses completely and squint as the sun shifted high above them. “Is that like Vanessa Rae Brown?”
The raven-haired woman lowered her head and peered. “It looks like it. She’s got a smaller waist than I’ve seen in her magazine.”
“Bigger tits though.”
“Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Wonder if they’re paid for?”
“Who cares, they look great. I’m thinking of getting my daughter a pair for her graduation. But what I’m more concerned with right now is what the hell they’re arguing about.”
“At least she hasn’t knocked him on the ground and started dragging him around like she did that, um” -- she popped her fingers – “what’s her face, the one we read about. That Sheila Harris. You’d think after what continues to fill the rags concerning all of them that they would learn to settle their shit better, like in private.”
“What the hell kind of fun would that be?” the strawberry blond squealed. “I’m only disappointed that we don’t have a few chairs and some popcorn to go along with it.�
�
And like everyone else around them, they continued to listen in.
“You know what,” Vanessa started, after what seemed like an eternity of silence between her and Maurice, “I don’t really care what you do or who you do it with anymore. Your dick is your own responsibility now, not mine.”
“Don’t start that shit again by saying you don’t care, V, alright?” he hollered out. “You care. You care a hell of a lot, otherwise you wouldn’t still be so damn angry about it.”
“You know what, fuck you, Mo!” she shot back, furiously thrusting her finger in his face. Her jerked back. “You think that just because you look like that, that you can get away with half the shit you do and say to any and everyone around you – but you know what? Not this time. Fuck you.” She reached for the strap of her purse and turned on her heel.
“HEY!” He snapped his hand around the muscle of her arm and yanked her back in place. “We tried that last night, remember, you and me? But it didn’t work out so well which is why we’re both standing here like two idiots and yelling at each other in the middle of the damn street!”
“WE’RE ON A FREAKIN’ SIDEWALK!” she yelled back. “And let me GO!”
She wiggled herself from his grip and shoved her hands into his rock solid chest. He stumbled back but quickly caught his footing.
Tightening his jaw and clinching his teeth, he looked down at her and shook his head. “V--”
“Fuck off.” She latched onto the strap of her purse again and headed off in the direction of her office building. “You’re such a vile, narcissistic asshole--”
“V!”
She whipped her head to the side and shouted out, “FUCK. OFF!”
Maurice rushed forward, still calling out to her. “VANESSA!”
From the corner of her eye, she could see his hand reaching up for her again. She spun around quick and tried slapping him away. “NO!”