“Sorry,” I said, seeing why he might feel that way. “But I’m a doctor. Hospital shows notwithstanding, a lot of us can be, um, weirdly analytical. To us, solving the problem is often more romantic than planning the wedding.”
He considered me for a long hard moment, then let me off with a lazy grin. “That’s all right. I’ll take it.”
Then he made a sharp right.
“Where are we going,” I asked as Waze busily recalculated the route on his smartphone screen.
“You’ll see,” he answered as he made another sharp right into a strip mall parking lot.
He quickly found a spot, and when I looked up, there was a jewelry store looming over our little car, our little relationship, so big it blocked out the sun.
And a few hours later, I’m on the phone with my brother, asking for his blessing while looking down at my brand new wedding band.
“Here’s my promise to you, Dr. Anitra Dunhill,” Woods said, as he slipped the simple silver band I picked out onto my finger, right there in front of the sales person standing behind the glass counter.
Then he turned to the seller who’d rung up our humble purchase, all while peering at me in a suspicious manner.
“Know what? I’ll take this same one in a men’s size for me too.”
Woods may very well be crazy. He insisted on wearing his own wedding ring, even after I told him most men don’t wear a ring before they’re officially married. At least, not unless they’re Irish.
“Then I guess I must be Irish,” Woods answered as we made our way to the cheap hotel room I’d booked for us on Priceline. “Because that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I don’t want any confusion about my intentions when I meet your daddy…”
“That is fucked up romantic, sis,” my brother declares on the other end of the line, after I finish telling him the story. “And you say he good in bed, too? I don’t care if he crazy. You got big brother’s blessing, and a ‘go head with your bad self, Miss Nitra!’”
A host of annoyed deep voices sound in the background, and I can hear the crowd chanting angrily.
“Thank you, Curt. You better get to your show,” I say.
“Either that or go troll the local ERs for an amnesia victim. You got me wondering now. Though I am sad I won’t be there when you introduce him to Daddy.”
I groan at the mention of the meeting. “Please don’t call him and tell him about this,” I say, knowing how those two love to gossip. “I really don’t want to give him time to formulate a reaction to the news.”
“Yeah, you probably right about that. Sandy said she made sure there weren’t no more real guns in the house when we moved, but you never know with him.”
“Okay, bye Cee-Cee…” I say with a real chill going down my back. “Love you.”
“Mwah, love you too, Nee-Nee. Now let me stuff this dick back into my hot pants and go wave these fake titties!”
I laugh, amused as always by my brother’s refusal to take anything in life that isn’t death seriously. “Break both them legs,” I tell him, before getting off the phone, already knowing he will.
Then I go back out to the hotel room. To the real life scenario that’s even crazier than anything my brother could possibly come up with for his show.
I find Woods already in bed. In typical fashion, he’s found an old movie for us to watch.
“West Side Story,” I say, recognizing it with a fond grin.
“Is that what it’s called?” he answers, holding out his now cast-free arm so I can get in bed with him.
“Who were you talking to in the bathroom?” he asks after I curl up beside him.
So he’d heard. Or guessed.
“My brother,” I answer.
“You tell him about us?”
“Yeah, everything.”
“And what’d he say?”
“Basically, go’on girl. But he’s a drag queen so, you know, his response to this is going to be different from most.”
“A drag queen…”
“A man who dresses and performs as a woman. He also dates other men, but never when he’s dressed as a woman. It’s kind of complicated, but he’s one of the best friends I have in the world, other than Sola,” I explain. And then I wait. For him to say something bad about my brother. For him to give me an excuse to stop being crazy about him.
But after a moment he says, “I do recall seeing somebody like that on one of them reality shows when I was in the hospital. I remember thinking, that it was definitely new.”
“New good? Or new bad?”
“He’s your brother and you love him, so he’s got to be new good, unless something he’s doing is hurting you in some way,” he answers, as if feelings of sexual orientation are a simple matter of family loyalty.
Maybe on a base level they are to him. But I have to admit, “You’re taking this way better than my mother did. She’s an evangelical pastor. Is that concept old or new?”
“Old,” he answers after a moment of thought. And strangely, this is when he chooses to tense up. Then he says, “We got a long drive tomorrow. Mind if we just watch the movie?”
No, I don’t. But there’s one more thing I’ve got to deal with before we get to L.A.
“Ah, John—I mean Woods. How would you feel about me introducing you as my husband tomorrow? It will, ah…” I struggle to come up with a good excuse, and end up settling for, “…be easier if everyone thinks we’re already married.”
Now he drops all pretense of watching the movie to look down at me with a pleased smile. “Doc, I already consider you becoming my wife a matter of bullshit paperwork. I’d be honored to be introduced to your daddy with my true intentions in mind.”
I have to shake my head at his easy acceptance of my request. “You’re like a southern gentleman on steroids.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means I love you, Woods,” I say out loud, while inside I can only hope he’ll still love me when I tell him the truth tomorrow.
But tonight, I decide not to think about tomorrow yet. I curl up inside the shelter of his arm and play with his Irish-but-not-really wedding ring before falling asleep while Tony sings about instantly falling in love with a girl he just met. One named Maria.
As intimate as sex was with John before, it’s somehow even more intimate with Woods that night.
He wakes me from my doze with a gentle press of his lips to my forehead.
“Did you like the movie?” I ask, my voice husky with sleep.
“Yeah, Doc, I liked it. I liked it a whole lot,” he answers, his voice husky with something else.
He undresses me slowly. Easing everything off my body with deliberate care. Then he palms one breast as he lowers his head to the other, suckling so tenderly, it feels like more of a promise than a kiss.
Everything he does to me feels like a promise that night. The way he lowers me back onto the bed before slinging one leg over his shoulder, and worships my pussy with his mouth until I’m coming so hard, I find myself crying out his new name.
I’m still coming, my pussy trembling, when he braces himself above me and fills me with his bare cock. Even after a week, we’re still deeply aware of all the new sensations. Deeply aware of what this means to the both of us to be together this way.
Tonight his claiming goes even slower than usual. Deep, dragging strokes that give me plenty of time to accept who is the one in control, and who is the one being treasured in this relationship.
Woods, I’ve noticed over the last few weeks, is a bit of a talker when it comes to sex. But tonight he takes me quietly with the lights of Vegas shining into our room, brighter than the moon. Tonight he tells me everything both he and I are feeling without uttering a word.
And it feels like the most inevitable thing in the world when we break the quiet together, his cum coating my sex as the orgasm crests over us both. Two perfectly matched stars in a universe of love.
Chapter Nineteen
Is it an
y wonder I’m so relaxed on the drive to L.A.? No more throwing up. Just a lot of shared smiles and hands clasped over the center console as we make the relatively short journey out of Las Vegas to L.A. and then crawl through the heavy traffic of Downtown, before we’re finally able to get off the highway at Forest Lawn Drive, and then into more congestion on Barham.
“Welcome to L.A.,” I half apologize.
“How did you live here full time?” Woods mutters, eyeing the congested road in front of us grumpily. This street is wider than some West Virginia highways, but completely stuffed with cars. Like anyone dealing with L.A. traffic for the first time, or even for the hundredth, I can tell he doesn’t love all the stop-and-go we’ve encountered since getting into town.
Definitely not the time to tell him, I decide, thinking how unfair it would be to drop my bomb while he’s trying to navigate the lunch time chaos of the Barham pass.
However, Woods frowns when Waze finally tells him to turn left off of Barham into a much quieter scene. Roads that become narrower the higher you go, lined on each side with expensive cars. Audis, Teslas, Range Rovers, Maseratis, Porsches, Maybachs, and just about every other car with a six-figure price tag currently on the road.
Woods squints at the Waze app on his phone, which he hasn’t really trusted since we left West Virginia.
“Are you sure we’re going to the right place?” he asks as my Prius makes the long climb toward the address I keyed into his phone. “This isn’t exactly how I imagined Compton would look from your descriptions and the pictures I saw on the internet.”
“Um…actually Compton is where I used to live until I was, like, twelve. It’s a lot further south. Then we moved here. Right now we’re in the Hollywood Hills.”
Woods’s brow pulls low as the houses get bigger and bigger. “So you were struggling to make ends meet back in West Virginia, but your family lives here? In one of these big houses?” he repeats. “Are they, uh… live-in servants or something like that?”
I grimace. “No, it’s a long story. But I guess you could say my dad didn’t support my decision to move to West Virginia and become a doctor. Really didn’t support it, in fact. And Mom is old-school. Like one of those women who believes whatever the man says, goes. So I ended up having to do it on my own dime.”
He digests this information and opens his mouth to ask another question. But then the nav system interrupts with a command to turn right onto to the small access road leading to our house. And then he’s left without words, because he’s too busy ogling the white stucco mansion sitting just beyond a double gate with two microphones sculpted into its iron bars.
We stop at the gate, because according to Waze, we’ve reached our final destination.
Woods stops the car, letting it settle into a silent electric idle as he continues to stare at the house in front of us.
“This why you didn’t want to bring me home to meet your family at first?” he asks me. “You’re ashamed of me, because I don’t have nothing to my name but a backpack full of money and your daddy’s got all of this? Is that why we’re pretending to be married already, because you know they ain’t going to accept me as the father of your baby unless they think we’re already hitched?”
Woods’s tone is so sincere, his expression so hurt, his questions so valid given how little I’ve told him of my past. Which is probably why I come off as a straight up bitch when I burst out laughing.
“No, no! That’s not it at all,” I answer. “If anything, my dad’s going to love you. Like love you way too much, and then immediately try to use you.”
Woods just shakes his head at me. “Call me dumb, Doc, but I’m not even close to understanding any of the words coming out of your mouth.”
“I know,” I answer, sobering. Then I take a deep breath because this is it. No more stalling. I need to come clean with him about everything.
“Before we go in, there’s something I have to tell you,” I say, peeping up at him. “Actually, it’s a big something about my family…”
But just as I’m about to spill the beans and share everything I didn’t tell him back in West Virginia, the microphone gates part and my larger-than-life father comes out dressed in boxer shorts, a white tank top, and a velvet robe.
Of course he’s holding his smart phone—the exact same make and model as my latest special phone—at chest-level. And he makes sure we’re fully lined up in the shot before yelling, “What the hell, Nitra! You got married to some random white nigga in Vegas and you didn’t tell me?!?!”
Chapter Twenty
Oh, eff the internet. I’d been living so long in a place where every other person and their child does not have a smart phone, I’d forgotten how everywhere it could be at all times here in Los Angeles.
As romantic as yesterday was, I now curse our impromptu trip to the jewelry store. I knew that sales clerk was up to no good the way he was eyeing me. Yet, I’m incapable of feeling violated. Not after how I grew up.
Right now, I only feel worried. Mostly about Woods, who’s already out of the car and getting between me and my father like a Southern wall.
“Excuse me, sir, I’m not sure who you are, but I cannot and will not allow you talk to my wife that way.”
Dad looks over John’s shoulder at me, popping his eyes and, because he’s my dad, asking out loud what most folks would only think, “Nitra, is this nigga serious?”
Then he lowers the phone to whisper-ask me, “Did you not explain things to him?”
“I was about to,” I answer, coming to stand beside Woods. “But then you came out here, dropping n-bombs in your underpants.”
I snatch the phone out of his hand, making sure to turn it all the way off before I put it in my back pocket.
“Hey!” My dad starts to yell.
But I cut him off with my introduction. “Woods, this is my dad. Curtis Dunhill, but you know him better as C-Mello.”
Woods comes out of his protective stance to blink down at me. “C-Mello?” he repeats, probably thinking of all the hardcore lyrics from the songs I’d included on his workout mix. “C-Mello is your dad?”
“No, Curtis is my dad. C-Mello is the role he plays...”
“Fuck that! Tell this nigga I will go back in my house and get a gun to put a cap in his ass if he doesn’t stand down right now and let me get this hug in.”
“A role he plays, like, all the time,” I finish wearily as I step forward to present myself for one of Dad’s signature bear hugs.
Dad grabs me up in his arms like I’m still a kid, and kisses me on top of the head.
“Good to see you, Nee-Nee. Hair and make-up will be here in about an hour or two. And the rest of the crew’s going to meet us at the VMH awards.” But in a flash Dad goes from informative back to hurt. “You seriously didn’t tell him nothing about us?” he asks me.
“I didn’t know how to,” I admit, casting my eyes downward and to the side, pretty much as far away from Woods as I can.
But then I force myself to look back up at him, if only to say, “I wasn’t planning on letting him ambush you like this. I was going to tell you before we went in.”
Now Dad is looking at Woods sideways, like I’ve brought home a green alien. “Okay, since you took my phone, I’m just going to straight up ask: where did you find this boy? He been living up under a rock or something?”
“He’s got a rare form of retrograde amnesia,” I admit to Dad. “So even if he’d heard of us, he wouldn’t remember it.”
Now Dad’s eyes really bug. “No shit!?!?”
“No shit,” I grudgingly confirm, really not loving how much delight he’s taking in Woods’ ongoing medical condition.
“Hot damn!” Dad says, rubbing his hands together. “Wait till Sandy gets a load of this nigga! She going to lose her fucking mind.”
But Woods is shaking his head, obviously having a hard time processing this. “So your father is a rapper, and your mother is a pastor, and your brother dresses up as women for his ca
reer. You guys sound a lot like that reality show I was watching in the hospital...”
Dad nearly loses his shit then. “Nitra! You have got to be fucking kidding me with this!” he yells.
“He has amnesia Dad. Amnesia!” I shout back, full bitch. “I seriously couldn’t figure out how to tell him, okay?!”
But then I force my voice back down to a much more pleasant register, turning back to Woods to say, “Funny, you should mention that…”
As if on cue, a 90s era Hummer comes tearing around the corner.
“Ooh, Nitra, you going to get it!!!” my dad sing-songs, pointing at me like a kid in the schoolyard as the oversized car screeches to a halt in front of the gate.
At my dad’s words, Woods once again goes into his protective stance, fists bunched, ready to meet whoever comes out of the car head on.
That is until the door flies open to admit a five-foot tall, middle-aged woman screeching, “You’ve got some freaking nerve, kid. First West Virginia, and now this? Did you really get married without telling me first? And if so, tell me you’ve got something on tape other than that shitty security camera footage!” She glares at Woods. “And he’s cute, kid, but if you found him on a competing network, I swear to you, I will lose it. I will kill you and your entire family and tell VMH exactly why I did it at the contract negotiations.”
Woods goes from defensive to confused. Really confused. “I’m guessing this isn’t your mother, the pastor,” he says to me.
“Worse,” the little woman answers. “I’m her mother fucking executive producer. But the real question is, who are you?”
“So, Woods…” I say in the quiet that follows. “I’d like you to meet Sandy, the executive producer of Rap Star Wives, which, ah…just so happens to be the reality show my family sort of headlines.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“I’ve got a joke,” the twelve-year-old version of me tells everyone gathered around the dining room table at her unusual parents’ swanky new Malibu mansion. “Why did the chicken have a gun?”
His Forbidden Bride: 50 Loving States, West Virginia Page 13