by A. C. Arthur
But he didn’t give a damn about either of those figures. With rapid heartbeats his eyes scanned down to the final woman, the one with her face between Tyrese’s legs. Her face wasn’t completely visible, but the hair was the same. He flipped to another picture. Donovan lay on his back, Tyrese straddled over his face and the woman Khalil thought he was in love with, the woman he thought was in love with him, was riding this other man, cupping her own breasts as she sat atop his penis.
In one long ragged movement, everything on Khalil’s desk hit the floor, pictures included. He stood, slamming a fist into the wall with such fury the picture shook and the drywall gave way, leaving a hole the size of his hand. He wanted to scream, wanted to yell the roof off that building. Then he wanted to kill. Red blurred his vision, tinting everything around him with the fury that he felt. He wanted to break Donovan Jackson’s body in two, wanted to watch the man suffer for a long time before finally killing him. Tyrese was a slut, this Khalil had already surmised. The pictures only validated that point. But for her part in this, for her treachery, he could wrap his hands around her pretty little neck and send that rail thin body splattering across a cold hard floor.
And Reka…Falling to his knees, he felt a jagged moan escape his chest. What could he do to her? What could he possibly do to this woman who had come to mean so much to him? Holding his head between his hands he knew he could never hurt her, could never cause her the type of pain she was now causing him. But he couldn’t forgive her either. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, let this go.
Scooping the pictures up from the mess on the floor, he found the FedEx envelope and dropped them inside. Standing, he moved to the door, took a deep breath, then opened it and walked towards her office.
* * *
Reka was at her desk finalizing an email she was sending to Khalil. This weekend had been so wonderful and so emotional at the same time. She’d realized just how much she cared about him and had decided to put everything else in her past aside because he was different. They were different and, because of that, their relationship had a chance. Last night she’d lain in bed believing that she and Khalil could have what Cienna and Keith had. They could have a big house filled with kids and lazy Sunday afternoons. They could have the love and trust that was so apparent between Cienna and Keith.
They could be happy.
With a smile on her face she hit the send button and sat back, wondering what his reaction would be to her written words. It was almost lunch time and she hadn’t heard from Khalil yet. Tacoma had told her about a half hour ago that Khalil had discovered Jack’s identity and that he was waiting to talk to Cienna first, so she assumed that’s where he was because when she’d just called his office he hadn’t answered.
She had work to do, but couldn’t quite concentrate. Her thoughts were focused on one thing, one person, one man.
And at that precise moment that man walked through her office door.
Her heart took that butterfly leap it did each time she saw him, then plummeted with a loud thud as she scanned his face. His lips were set in a thin line, the muscles in his jaw visible through the thin beard and clenching fiercely. His eyes were dark, ominous, as he glared at her. With a fluid motion he shut the door quietly, in blatant contrast to the look of a dark storm on his face.
“Hey, baby. What’s the matter?” She made a move to stand, to go to him, but he held up a hand, stopping her.
“No. You need to sit down for this.”
His words were cold, almost unrecognizable. He moved closer to her desk and she noticed his chest heaving through the stark white dress shirt he wore. Those thick muscles she’d come to love rubbing her hands and her mouth over rose and fell in sudden spasms, his arms bulging until, for a minute, he looked like the Incredible Hulk about to burst right out of his shirt.
“What’s going on?” He didn’t look sad, so the thought of someone dying or being hurt didn’t immediately come to mind. What he looked was angry enough to kill.
“You tell me, Reka.” He tossed the envelope onto her desk before dropping down into the chair across from her, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. “I thought you and I were in a relationship. I thought we were working towards something real here.” He looked away from her then, because today, of all days, she was more beautiful than ever. Her hair hung straight down, resting between her shoulder blades. Her face was smooth, the prettiest shade of brown he’d ever seen, with that bold beauty mark at the corner of her mouth. But then there were those eyes, that molten color that was a toss up between hazel and green on any given day. That was the betrayal, the one thing he couldn’t handle.
“Khalil, I don’t know what’s going on with you, but you’re really scaring me.”
She didn’t make a move for the envelope, he noticed when he turned back to her. “Pick it up and look at them,” he said slowly, each word laced with pain.
Sitting up in her chair, Reka reached for the envelope, a sense of dread building in her gut. Grabbing the stack from inside she pulled out the pictures and gasped as the images became clear. Donovan and Tyrese and…and…“Where did you get these?”
“Does it matter?” He grimaced. Where was the denial? She should have been screaming and yelling her innocence. Instead she simply looked at the pictures, then up at him.
Reka couldn’t believe what she was seeing, what she was experiencing. In an instant Khalil’s anger and the source of it registered with her. In that same instant her own anger began to rise. She tossed the pictures back onto the desk. “So let me guess. You’re here because you think I cheated on you. You think I lied to you.”
“Let’s not play childish games, Reka. I don’t have time for them.”
She blinked, astonished at the pain his words caused. “Oh, now you want to emphasize the age difference. I seem to remember a time not too long ago when you told me that age didn’t matter.”
“Age doesn’t. Maturity does.”
It was a staredown. Dark brown eyes holding hazel flecked ones. The tension in the room was so thick either of them could have choked from it.
“You’re right, Khalil. So the mature thing to do is to put all our cards on the table.” Dropping her hands to the arms of her chair, she crossed her legs and glared at him. “What do you have to say to me about these pictures?”
Was she turning the tables? Again his vision blurred with rage. She was the one in those photos, she was the one performing a number of explicit acts with her ex-boyfriend and her co-worker. She should be the one doing the talking. “Are you even going to deny it? Aren’t you going to try to plead your case, to tell me I’m mistaken?”
Why should she? He already believed the worst of her. Reka shook her head, shook away the tears that threatened to erupt. She’d been through too much in her young life to be baited into a yelling match with him. His mind was made up. Whatever she did or did not say wouldn’t matter. It never mattered. Her college degree, her new title at work, her new clothes, none of it mattered to the woman inside. She was who she was, Reka Boyd, born and raised on the streets. She should have never let herself believe that a man like Khalil could see past everything else and truly love a woman like her.
“What I’m going to do is tell you this one time and one time only.” She took a deep breath and stood, folding her arms across her chest because she didn’t know what else to do with them. “I loved you. I never lied to you about my past or about my present. You knew who and what I was the moment you met me, the moment you talked to Keith about me. You pursued me, even when I told you I was no good at relationships.” She paused, those damned tears getting too close to the surface.
“You said our backgrounds didn’t matter to you. But you lied. These last few weeks you’ve been convincing yourself that I was a woman you could be with when in truth, you want a woman like Sonya, the socialite that your family will approve of, the perfect looking bitch to appear on your arm. The other side of you, the carefree, almost human side, wants to live a little dangero
usly, to break the rules. That’s where I came in. But in your mind you knew I’d never measure up. So you sat back, watching, waiting for something to happen, something to prove your point.”
“That’s not how it was,” he interrupted. Standing, he concentrated deeply to keep from going to her, from wrapping his arms around her. Couldn’t she see how much this was hurting him? Couldn’t she see what she’d done to him?
“Oh yes, it was. There’s no use denying it. I was a fool, too, because I thought…I believed you when you said you were different, that you could show me how a man loved his woman.” She lost the battle and one tear found its way down her cheek. She quickly wiped it away, then leaned over the desk to scoop the pictures up and put them back inside the envelope. Holding it out to him, she summoned her resolve and looked him straight in the eye. “You never trusted me. That’s why you questioned me about Donovan. And if you never trusted me, then how could you love me?”
Khalil had never felt so broken before. This last hour of his life had seemed like a hundred years of hard labor, of solitary confinement in which he was starved and beaten. No. Even that didn’t seem to explain what he was feeling. He snatched the pictures from her. “I didn’t cheat on you!” he yelled.
She shook her head. “No, you didn’t. Cheating would have been the easy way to hurt me. Gaining my trust then letting me down took a lot of work and effort on your part. For that I give you an A+.” He stared at her incredulously. He was expecting something else. A scene, a tantrum. That was more like the Reka he presumed she was.
With a chuckle she shook her head, finally giving in, a little. “And for those bullshit pictures you have, you and the pervert who took them can go to hell! Now get out of my office before I call security.” She did raise her voice then because the sight of him was literally breaking her heart. She felt the ripping, the searing pain of the separation and wanted to lash out at him. But he’d gotten all he was going to get from the ghetto receptionist turned college prepped paralegal. She wouldn’t give him another minute of pleasure.
To prove her point she lifted the receiver of the phone.
Khalil wasn’t afraid of security. He wasn’t afraid of anyone in the office hearing what was going on between them. He was so beyond that point. What he was afraid of was that he’d take her in his arms and tell her he forgave her, that they could work past this, that he still loved her. He didn’t want her to have that type of control over him; she didn’t deserve that type of loyalty and dedication, since she was incapable of giving the same in return.
“You disappoint me,” he said on his way to the door.
“No, Khalil.” Her breath was ragged now, the tears inevitably about to flow. “I didn’t make promises, you did. And you didn’t keep them. So you let me down.” The last was said quietly.
He didn’t turn to her again, didn’t look at her one last time, simply walked out, closing the door soundly behind him.
Reka sank back into her chair, dropping her head onto the desk, those pesky tears flowing fiercely.
17
Cienna was still in her meeting, and that was just fine with Khalil. Everything, including those damned emails, had taken a backseat in his life the moment he opened that envelope. He stopped by his office only long enough to shut down his computer and grab his suit jacket. Then he was on the elevator, headed out of the building.
He drove with no awareness of the other drivers on the road, and only by sheer luck did he make it to his destination without causing an accident. Switching the ignition off, he attempted to calm himself, resting his head on the steering wheel. Inside he was in turmoil, his emotions so confused, twisted and distorted that he could barely tell right from wrong. He needed to vent, to clear his head. Grabbing the envelope from the passenger seat, he stepped out of the car intent on doing just that.
He was inside the courthouse, was checked and checked again because he’d left his keys in his jacket pocket. Now he was on his way down the marble hall towards the judge’s chambers.
“Good afternoon,” Gayle said cheerfully from behind her desk.
“Hello,” Khalil offered with no hint of a smile. “I’m here to see Judge Page. You can tell him it’s Khalil Franklin.”
Keith was opening his door, on his way out to lunch, when he saw his friend standing at the desk. “Hey, man. You’re just in time. I was about to go out and grab a bite to eat. Join me.”
Khalil took Keith’s outstretched hand, shook it then shook his head. “Nah, we need to talk. Let’s go in your office.”
Khalil’s voice was grave, and Keith knew instinctively this was going to be bad. “After you,” he said extending his arm towards his office. “Gayle, I’m out to lunch. Don’t disturb me unless it’s my wife.”
Gayle nodded her understanding.
Khalil sat down in a high-backed leather chair after dropping the envelope on Keith’s desk. Keith watched as the man he’d known for years sat defeated, his shoulders slumped, his head down.
“What’s going on? Is it your parents?”
“No,” Khalil said quietly.
Keith had known that but asked anyway. The look Khalil had said one thing: woman problems. “Reka?”
Khalil inhaled deeply, sat back in the chair and looked at Keith. “Open the envelope.”
Keith did as he was told, but was in no way prepared for what he saw. “What the hell? Where did you get these?”
“They were sent to me at the office this morning.”
“Is this Tyrese?”
“Yes.” Gritting his teeth, he continued, “The man is Donovan Jackson, Reka’s ex. And the other woman is?”
Keith held up a hand. “Don’t.” This had to be the hardest thing for any man to swallow. Pictures of the woman you’re in love with in bed with another man…and a woman. He didn’t envy Khalil one bit. But he did sympathize.
“When were these taken?” Was Keith’s first question.
Khalil shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“It could have been before you two got together.”
Khalil hadn’t thought of that, but agreed. “It could have been. Does that make it all right?”
Still holding the pictures, Keith looked at his friend. “Are you judging her based on these pictures?” Khalil was silent. “Or had you judged her before?”
Khalil stood, throwing his hands up in the air. “I don’t know.” He walked towards the window, then turned back to Keith. “What kind of woman does something like this?”
Keith rocked back in his chair after setting the pictures on the desk. His fingers steepled beneath his chin, he studied the man he called a friend. Khalil was a good guy, but he’d been raised with blinders on. He was from an affluent family, who lived, breathed and existed a certain way. They believed in black and white; there was no room for gray. And Reka was definitely gray. “What you should be asking yourself is, what type of woman is Reka? That’s all that matters here.”
Dragging his hands down his face, Khalil felt the weight of the world on his shoulders. He was so conflicted. There was a part of him, a strong part, that told him from the moment he saw those pictures up until now, that Reka couldn’t do this. Not before she met him, and certainly not after. But he was faced with irrefutable proof, or so the logical side of him believed. “She didn’t deny it,” he said quietly.
“She shouldn’t have had to.”
He shook his head. “I loved her.”
Keith raised a brow. “And you don’t anymore? Can you honestly say that once you looked at these pictures everything you felt for her disappeared?”
Khalil didn’t even attempt to kid himself. “No. I guess that’s what makes this so bad.”
“I could go into how you should trust her, how I told you not to hurt her, how I explained to you that she was different from the women you were used to, but that would be futile and might turn into a pretty ugly scene in my place of business.” Keith stood, walked over to his friend. “So I’m going to be the judge here.”
Khalil looked at him peculiarly.
Keith cracked a smile. “Humor me,” he said, clapping Khalil on the back.
Khalil nodded, not sure where Keith was going with this but desperate for anything that would shed some light on this situation.
“What I look for first is a motive. Who would want to see you and Reka apart? Because there’s no doubt in my mind that’s the purpose of these pictures being sent to you. And if you weren’t drowning in your own emotions right now you’d see it, too. But since you are, I’m going to help you out.”
“Man, I don’t feel like doing this right now.” Khalil’s fists clenched at his sides as one of the pictures popped into his mind.
“Ever heard the saying, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’?” Keith asked simply.
Khalil paused, closed his eyes, then re-opened them, his thoughts shifting from Reka to Sonya. “She couldn’t. How would she have even known?” Then he remembered her phone call the day after Thanksgiving. He remembered her mentioning Donovan Jackson.
“Second, ask yourself who had the most to gain by your breakup. Now I recall hearing about Donovan and Reka’s relationship. He seemed all right on the surface, but he loved money and would do just about anything for it. He sold drugs, stole cars. Anything he could do for money, he did it. That’s the reason Reka ended it with him. That and the fact that he was pimping women out, then making them sleep with him when they didn’t get all his money.” Keith shrugged. “Think about it. Put one and one together.”
“But in this instance one and one don’t go together. How in the hell would Sonya know a guy like Donovan?” He didn’t have the answer to that but he knew that she did, she’d told him as much.
“Don’t put Sonya on a pedestal, man. She’s still a woman, the woman you refused to marry. Imagine how embarrassed she was when you broke things off with her and then took another woman to your mother’s house on Thanksgiving. And she still wants you. You even said yourself that she was willing to settle for a loveless marriage for the sake of money and prestige.”