by RM Johnson
Lewis now was staring at Selena with a look that could kill. A look that said she would pay for everything that was happening, once it was all over.
“So, looks like we got a situation,” the man said. “What you want us to do about it?”
“I just want you out my fucking house,” Lewis said, breathing hard, his chest heaving.
“I can do that. But I don’t want you making no crazy moves while I put my shit on. You hear me?” the man said.
“No!” Selena yelled from the corner of the room.
Both the man and Lewis looked over at her.
“Do I still get my money?” Selena asked the man.
He chuckled some, shaking his head. “The deal wasn’t completed, baby.”
“Then I want you to stay.”
“What!” Lewis said, shocked.
“I said, I want him to stay. I need this money, Lewis. I can’t be waiting—”
“I got money!” Lewis said, reaching for his pocket.
“Whoa!” the man said, pressing the gun again against Lewis’s head, as if he was worried that Lewis was going for a weapon.
“I got money. A hundred dollars in pocket. I been working all day. I told you I was going to do it, and you go out and fuck this nigga!”
Selena looked a little surprised at first, then sadly shook her head. “It took you eight hours, what I’m gonna make in one. It ain’t gonna work, Lewis. Just leave.”
“No!” Lewis said. “No! What about Layla? I’m not leaving!”
“You can come back and see her, but right now, you gotta go. I got work to do.”
“No!” Lewis said, starting to get up, trying to have at her. But he was stopped again by the gun to his head.
“You heard what the lady said. You gotta go, motherfucker.”
Lewis stood up, the man standing behind him, the gun still on him.
Lewis gave a last look to Layla, then to Selena. “I ain’t leaving my baby with you, Selena. I ain’t leaving her like this.”
“Whatever,” Selena said, looking as though she didn’t care about a word Lewis had said, as the man escorted Lewis out of the room.
16
Nate rode the elevator up to the floor his office was located on. It was packed tight with the usual wall of suited men and women, but he paid them no mind, for his thoughts were on last night.
His wife had apologized to him about lying, about the comments she made about suing him, and Nate let her believe that that was enough to erase the threat she had made, a threat he could never really forget, or forgive her for.
After she had read the card he had given her, after he said his little bit about how he had made a huge mistake for mistreating her the way he had, he took his wife by the hand, led her upstairs, and made love to her.
As always, she felt wonderful, and he could still feel the love he felt for her, but he couldn’t allow that to get in his way. He wasn’t having sex with her to profess his love, or to gain pleasure from it, but to distract her from the fact that he might be seeking a divorce. He wanted Monica to believe that everything between them was back to normal, that the incident with the baby had never happened. Their argument, and her question about whether he wanted a divorce or not, he wanted wiped from her mind. And when she started panting hard under his efforts to bring her to orgasm—when she started screaming, “Do you love me? Do you still love me?”—Nate replied with, “Yes, I do! I always will!”
Nate felt her body tighten, her nails digging into his back, her thighs clamp around his hips, the characteristic cry she emitted when she came.
Afterward, they lay face-to-face, Nate holding his wife very close, their lips barely touching.
“Are we going to be okay?” Nate asked Monica, one of his arms thrown over her side, gently stroking her back with his fingertips.
“If you ask me, we’re already okay,” Monica said, her eyelids very low, the corners of her mouth turning slightly upward into a content smile.
That was all Nate wanted to hear. He had done what he had to do.
About the matter of divorcing her, Monica receiving half of everything he earned, that would just have to be placed on the back burner until he found a better way to proceed.
Stepping off the elevator, Nate walked into his office space, nodded to the two receptionists after they gave him their greeting, then he headed to his office, toward the back of the floor.
When he got to his secretary’s desk, he noticed that Tori had not come in yet. He glanced down at his watch and saw that it was still early, only 8:30 A.M., and Tori didn’t normally come in until about quarter to.
Nate opened his office door, stepped in, and was startled by the big brooding man sitting behind his desk, his head dropped into both his hands.
Nate closed the door. The man didn’t look up.
Nate walked closer to him, gently placed his briefcase down on the corner of his desk, and stood there in front of him.
The man’s name was Barry Atkins. He owned the financial investment company upstairs. Nate had met this man the day he opened his business here, and Barry had been nothing but a friend from that moment on.
“If you need to know anything, just give me a ring. I know how it is being the new guy on the block,” the chubby, balding man said upon first meeting Nate.
The two men played racquetball three times a week, golf occasionally, and did the routine business trip together every now and then.
He was a good guy, always upbeat, always a smile on his face, so Nate felt there had to be something terribly wrong to walk into his office and find Barry like this.
“Barry, what’s going on?” Nate asked.
Barry looked up, appeared as though he had been crying, shook his head pathetically.
“That bitch,” he said under his breath, raising himself out of Nate’s chair and walking around the front of his desk.
“Who are you talking about?”
Barry was pacing back and forth now, mumbling something Nate could not make out.
“That bitch is having an affair.”
“Who?”
“My wife!”
“No. No way. Lisa loves you like crazy. There’s no way she’d cheat on you.”
“Really,” Barry said, standing, digging into his inside breast pocket, and throwing at least a dozen black-and-white photos down upon Nate’s desk. The pictures spilled out, giving Nate a look at practically all of them. What he saw was a naked woman bent over a bedroom nightstand, a half-naked man grabbing her from behind, his head thrown back, mouth wrenched open, as if yelling in pleasure. Another photo was of the woman embracing this man, kissing him. There were more, the sexually explicit ones all seeming to be taken with a long-range lens, from outside the window of a hotel room or something. There were other shots, and clearly, on those, Nate could see that it was indeed Barry’s wife.
“Damn,” Nate sighed, standing over the photos. There was nothing else he could say.
“This motherfucker,” Barry said, stabbing a chubby finger into the forehead of the man in the photo. “Look at him, will you? He’s half my age, twice the man I am, and he’s fucking my wife!”
“Why did she do it?” Nate asked. “She never—”
“I don’t know. I don’t know!” Barry said, shutting his eyes tightly, whipping his head back and forth, waving his hands in the air as if he was trying to rid his mind of the images on the photos.
“Well, something had to have led her there.”
“I don’t know. Maybe all the working I’ve been doing, the traveling, never being home. She was always complaining that we don’t do anything anymore, that I’m never there. And when I am, it’s like my mind is somewhere else, she says. But to fucking do this. She could’ve just told me. She could’ve told me first!” Barry yelled.
Nate wanted to tell him that it sounded like that’s what she’d been trying to do, but that would’ve only been fueling Barry’s fire.
“What do you want me to do, Barry? You need any
thing?”
Barry turned to Nate, wiped his face with a handkerchief he pulled from his back pocket, exhaled, and said in a relatively calm voice, “I want you to go with me.”
They went to breakfast, where Barry didn’t say or eat anything, just dabbed at his food with the tip of his fork. After that, Nate found himself parked before the elementary school where Barry’s wife was the principal. After receiving the photos from the private investigator last night, Barry said, he couldn’t bring himself to go home and face her. He rented a room in a motel, trying to find the courage to do what he had to do, which was end it.
Barry sat there in the running car beside Nate, just staring out at the building, like a fearful child on his first day of school.
“You all right, Barry?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Barry said, sounding a little better, but still a bit shaken up. “I just never thought I’d be doing something like this.”
“You want me to go with you in there?”
“No.” Barry turned to Nate, smiling as best he could to show his appreciation. “I’m glad you brought me this far.”
Barry reached out and hugged Nate. He could feel the big man trembling around him. Nate leaned back after he was released and watched Barry get out of the car, start walking toward the school, his head lowered.
For the rest of the day, Nate was worthless. He couldn’t get his mind off what had happened to Barry, how torn up the man was about it. Nate tried to mentally place himself in that position. He wondered, even though he was trying to divorce her, if he could find out that his wife was cheating on him, see photos of her engaged in the act, and then not throw himself off a building, or hunt the man down with a shotgun.
The ironic thing, Nate knew, was that he needed exactly that to happen to him in order to divorce his wife without handing over a fortune.
When Nate got home from work, Monica was there as she always seemed to be. She was happy to see him, especially since their reconciliation last night, and she jumped from the sofa when he walked in the door, was in his arms only moments after he had set down his briefcase.
She kissed him on the lips, smiled as she excitedly spoke to him about something, but her words went unheard by Nate.
His mind was elsewhere, stuck on how life would be without his wife there at home for him when he walked in the door, without her smiling in his face, jumping in his arms, like she had just done.
Nate sat and ate dinner with Monica, doing his best to listen to whatever she was saying, to pretend as though he was in the conversation, when he really wasn’t.
That night he made love to her as passionately as he ever had, as though nothing at all was wrong.
After Monica had fallen off to sleep, Nate lay there beside her, his arms behind his head, staring up into the darkness, listening to his wife breathe.
“Monica,” he whispered lightly, checking to see if she was still awake. When she didn’t answer, he pulled the blankets back off himself, and quietly got out of bed.
Nate ended up on their balcony, his bathrobe pulled tight around his waist, the cool night air blowing past him as he looked down the sixty-five stories onto the brilliant night lights of the city.
Nate placed both his hands on the balcony railing, stepped very close to it, and looked out over the edge.
It was a decision that Nate didn’t want to make, but he would have to decide. What was most important to him—having his wife, or having a family? Because he could not have them both.
Nate pulled the cordless phone from one of the big pockets in his robe. He stared down at it, trying to decide if he should make the call he was considering making.
He shouldn’t, he concluded, but found himself punching in the numbers anyway.
The phone rang, then a slightly groggy voice answered.
Nate looked back over his shoulder, through the balcony doors, making sure that Monica had not awakened and come downstairs.
“Hello,” Nate said, seeing that he was alone. “I woke you, didn’t I?”
“I was just nodding off,” a female voice said. “Is everything all right, Nate? You don’t sound good.”
“It’s just everything that’s going on. I need to talk to you tomorrow.”
“I don’t think we can avoid that, Mr. Kenny.”
“No. Not like that. Lunch, dinner maybe. I mean, I really need to talk.”
There was a moment before a reply was made, and Nate felt himself becoming uneasy.
“Okay,” the woman finally agreed. “Just let me know.”
17
Lewis had stood outside Selena’s apartment the other night, just after he had had a gun pressed to his head.
The man that Selena was having sex with walked Lewis through the apartment wearing nothing at all, making sure that the tip of the gun barrel stayed flush against the back of Lewis’s skull.
“Open it,” the man said, once they got to the front door.
Lewis did as he was told. He stood in front of the screen door, looking out on the street, kids playing in front of him as they always did, this naked man behind him, threatening his life.
“It’s fucked up how this is going down, and on the real, brotha,” the man said, Lewis hearing some actual sympathy in his voice, “I feel for you. But shit is how shit is. Now get the fuck out, and I wouldn’t come back until I’m gone, ’cause I wouldn’t want to use this on you.”
Lewis slowly stepped out of the screen door, looked back to see the man eyeing him. All the kids on the street were looking at the naked man holding the gun as well.
The man closed the door, and there Lewis stood, fuming, an anger raging in him so intense that he considered bursting back in and taking his chances at getting shot, just to get his hands on Selena, then grab his baby out of there.
After a few more minutes of standing by the door, he walked around the back of the apartment, to the bedroom window. He cupped his hands, pressed his face up against the glass, trying to see through the pink bedsheet that hung there.
He couldn’t see a thing, but he didn’t have to, for he heard enough to know what was going on. He didn’t know if it was an act or for real, but Selena was moaning and carrying on like she had never had sex before.
Lewis heard his daughter start crying, and that’s when he had to force himself away from that window. He jumped in his car, sped away as fast as he could before he did something stupid.
Lewis ended up at a childhood friend’s house. His name was Freddy, and actually the house was his mother’s. Freddy lived in the basement.
It was after ten o’clock, for Lewis had driven around for as far as his tank of gas would take him, trying to figure out what to do, when he landed there.
He tapped on the basement window where Freddy lived, and when his bony friend finally came and pulled back the curtain, Lewis motioned for him to go to the basement door.
“I need a place to crash tonight, Freddy,” Lewis said. Freddy stood in the doorway, jeans sagging off his narrow hips, and no shirt covering his skeletonlike torso.
“Can’t do it, man. You know my moms ain’t like you since we got caught stealin’ in third grade.”
“Selena just kicked me out, and I ain’t got no place to go. Just this one night, Freddy,” Lewis pleaded. “I can sleep on the couch, and I’ll be out of here in the morning before anyone even wake up.”
Freddy looked at Lewis long and hard, as if trying to determine if he was trying to run a game of some sort, then he stepped back from the door, saying, “All right, but if she find out, I’m gonna say that you broke in, and I didn’t even know you was here.”
That night, Lewis slept on Freddy’s lumpy old love seat, which smelled of mildew and was so short that he had to hang his legs over one of the arms.
Freddy was nice enough to give him one of the blankets off his bed, which might as well have been made of paper towel, considering how thin the thing was.
Lewis lay there in the dark most of the night, shivering against the drafts
that blew over him, thinking about his daughter and wondering just how he had gotten to where he was.
Bad decisions, he told himself, not wanting to think in detail about every single mistake he made, knowing it would only make him feel worse. Lewis knew he had to concentrate on how to better his situation. And he knew the first thing he had to do was get his daughter.
The next morning, Lewis was up, folded the bedspread, and set it neatly across the love seat. He was out of Freddy’s basement before he or his mother had gotten up.
Lewis had gotten only about two hours of sleep, but regardless of how tired he was, he knew he still had to go to work. He needed the money now more than ever, since he would possibly have to pay for some place to stay, if Selena wouldn’t let him back in.
After spending half a day at the barbershop, Lewis discovered that work had just that quickly gone back to the way it always had been. None of Beasly’s old friends were lined up in Lewis’s chairs waiting for haircuts, and by the time six o’clock inched around, Lewis had a whopping forty-five bucks in his jeans.
He stood outside, leaning against the building, pulling in smoke from a cigarette he had bummed off another barber. Beasly was beside him, doing the same, only half smoking and half chomping on the butt of a fat cigar. Lewis had pulled him out of the shop for the express purpose of telling him all that had recently gone on, and asking him just what he should do.
“Well, that ain’t no place for no nine-month-old little girl to be,” Beasly said, after taking the cigar from his lips.
“I know that. But I ain’t got no place to stay myself, let alone a place to keep Layla.”
“Then you got to smooth things over with your girl till you can get a place.”
Lewis looked at Beasly, thinking about all that would take, and he shook his head.
“I know what you thinkin’, boy. Your woman layin’ up with another man, and you having to look past that, but you just gotta tell yourself you doing it for the sake of your daughter. You hear that,” Beasly said, nudging Lewis with the hand he held the cigar with, then sticking it back in his teeth. “Do it for the sake of your daughter.”