Other Titles by Gloria Mallette
The Honey Well
Promises to Keep
Weeping Willows Dance
Shades of Jade
When We Practice to Deceive
GLORIA MALLETTE
Distant Lover
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Other Titles by Gloria Mallette
Title Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DISTANT LOVER
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DISTANT LOVER
Copyright Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I thank the Lord for once again blessing me with a story to tell, and for giving me an audience interested in reading it.
Much love to my husband, Arnold, for journeying with me on this literary path of highs and lows. Arnold, your patience is, at times, greater than mine—thank you for being the calm one.
Much love to my son, Jared, for trying his best to give me time alone to write—try harder next time, little one.
I humbly acknowledge my editor, Karen Thomas, for once again allowing me to write a story as dictated by my characters and not by a set of rules or formula. As well, a nod of appreciation to my agent, Stacey Glick of Dystel Literary Management, for being proactive in my career; and a special thank-you to Jessica McLean, the national sales representative of Kensington Books, for her selfless encouragement and enthusiasm. In addition, I must thank publicist Peggy Hicks of Tricom for always finding the time to talk and for her expertise in marketing titles by African-American authors.
Much love and appreciation to Trust Graham and Richlieu Dennis of Nubian Heritage of Brooklyn, Queens, and Harlem, New York. You’ve always believed in me and you’ve always supported me. You are forever in my heart. Thank you for a fabulous book release party. You’re the best. And to David D. Wright of The Orature Repertory Radio Theatre Group, thank you for coming through for me. Aixa Kendrick and Keisha Monique Booker, you ladies were superb.
A heartfelt hug to so many reviewers and book clubs who have always been fair and open-minded when reviewing my titles.
Last but most certainly not least, I tip my hat to the readers, the book clubs, the bookstore owners and managers, and the book vendors all across the country. Without you, my books would not be read. Bless you.
DISTANT LOVER
Yesterday I dreamed of you.
Today I yearn for you.
Every time I ache for the touch of you,
I’m reminded how distant I am from you.
Time and space has long intruded,
my love for you years ago rooted.
You are my distant lover,
you are the desire I cannot savor.
You are my distant lover,
my fantasy, my lover of favor.
—Gloria Mallette
1
Hordes of people—some strolling, some shopping, others hurrying about their own personal business—were rudely brushing past Tandi Belson, irritating her, making her move out of each square foot of sidewalk she claimed while she waited for Brent. She couldn’t get mad at Brent. He was only four minutes late. She was the one who was early—twenty-seven minutes early. Of course, if Brent was allowed to come to her house to see her like other girls’ boyfriends, she would not have had to sneak and meet him on the corner of Jamaica Avenue and 164th Street, one of the busiest commercial street corners in Jamaica, Queens, on a Saturday afternoon, when she was supposed to be bowling with her girlfriends up on Hillside Avenue. If her father had an inkling, he’d put a dog collar around her neck and let her out only when school was in session. Her father didn’t like Brent and the truth was, grumpy old Glynn Belson didn’t like her either. But that was all right. His disliking her didn’t bother Tandi, at least not anymore.
All that mattered to Tandi was that she had Brent and that they were in love. And it was love, although puppy love is what Aunt Gert called it; a hot ass is what her father called it. Of course, neither was right. She wasn’t a starry-eyed kid, and she wasn’t hot to lose her virginity. She was truly in love, and while losing her virginity wasn’t uppermost in her mind, she would not hold back nor would she regret it if it were to Brent Rodgers. He was to die for. Sometimes Tandi felt like she couldn’t breathe until she could see Brent again, until she could touch him and know that he was real and not a figment of her imagination. Oh, but Brent was very real. Hadn’t he, just the day before, behind the bleachers in the school gymnasium, tongued her deep and long while feeling her breasts under her gym shirt, rendering her weak in the knees and moist in a place where she had not yet been touched? Soon though, that’s for sure.
Oh, God! There he is! Tandi’s heart leaped. Her pulse quickened as she watched Brent’s long, muscular legs bring him closer. The funny thing was, she must have seen him walking down the street hundreds of times, yet each and every time she saw him was like seeing him for the very first time. He still took her breath away just as he did to a lot of girls at Francis Lewis High School. She knew of three in particular who would scratch her eyes out to get with Brent, but who could blame them? Brent was all that and more. He was definitely something to look at. The skimpy muscle shirt and mid-thigh shorts he wore exposed his sculptured biceps, his touch-me pecs, and powerful runner’s thighs. Brent truly must have been a beautiful baby because he was so fine now—and he was all hers. Tandi couldn’t wait to be in his arms, to taste of his lips, to feel his hardness against her softness. Her entire body throbbed with a yearning so strong she trembled. She wanted Brent to—
“Mommy! Are you sleeping in there?”
Tandi’s eyes flew open. She yanked her hand from between her thighs. She quickly sat up, splashing her tepid bathwater up against the wall and over the side of the tub onto the floor. “Damn,” she whispered, hating that the bath mat was probably soaked, and most likely the rug, too. She looked down at her legs through the clear water. There wasn’t a single bubble left.
Knock . . . knock . . . knock.
“Mommy! Can I have some ice cream and cookies?”
Looking at the door, Tandi sighed heavily. Back to reality. She was no longer that carefree seventeen-year-old girl whose every dream and every waking thought was of Brent. She was a wife to Jared Crawford who no longer noticed her, and a mother to Michael Jared who was the light of her life. Secretly, she ached shamelessly for an eighteen-year-old boy from way back in 1984 when the lazy, hazy summer days of her sexual awakening, combined with soulful love songs whet her appetite for Brent and filled her head
with erotic fantasies and made her reality even sweeter when he became hers.
“Mommy!”
“What!”
“ ’Bout time! Can I have some ice cream and cookies?”
Although the house was quite warm, just the mention of ice cream and knowing that the icy rains that came with the end of January were still falling outside her bathroom window made Tandi shiver in her tepid bathwater.
“Please, Mommy.”
“Did you finish your homework?”
“Yeah. Can I have some ice cream and cookies?”
“Michael Jared, you had cookies when you got in from school this afternoon.”
“Mommy, that was hours ago, and you only let me have three.”
“That’s because you ate a whole package of cookies yesterday.”
“It was a small pack. Mommy, we got cookies, why can’t I eat ’em?”
“Boy . . . Michael Jared, you’re wearing me out. Take three more cookies and let me finish my bath in peace.” She knew Michael Jared would ignore her and eat darn near the whole package again. But what could she do? He was a growing boy with a big appetite.
“Mommy, one day you gonna drown in there.”
“I’m sure you’ll break down the door and save your drowning mother, won’t you?”
“That’s gross! I don’t wanna see you in no bathtub. I’d call nine-one-one.”
“By that time, I could be dead.”
“They’ll bring you back, just don’t let them see you naked.”
Tandi smiled to herself. “Boy, go get your cookies and ice cream before I change my mind.”
Michael Jared was her heart, her baby, but he was at the awkward crossroads of still being a little boy and the awakening of his own sexuality. He had a hissy fit when she told him she use to bathe him along with herself, and sometimes along with his father when he was a baby, which wasn’t all that long ago, and now that he’d had his first wet dream and, most likely, compared notes with his equally horny finger-playing buddies, nudity and sex went hand in hand despite what she told him to the contrary. Michael Jared thought it gross to even think of her and Jared as either nude or sexual.
Knock . . . knock . . . knock.
She thought Michael Jared had gone. “What?”
“Mommy, can I watch TV?”
“You know the rules.”
“Can I, please? I finished my homework. One hour. Please, Mommy.”
Tandi wasn’t up to a long, drawn-out debate. “Thirty minutes, Michael Jared, and no more. It’s almost eight-thirty.”
“Thanks!”
Tandi could hear him running down the stairs. “And don’t make a mess!”
Whether Michael Jared heard her or not, he’d still leave melted chocolate ice cream spots on the coffee table in the family room and his empty bowl in the sink without a drop of water in it. Too many times she had tried to get him to clean up after himself, but Michael Jared seemed to prefer emulating his father. There wasn’t much she could do about Jared—his mama had already raised him—but Michael Jared, he could still be taught. Tandi wasn’t about to saddle her future daughter-in-law with a man who expected his woman to do everything for him except for maybe pick his teeth. That is, not if she could help it.
She often wondered what kind of father Brent Rodgers would have made. God, she had to stop doing that. Drawing her legs up, Tandi planted her feet solidly on the bottom of the tub, gripped the sides, and heaved herself up. Water cascaded down her body back into the tub like a waterfall. Deep in thought, she took her time drying herself off. Lately, more and more, Brent was constantly on her mind. If she wasn’t comparing Jared to Brent, she was wishing Brent would call or show up at her door. She hadn’t seen him in twenty years so she didn’t know if he was alive or dead, married or single, or if he was a bum on the street or president of a company. They had only gone together that one unforgettable last year in high school, but she could still feel what it was like to be kissed by him, and, in her mind’s eye, she could still see him walking down the street like it was yesterday. The more she thought about Brent, the more she ached to see him, to feel him inside her; for that she blamed Jared. If her life with him was any good—if he hadn’t cheated on her and left her doubting her own ability to keep him interested—she wouldn’t be dredging up memories of Brent Rodgers and relying on those memories to feed her emotionally anemic love life.
2
Tandi couldn’t say she knew the exact moment she felt her marriage was over; she just knew it didn’t end all at once. It didn’t end three years ago on the day she was cleaning out Jared’s closet and found six love letters from a woman named Jackie, stashed in a pair of old sneakers far back in the closet. Her marriage didn’t end altogether that same evening when the first words out of Jared’s mouth were a lie about when the letters were written—before they were married—and that he had kept the letters for sentimental reasons. The letters were not dated so Tandi couldn’t dispute him but she didn’t believe his lie either, not then, not now. If only she’d ended it then, she wouldn’t be reliving the hurt she felt that day.
“Jared, if that’s the case, why did you hide the letters in your sneakers way in the back of the closet?”
Jared cursed himself for keeping the letters that were spread out on the dining room table before him. “Because I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea like you’re getting anyway.”
“Actually, the hiding of the letters is what’s giving me the wrong idea.” Tandi picked up one of the letters and had begun to open the envelope when Jared snatched it from her and hastily gathered the rest.
“That’s all right, take them,” she said. “I’ve already read them.”
Jared momentarily closed his eyes.
“See, Jared, a liar is always caught. You would not have had to hide a letter written before we were married unless you were seeing this woman behind my back when we were going together.”
“No. I wasn’t seeing her behind your back.”
“So when were you seeing her?” She had put him on the spot. His eyes were moving rapidly.
“It was . . . it was before we got—”
“Stop lying, Jared. These letters aren’t that old. The paper hasn’t even faded. You’re having an affair.”
“No. No, I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Stop lying!”
“I’m—”
She tossed the credit card statement at him. It landed on the floor at his feet. Right away Jared saw what it was and was reluctant to pick it up.
“Motels take cash, you know.”
She had walked away from Jared then—out of the house, but not out of their marriage. Like now, back then it was a cold day. She had driven to Daina’s house, her and Jared’s best friend, but Daina wasn’t home and neither was Evonne when she called her. In the end, she had driven around Queens through quiet, tree-lined neighborhoods of modest red-brick houses, intermingled with old white-framed houses with no destination in mind, just to end up back in front of her own brick house of crumbling walls. It was then that she realized she really had nowhere to go.
That was three years ago and since then, Tandi felt as if she had been holding on to her marriage by her fingertips. For a little while there, she had been hoping and praying she and Jared could get back some of their early magic, but that had all been for naught. She and Jared had grown so far apart they had become ex-lovers, ex-friends, nearly strangers in their own home. While she spent most of her time there, Jared was spending all of his time away from it. Working, he claimed. The truth was, he did work long, hard hours, which he faulted for his exhaustion. He had stopped making love to her, he said, because he was always tired. Tandi didn’t buy that. Not after she found the letters, not after knowing that Jared used to make love to her at least three days a week even after he’d worked a full day.
The truth was, Jared was no longer interested in her, and she had been too blind to see it. There had been a slew of months that added up to years of first a
cceptance of Jared’s excuses as to why he was too tired to make love to her or too busy to be with her until she got to where she didn’t care if he came home or not. She was always irritable, and her irritability intensified the moment Jared walked in the door. Now, she felt trapped—trapped in a cycle of domestic mediocrity and endless days without passion for life or love. Tandi knew she didn’t always feel that way; she used to love taking care of her home and her man, that was her life.
That’s why she knew she didn’t simply wake up one morning and wish Jared would cease to exist; it really was more subtle than that. Over time, little things that didn’t seem so important snuck up on her and became overwhelmingly irritating: Jared’s dirty socks dropped and left so carelessly on the bedroom floor for her to pick up; the way he left the soap drowning in the dish so that when she touched it, it was repulsively soft and slimy; his chewing with his mouth open, nauseating her; and smacking his food loud enough to be heard a room away. It really wasn’t worth it to continually nag him about those things, but she did anyway. Jared’s response was his usual blank look and an offhanded “What’s the big deal,” which only irritated Tandi more. Looking back, Jared was doing the same things and worse thirteen years ago, but then she overlooked them. Now, they were driving her out of her mind.
While Tandi’s feelings about her marriage had not soured all at once, it seemed to her that Jared appeared to show his age all at once. She didn’t know when stray hairs started growing like vines out of his nose and ears or when sprigs of gray popped up in his moustache. Nor could she recall when his once tight washboard stomach softened a bit. True, he was six years older than she and none of that should have bothered her when her hips had spread a good eight inches since she had Michael Jared eleven years ago, and no matter how many crunches she did, her stomach still wasn’t as flat as it was when she was a seventeen-year-old and proud to wear the halter tops and midriff blouses that her father hated. The truth was, her belly button was never going to see the light of day again. And, worse yet, fine lines were beginning to appear around her mouth, reminding her that her thirty-seven years were marking her.
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