Best Kept Secrets

by Shelly Ellis

  “What’s wrong?” he asked as she started twisting against him and shoving him away from her. She gave another hard shove and he fell back against the mattress in a sprawled heap.

  “Lee, what the hell’s wrong?” he repeated, watching bemused as Leila scrambled away from the headboard to the other side of the bed. She grabbed for one of the bedsheets, cloaking her nakedness.

  What had gotten into her?

  “Mama! What . . . what are you doing here?” Leila asked breathlessly, shoving her hair out of her eyes.

  “Mama?” Evan turned to find Leila’s mother, Diane, standing in the doorway.

  “Shit!” he spat before grabbing for one of the bed pillows and holding it in front of his groin in a feeble attempt to cover himself. But it was obvious from the look on the older woman’s face that she had seen enough already, that she had seen too much. She looked utterly stricken and worse—sickened—by the sight of them.

  “Marsha got sick last night,” Diane whispered, barely audible over the sound of the news broadcast. “We decided to head home early. I . . . I left you a message saying I was on my way.”

  Leila tightened the sheets around her and crawled off the bed. She stood near her night table. “I-I didn’t get the message.”

  Her mother’s stricken expression disappeared. Her lips puckered like she had just tasted something sour. “I guess you were busy doing . . . other things.” She then shifted her withering gaze to Evan. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

  Evan adjusted his pillow, unsure of what to say in response to that.

  “Don’t you have a home and wife you should be attending to?” Diane asked.

  He blinked in shock. Was she none-too-subtly kicking him out of his own rental? Evan turned to Leila to see if she would come to his defense, but she kept her head bowed. She refused to look at him.

  So it’s like that, huh?

  He slowly climbed off the bed and headed to the bathroom. “I guess I do,” he mumbled before closing the bathroom door behind him.

  Chapter 21

  LEILA

  Leila had just finished gathering the last of her dirty laundry, tossing her clothes and damp towels haphazardly into a plastic basket that she planned to drag down the stairs to their laundry room two floors below, when she heard a soft knock at her door. She paused, looked over her shoulder at the closed door, and took a deep breath. She knew who was knocking: it was her mother, and the older woman was probably tired of waiting to give the lecture she had undoubtedly been itching to give all day.

  “Lee? Lee?” Diane said from the hallway, knocking again. “Lee, I know you hear me!”

  Leila gnawed her bottom lip, wondering, if she stayed quiet long enough, whether her mother would go away.

  She couldn’t put into words how humiliated she had been to have her mother stumble upon her and Evan in bed together. Seeing the look of horror and disappointment on the older woman’s face had caused whatever feelings of joy and ecstasy Leila had had at that moment to evaporate. Instead, she had felt an overwhelming, almost crippling sense of shame.

  After Evan put on his clothes and left, she had shut her bedroom door and sat on the edge of the bed for almost an hour, staring at nothing. She didn’t go to work that day. She had barely left her room. She saw that Evan had called her cell phone more than once, but she didn’t answer. She told herself that she needed to be alone, that she needed to think things over, but the truth was that she was hiding. She was hiding from Evan and she was hiding from the woman on the other side of her door who wouldn’t take Leila’s silence as a cue to leave.

  “I’ll just keep knocking until you answer, Lee,” her mother called. “Open up!”

  Leila sighed and finally trudged across the carpet to her door. She slowly opened it and found her mother standing in the hall with her arms crossed over her chest.

  “If you made me wait any longer, I would have to beat that damn door down,” Diane said.

  “I know.” Leila turned away and kicked her basket aside and out of her mother’s path. “Believe me—I know.”

  “It’s a little after one o’clock. You didn’t come down for breakfast or lunch. You gonna stay holed up here forever?”

  “If I have to,” Leila muttered before tossing a sweater into the laundry basket.

  Diane raised a brow and walked further into the bedroom. “You avoiding something?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Like what?”

  Leila pursed her lips, wondering why her mother was drawing this out. “Oh, I don’t know, Mama. Maybe, the lecture I have coming to me.”

  “You think I’m going to lecture you?”

  “I don’t think you are; I know you are. You’re going to tell me that I shouldn’t be having an affair with a married man. You’re going to tell me that you raised me better than this. You’re going to tell me that—”

  Diane sucked her teeth. “I wasn’t gonna say any of those things. Shows how much you know.”

  Leila paused, now confused. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a grown woman, Lee. If you are happy with what you’re doing with that man, nothing I can say can stop you. If this is what you really want, so be it.”

  Leila stared at her mother, now wondering if the older woman was trying to trick her into confessing something. “So you’re . . . you’re saying you’re fine with what Ev and I are doing?”

  “Oh no!” Diane quickly shook her head. “I didn’t say that! I said the decision is yours. If you’re okay with being what some folks in town always thought you would be, then”—Diane shrugged—“that’s up to you.”

  Leila frowned. “What some folks thought I would be . . .”

  “Uh-huh,” Diane said, taking a step toward her daughter. “Since you and Evan were old enough to know what love is, Evan was in love with you, but some jealous folks out there didn’t think you two stood a real chance of being together. I heard it myself once from a woman at church. You remember Miss Ida?”

  Leila nodded, now even more confused by the direction this conversation was going. “Vaguely. She always wore those leopard-print hats, right?”

  “That’s the one! Miss Ida was supposed to be a Christian—or at least that’s what she called herself even though she could say some mean and hateful things sometimes.”

  Diane walked to the foot stool at the end of Leila’s bed and sat down. She crossed her legs primly at the ankles.

  “One day, that woman showed her true colors, but she didn’t know I was standing by listening. Miss Ida saw you and Evan walking down the aisle together at First Good Samaritan, collecting the donation baskets and whispering and laughing to one another. You two were no more than fourteen, maybe fifteen years old—just kids. That hateful woman turned to her friends and said, ‘I wonder does that girl know that’s the only time she’s ever gonna walk down the aisle with a Murdoch. Leila White can smile up in that boy’s face all she wants. The most she can ever hope for is being one of their whores.’”

  At those words, Leila felt as if she had been punched in the gut.

  “I wanted to slap the teeth out her mouth, Lee. I wanted to yank that leopard hat and that cheap wig right off her head, and probably would have if we weren’t inside a church. I caught up with her later though, when she was handing out cake at one of the church picnics. I pulled that heffa aside and I pointed my finger right in her face and I said, ‘How dare you? How dare you use my daughter’s name and that word in the same sentence! My daughter would never, ever agree to be any man’s whore, even a Murdoch’s! And if I ever hear you talk about my child like that again, I’m going to yank you into the parking lot and its gonna be me and you battling it out, old woman!’ She must’ve believed me because she never said it again.”

  Leila gazed at her mother in shock. She gaped. “I-I didn’t know that.”

  “Of course, you didn’t! Why would I tell you? I wanted to protect you from that hurt, that venom. You didn’t deserve to be called a whore.” Diane
abruptly narrowed her eyes and twisted her mouth in disgust. “But I can’t say that anymore. You made yourself into what that woman thought you would be. You made her right and you made me liar, Lee.”

  Leila swallowed the lump that had formed in her throat. She shook her head. “I’m not . . . I’m not his whore, Mama.”

  “You could’ve fooled me from what I saw this morning.”

  “We’re in love! Evan cares about me,” Leila insisted, though her voice was trembling.

  Diane jumped up from the footstool to glare at her daughter. “How much does he care? Does he care enough to tell the world how much he loves you? Does he care enough to leave his wife?”

  “He can’t do that. He has too much at stake! It’s not that simple! He could—”

  “Yes, it is! It’s as simple as that. Any man who puts you on his payroll so that you’re beholden to him—”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “—who asks you to sneak around so that you can’t even tell your own mama what’s going on—”

  “I told you, it’s not like that! He hasn’t asked me to do anything!”

  “—doesn’t love you. Or at least, he doesn’t love you like a man should love you, honey. He needs to stand up. He needs to be a man, a real man! And you need to be enough of a woman to say you don’t deserve any less from him!”

  Leila closed her eyes and dropped her face into her hands. She slumped back onto her bed, from which she had already removed the sheets that she and Evan had slept on only hours earlier.

  “I can’t ask him that. His family, his name, his reputation. . . it means so much to him. It’s been drilled into him for . . . forever. I can’t ask him to toss all that aside for me.”

  Diane gazed at Leila evenly. She walked toward her and pulled the younger woman’s hands from her face so that they stared into one another’s eyes.

  “Then don’t, Lee,” Diane whispered. “But don’t let him ask you to push aside everything that’s important to you either. Don’t forget the woman that you are just to make him happy.”

  At that, Leila’s stomach clenched. Her mother was right. Dear God, she was right! All this time, Leila had been deluding herself into believing differently. She had told herself not to ask questions, to put off all misgivings and doubts and just go with the moment. But she couldn’t do that anymore. She had to accept the truth: her affair with Evan had to end.

  “Morning, Leila!” the perky younger woman called as Leila darted past the stainless-steel receptionist desk on the twelfth floor of Murdoch Conglomerated.

  Leila almost tripped on the C-suite’s plush carpet, startled by the sudden greeting.

  “Oh, hi! G-g-good morning, Emily,” she stuttered. She then adjusted her purse strap and shifted the empty cardboard box she held so that it was now mostly hidden behind her back.

  “We missed you yesterday!” Emily gushed. “Were you out sick?”

  “Uh, yeah.” Leila did a fake cough and motioned to her throat. “I, uh . . . I had a little cold.”

  “Oh, that’s a bummer.” The receptionist shifted her headset aside. “Melanie had her retirement party. You missed an awesome cake! They got it from that nice shop downtown. It had three layers and one was tiramisu or something like that. Or was it hazelnut?” She tapped her cleft chin thoughtfully. “It had this weird flavor that—”

  “You don’t say,” Leila muttered, glancing at her office door. “Look, I should get going.”

  Emily nodded and waved her hand. “Sorry. Listen to me jabber when you’ve probably got plenty of work to do,” the young woman said with a laugh. “I won’t keep you. Catch you later, Leila.”

  “See you later,” Leila echoed, though that was a lie.

  If it was up to her, she might never see Emily again—save for when she made her way back to the elevators to leave Murdoch Conglomerated for good. Leila hoped to have her desk packed and her letter of resignation waiting on Evan’s desk in less than a half an hour. She hoped to be out of this building and driving away before his driver pulled into his reserved space in the parking garage.

  “Morning, Lee!” the assistant director of marketing called.

  “Hey, Leila!” someone else said as she passed.

  Leila winced and lowered her eyes, waving awkwardly to the company staffers who called out their greetings, trying her best not to get sucked into any more conversations that could cost her time.

  She glanced at her watch and felt perspiration form on her brow when she realized another minute had ticked by, another minute that drew her closer to Evan’s arrival.

  Gotta speed this up, she thought.

  She knew she was handling this the cowardly way. She was avoiding confrontation with Evan, slinking out the back door with her tail between her legs. But what was she supposed to do? What could she possibly say that wouldn’t make him angry at her, that wouldn’t seem like she was giving him an ultimatum?

  It’s either me or your marriage, Evan. It’s either me or your precious reputation.

  But she wouldn’t tell him that. She couldn’t. So rather than give him a choice, she was making the decision for them. She was walking away with that little part of her soul intact.

  He would be hurt by her decision, maybe even furious—at first. But later, he would see the wisdom in it. He would know she had had only the best of intentions.

  With that resolved, Leila’s guilt abated a little. She decided to focus less on Evan and more on packing. She entered her office and quickly assessed her desk, determining at a glance what to trash, what to pack, and what to leave behind since it was rightfully company property. She sat aside the envelope containing her typed and signed resignation letter and placed the cardboard box in the seat of her rollaway chair. She quickly began to gather pictures—three of Isabel and one old photo of her mother—and placed them in the box. Next she dumped in a crystal paperweight and pen holder. Just as she grabbed her stapler, she heard the door open behind her. She turned, startled, to find Evan standing in his doorway.

  Leila dropped the stapler to the floor with a clatter. She gaped. “Wh-what are you d-doing here?” she asked, whipping around to face him, bumping into her desk.

  “What do you mean, what am I doing here? I came in early to prep for the eight o’clock meeting with Wendell Foods.”

  When she continued to stare at him blankly, he raised his brows. “You don’t remember the meeting with Wendell Foods? The one you scheduled?”

  “N-no, I don’t.”

  I’ve been a little preoccupied lately, Ev.

  “What are you doing anyway?”

  She followed the path of his gaze to her half-filled cardboard box. “I . . . well, I . . .”

  Her words faded. She couldn’t say it. This wasn’t how this was supposed to happen. He was supposed to come in for another hour! He wasn’t supposed to see this!

  Leila watched as Evan stepped closer to her desk, leaned down, and picked up the fallen stapler. He placed it on her desktop beside the envelope that had his name scribbled on top. He picked up the envelope. “What’s this?”

  Standing before him, watching his confusion, all her resolve faltered. She helplessly shook her head. Her eyes began to water. “You weren’t supposed to be here,” she whispered softly.

  And that’s when he knew. She could see the realization of what she was doing dawning on him like a curtain on a window suddenly being drawn back, revealing the landscape on the other side of the glass. But this landscape was desolate and empty, sad and barren. That was what overwhelmed her as he raised his eyes from the envelope and stared at her. She saw a myriad of emotions flash across his face—shock, hurt, disappointment, and finally, anger.

  His lips tightened. She watched as the muscles along his jaw rippled. “Come into my office,” he said, clutching the envelope in his fist. He turned and shoved the door open.

  “Ev, I—”

  “Inside!” he barked and she winced. Even one of the other secretaries who happened to be walk
ing by paused and stared at Evan, stunned. He didn’t usually talk to anyone, let alone Leila, that way.

  He stalked inside and toward his desk and Leila followed him reluctantly, feeling her heart thud wildly in her chest, feeling weak in the knees. She kept her eyes downcast, unable to meet his furious gaze any longer.

  “Close the door,” he ordered and she followed his command like she had so many times in the past. But unlike those other times, Evan wasn’t about to rush across the room to hold her close or to steal a kiss. Right now, he radiated no warmth.

  She had felt this coldness before when he refused to ever talk to her again during that phone call ten years ago. She wondered if that was about to happen all over again.

  But what did she expect? For him to say, “Sure, Lee, I understand if you want to break it off. Don’t worry. We can still be besties!”

  No, he wouldn’t let her off that easily. She realized the full scope of what was about to happen. She wasn’t just ending an affair with her lover; she was also about to lose her best friend all over again.

  Leila watched as he started to pace in front of his desk.

  “I knew something was up! You didn’t come into the office yesterday. You didn’t return any of my phone calls. I figured with your mother walking in on us that you needed to work through some things, that you may need some time. But tis . . .” He paused from his pacing, held up the envelope, and furiously shook his head. “I never expected any shit like this!”

  “I’m so . . . so sorry. Really I am, but . . . I can’t . . . I can’t do this anymore, Ev.”

  “Do what?” He tossed the envelope onto his desk before turning to glare at her. “Do what, Lee? Work for me? Have sex with me? What?” he yelled.

  “All of it! All of it, Ev!” She finally raised her eyes and took a step toward him. “I have to quit my job. I have to end this, all of this!” She pointed to the envelope. “In there is my letter of resignation and . . . and a check for the next two months of rent.”

  “You think I care about a fucking check?”

  “Look, I know we’re moving out with little notice, but I wanted to make sure that—”