Lee swallowed hard, like he’d just said the heck with chewing up that chicken. He then dropped his fork to his plate and pushed it away. There was silence as he then picked up his napkin, wiped his mouth, and threw the napkin over his plate. Guess something I’d said had made him lose his appetite.
He took a deep breath, then rested his back against his chair. “Are you asking me did I seek you out just to gain some kind of notoriety in church for evangelizing the lost or something?”
“Don’t act like it’s farfetched. It could be some tactic you guys use. Go to clubs searching for lost souls to bring to God. Kind of like a . . . a . . .”
“An outreach ministry?”
“Yeah, outreach or something. I mean, what kind of deacon hangs out at Satin Saturday’s?”
“A deacon who owns a printing company and had to meet one of his clients there to drop off some marketing and promotional material.”
I wanted to excuse myself while I picked my face up off the ground.
“The guys who host Satin Saturday’s are one of my clients,” Lee started to explain. “I’d just dropped off one of their projects. I was waiting for them to bring me my check. Once they did I left. I wanted to stay and hunt down the beautiful girl who brushed me off while I was waiting, but I had an anniversary party I had to attend. Does that answer your question?”
Ohhh, he told me. I was feeling real embarrassed now. Wearing a little sundress and flip-flops to church was nothing compared to this. “I’m sorry, Lee. But can you blame me? You kept all that a secret. Usually when people keep secrets, it’s because they are hiding something or have ulterior motives.”
He sighed and leaned in. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to lose you before I ever even had you.”
I was confused by his comment.
“Musik, do you know how many women I’ve met who I really wanted to get to know better, but before they could even get to really know me at all they cut me off? The minute I mention the fact that I’m a deacon in the church, these women act like I’m the kryptonite to their every fantasy. There are a few women who couldn’t care less. They are the ones who were too busy trying to convert me in order for me to convert them, if you know what I mean.”
I knew exactly what he meant with that convicting comment of his. I, myself, had only been a thought away from trying to convert him over to my team of fornicating sinners. Dang it!
“But you’re different, Musik.”
Huh, if only he knew.
“You just have this air about you that is vivid and clear. You don’t blow smoke. So for some crazy reason, with you I was compelled to keep that bit of information about me being a deacon and all on the back burner. Don’t get me wrong, in no way shape or form am I denying Christ. I just felt this was the right way to go about it. I wanted to show you instead of tell you.” He rested his case, looking at me as if he was expecting my closing arguments. Then the verdict.
I thought for a moment, leaned in, and simply said, “Well, I’m kind of glad you decided to show me rather than tell me. I’m a strong believer that actions speak louder than words. And, well, Mr. Hampton, or should I say Deacon Hampton, I liked what I saw.”
He leaned in as well. “And, well, Ms. Carter, I love what I see.”
I wanted to melt in his hands. He smiled one of his bright smiles and then I changed my mind. I wanted to melt in his mouth instead, repenting a few seconds later for that thought. This was going to be hard, kicking it with a Christian dude. A fine, sexy Christian dude at that. Why did God have to go and make Christian men so sexy? Just seems like an oxymoron to me. I’d have to put my guard up. He could see me as the hellion I was—non-convertible—and decide to drop me because our egg yolks didn’t mix up, scramble, or something like that.
“So, what do you say, Ms. Carter? Willing to get to know me better and see what God has in store? I’m not asking you to give up the life you live. Do your thing, ma. Be the woman you are. But if I do my job right as a man—a man of God—then, eventually, you’ll end up being a reflection of me regardless. So do you think you can hang with an old church boy like myself? Do you?” He waited all cool, calm, and collected like he was at a detail shop waiting for his Jaguar to get finished up.
“I do, Mr. Hampton. I do,” I confessed. I had no idea how this thing with Lee and me was going to work, with him being into church and me not. But who cared about all that business about yolks and stuff? I had to take my chances with this man. Besides, I wasn’t a big fan of eggs anyway.
Chapter Three
Did He Really?
“I do, I do, and I do. And just in case you didn’t hear me, I do again!”
The minister and the two witnesses at the Vegas chapel couldn’t hold in their laughter. Neither could Lee as I professed to take him as my lawfully wedded husband.
Vegas wasn’t necessarily the wedding I envisioned in my fairytale, but who cared? I was marrying the man I had dated for the last nine years. Come to think of it, the proposal wasn’t necessarily the proposal I envisioned in my fairytale either. There was no knight in shining armor down on one knee professing his undying and everlasting love for me. There was no ring. As a matter of fact, there really wasn’t even a proposal.
Through all nine years of our relationship and all the drama, Lee and I had managed to have two children and no wedding. When I say drama, it wasn’t anything serious. There were just a few disagreements here and there. Then there was a season of nothing but arguments. In all honesty, I was the argumentative one. Lee hated fussing and fighting, but I couldn’t help it. I was just so bitter and hurt. My underlying emotions were a result of me just harboring issues with Lee, because in my mind, he was the root of my bitterness and hurt.
Ironically, the best thing that ever happened to me in life, falling in love with Lee, was like a double-edged sword. It was the thing that was drumming up all the tension I was having with Lee. After almost a decade, he’d made me the mother of his children, but he had not made me his wife. I had a major problem with that, but I didn’t want to speak on it because I didn’t want him to think I was pressuring him. I didn’t want to have to tell a man that I wanted him to make me his wife. I wanted a man to tell me that he wanted to make me his wife. But Lee just seemed so content living together and having babies. That truly surprised me, considering how into church he was. But that all had changed too.
There was a period of six months when Lee’s job transferred him to a neighboring city. The kids and I stayed at the house we’d bought in Columbus and his job got him a little one-bedroom apartment. His church duties and obligations had already started taking a back seat to his job, but this move ushered church completely out of life. His life, not mine. Me and the kids were attending church every single Sunday. Our presence in the house of the Lord went without saying. Eventually I even joined the dance ministry. That’s when things got real for me.
About three months into my being on the dance ministry, the pastor felt led to have the dance leader draw up a mission statement, vision, and bylaws. Part of the dance ministry mission statement was that we present our bodies to Christ holy and acceptable. Immediate conviction swept through my spirit. How could I lie down with Lee, a man who wasn’t my husband, then get on that altar every Sunday and minister with that same body? I even asked God to give me exceptions.
“Lord, Lee and I have been together over eight years. That’s longer than some marriages last. And we have kids together. We’re practically one. We’re practically married.”
God agreed that He would give me a pass if I could show Him in His word, the Bible, where He stated that such exceptions could be made to that particular commandment of “Thou shall not fornicate.”
I couldn’t. I knew right then that even though God had an anointing on the ministry of dance He’d placed in me, I would not be able to go to the levels and dimensions He’d called me to if my life did not line up with His Word. Needless to say I sat Lee down and told him that from that point
on he could no longer put his hand in the cookie jar. The bakery was closed. No more getting the cookie until after we got a wedding cake. Period. Point blank.
Everybody thought I was crazy for doing that. Believe it or not, even some church folks thought I was wrong for doing that to Lee. I stuck to my guns though. I feared the Lord more than I feared Lee’s reaction to my commitment to the Lord. Needless to say, Lee did not take it well.
He was livid at my decision not to break him off even a chocolate chip. He being the one who introduced me to the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost, I was just sure he would support my decision. Not!
By then, Lee and I had completely flipped roles when it came to church. He didn’t even go on the Sundays he was in town, complaining he was too tired from the drive in after work the night before.
My commitment wasn’t to the church, though. It was to God. And I’m so proud to say that even on nights when Lee would put me out the bed because he couldn’t stand being next to me not being able to touch me, I stayed true. I didn’t give up. I didn’t give in. For nine months I didn’t even turn the oven on to bake cookies.
There was more tension than ever in our relationship to say the least. That was one of the reasons why we decided to take a family trip to Vegas. We wanted to have fun and get things back on track.
“We should just get married while we’re in Vegas.” That suggestion was made about a month before we were set to leave on the trip. I honestly can’t even remember who said it. The other agreed. And now there we stood in a Vegas chapel exchanging vows. No big wedding. And with Lee being the oldest child and the first to marry, his mother was not too thrilled about being deprived of having a great big wedding with all the bells and whistles for her child.
She blamed me. She never said it straight out like that. But I could tell. Little did she know it was Lee who didn’t want to have a big wedding. He didn’t want to make a big to-do. It was right then and there when I should have questioned whether he even wanted to be married at all. He’d said “I do,” but did he really?
For the next six years I tormented myself with that question. Had Lee really been so deeply in love with me that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me? It was hard for me to give a wholehearted yes. After all, he hadn’t planned a decent proposal. Heck, even an indecent proposal would have been sufficient. He didn’t want a big wedding or any of his family to even fly out to Vegas and witness the exchange of our vows. He never went out and bought me a wedding band. I’d picked one up for each of us at a Walmart just for the sake of having something to exchange during the ceremony. He didn’t even rent a tux. Not even a suit jacket. He married me in a cotton shirt. He would go out and buy suits for his company’s management meetings, but he bought a cotton shirt for our exchange of vows—something he should have deemed far more special. In my heart it was special.
Lee didn’t make it seem special in any way. It was like he was saying to me without actually speaking the words, “What the heck? I been with this chick nine years. I’ve already spent the best years of my prime with her, we got two kids, I done bought a house. I got too much invested in this. And on top of it all, who wants to come to Vegas and not get any cookie? Might as well get married and just get it over with.”
Even when Lee would introduce me as his wife, it just seemed so mechanical. There was no pride behind the introduction. No feeling. I wanted to feel something. I wanted him to feel like D’Angelo did in that song, “You’re My Lady.” I wanted him to make me feel like that woman in that song. I needed him to make me feel that way. What woman didn’t want her man to make her believe that she was the only woman in the world? That she was the only woman he had eyes for? That she was the only woman he could ever see himself lying down with? Even if it wasn’t a realistic truth, a woman still wanted that from her man. She needed that from her man.
At the end of the day, I can’t believe Lee and I ended up being unequally yoked after all. How so? Well, the answer to that is simple: I was in love with Lee—deeply in love with Lee. Lee only loved me. This is why our now six years of marriage hasn’t been that electric. I started holding myself back from Lee. I was too scared to give him all of me knowing that I was barely getting half of him. It was miserable, but we had kids. I’d wanted this marriage more than anything. I couldn’t bail out now. I’d had fifteen years to see our relationship for what it was. I guess maybe those bright smiling teeth of his really had blinded me. I couldn’t see that I was pushing for and wanting things that Lee might not have wanted.
I was happier than Shug Avery in The Color Purple when she finally stopped giving away the cookie without a ring and got married. I, too, was shouting out from the rooftop, “I’s married now.” I loved the status of being married, but I had great doubts of whether Lee did. Then one day my doubts were completely erased. I knew for sure he didn’t grab hold of and wear the status of marriage as proudly as I did. If he had, then the day I finally went to his www.FaceIt.com social networking page I would have seen his relationship status as married. But I didn’t. His relationship status was blank. Now why wouldn’t he want to shout it from the rooftop as well that he was married? I had no idea, but I became hell-bent on finding out!
Chapter Four
Friend Request
Let’s rewind it about a week or so prior to me discovering Lee’s relationship status on FaceIt. I’d spent an entire day setting up my FaceIt page. It was so fun plugging in all that information the profile page asked for. My family was my life so I spent a great deal of time posting wedding pics, pictures of the kids playing sports and whatnot. I started getting friend requests immediately. I began searching for people who I knew and sent them friend requests. When I searched for Lee’s name and he popped up, of course I sent him a friend request.
After a while I gave FaceIt a rest for the evening, but was excited to get back on it the next day and begin networking.
I was new to social networking. Lee and some of my other friends had been on FaceIt for years. My pastor had always voiced his disdain for the public networking site, so I never had a desire to engage in it. But the more I started going to work-related conferences and realized that half the folks already knew each other and had relationships with one another because of that Web site, I knew I had to get with the times. And so I did.
I accepted most of the friend requests and even had a couple of FaceIt inbox messages. All of the friend requests I had sent had been accepted. All except for one: Lee’s.
“His should have been the first to accept,” I told myself. Maybe he just hasn’t been on FI to see that I sent him a request. But a couple more days went by and still no acceptance. Then a couple more went by. There was still no acceptance.
“Hmmm, let me try to send him another one. Maybe I thought I sent him one and really didn’t.” When I attempted to send Lee a friend request I got a prompt stating that I’d already sent one. That’s when I decided to do something I hadn’t done yet: go check out Lee’s FI page and see if he’d been on it. But I was almost certain he had. Every time I put the kids to bed and came into our bedroom he was on the computer. I’d imagined he’d checked in on his FI page while on the computer.
Once I searched for Lee’s page and it came up, I was taken directly to his information page. I was excited to see all the information he had listed.
My breath got caught in my throat when I saw that he hadn’t mentioned anywhere the fact that he was married and had a family. I was so hurt. He was my world. I thought I was his. I know FaceIt didn’t define our relationship, but it did let me know where his head was at when it came to what he thought about me.
If you ask me, a person’s family and most important things in life should be one of the first things they would want to share and talk about with the world. The fact that Lee had a beautiful wife and family at home shouldn’t have dominated the page, but it should have at least been prevalent somewhere. I didn’t give a crap about his favorite book, movie, or interests. I cared about
his favorite girl—me.
The more I scrolled his FaceIt page, the more I realized that I was nonexistent. How was it that he had pictures of his mother, siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, but none of his wife? Heck, he even had a picture of his prized Corvette. And here all this time I thought I was his prize. And should I even humiliate myself a step further to mention that he even took a picture of the jersey of his favorite sports team and put it on FI?
I had no idea tears had began falling from my eyes until I began questioning where all the drops of water that were hitting my keyboard were coming from. Yes, I’d questioned my role in Lee’s life, if I was as big a part of his life as he was of mine. It was devastating to find that, let his FaceIt page tell it, I wasn’t a part of his life at all. I wasn’t even a second thought. I wasn’t a thought at all. Had I even been a mere thought I would have been somewhere, anywhere on his FaceIt page.
As I searched his FI page for even a remnant of the fact that Lee was a married man, I realized that my access was limited. I had to be a friend of his to get the full scope of his page: things he posted, pages he liked, people he was subscribed to, and people he was friends with. But I wasn’t his friend. Heck, let him tell it, I wasn’t even his wife.
I was fired up. Everything in me wanted to call Lee up on the phone and confront him with my findings, but I knew if I did that, he would never accept my friend request. I needed to be his friend to actually find out if there was anything I should be worried about—anything like him not just hiding me, but him hiding someone from me, like a woman. From women. Despite popular opinion, it wasn’t just men who got on social networking sites to seek out women. There were women who were convinced God had told them their husband was on FI. And as long as they thought Lee was available, what was keeping them from trying to make my husband theirs?
A Woman's Revenge Page 17