I kept watching the clock. It seemed like the time was going by slowly. It had only been an hour since my last attempt to reach Dre, but it felt like days.
Okay, Savannah, get your shit together, girl. He’s just another nigga. But, was he just another nigga? I hadn’t experienced one like him before. Yes, he had some similarities to other men I dated, but that just qualified him as my type, right? I did want a man like Dre, someone who could tame my hot ass and keep me in line, but what about his baby’s mama? I had so many thoughts and unanswered questions.
I heard music playing in my head: “Say Yes” by Floetry. Oh, shit, that was my phone ringing. Technically, it was my text message tone—Dre.
I hit my pinkie toe on the laundry room door frame trying to get to it. The pain shot up my leg to my knee and brought me down hard to the floor. I didn’t have time to nurse the pain. I had to get to that phone. I scooted across the floor until I reached the couch and grabbed my phone.
To my disappointment, it was Sandy, texting me to get the details of my night with Dre. I threw the phone back down. I wasn’t in the mood for girl talk at all.
I know I promised to wait before I called again, but a text message was not considered a call, now, was it? I texted: I’m heading home tonight and would like to see you before I leave if possible.
Do you know I waited four hours and did not get a return text? Who in the hell did he think I was? I went from anger to concern and back. It was time to get on the road if I was going to make it home at a decent hour, but I didn’t want to miss his return if there was going to be one, so I decided to take off on Monday.
I sat on the couch until I fell asleep, waiting on Dre. I woke up from hearing the kids in my complex grouping up to walk to their school buses. I waited until seven o’clock before I dialed his number. Once again, I was forwarded to voice mail. I was planning to leave a fuck-you message, but decided to play it cool.
“Hey, Dre, just wanted to thank you again for all the great Southern hospitality. See you around.”
I grabbed my shit, erased his number out of my phone, and headed to my car to leave Tennessee behind. Fuck Dre.
Chapter 5
The Intrusion
When I got back to Alpharetta, I had so many voice messages on my house phone it was unbelievable. Sandy was nosier than I thought. I had five messages from her telling me that she needed all the dirty details and if I didn’t call her back, she was on her way.
I had a “Just checking on you” message from my daddy. He must have called my office looking for me, and I was right because my last message was from Stephanie telling me my father called saying he was worried sick about me because he hadn’t heard from me in two weeks.
I called him to calm his nerves. Since Memphis had been shot in the leg, he had called me once a week and that happened over three years earlier. Memphis was selling dope and got shot, which is a different life than I lived, but I made sure to give him safety updates so he could have peace of mind.
I was glad I took the day off. It gave me time to take a few items to the cleaners and prepare for a hell of a workweek. I had final contract meetings with two of my six-figure clients on Friday, and I wanted to work on my proposal, correcting any weaknesses I had overlooked.
While walking out of Starbucks from getting my daily Mocha Frappuccino, I got a call from Dre.
“Hey, baby, how you are?”
The sound of his voice made all the anger I had in me come back, but I still needed to play smooth. “Hey.”
There was a pause after my response, and then he said, “I got your calls, messages, and shit, but you know Sundays are family days, so everything else gets put on hold. But I wanted to see you too. Where you at?”
I took a deep breath and tried hard not to snap. “I’m in Atlanta getting myself ready for work. Look, Dre, what do you want from me? I need to know, because it sounds like you, your son, and your baby mama got everything squared away.”
He cleared his throat. “My baby mama and son ain’t got shit to do with me and you, and I know you upset at how I just shook you without a good-bye, but my life with them comes first. Now it’s your time, baby. Are you going to invite me to Atlanta tonight or what?”
Instead of replying, I just hung up. Dre was trouble. He made me feel so weak and dumb minded, and that was not a comfortable feeling.
He didn’t try to call back, and I’m glad he didn’t. I stopped at Justin’s, grabbed a to-go order, and ate in front of the TV alone. My peaceful meal was interrupted by a call from Mike, Dre’s boy.
“Is this Savannah?”
Still staring at my phone, I said, “This is her.” I couldn’t believe he had his boy do his dirty work. I hoped he wasn’t calling to confront me about hanging up the phone, because we could have a repeat of that incident right now.
“Ay, this is Mike, Dre’s friend. We met at the gas station. Anyways, my boy asked me to call you and tell you to meet him at your place in four hours. I can’t go into details, but he said he needs you. Tell me you coming.”
I don’t know if it was curiosity or the urgency in his voice that made me get up. “Tell him I’m on my way,” I said, grabbing my purse and shoes. I shot down to my Charger. It had a full tank, and it was faster than the 300. I made it all the way to Chattanooga before I thought about work.
“Stephanie, are you awake?” I hated to call her, but she was the only person who could rearrange my schedule and help me get prepared for Friday. I told her that I had to get some things together in Nashville and wouldn’t be back until Thursday evening.
I asked her to get my slides together on the PowerPoint we had been working on, to cancel any lunch dates I had on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and to respond to all inquiries that were over $50,000. I reminded her to send all my clients their annual thank-you cards and goody baskets filled with everything they liked personally. I could hear her writing away as I gave her instruction after instruction. That was one of the things that led me to sleeping with her. She knew her job and was good at it, which was a turn-on for me.
Stephanie came to me through a temp agency. After her first week of work, I knew I wanted to hire her as my permanent secretary. She was efficient, fast, and knew how to stay a step ahead of my needs. I would have never made a sexual pass at her. I had an office full of sexual harassment videos given to me by HR, and I memorized each one of them. Luckily, for me, she came by my house one Saturday afternoon to drop off some dry cleaning she had picked up for me.
She was wearing an Ann Klein Summer Collection yellow dress with sandals. Her hair was pulled back to the side in a ponytail that allowed her hair to fall over her right shoulder. I had never seen her without a business suit on.
As she walked up the pathway to my condo, I could see her hips and breasts protruding from her dress. Her nipples were hard like it was below zero outside. She was bad, with skin the same tone as honey, and I bet she dripped slowly like it.
She followed me into my house and laid my clothing across the couch. Bending slightly, I could see how round her ass really was. She caught me staring, so I turned my head to play it off.
“You can look. I’ve been hoping you would.”
Trying to play confused, I said, “What are you talking about?”
She walked up to me, kissed my lips, and said, “I’ve been waiting a year for you to look at me that way.”
I couldn’t muster up anything to say back except, “Is that right?”
Nodding her head, she took a step closer. “I saw your schedule was empty today and thought I’d pencil myself in. I hope you don’t mind.”
Hell, she managed my schedule. She could have penciled herself in a long time ago. What was so different about now? Before I even asked, I thought about it. Last week, I stopped sleeping with Angel from the gym. I had Stephanie order the flowers, and they included a breakup card.
“Do you know I could fire you right now for this?”
She didn’t seem concerned. In fa
ct, she took a step closer, and that was all she wrote. I took her down right by the living-room door. She was saying all kinds of shit to me, but I wasn’t listening, I just wanted the warmth in between her legs.
She soon became my fill-in sex or, at least, that’s how I saw her. Whenever I wanted some and didn’t have a candidate, I would invite her over.
Everything was going good until I had her invite Gina, the Latino freak I met at the store, to lunch for me. She set the first date up for me with all smiles. By the third meeting, I was being questioned about my plans with Gina. I know a red flag when I see one. So I called our sex sessions off.
I don’t do titles with women or men, nor do I have plans on being faithful to either sex. The mentality I have when it comes to women prevents me from trying to do serious relationships with men. I’m sure they look at me the same way that I look at women, which is that pussy is a rare fruit and you will never run across the same taste or feel twice. So I collect each like a merit badge like I’m in the Girl Scouts. Life is much easier when you’re free, and I’d be damned before I locked myself down with one person, especially a woman.
Maybe I was lonely or just had a lot of errands that week, because I stayed on the phone with Stephanie until I reached my apartment complex. When I drove in, Dre was already parked in front of my unit.
“Thanks, Steph, I got to go.” I pulled up next to him and went upstairs. He followed closely behind me. As soon as we walked in the door, he pulled me into his arms and kissed me.
“Thank you, baby, I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”
I enjoyed the kiss, but I had just finished driving three and a half hours. He had some explaining to do. I pushed him off me. “So, I’m here. What was so urgent?”
Walking me over to the couch, he told me the person he had Mike meet at the club, the one who tried to cheat him out of $300, got busted after getting that additional $1,000 worth of product from him. Word around town was that dude was going to give up Dre and his supplier for an easier sentence since he was a parolee.
“Wow. Dre, I hate to hear that!”
“Yeah, me too. They’re going to put my life on pause like I can get the time back and make me sit down for a while. This shit is crazy.”
He kept going with his situation, but I now had my own problems. Where would I meet another nigga like Dre? Not only was I losing a potential fling, but also some of the best head I had ever gotten in Tennessee. That was so messed up. I didn’t care about his problems. All I could think about was how I was supposed to move on after meeting a man like him.
I decided to let him hide out until I left Thursday night so I could get three days of his body before it belonged to the state of Tennessee. I felt the old me coming back. Fuck Dre. He was no better than the niggas I grew up around.
When I went off to college, Memphis started selling drugs and was arrested. If I didn’t visit, write, or accept my own brother’s phone calls, I wasn’t about to do it for anybody else.
This is why I don’t get attached to people. They always seem to let you down. As long as I have myself, to hell with everybody else. I don’t even want kids. They are too needy and stressful. I’ll spend sixteen years getting attached to them and catering to their needs hand and foot, only to watch them pick their friends over me.
Fuck that. I wouldn’t dare kill my figure for stretch marks and changing shitty diapers. I’ll leave the entire baby-having thing to my fat and ugly friends. I can be a godmother or something.
I felt something with Dre that I never felt with anyone before and in a few days, it would be just another memory. I was going to enjoy the last three days of Dre, and when I left Tennessee, it would be like he never existed.
Pretending I was listening the entire time, I cut him off. “I’ll take the next few days off of work, baby, and you can stay here with me. That will give you some time to come up with your next move.”
* * *
The next three days went by too quickly. I guess that’s because all we did was sleep, eat, and make love. I was really starting to like Dre. He was more intelligent than I had gathered. Once he was forced to get away from his drug-dealer role, he became more my type, which made me glad that in a few hours he would be out of my life as if I never met him—or so I thought.
Never in a million years would I have thought one man, who I’d known for less than a week, would change the entire flow of my life.
To prevent the chance of him trying to contact me, I called my cell phone provider and had my number changed. I called all the important contacts in my phone and gave them my new number. They were used to my number being changed because I seemed to run across a lot of people who didn’t understand what “leave me the hell alone” means.
I had been out of my one-year lease with my apartment complex in Bellevue for a while and was on a month-to-month basis with them. I called and informed them that I wouldn’t be renting from them after that month. That gave me three weeks to get my things out of that apartment, which was more than enough time to hire professional movers.
There was no way in hell I was going to continue living in that apartment complex after meeting Dre. I didn’t trust him, and the lack of eye contact he gave me let me know he didn’t trust me, either, which was fine with me.
I normally went into details about my job or what it is that I do for a living, but with Dre, I didn’t share a thing. It wouldn’t take much to disappear from him, just get a new telephone number and address.
The night after I left him, I couldn’t sleep. I kept having horrible dreams about pregnancy, unemployment, getting married to Dre while he was in jail, and fighting during jailhouse visits with his baby mama. I didn’t like the fact that I had cut him off, yet he lingered in my dreams. How do I convince myself that I am done with him? It was the best sex I ever had in my life, and I got three days’ worth of it. Of course, he was still going to be on my mind.
It was an hour before my alarm clock would go off, and I refused to sit around with thoughts of Dre for another hour. I got up, got myself together for work, and by the time my alarm did go off, I was twenty minutes away from walking out of the door.
I headed to Starbucks for a Frappuccino and cream cheese Danish, and then headed to work. Once I made it to work, I decided to order Stephanie flowers to thank her for picking up my slack for the last four days. She had completed every task I requested to be done and went beyond by also setting up the conference room for my meeting. She had the PowerPoint set up on the computer, all the slides were numbered and organized, and she even supplied me with a cheat sheet, which highlighted all the crucial points I needed to make. She had made my presentation easy for me. All I had to do was present the information and pray that it was enough to close the deal.
“Knock knock, did someone in this here office send me flowers?” she was standing in my door with her face buried in her dozen of dark pink roses.
“Yes, I did. I know I don’t tell you often enough, but I really appreciate all you do for me on and off the clock.” I gave her a wink, and she dove deeper into their contagious scent to try to hide the rosy glow warming her cheeks.
“They are beautiful. The last time I was given flowers it was from you to deliver to one of your flings with a ‘I’m cutting you off’ heartbreak letter. I checked my flowers for an identical card but didn’t find one.”
She turned on her heels like a solider with a full-toothed smile on her face to exit but never took a step. She looked back at me.
“Oh, I almost forgot to tell you, your apartment complex in Tennessee has been blowing me up looking for you. I told them I’d tell you when you made it to work. Girl, I checked the office messages and they had already left four by eight o’clock our time. Isn’t Nashville on central time? They didn’t give any details or say what it was that they wanted, but it must be important if they’re blowing up every number they have for you before seven o’clock. Please hurry and call them folks back so they can leave me alone. Do you need the
number?”
“No, I have it and thanks again for everything, Steph.”
“No problem at all and you’re welcome.”
I wondered what they could have wanted, but I needed to eat and get familiar with my presentation. It wasn’t like them to call me on the job. Even when they had to do maintenance work, they called my cell phone. Maybe they had attempted to call my disconnected number.
I had gone five hours without thinking about Dre. The only reason he crossed my mind now was because the apartment employees kept calling me, and my move was an attempt to erase him. I decided to return their call as soon as the meeting was over.
The meeting started promptly at 2:00 p.m. If it went smoothly, it should be over by 3:30 p.m. at the latest. Everything was going as planned. The prospective clients seemed impressed with the layout of their financial data. It was almost 3:30 p.m., and I had every question answered.
“Our firm in California will handle your account. Their focus will be on your business needs solely . . .”
My words were taken over as curiosity of why the receptionist, Darlene, from the first floor, walked in with two male detectives from the Atlanta Police Department. One was short and stocky. The other was an older gentleman. They were both black. Darlene nodded her head in my direction, and when the officers walked past her, she looked at me and shrugged her shoulders as if to say she had no clue of what they wanted with me.
“Are you Savannah James?” asked the older of the two detectives. As he moved closer, I saw that he looked like Don Cornelius from Soul Train. It was hard not to smirk as I thought of him stopping in his tracks and saying, “Love, peace, and soul.” While I was daydreaming, the detectives were still waiting on a response.
“Yes, I am, and I’m in the middle of a meeting. How may I help you two gentlemen?” I don’t know if the stockier detective was mute, but he never said a word.
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