A Strong Family Novella
by
NIOBIA BRYANT
www.NIOBIABRYANT.com
Welcome Back, My Love
Published by Infinite Ink Presents...
Copyright © 2018 by Niobia Bryant
First eBook printing: June 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, accepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
DEDICATION
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
EPILOGUE
ALL ROMANCE BOOKS BY NIOBIA BRYANT
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ALL BOOKS WRITTEN AS MEESHA MINK
ALL BOOKS WRITTEN AS SIMONE BRYANT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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DEDICATION
Much love and gratitude for those who read my books.
PROLOGUE
June 2016
“He really left me.”
Meena Ali’s heart pounded as she looked down at the empty drawers of the dresser. The spare house key she held almost fell out of her grasp as she stumbled backward. At the feel of the edge of the bed hitting the back of her legs, she allowed her body to drop down upon it. Legs spread wide. Hands at her side with the palms up. Mouth ajar. Panting. Eyes wide. Dazed.
He’s gone.
For countless moments Meena sat there staring at the wall before her eyes shifted, landing on reminders that he was truly gone. The empty drawers of his dresser. The lack of dirty clothes on the seat of the recliner. His bed still made, not slept in. His bottles of cologne and deodorant gone. The picture of him as a young boy with his mother missing from his nightstand.
Meena’s heart rate accelerated and the muscles of her stomach clenched as her breathing became shallow and quick. She tilted her head back, raising her hand to softly stroke the soft skin of her throat. It was then she noticed that it was shaking. She clenched the hand into a tight fist and squeezed her eyes shut. “Shit,” she swore in a whisper.
Pain clutched at her heart before radiating across her chest. It made her breathless and she gasped as a tear fell and raced down her cheek. She bit her trembling bottom lip with her teeth. Her shoulders slumped. She felt weak.
You never miss your water ‘til your well runs dry.
She opened her eyes and they landed on her reflection in the mirror over his dresser. How many times her had her step-grandmother, Nana Lisha Strong, offered up that advice to nearly everyone in their large family at one time or another? So, this is what she meant by that.
Meena jumped up to her feet and raced from the bedroom. As she crossed the small living room of the single-wide mobile home, she frantically dug into her crossbody bag to grab her keys. Her tears blurred her vision and she stumbled over something. Her small cry was more from her anguish than tumbling forward to the floor. Quickly she scrambled to her feet and rushed to the front door, grabbing and turning the knob to yank it open wide.
The night summer air surrounded her. She paused in the doorway. The heat warmed her tears.
Meena closed the door and rushed down the wooden steps to her parked red Volvo. As she reversed out of the dirt packed yard she alternated her hands between steering the wheel and wiping away her tears.
‘Is this really the end?’ she wondered, her face pensive as she drove the short distance in Holtsville, South Carolina from the mobile home park to the home of her twin sister, Neema, and her brother-in-law, Dane Jackson.
She felt as if she were in a daze. More than once she sat at a stop sign, lost in her thoughts, jarred by a startling blare of a horn from the driver behind her. Sometimes she freed her cheeks of tears and accelerated forward. Other times she sat there with her forehead resting lightly on the steering wheel, not caring if the vehicle behind her went around or waited.
Soon Meena pulled into the yard of the modest home shaded by a large maple tree. After she parked in between Dane’s Harley Davidson motorcycle and her sister’s matching Volvo in white, Meena sat there staring at the front door. The windows flanking it were dark. They’re asleep.
She lightly bit her bottom lip, feeling hesitant about disturbing them. With a deep breath, she pushed her reluctance aside. The man she loved for the last three years of her life had moved on from her. Nothing but the feel of her sister’s arms would get her through this first night.
Nodding to build reassurance, Meena licked her lips again as she opened the door and made her way up the flower-lined path and stairs to the front door. She raised her fist.
Sadness and disbelief flooded her again. She lightly rested her knuckle against the door and released a heavy breath that cooled her moist mouth. “Oh, God, help me,” she begged in a soft voice, closing her eyes as she opened her hand and pressed her palm against the gleaming wood for a moment before closing it back into a fist. “Please.”
Knock-knock-knock-knock.
Meena turned and pressed her back against the door. I never thought he would really leave.
She winced.
Knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock.
She tilted her head up to look up at the moon’s light breaking through the leaves and branches of the towering maple tree. With a hint of a smile, she remembered one night when they made love on the bed of his truck and how she saw the stars in his eyes as she rode him.
“I love you so much,” he whispered up to her that night.
Rough cries of passion came from inside the house. Meena frowned and arched a shaped brow as she pushed off the door to leave. She paused and shook her head before turning back to rap her knuckles against the door again.
Knock-knock.
“Neema? Dane? I know y’all home. Open up,” she said, her voice loud.
Her body went still as she listened closely. Was that a laugh? “Come on, y’all. Pull it out and wipe it off,” Meena drawled.
Knock-knock.
“Coming,” Neema and Dane yelled out to her in unison.
Moments later the windows were filled with light. Relief flooded her. She was anxious to fill her sister in, her hear advice and receive a “twin hug”.
Neema would understand.
Neema would not let her go through this night alone.
Neema would make it all better.
But it’s not just Neema anymore. It’s Neema and Dane. Am I wrong to expect the same kind of closeness with her?
Meena remembered last Christmas when her twin was in the throes of her breakup with her then-fiancé and made it clear that Meena’s boyfriend Armstrong Mann was intruding on their twin time. Very clearly, she recalled the memory of her standing on the porch as she watched Neema leave the home they shared. Even though she knew her sister had felt like an outsider in her own home, Meena had let her go.
“I chose him,” she mouthed.
What if Neema does the same? How can I blame her?
“Hey, Twin, what’s the...”
Their identical eyes locked for a second before Meena was pulled into her sister’s arms.
“What happened?” Neema asked.
At that moment her sister’s compassion broke the dam in her. Her tears welled up and returned full force. “Mann went ghost on me,” she cried against her sister’s shoulder.
There it is. I said it out loud. I can’t take it back. Can’t hide it. My man left me. Won’t call me. Won’t answer me. It’s
over.
Her sister hugged her closer.
Meena released a wail. Her body went slack.
I gave him three years and he can’t give me the time of damn day?
Meena felt her body lifted up by Dane.
Three. Years. The fuck?
The softness of the sofa welcomed her body. Soon her head was on her sister’s lap. Her twin’s soothing noises and smoothing of Meena’s hair was of little comfort, but she didn’t bother to stop her. Her thoughts were elsewhere.
How did we get here?
CHAPTER ONE
Three years earlier
Summer 2013
“Is it bad that I never made love...”
Dressed in nothing but a snug fitting tee that framed her plump breasts and low-cut bikinis, Meena Ali twerked her plush bottom as she sung the chorus to Wale’s “Bad”. She smiled at her reflection in the full-length mirror sitting in the corner of her bedroom.
She paused and cocked her head to the side as she twisted this way and that, studying her figure. “Not bad,” she said.
“How can one twin be vainer than the other when they’re identical?”
Meena looked over her shoulder at her twin, Neema, leaning in the doorway of her bedroom. Save from their clothing they were mirror images. Long and thick jet-black hair, cinnamon brown skin, slender faces with pouty lips, and slanted eyes. “Self-love is very necessary, Twin,” she advised her as she turned from the mirror and walked over to her bed to scoop up her distressed jeans to pull on. Meena was of the mindset that a woman without self-esteem could—and would—fall for the manipulations of a man. “See, a man will tell whatever to whomever to get what he wants whenever.”
“Here we go,” Neema drawled, turning so that her back was pressed to the door frame as she crossed her arms over her chest.
Meena cut her eyes over at her sister as she paused in buttoning her jeans. “You better listen to this knowledge instead of trying to hush me,” she said, her dark brown eyes serious. “If women stopped looking to men for validation they wouldn’t give them the power in the relationship. If you know you’re beautiful, a man telling you that won’t make you stuck on stupid. His compliment will be a light dessert—”
“And not the main meal,” Neema finished with an overly dramatic eye roll.
“Nice but not necessary,” Meena continued, before reaching up to pull her hair into a loose top knop that she secured with bobby pins. “I’m not even tryin’ to let a man destroy me because he decides I’m not what he wants anymore.”
Neema sighed.
Meena eyed her as she stepped up into her pair of midnight blue wedge sandals.
“When you gone forgive Daddy?” Neema asked, stepping fully into the room to kneel and buckle the straps of the sandals around her sister’s ankles.
Meena frowned. She looked over at her reflection again. They resembled their mother—a woman who looked more their age than nearly in her fifties—but there was no denying that Ned Ali was their father. Their foreheads, soft hair texture, and smiles were given to them by him. And his giving nature to his twin daughters had been ongoing, even down to the matching convertible Volvo c70s he purchased them as college graduation gifts.
For the material things, she could never deny he put his daughters first. For his treatment of their mother and the dissolution of not only their marriage but their family as the twins knew it? His affair wrecked that. For that Meena would never forgive him. She had only spoken of her disappointment to her sister. Her anger simmered beneath her façade of everything being okay. Nothing but the way they were raised to always respect their elders had Meena hold her tongue.
“Daddy’s remarried and Momma has moved on, too, and is a lot happier with Kaleb than she was with Daddy,” Neema reasoned, rising to her full height.
Meena shook her head with regret. “I guess you don’t see what you did there?” she asked, glancing over at her sister as she slid her iPad into her leather messenger bag before easing it onto her shoulder.
“What?” Neema asked.
“You equated our mother’s happiness to her relationship with one man versus another,” Meena chided her.
“That’s not what I meant and you know it, Meena,”
True.
“My apologies. I just went by what you said and not what you meant,” Meena said, loving to tease her twin.
She eased past her sister to leave the bedroom in the house they shared in Summerville, South Carolina. It was their childhood home and up until the time their parents separated, it had been their family home. Once their mother met and eventually married dairy rancher Kaleb Strong and moved into his sprawling ranch in Holtsville, the twins had remained there as two grown women ready to begin lives independent of their parents and stepparents.
“Falling in love will soften you, Twin.”
At her sister’s words, Meena paused on the stairs. “You mean change me, right?” she asked without turning around.
Silence reigned.
Meena did look back over her shoulder then. Her sister was gone, obviously in her own bedroom or one of the bathrooms on the upper level. Meena smiled a bit before continuing down the stairs and out the front door.
She slowed her pace down the steps as she eyed her red Volvo c70. The high gloss paint shimmered brightly beneath the blazing summer sun. The top was down and she could read her name embroidered in red letters on the headrests of the camel leather seats.
Meena bit her bottom lip clearly remembering she and her sister coming home after their graduation from the College of Charleston and finding the cars sitting in their driveway with huge gold bows atop them. Hers was red and her sister’s was white. Gifts from their father.
Even as she hollered for joy and hugged his neck close, Meena had wished instead that he had remained faithful, remained with their mother and remained the head of their family. A car, no matter how shiny and pretty, couldn’t erase how she felt. How she still felt.
Meena released a long heavy breath as she bit the inside of her bottom lip and shook her head regretfully.
Her father had let her down.
He was a cheater. Not to be trusted. Not to be respected. Just like other foolish men making decisions based on the head between their thighs and not the one on their neck.
With one last shake of her head, Meena crossed the distance to her car and climbed in, reaching up to the visor to remove her rose gold aviator shades. She slid them on, settling them comfortably on the bridge of her nose. Soon she was reversing the car into a semi-arc and then accelerating down the drive.
She tapped the pads of her fingers against the leather steering wheel as she listened to “The One” by Tamar Braxton. The song had a nice beat and Tamar could sing, but the premise? The one? Just one love for the rest of your life? “Bullshit,” Meena muttered before singing along to the chorus with a one-shoulder shrug.
She pulled to a stop at a red light and checked her eyebrows out in the rearview mirror, before smoothing them into place with her forefinger.
“Hey, beautiful.”
Meena’s brows furrowed a bit before she turned her head to the left. There was a driver in a rumbling pick-up truck that was more rust than its dull red. He was leaning across the passenger seat to talk to her through the open passenger window. His complexion was that medium brown-skin made all the more appealing by his low-cut jet-black hair, dark slashing brows, full beard, and full lips that were darker than the rest of him. His eyes were deep set and obsidian but there was a warmth and light that was welcoming. Square jawline, high cheekbones, and when he smiled he displayed straight and even white teeth. She couldn’t deny that he was a very handsome man.
She smiled back, and it caught her off guard that she did. His smile was infectious.
“Do you always flirt at a red light?” she called over to him as she took in his handsome face and those warm dark eyes that instantly let you know he was a good guy.
He shook his head. “Never been inspired to do
it before,” he said, smiling again as if he couldn’t help himself.
Meena briefly wondered if he was flirtatious or slightly off in the head. “Really?” she asked, her doubt obvious.
A horn blew behind her.
Meena glanced back at the traffic light to find it had turned green. She gave Mr. Smiles a playful side-look before accelerating forward, leaving him behind in the left turn signal lane.
She began to run through the errands she had to run for the day and she increased the volume of her radio by the buttons on the steering wheel. She pulled to a stop at another red light as she sang along with “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke, T.I., and Pharell.
“Can I get your number?”
She looked to the right and shook her head at that rusted red truck and the man behind the wheel with that bearded smile now looking at her via the lowered driver’s side window. “Weren’t you supposed to make a left turn?” she asked, her voice incredulous.
He smiled again. “I wanted to see you again,” he admitted. “So, I switched lanes.”
“You are crazy,” she teased with a laugh, her heart racing.
He really is cute.
“Crazy for you,” he called over. “Let me take you out.”
Meena eyed the light, found it still red, and then eyed him again. He really had one of those faces that was easy on the eye. Handsome but friendly. Warm. Charming.
“You know you want to,” he said.
I’m not looking for love, but dinner and a movie is absolutely doable. Right?
Horns began to blare.
Meena grimaced as she frantically glanced in the rearview mirror.
“Just gimme a sec. Please,” her charming stranger hollered out as he left his pick-up truck and came around her car to stand by the driver’s door.
Her heart raced hard—some of it was fear, but mostly it was excitement. She snatched up her cell phone and opened the camera. “I’m recording this,” she said.
Horns blared again and a few irate drivers released less than nice words on exactly what they should go do to themselves.
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