Love Me

by Diamond Johnson

  © 2018

  Published by Leo Sullivan Presents

  www.leolsullivan.com

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Unauthorized reproduction, in any manner, is prohibited.

  Contents

  1. Takari Evans

  2. Jerrod Evans

  3. Za’Kai “Bully” Kemp

  4. Takari Evans

  5. Journey Evans

  6. Jerrod Evans

  7. Za’Kai “Bully” Kemp

  8. Journey Evans

  9. Takari Evans

  10. Za’Kai “Bully” Kemp

  11. Jerrod Evans

  12. Takari Evans

  13. Raheem Wallace

  14. Za’Kai “Bully” Kemp

  15. Journey Evans

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  1

  Takari Evans

  “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear Jada and Jaden. Happy birthday to you.” A crowd of almost one hundred people, including me, sang the original happy birthday song that people around the world had been singing for centuries to my twin daughter and son as they celebrated their fifth birthday.

  I was still in shock as I stood behind both my kids at how many of their friends from school had shown up to their birthday party. It had to be at least sixty children running around our massive backyard, which was so absurd to me because when I was five years old, I didn’t have half the number of friends that just showed up to my kids’ birthday party.

  My daughter, Jada, was much worse than Jaden with the number of friends who showed up for her. I promise my daughter was the five-year-old Beyoncé of her generation. I was still in shock at the way her little friends from school ran up to her a few hours ago when the party began. They damn near tackled her to the ground with hugs, as if they hadn’t just seen her yesterday at school. Throughout the party, as if my daughter was the ringleader of the crew, her friends followed her wherever she went. Whether it was to get on the ponies that my husband had rented for her to go up and down the block, to the bounce houses, or to get their faces painted, they were right behind her.

  My son, on the other hand, was the complete opposite. In fact, he’d been walking up to me almost every five minutes and asking me if the party was almost over because all he wanted to do was to go in his room and play his X-Box. My son had a lot of ways like his father. One of them being that he didn’t too much care for big crowds. He didn’t even want to have a big birthday celebration; all of this was Jada’s idea. Although he’d invited a handful of his friends from school, he paid them the least bit of attention because he was so ready to call it a day. Although Jada and Jaden were biological twins, I promise you the only thing that they had in common was their looks because they were truly like night and day when it came to their personalities.

  “Mommy, when are we going to open the gifts? I want to see what everybody got me. You know my new best friend, Ashley, right? She better had gotten me something nice because you remember when it was her birthday a few months ago, and we brought her all of those pretty clothes from Justice and…

  I had long ago tuned my daughter out because she would go on and on about her little kindergarten drama, and I was too busy looking at my husband from across the backyard and shaking my head. He had his work phone glued to his ear as he paced back and forth like he was in the middle of an intense conversation. I sucked my teeth in annoyance and rolled my eyes because, from his facial expression alone, I could tell that whatever he was listening to on the phone wasn’t good. It would only be a matter of seconds before he came over and let me know that he had to head into the office.

  Don’t take my annoyance at my husband as me being childish or even inconsiderate. Hear me out first before you judge me. The things that I’ve been through with this man has me rolling my eyes. Even now, as I think back to a couple of months ago, which was our wedding anniversary. He ended up canceling on the dinner that we had planned at the last minute because he needed to go into the office. It was the amount of hard work and effort that I’d put into that night, only for him to cancel on me as if it wasn’t anything.

  My husband, Jerrod, was the CEO of Evans & Sons, a company that was passed down to him from his father. His company distributed just about every electronic device such as iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and electric scooters, just to name a few. Jerrod’s job was to make sure that their strategies and policies were aligned to meet the company’s goals. In other words, if one of the workers there couldn’t figure out why the toilet wasn’t flushing, they called Jerrod. No, that’s not exactly in the job description of a chief executive, but I swear that’s what it felt like to me.

  My husband was the boss of the company, the damn CEO, the one who signed everyone’s checks, so I just didn’t understand why he had to be the one to get called every second of the day, especially on a day like this. I hated to sound like the bitter wife, especially when most women would have killed to be in my position and have a man who worked hard and provided more than enough for his family.

  Jerrod has always been a hard worker. He and I met during our sophomore year in high school in our honors math class. I remember the day we met like yesterday. My teacher loved to pair the classroom up to work on our assignments together, and on that particular day, Jerrod and I happened to be paired together. Prior to that day, I never paid him much attention because he and I didn’t hang around the same crowd. It was always me and my two best friends, Brooklyn and Kassidy. Of course, I had little associates here and there because I was in plenty of school clubs like the women’s empowerment club, the speech and debate club my junior and senior year, and even the National Honor Society, just to name a few.

  The majority of the kids who attended my school were either middle class or lower class. Jerrod was one of the very few students at the school who was considered to be upper class. I remember all the talk around the school sophomore year about the new student who drove a Mercedes G-wagon to school. I just assumed that he was one of those guys who came from money and thought he was better than everyone else, but he turned out to be the exact opposite. It wasn’t until we were paired together in our math class, that I ran out of fingers on my hands to count up all of the pros about him.

  The first thing that sparked my interest was when he opened his mouth, and I saw just how intelligent he was. I’ve always been good at math, amongst so many other subjects, so it was thrilling to see that someone else enjoyed math just as much as I did, and he was just as good at it. We ended up finishing our assignment before anyone else in the class, so that gave us time to sit and get to know each other. After I found out how intelligent he was, and completing an assignment was no longer the goal, I was forced to look him in his eyes when he spoke. His attractiveness was another thing that drew me in.

  To me and probably every other girl at the school, Jerrod was beautiful. I know that’s an odd thing to say, especially since he’s a male, but I felt like handsome wasn’t fitting enough for him. Beautiful was the word for him. Before he even told me, I knew that he had to have been mixed with something because he had silky hair that he would wear in single braids that went down to just about the middle of his back. Even his eyes were beautiful. He had light hazel eyes and some of the most beautiful, thick eyelashes that I’d ever seen. Lashes that I still to this day wish were mine.

  At the time, he had braces, but that didn’t stop me from finding him attractive. Hell, if anything, it
made me more attracted to him. He was tall as hell too. I remember questioning him on if he ever thought about playing basketball, and I found out that he wasn’t into sports like most guys. I began to learn more and more about him, and my instant attraction dwindled. It wasn’t anything wrong that he said. He never offended me or anything, but I started to think about my lifestyle and the things that he said about his, and I realized that we didn’t have anything in common besides our intelligence and deep interest in math.

  Jerrod came from a very wealthy family. At the time, his father was running the business Evans & Sons, so that explained why Jerrod was sixteen years old and riding in a Mercedes G-wagon to school. He didn’t live in the areas of Miami that I knew about. He lived over the bridge, meaning back there on Star Island. It wasn’t that his silver spoon lifestyle turned me off, but ultimately, I wanted someone who I could share deep interests with. For example, my mother raised me on her own. It was just myself and my older sister, Sky. We had no help from our father, so that lets you know right there the type of struggle that we had.

  We weren’t poor or anything like that, neither did my mother have to knock on other people’s door for us to have a place to stay, but we weren’t comfortable either is what I’m trying to say. I’m not scared of the dark because I know what it feels like to go days without power on in the house when my mother would have to choose if she wanted to pay the electric bill or the water bill. Rice and honey were still considered a snack for me because back then, that’s what I was accustomed to eating. Those were just a small portion of the hard times that I experienced as a child, and because I’d never had a boyfriend or anything like that, I wanted someone to relate to. Sadly, Jerrod wasn’t that.

  Weeks had gone by, and although there weren’t a lot of underlying factors that Jerrod and I had in common, I still found myself liking him. It was the way he would ask me how my night went whenever I saw him the next day at school. We started being partners just about every day in our math class, and whenever we would finish our work early, we would just talk. Next, came him offering to drop me off at home after school. Those rides home led to him taking me out to lunch after school, and sometimes, it would be to restaurants that I’ve never even heard of because they weren’t in my price range. Yes, we were different, but he started showing me things that I’d never seen before, which is what drew me in. Like, going to college.

  I knew that I was smart as hell, but college was never an option for me because it would just be another bill that my mother wouldn’t be able to afford. Jerrod helped me with applying for college. He helped me with applying for scholarships, and by the time I graduated high school, I had a full ride. Mind you, Jerrod and I never became a couple in high school. We were just best friends, as we liked to call it. We slipped up and kissed a few times, even hugged each other a little longer than most friends do, but that was it. It wasn’t until he surprised me on my first day at UCF, that he and I became a couple.

  Jerrod had been offered full rides to just about every college around the world, and he turned them all down just to come to UCF with me. That was the day that I knew I loved him. I told him, and he ended up saying it back. That’s when we put a title on what we were doing and let it be known that we were in a relationship. It didn’t take but a few months in college for me to lose my virginity to him. We were like the modern Monica and Quincy from the movie Love & Basketball. The only difference was, neither of us played sports, but I’ll be damned if the love wasn’t there.

  Almost five years went by, and we both graduated with masters in hand. Both of our degrees were in business. Originally, I planned to earn my degree in education, but I ended up listening to Jerrod when he told me that there wasn’t any money in teaching, so I ended up switching and going into business with him.

  After we both graduated from college, it was at our celebration dinner with both our families that Jerrod asked me to marry him. Of course, I said yes because I was so deeply in love with him. We ended up having the biggest wedding that Miami had ever seen, and the day after the wedding, my husband gave me something that I am still very thankful to have to this day. He gave me property. Property to open my own daycare because that had been a frequent conversation between the two of us, and he made it happen.

  He was working alongside his father at the time, and after everything was set in order with the daycare and it finally opened for business, he and I were set. Set to book a trip to go to Paris in the middle of the week if we wanted to. Although Jerrod was the breadwinner amongst the two of us, he let me know whenever he got the chance that whatever was his was mine and vice versa. It didn’t take me long to get pregnant with our oldest daughter, Journey. That’s our thirteen-year-old daughter, who’s going on 30! Even right now, on a day as big as this one, she was upstairs in her room, more than likely with her phone glued to her ear as always. One would think that she would have come down and shown some type of change in her behavior, being as though she’d just gotten her phone taken away for two weeks for doing the exact same thing that she was doing now.

  Anyway, after having Journey, I couldn’t always be there at the daycare as much as I wanted to, which was slowly putting me in the category as a stay at home wife. At that time, things were still good in my marriage. It wasn’t until a few years later when Jerrod’s father passed, and the business was passed down to him that the shift began. I won’t even talk about the day that I gave birth to the twins, and Jerrod missed it because I couldn’t get a hold of him.

  I loved my husband dearly, but I wasn’t happy in my marriage, although I was trying to make it work. Even with having three kids that keep me on my toes, I still made sure that every morning breakfast was on the table and at night, the same thing went for dinner. I make sure that the gym we had in our home was put to use because I want him to still see the high school girl that he fell in love with. I was at the hair salon just about every other week, making sure to keep my hair done up for him, but it was like nothing I did even mattered anymore. You can forget about sex too.

  As crazy as this sounds, I wanted my damn back blown out! I wanted to be on my hands and knees, moaning to my husband and telling him that he was killing my spot while sweat beads poured from just about every inch of my body. I wanted to cry tears of pleasure. I wanted to have sex so good at night that I woke up the next morning too tired to fix any breakfast or be a mother to my kids. I can’t even tell you the last time that Jerrod had done any of those things to my body.

  If I go upstairs right now and show you what’s in my third drawer, you’d see the many toys that had been getting me off.

  “I see that look in your face, Shrimp, and it’s only a matter of time before you spaz out. Calm down, Kari. Please, don’t argue in front of the kids,” my mom said as she walked over to me.

  It was crazy because nothing had been discussed between her and me, but she could just tell from the look that was on my face that I was annoyed. She knew about the problems that were going on in my marriage. Besides my two best friends, Brooklyn and Kassidy, my mother was like another best friend as well, so she knew it all. There really wasn’t much about me that she didn’t know. Like I mentioned earlier, it was just my mother, Sky, and I growing up, so we had no choice but to be tight.

  My eyes left from my husband, and they lingered on my mother. A mother who didn’t look like half of what she’d been through. Hell, a mother who didn’t even look like she had a thirty-four year old daughter, nor a thirty-five year old daughter, which was Sky’s age. My mom looked as if she could fit in my crew, which was just myself, Brooklyn, and Kassidy.

  I didn’t take after my mom when it came to a lot of things. My mom was collard greens and cornbread thick, with a nice, flat stomach, and one of the asses that the background dancers for Trina has. She still held onto that one gold tooth fang, which had her looking like a typical, southern mama. I say that I didn’t take after my mom on a lot of things because our physical features were so different. Here I was, thirty-th
ree years old, with three children, and my body was still filled out the way that it was when I was twelve years old. My daughter is even bigger than me. My size is how I’d gotten the nickname “Shrimp,” which only my close family and friends would call me. Last time I checked, I was standing just five feet even, and I weighed one hundred and five pounds soaking wet.

  Whenever I was out in public, people acted as if they were so shocked that someone my size, with a face so innocent, was really thirty-three and that I even had a teenage daughter. Weight has been something that I struggled with for years. I thought that after each time I gave birth, I would gain a little weight here and there, but I promise I felt like I was only getting smaller. I had tried everything from adding more starches to my diet, protein shakes, taking supplements, but nothing worked. As women, I believe that we all had things about us that we considered to be flaws, and my weight just happened to be one of mine.

  “Ma, I swear he does this shit every time! I know that look on his face. In a few more minutes, he’s going to walk over here and tell me that he has to go. It’s not even about me right now. It’s about my kids! He thinks because the twins are so young that they don’t question things, but they do. I can’t tell you the number of times that both Jada and Jaden have asked me why Daddy isn’t here for dinner or how come Daddy doesn’t give us that much attention. They see it, Ma. I’m tired of begging my husband for time. I shouldn’t have to beg him to love me. Hell, to love us,” I said, and toward the end, my voice trailed off, and I heard it crack.

  Yes, I was hurt, but I was breaking right now because if anything, I was angry. The thought of my husband having an affair did run through my mind once before, but the man barely has enough time for his own wife and three kids, so I knew that he didn’t have any time to cheat. I trusted Jerrod too, so I knew that it wasn’t another woman. Sadly, the only thing that me and my kids were in competition with was that damn job.