The Double Life: A Novel By Shea Lynn

by Shea Lynn

  “You’re still awake?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I was waiting for you.”

  I caressed her right cheek and tried to keep my lips from trembling. “I’m sorry, Dev. I know I probably scared you and I didn’t mean to.”

  “Aiden…he just doesn’t like broccoli,” she whispered.

  “I know. I know he doesn’t. I don’t know why I was so angry.”

  “And he’s been saying ‘no’ a lot. That’s a new phase,” she said.

  I smiled. “What do you know about phases?”

  “Well, that’s what Grandma Campbell calls them. Phases. She said I have phases, too.”

  “Your grandmother is a very smart woman. She’s right. And maybe Mommy is going through a phase,” I wondered aloud.

  Devann’s eyes crinkled in the semi-darkness. “Hmmm. I didn’t know mommies could have phases, too. But I guess so. Is your phase over?”

  “I hope so, Sweetie.”

  “I hope so, too.”

  I kissed her forehead and each of her cheeks. “I love you, Gumdrop.”

  “Love you, too, Mommy.”

  “Can you get some sleep for me, big girl?”

  She nodded again.

  “And don’t worry about Mommy, okay? It’s Mommy’s job to worry about you. Let me do the worrying. Okay?” I said, desperate to relieve her anxiety and the guilt that I’d caused it.

  Devann smiled. “Okay. You take my worry.”

  She yawned then. And her yawn let me know she was alright. She was tired and she would be asleep before long.

  “Good-night, Baby girl. See you in the morning, okay?”

  “Okay. Night-night.”

  I kissed her a few more times before taking the long walk back to my room.

  “Everything okay?” asked Aaron. The lights were out and our room shone with the glow from the television. He was now in his pajamas and sitting up in the bed, his glasses still on, his arms folded across his chest and his ankles crossed.

  I nodded. “Everyone’s okay.”

  I swallowed thickly, still trying to get my bearings with him. The embarrassment of my behavior that evening still hanging heavily over my head. I padded around to my side of the bed and slid in beside him.

  “Maybe you should take some time off from work. Maybe we should go on a little vacation,” Aaron said.

  His logical mind had found a logical reason for the source of my stress: my job. The funny thing was that I actually enjoyed working. It was the one aspect of my life in which I still had control. And hopefully, things would get busy enough at the office for me to get distracted.

  I responded with, “Maybe I should.”

  Aaron turned off the television with the remote and said, “Come here. Let me hold you.”

  Was God laughing at me?

  I loved Aaron. But I didn’t want to be in his arms. I wanted space from away him. Physical and mental room to think and clear the anxiety-driven cobwebs in my brain.

  But he wanted to console me. And I wanted to want to try to be loving and tender with him.

  I scooted over in the bed and he spooned me, wrapping his long arms around me, holding me close in the darkness of our room. His masculine scent drifted towards my nostrils and the contrast of that scent to the soft, feminine scent I wanted to smell made me feel even worse.

  “I just want you to be happy, Sid,” he whispered.

  “I know you do, Sweetie.”

  “Are you happy with me? Are you happy with our life?” he asked.

  I looked around in the darkness, willing my breathing to stay even and not betray my instant reaction to such a direct question.

  “I’m happy. I’m just not quite myself. But I’ll get there. I know I will.”

  We whispered in the darkness for a little while longer before my husband’s breaths began to even out and I knew he’d slipped off into sleep. When I felt he was sufficiently slumbering and wouldn’t notice my departure, I slipped out of bed and made my way downstairs to my office with the dark red walls.

  I kept this room very neat. I wouldn’t even let our twice-weekly maid into the room to clean. This was my special place and I didn’t want anyone or anything tampering with it. I flipped on the light switch and the room came to life in a soft glow. I’d made Aaron figure out how to bathe the room in soft lighting because lighting was important to me.

  Nervously chewing on my lower lip, I walked over my bookcase and found the keepsake box I always stored on the bottom shelf. It was one of the few things my brother had ever made for me and even though it was nearly twenty-five years old, its stained wooden walls were still shiny and elegant. My name was written on a small silver plaque on the top of the box and I ran my hand over the engraving before sitting down on the second hand couch.

  The room smelled of strawberries, the fragrance floating up from fruity scented candles along the windows and an air freshener plugged into the wall by my desk. I inhaled that scent and it opened the door to memory lane for me. I’d been a fan of the sweet strawberry smell for as long as I could remember and a memory of the smell of the sweet, red fruit on the lips of my first female lover kept forcing itself into the forefront of my mind.

  With the box now open and on my lap, I flipped through birthday cards, anniversary cards, love letters from Aaron, and private pictures from my past. I flipped and I flipped until I saw her. There she was, sitting in the middle of a stack of pictures, her age frozen at twenty-five years, her smile the same as I’d remembered.

  Janelle.

  Janelle was my first Dayna. The first woman I’d loved. The first woman I’d been in “a phase” with.

  I’d tried long and hard to forget her, but the harder I tried to suppress the part of me that loved women, the more she kept creeping into my thoughts. I wondered how she was doing. I wondered if she was in a relationship. If she ever wondered what became of me.

  I met her in my first year of law school. All of the first year law students got a third-year student mentor. Mine was Janelle. Beautiful, beautiful, Janelle with the smooth cocoa brown skin and the full, strawberry scented lips.

  She was a breath of fresh air to me. I’d been so tightly wound for so long and she let me know it was okay to smile. It was okay to laugh and be free and freedom didn’t mean one could not be successful. She was at the top of her class and her charismatic free-spiritedness was the perfect balance to her blazing intellect.

  My eyes studied my past and gazed deeply at the woman in the photograph. Her natural hairstyle was cute and chic and fourteen years after the picture was taken, her dark eyes were still twinkling at me.

  Janelle was never ashamed of herself. Never ashamed of who she was. She’d told me in an offhand way that she only dated women. It wasn’t something she hid. I remember my ears growing hot and my face flushing when I finally understood what that meant. My strict Baptist upbringing had educated me about such things and when Janelle had clued me in on her sexuality, I’d expected the earth to open up and the devil to come dancing out, ready to stake his claim on the beautiful cocoa-brown Janelle with the strawberry scented lips.

  Oddly enough, it wasn’t the earth that opened up.

  It was my heart.

  I leaned back against the couch, the picture now in my hands, my eyes seeing it, but my mind seeing the past.

  I would hang out with her from time to time and one day, we were at her apartment. She was helping me prep for finals.

  Janelle looked over at me and said, “Sidney, I think you’re smitten by me.”

  I smiled. “Smitten? Janelle, who says ‘smitten’?”

  She giggled. A soft feminine giggle that drew my eyes to her shiny lips. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  I swallowed thickly and slowly met her eyes. “Maybe it is.”

  Janelle leaned closer to me and whispered, “I know it is.”

  My body flushed with heat and I could have sworn I broke out into a light sweat. I didn’t understand how her words and her proximity could leav
e me feeling so aroused and off-balance. I’d dated guys before, but I’d never had my body react so instantaneously to someone.

  We were sitting side-by-side on the couch in her apartment. She put her hand on mine and whispered, “I’m going to kiss you, Sidney Campbell. And you can stop me if you want, but I’m going to try.”

  I didn’t stop her that afternoon and in a few weeks’ time, I was regularly sharing her bed. I loved her and she loved me and just when I got comfortable enough to be open about who I was and who I loved, my brother Marcus overdosed on a combination of illegal drugs and fell into a coma that lasted a week.

  Janelle was beside me. She visited with me, held me when I cried. But my parents only knew her as my “good friend, Janelle” and she didn’t like that. She was proud of who she was and she didn’t like pretending for the comfort of anyone. My parents were under such an emotional strain that I didn’t want to burden them with any shocking revelations. And so I pretended for their sake. But my pretend for their sake became pretend for my sake and as we neared her graduation, Janelle decided that we just weren’t working.

  And now, fourteen years later, I was staring at her picture and wondering what my life would have been like if I’d loved her as openly as she wanted me to.

  Would we still be together?

  Would I have met and married Aaron? Or some other man?

  Would I be leading a double life, teetering on the destruction of my world?

  I put away the pictures, my mind still walking in the shadows of my past. I placed my keepsake box back on the shelf, fingering the beautiful engraving one last time before sending up a silent prayer for my wayward big brother, turning out the light, and heading back upstairs to the arms that were undoubtedly waiting for me.

  Chapter Thirty: Dayna

  In the end, I’d slipped back into bed with Cameron and decided that I just needed to keep trying. I needed to try to enjoy him as a person and a friend and I hoped that the more I enjoyed just spending time with Cameron, the more attracted to him I would become.

  We had a lot of fun over the next few weeks. Nina was definitely a Daddy’s girl and she loved the three of us being silly and hanging out together. As an only child, we bathed her in attention and over those few weeks we made pizza together, went to the movies, took her to Magic Monkey Land, and it made to church as a family every Sunday.

  I’d see her on Sundays. But never for very long.

  It was if suddenly she couldn’t even make it to Sunday school and the Kings usually arrived just in the nick of time for service to begin. After service, I’d make my way to the fellowship hall, hoping to get a glimpse of her before she departed, and it surprised me that I rarely saw her there either. I’d see Aaron, Aiden, Devann, and her parents, but I didn’t see Sidney. She always found a way to disappear.

  She was being like Job.

  Avoiding temptation.

  Avoiding me.

  I needed to follow her lead.

  I kept trying with Cameron. We kept making love and though I didn’t enjoy him nearly as much as I did loving Sidney, it began to get better than it had been that first night when I’d escaped to my warm-water refuge. We were happy. Much happier than we had been when we’d first moved to Wilmette. But I still saw the doubt in my husband’s eyes. I heard it in his voice during our bi-weekly counseling sessions.

  On one Sidney-less Sunday evening, I tucked Nina into bed and made my way back to my bedroom. Cameron was on the floor, wearing only his sweat pants. He was doing pushups and I could see the muscles flexing in his back, his creamy brown skin shifting and buckling as he moved.

  Cameron was important to me. The life we’d built was important to me.

  I stood in the doorway and watched and wondered until he was finished.

  My husband met my gaze with a shy smile as he turned around and sat on his bottom, his knees bent, his hands resting on the carpet behind him.

  “Hey you. How long have you been watching me?” he asked.

  “I want you to move back home.”

  Surprise danced in his dark brown eyes. “You do?”

  I nodded. “I do. This is your home. This is where you belong.”

  “You’re sure? Shouldn’t we take a little more time to - - ,” he began.

  I shook my head in response and walked over to him, kneeling down to his level on the carpet.

  “I’m ready. I know you’re ready. When can you move back in?” I asked. The certainty in my voice surprised even me.

  My husband’s hands found mine. “You’re sure you want to do this? You’re not worried that - - - ,” he started.

  I studied his eyes, delved deep inside them to read his worries. “You love me, right?”

  “Damn right, I do.”

  “Then if you love me, you won’t hurt me,” I said.

  “I won’t. I promise you that.”

  “You’ve practically been living here since we got back together. You’re just wasting money with the apartment.”

  That was only a half-truth. We both knew that his leasing of the apartment gave us a “get out of my space” free card. One that could be used whenever the pressure between us became too great. Me asking him to move back home was an elimination of that buffer and a statement that I would be there with him for better or for worse.

  “Dayna? Are you really sure about this? I don’t want to rush you.”

  “You said it before. You said, ‘Let’s try again’. Let’s do it. This time, with no training wheels. No more apartments. And no more counseling. Just you and me. You’re my husband. I’m your wife. Let’s live like a family again. Always and forever, right?” I said.

  There were tears in his eyes when he smiled at me and whispered, “Always and forever.”

  Chapter Thirty-One: Aaron

  “Does it really matter, Aaron!?” she yelled at me.

  “Yes it does matter! It matters a lot. Every time I say something to you, you’ve got this attitude. I haven’t done shit to you. Why the attitude?”

  “Maybe I’ve had a long day. Maybe I don’t want to come and have to pick up after you. Maybe I don’t feel like cooking dinner and dealing with Aiden’s temper tantrums. Maybe I’m worn out. Do you ever think about that?”

  I stared at her from my side of the bed. “So what? Are you saying I don’t help out around here? I bust my ass for you, Sidney. Every day, I’m busting my ass.”

  “Aaron, you cook once every blue moon. When was the last time you washed a load of clothes? When was the last time I came home from work and didn’t have to pick up a trail of mess from the kitchen to the kids’ bedrooms? I work every day. Same as you. I’m just asking for a little more help.”

  “You’re always asking for a little more of something. A little more of this. A little more of that. Guess what, Sidney? I’m not fucking perfect, okay? I’m not perfect.”

  “Keep your voice down. You’re going to wake the kids!” she hissed at me.

  “Like they don’t know we’re fighting. Like they don’t know we fight all the fucking time.”

  “We don’t fight all the time.”

  “We do fight all the time. Every day. Every damn day. It’s the same shit every day. When do you get tired of hearing yourself complain? Or maybe….maybe you don’t get tired of it. Maybe complaining is your favorite thing to do.”

  She pointed at me then, her hair pulled back in a long black scarf, her night gown slightly swaying from her movement. “You, you’re an ass.”

  Then she grabbed two of her pillows and headed for the door.

  “Oh okay. Here you go again. Leaving once again. You know what I think?” I asked.

  She turned to me, her eyes narrowed and angry, her voice lowered but haughty. “I don’t give a damn what you think. Goodnight.”

  And with that she ran off downstairs to the living room. The couch was getting more of her attention than I was these days. Some nights, she slept down there. Other nights, she stayed down there until the wee hours of the morn
ing before coming back to bed.

  “Shit,” I hissed, punching my pillow in frustration.

  This type of exchange between us was nothing new. Her temper seemed to grow worse and worse and I could no longer discern how reasonable her tantrums were. I couldn’t determine if I was doing something to aggravate her or if she was being ridiculous.

  And now, I looked down at my pajama bottoms and saw myself standing at attention. Our argument had gotten me worked up.

  Again.

  I still wasn’t getting any. Hadn’t gotten any. And the more she yelled, the more I realized I wasn’t going to be getting any in the near future. I grimaced and tossed my fists at no one in particular before stomping off towards the shower to appease my manhood.

  By the time my shower was over, she still hadn’t come back to bed and I was too frustrated to try and see if she was okay. She’d started the fight. She’d stomped off. She needed to start figuring out how to work with me. Not against me.

  If not….

  If not….

  I sort of chuckled to myself in despair as I settled down in my empty bed in the darkness. I didn’t even know how to finish that sentence. If not, then what? Would I leave? Where the hell would I go? What kind of life did I have without Sidney?

  But not this new, angry Sidney.

  I was used to the other one. The one that smiled easily and laughed from her belly. The one that loved me and rubbed my neck when I tired. The one that snuggled close to me at night and took off my glasses when I fell asleep in them.

  That was the Sidney I needed.

  This new one, I could do without.

  She didn’t come back to bed all night and the next thing I knew, I heard her in the shower the next morning. I was groggy. I always slept better when she was beside me and now that she was hardly ever beside me, my body wasn’t getting the deep sleep it was used to getting.

  I sat up, reached for my glasses, turned on the television and waited for her.

  When she emerged ten minutes later, she was fully dressed in a gray, pin-striped pantsuit. Her hair was down around her shoulders, curled and crisp and she’d already put on her dark red lipstick. She looked beautiful and she appeared surprised to see me sitting there. Like she’d planned to get out of the room before I woke up.