Secrets of a Kept Woman (Volume 1) Read online

  Once his eyes met mine with the reassurance that I needed to let me know that I was in the right place with the right person at the right time, all of the old emotions I held for him came rushing back to the surface. I knew there was nothing for me to feel guilty about. Memories of all the nights of hot passion we shared, all of the dreams of children, careers, marriage together, all the hopes and plans for our future brought comfort in being with him. How could I ever forget our destiny? This man was my soul mate – el amor de mi vida. It’s not cheating if it is with your soul mate, I told myself. That type of thing is just meant to be. There are some affairs that are just pointless, but then there are those matters of the heart that trump every last holy-rolling guideline in the affair book. This one was one of those matters of the heart that was unexplainable. I reasoned that there were certain raw emotions and passion that right all wrongs, in all circumstances. Those that make the breath we breathe more nourishing to the lungs and the food we eat more nutritious to the body. Some things were just meant to be, right?

  After placing the water jug back into refrigerator, he once again joined me on the couch and tossed back his cup of water in one gulp. “All of that dancing made me thirsty,” he said, with a big long ‘ah’ after he finished drinking the water down.

  “I know, right?” was all I said, before taking a few sips of my own drink.

  He stood up, took my glass from my hand, and planted kisses on my neck, followed by a passionate kiss on the lips. When he finally broke the kiss, he held me close for a moment. I teasingly pushed away from him and sat back on the couch. “Your shirt is soaking wet from all that sweating you did while we danced tonight. You need to hit the shower too, young man,” I cooed.

  Knowing one of my nervous gestures was to change the subject, he ignored my statement and came back in for another kiss allowing the warmth of his mouth to send another wave of heat through me. “You never had a problem with me being sweaty before,” he said, as he pulled his lips from mine.

  “Yeah, but you’re wet.” I took him by the hand and said, “Come on, and let’s get you out of these wet clothes.” I was glad that by now I knew my way around his place enough to get him to the shower and then the bedroom. I guided him until we were walking down his hallway. When we were standing directly in front of his bed, I turned to stand facing his tall frame towering over me. Unbuttoning his shirt slowly and drinking in every contour of his chest, I removed his top and then the t-shirt underneath, leaving his hairy chest bare. I tenderly kissed his chest before he tilted my head toward him and kissed me fervently on the lips.

  “I…I…I…” I wanted to say the words, but he pulled me close and wrapped his arms so tightly around my waist that I could barely breathe. I tried to speak but couldn’t. The words were caught in my throat. Instead of helping me out of my Ebonics crisis, he pressed his tongue into my mouth, drowning out all thoughts and unspoken words. Heat traveled down through my bones.

  “Maverick!” I finally was able to speak.

  “Yes?” he said, moving his kisses to my neck, lifting my shirt over my head and tightly gripping my behind.

  “I’m supposed to be getting you out of these wet clothes and drying you off.”

  “Well, I’m not trying to get you dry. Jesús dulce, usted no está usando ningunas bragas, Marisol,” he said, as his wandering hands made note of the fact that I was not wearing any panties under the oversized tee. He knew talking dirty to me in Spanish would push me over the edge, because I loved it when he’d speak in my native tongue to me. “Te amo,” He said ‘I love you’, and I felt like a woman granted an all-access pass to the world at large. Being there with him didn’t seem wrong at all. To the contrary, it felt like it was meant to be, as if even in our separation, we’d never spent a day apart. I pushed him back onto the bed where we both stayed until sunrise, thoughts of him taking a shower pushed to the farthest recesses of my mind.

  Chapter 16

  Rhonda

  Sitting in my doctor’s office, I had to do something in order to keep the voices in my head from driving me crazy. of the fact that Titus and Shayla had run off to California for Lord knows how long together to do Lord knows what had me in a tailspin. He had some nerve taking her with him instead of me! Now he was out there showing Shayla off like she was the trophy piece! Ever since their plane left the ground, I had been a total wreck. I still could not believe that he took her to California to handle business with him. That was our spot – the only place he would take me that I would be able to be his number one. When we would get away to handle his business for Fa Ya Grillz, not only would I shop at some of the best stores in Beverly Hills, but I would be flaunted around on his arms in front of to his friends and acquaintances. All of the people that worked at the shop knew me as his main woman. That was my time to be ‘wifey.’ The thought of Shayla showing her high yellow-ass up and playing my position made me physically sick to the stomach, which was why I was at my doctor’s office for a checkup. I had been throwing up and coughing all weekend. To top that off, I was having a problem with my periods being irregular – something I’ve been plagued with since my teens. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t about to lose my sexy being pregnant.

  “Ugh! I hate that bitch!” I said clenching my teeth tightly together, as another wave of stomach pain kicked me in the gut responding to my upset. Either I had to get something for my upset stomach or get my birth control pills changed, again. Ever since the doctor started me on a new brand last month, I had been cramping, nauseated, and hurting something serious. I placed the magazine in my lap and sat very tense and still until the pain subsided.

  Titus must have really been upset about me disrespecting Shayla, because he hadn’t called or texted me all week. Hell, I knew he had to be a little weak after the number I pulled on him in the den. I knew he would have been over our little misunderstanding if he wasn’t running around trying to play the perfect husband. I wondered what Shayla had done to get him to take her to California with him. It had to be some sort of damsel in distress trick she pulled because I couldn’t imagine her putting her foot down and making that nigga account for his time. It just wasn’t in her timid ass, so he must’ve just been soft on her for a minute. No problem, I knew how to get him back on my track.

  With my stomach pain subsiding, I picked up the Essence of Color magazine from the magazine rack. I skimmed through the pages until I found an interesting article about healthy relationships and how to have lasting friendships. Good, something to occupy my mind for a minute, I thought laughing at the irony of my situation and the reading material in my hand. This writer was on a roll talking about friends crossing the line, cheating, and a variety of other provocative topics. The part that got to me was this:

  “When evaluating the reason you are not as close to your friends as you should be, you must stop and ask yourself, has my friend changed or have I? Just because the climate changes doesn’t mean the people on the land have or ever will. We all know that change can be a good thing, but what is most important to note when evaluating change is whether it is you that has changed or has your setting changed. And is the change for the better?”

  I looked up from the article and looked around the room to see if anyone else in the room was understanding what the fuck this dumb writer was trying to say. Talk about talking all around a subject. This writer was a moron. But anyway, the article went on to say:

  “A fool in a forbidden love is incapable of being a good friend, for they will do anything to savor another moment of the sweet nectar of love, even if it means crossing once beloved friendships out in the process. The urgent need to remain in a sense of euphoric bliss is the number one cause for the death of budding friendships of yesterday. A lot of young women get caught up in the moment and play down some of the hurtful things that they do to their friends, but the fact remains is that they are toxic to some of the very people who care about them the most.

  Have you ever heard the saying, you can take a woman out
of someone else’s husband’s bed, but you can’t take the mistress out of the woman? Well, now that you have heard it, what do you think? Even women who have committed terrible atrocities toward their fellow sisters can make strides to change their behavior and redeem themselves once they realize that the environment or climate hasn’t changed, they have simply crossed that unthinkable imaginary line and betrayed their friend in the worst way a woman could by sleeping with her man.

  In closing, I want all of my readers to ask themselves, have your actions left any of the people you once loved drifting off into faint memory, simply dangling in the wind with disconnected or hard feelings, and more importantly, what can you do to repair your friendships?”

  A moment of truth attempted to tug at my subconscious. The fact that I was upset about my best friend being on a trip with her husband, the fact that I would sleep with said friend’s husband any opportunity I got, and the fact that I truly loved her husband ran through my mind within that moment. But I was convinced that I was not the problem between Titus and Shayla. They had their own problems – the main one being that they were not meant for each other.

  “I should start writing articles for EOC if this was the best they could come up with,” I said loudly, and threw the magazine down onto the table with the rest of the know-it-all publications. I knew then why I didn’t subscribe to those kinds of magazines. Some experts can be too preachy, even when they don’t know jack shit about love or friends. I loved my friends the best way I knew how, all of three of them – Shayla, Gladys and Titus. It was just a different kind of love, so I wasn’t trying to hear what the writer wrote in that article. For a minute, I sat there stewing about the harmless words of the magazine article as if they had jumped up and slapped me in between my eyes with the force of a moral hurricane. I pulled out my mirror case from my cosmetic bag and took a look at the woman staring back.

  “I can’t help who I love. I love my girls, but I love Titus in a special kind of way. It’s not like I had planned to be all sprung over him like this. It just happens to be reality, and I don’t know how to reverse it without losing the part of me that he has awakened,” I said, looking hopelessly into my mirror. The woman in the mirror had no response.

  A soccer mom looking white woman sitting beside me looked at me like I was crazy for talking to my mirror. She held her little Tommy close to her as if she thought he would catch whatever mental disorder I had. I shot her a what-you-looking-at glare and then commenced to searching through my purse for something else to keep me occupied than talking aloud in the waiting room.

  I put my mirror back in my cosmetic bag and took out my cell phone to check for text messages. There were none. Not even one raggedy ass text from Shayla. I silently hoped that she had not found out about Titus and me. After all that had happened, Titus may have broken down and decided to come clean. I doubted it, but then maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Then, he would be able to stop living his lie and be with me for good.

  When the nurse finally came out and said, “Ms. Jackson, you are up next. I’ll come and call you on back so that Dr. Swanman can see you in less than five minutes,” I decided to make a quick call to Gladys, who was back at work. I wanted to see how her trip to Miami had been. Eager to get my mind off of my own dilemma, I was happy to hear her bubbly voice when she answered on the first ring.

  She beamed brightly with a big ole, “Hello! It is a great day at Naytek Corporation, Gladys speaking. How may I assist you in your consulting needs?”

  “Dang, girl. Work it then,” I said, laughing as I spoke. I tried to sound full of energy and optimism and not like the two-bit, jealous, home-wrecking friend I was beginning to feel like – thanks to the Essence of Color article, of course. I put as much pep in my voice as Gladys had. “Hey G, how was your trip? I know you were turning some heads down there with that sexy two-piece we picked up at the mall last week.”

  “Girl, I had so much fun. How about I didn’t turn many heads, but I did turn one particular head. Wait until Shayla gets back, and I’ll tell you who I ran into at the hotel looking finer than three Morris Chestnuts in speedos!”

  “Aw snap, now you’ve got me curious. Who?”

  “I said, I will tell you when Shayla gets back from California.”

  “I can’t wait. Tell me G!”

  “Ah, well take one guess. It’s the last person you would ever expect.” She must have known that I was drawing a blank, so she added, “From back in my college days at Albany.”

  No way, I thought. I knew that if she had run into the man I thought she was talking about, she was in trouble. Good trouble. “No way, you ran into Maverick Douglas?”

  “Hell yes, that’s exactly who a sister brushed up with this weekend,” she said, with more life than I was used to hearing from her. I could imagine her pearly whites spread across her face through the phone. She was smiling, showing her full set, and from the sound of things, she had a good reason to be smiling.

  When she was attending Albany State, Maverick Douglas had been the alpha and omega for Gladys. She was so in love with him that when she did come home on break, he was all that she talked about. She even picked out names for all of their unborn children. That’s how gone my girl was back then. He brought out the best in her, and when they broke up, she got so low on herself that she ended up settling for her trifling ass abusive and cheating husband, James. Because she’d broken up with Maverick without giving him a chance, she gave James all the chances in the world to prove himself to be a jerk. I had always wished she would give the man that really cared about her those chances, though. Her running into that man this weekend was major.

  “Oh my God! Tell me what happened. Did he say anything to you?”

  “Did he? An earful. But you know the weirdest thing was that his touch, feel, smell, sound, and taste had the same stronghold over me as when we were together. And did I tell you he is so damn fine with his muscles! Ai, Dios mio… Lawdhamercy.”

  “Did you just say his taste, or was I hearing things? Girl, don’t even answer that. I hope you got in a lot of trouble this weekend. The whole weekend. Every waking minute!”

  “It was good seeing him again,” she said losing some of the pep in her voice and quickly changing the subject. “How did Shayla’s big surprise shebang she planned for Titus turn out? Or has he turned her loose yet?” Gladys chuckled, as if she had told a fabulous joke.

  “Titus didn’t come home Friday night. Shayla’s upset. The usual,” I said, uninterested in going over the details of the past weekend again.

  “Damn,” Gladys said concerned. “I know my girl is hurt about that. She was really excited about spending that time with her husband.” I could have sworn she put emphasis on ‘her,’ but maybe I was hearing things. After all, creeping will give you a temporary case of paranoia at times. When I didn’t say anything, Gladys continued, “She called me Friday morning all happy, bubbly and everything. Ready for their time together. He just never seems to do right, so we gotta keep praying for our sister that she find the happiness and peace she deserves.”

  “Yeah, always.”

  “I tried to call her when I got back, but all I got was the message on her voicemail about being out of town. Hopefully Titus is showing her a good time. Maybe he’s making things up to her. She deserves it.” Gladys sure was laying the Shayla love on thick today. Frankly, it was starting to bring back my stomach pains. She had always been all up Shayla’s booty since we were kids.

  “Well, I’m going to let you get back to your work. Love you.” I tried to cut her off.

  “Love you, too.”

  I hung up the phone feeling a little bit better knowing I was at least able to be a good friend to Gladys. There was nothing wrong with me or my capability of being a friend, so the Essence of Color article I was reading had to have gotten it wrong. I’d be happy for Gladys if she got back together with Maverick and finally dumped James. The pictures she had shown us back in the day of Maverick were incred
ible. I couldn’t believe how handsome he was, and I always thought they would make a good couple. Unfortunately, I had never met him in person, but I may get my chance after all.

  I was a good friend. I never dished out anymore than I could take. I glanced at my watch and wondered what was taking the nurse so long to call me to the back. Five minutes had come and gone.

  Chapter 17

  Shayla

  The morning after we got back from California, I woke up and started my morning stretches. I was pleasantly surprised that the last night’s sleep had been so restful. I felt refreshed and ready to face my day head on. Thanks to my husband having other things on his mind than sleeping, I had only gotten four hours of rest the night that we got home. With my morning routine complete, I sauntered into the bathroom to wash my face.

  The bags from my shop ‘til I dropped spree were scattered about my dressing room. The sight of all of the bags that we had to pay extra to fly on the plane ride home made me decide that today, instead of complaining about the things that I did not have, I would celebrate the luxuries that were mine. In my wildest dreams, I would not have imagined living large to this magnitude. I was truly blessed. With a huge smile spread across my face, I declared, “Today, I’m going to pamper myself some more, so that I’ll be looking hot and sweet when I see my boo-boo tonight.”

  Yeah, after all of the quality time we’d spent together lately, I was ready to upgrade his cheating behind back to the status of my boo. Maybe all we needed was more time to bond and get him out of the clutches of my so-called best friend. Within an hour, I had dressed to impress and was leaving the beauty shop with this cute little crinkly number that Titus loved to see on me. After leaving the salon, I went to the Chinese nail shop and got a quick pedicure, manicure, and a replenishing facial. The only stop left is to Victoria’s Secret to pick up a sexy teddy for tonight, I thought. When I arrived back home Titus was sitting in the den watching TV. I couldn’t even describe the joy I felt having him at home waiting on me for a change!