That shut her ass up…for all of three seconds.
“Did you sleep with him in Dallas, Kiss?”
The question hung in the air like a cloud of smoke.
Calibri tried to break the ice by snickering. “You all calm down. Nancy, you shouldn’t ask her that. I’ll admit that I asked her in the car, but that was before I realized Aleck was married. I’m sure Kiss wouldn’t sleep with a married man. She’s not that woman.”
I started flipping through television channels with the remote, looking for Martin.
“You’re not that woman. Right, Kiss?” Calibri asked.
I found the correct channel and even though I was tempted to turn the volume all the way up, I hit the mute button instead.
“Not that it is any of your business, but I will tell you…only because the two of you have been there for me and A.J. from the beginning.” I paused. “Yes, Aleck and I succumbed to a moment of weakness and engaged in intimacy in Dallas.”
I realized that I was making it sound more like a romance novel than straight, cold fucking.
“The next morning we both came to our senses and realized that we can never have a true relationship. He went his way and I went mine. I have no regrets about it, so I hope that you ladies will drop the subject. I don’t wish to discuss it further.”
They were quiet for a good two minutes while I turned the volume back up and the opening scene came on. Holding true to form, Nancy had to get in the last word.
“Kiss, okay, I am going to make one comment and then I swear that I will leave this alone.”
I glared at her. “What comment?”
She sighed. “You can sit here and try to pretend like what happened was no big deal. You can be nonchalant about it until the end of time, but you love that man and I don’t think that’s ever going to change.”
“Thanks for the revelation,” I stated sarcastically. I got up from the recliner. “I’m going to grab a wine cooler. Anyone else want one?”
As I headed toward the kitchen, they both said, “No thanks.”
I got my wine cooler and reached into the drawer to get a bottle opener. I struggled to get the cap off and finally gave up, after I could not get my hand-eye coordination together. It probably had something to do with the tears that were streaming down both my cheeks, blurring my vision.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
AUGUST 2006
KISS
A.J. was starting college and I could not be more excited. He had gotten a full athletic scholarship to Morehouse College for football. All the years of driving him back and forth to practice has paid off financially and we sure could use the assistance. It has not been easy for me over the years. Going back and forth to New York from California had proven to be too much for me. While I did not mind the travel before I had A.J., he was the reason that I had given up performing in the circus. Yet, there I was still away from home constantly. I started guilt-tripping and feeling like an unfit parent, even though he had a nanny. I wanted to be the one there for him.
I gave up my property management job shortly after I ran into Aleck in Dallas and started selling life insurance. It was quite a career jump and it was not for me. People do not like discussing life insurance because that means discussing death. The only job more difficult than a life insurance agent is selling cemetery plots. People really aren’t trying to deal with that concept—being lowered into the ground. There is no way to make “final resting place” sound appealing.
After three years of selling life insurance, I was bored to death—no pun intended. I got into the whole cellular phone boom and sold a bunch of those bad boys until the fad became the norm and people were no longer looking for new service, just upgrading to the newer gadgets. Plus, I was still bored. Calibri opened a restaurant and wanted me to partner with her but that did not interest me. Nancy wanted me to go into this “virtual assistant” business with her. I was proud of my friends being entrepreneurs, but those were their dreams, not mine.
I searched to “find myself” and keep food on the table and clothes on our backs. Then I decided to do something drastic and moved to Atlanta in 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks. If life was going to be that unpredictable, I was definitely going to begin treating every single day as a gift—something that I should have been doing all along.
There was something about Atlanta that had always appealed to me. The Dirty South, the way African Americans were doing so well there, the cleanliness of the downtown area. A.J. had mixed feelings about moving because he had only ever lived in California. Let’s face it; most people in the East are trying to get to Cali. I was trying to get the hell out of there.
It was a huge undertaking, leaving my friends and family like that. My parents were retired and chilling at their beach home. They offered to let us come stay with them, assuming that my move was totally financial instead of because of my needing a change. Of course, they wanted their grandchild near them. He was their only one and that made him the most precious thing on Earth to them. They would be able to visit often, I assured them. I also promised to send A.J. back west to see them several times a year, during his school breaks and the summer.
Things worked out well those first years in Atlanta. I decided to get over all my fear factors. I went skydiving; I rode a motorcycle; and I got me a monster truck with tires that came up to my shoulders. I had a sticker in my rear window that read “Not only boys have big toys” and people were shocked when they realized a woman was driving it.
A.J.’s friends at Benjamin E. Mays High School thought I was the coolest mother around and I agreed. I did not try to smother him and while it was hard not to be too overprotective once he started dating, going to parties and driving, I managed to find that perfect equilibrium. He was the captain of the football team at Mays and the girls adored him. He looked so much like Aleck that it was scary. I was always reminded of the man that I wanted to love up close but had to cherish from afar.
I had dated several men over the years, but nothing serious. I had sex with them to meet my basic needs but steered away from developing any real feelings. The men in Atlanta thought they were special and in high demand because women put them on a pedestal. As I grew older, I realized that a lot of women my age were willing to accept a bunch of nonsense from men just so they could lay claim to one; even if they were sharing him. None of that was for me, so I fucked a man from time to time and then sent his ass home or got up and returned to mine. I liked it that way, too. No one to demand food on the table when he got home from work. No one to try to be the head of the household. No one to shove his dick into me when I was least expecting it, or wanting it.
On the day that A.J. was moving into the dorm, everything changed for me. A.J. had told me that his new roommate had a similar nickname, M.J. Even though I had never acknowledged that A.J. was really a junior of a man he had never met—I told him that was his great-great-grandfather’s first name—I figured that M.J. was definitely a junior. What I was not prepared for was that his name was Michael, Jr. and that his father was the same Mike from Jamaica, Aleck’s best friend.