DUBIOUS (28 page)

“
Why do you say that?” I turned so I could see his face.

“
I’ve never met one person that was ‘the be all’ for me, so I’ve never thought about settling for just one person. I had you pegged all wrong. I assumed you were a ladies man and that’s why your marriage had failed. Variety is the spice of life. While what we shared was fantastic, I won’t go cruising off the side of a mountain if it doesn’t happen again.”

The callous way he had spoke tore at my heart. I felt like a scorned woman. I rose up from against Jamie, no longer wanting to be touched. I wasn’t sure I wanted to sleep with Jamie again, either, but I wasn’t about to just say that to him while I was basking in the afterglow. That was just plain mean, and I didn’t appreciate him mentioning my marriage at all. I got out of the tub. Playtime was over as far as I was concerned.

“
Where are you going?” he asked, looking at me like I was crazy.

“
I think it’s time I went home.” I was dripping water everywhere.

“
Why?”

I looked at him as if he had just swallowed a coconut and it was coming out his ass. I wasn’t going to even dignify his question with a response. I grabbed a towel off the rack and dried off. He continued to sit in the tub, looking at me like I was the one flying over the cuckoo’s nest. I did my best not to bang shit and throw things around as I hastily found my clothes and put them on. My head was throbbing, but I refused to even ask Jamie for an aspirin. I would stop at the gas station on my way home and get some. When Jamie came out the bathroom, I was dressed and looking for my keys.

“
What’s the rush?”

I was not going to let him know how much he had hurt my feelings. “I’ve got to get a paper and start looking for a job.”

“
I told you I was going to put in a good word for you with my dad. He’s looking for new talent.”

“
That’s not a guarantee that I’ll get a job. I’ve got to have a backup plan, so I’m going to get a jump on it. I’ll talk to you later.” I walked out and closed the door before he could see me cry.

I pulled out of his driveway without even buckling my seatbelt. I just needed to get away from him and to clear my mind. I stopped at the first gas station I found and grabbed a Goodies Powder and poured it into my mouth before I had even paid for it. The acrid taste cleared my head instantly.

In hindsight, working with Jamie’s father would not have been a good idea at all. I would register with several temp agencies in hopes of landing something permanent. I grabbed a paper and paid for both at the counter. My cell phone began to vibrate as I was getting back in my car. It was Jamie, but I wasn’t ready to speak with him, so I let the call go to voice mail. It rang twice more before I got home. I ignored those calls, too.

* * *

Back on the sofa, I went through the paper marking the jobs that sounded promising. I also made a list of all the accounting firms in downtown Atlanta. I was going to call them in the morning and find out which temp agency they used so I could register with them. My cell rang again, so I decided to answer it. I didn’t want Jamie to start calling me a punk or anything.

“
Yeah,” I said.

“
Hey, you left your watch.”

I started to tell him to keep it, but Felicia had given it to me for our tenth wedding anniversary. “Shit! I’ll get it later this week.”

“
I could drop it by now if you want me to.”

“
Naw, that’s not necessary.” I definitely didn’t want to see his face.

“
You sure?”

“
Yeah, I’m kind of busy right now.”

“
Alright then … I guess I’ll—”

I hung up. “Fuck him.”

CHAPTER 31

Leaving Sherman the next morning was one of the hardest things I had done in a long time. I didn’t want to go home to an empty house, but I had to. I wanted nothing more than to curl up next to him for the rest of the day eating popcorn and watching movies. But real life was knocking on both of our doors. We couldn’t ignore it any longer, so I drove home.

I had ignored my phone and BlackBerry most of the weekend. Lord knows my emails were probably busting at the seams, but I wouldn’t have traded one minute of this weekend if I had to. It was picture perfect, and I was feeling confident about a future with him. I turned on my computer then headed to the shower. I wanted it to be ready when I came out. I had also put on coffee so that it would be ready when I emerged from the shower.

My body was deliciously tender from all the love biting and sucking we had done over the weekend. I wanted to keep his scent on me, but I knew I would never be able to get any work done if I spent my time constantly smelling him. I made sure to use a shower cap because, despite all the romping around we had done last night, I wanted my hair to be presentable.

The fresh smell of French roasted nuts tempted my nose as soon as I entered the kitchen, so I immediately fixed me a cup and carried it to my laptop. As I had suspected, my emails were overflowing. A lot of it was spam. Some of it was personal correspondence that I had to attend to, and I had to log into work to check my calendar for the week.

By eleven that morning, I had finished going through my inbox and responded to everything that needed my attention and deleted everything else. When I got to work Monday morning, I would certainly be ahead of the game.

A new mail ping on my personal account caught my attention as I was about to the turn off the computer. I double clicked on the icon and there was a big, yellow smiley face with its arms flung open. The caption read “missing you”; it was from Sherman.

I was not about to sit here for the rest of the afternoon exchanging emails with Sherman. I wouldn’t get anything else done if I had done that, and I would have wound up begging him to come over. I simply replied “miss ya too” and closed the window and shut off the computer.

When I went back in the living room, I remembered the weird tape I was watching yesterday. I was scared to continue watching it, but I was even more afraid not to watch it. Forcing myself to do it anyway, I pressed the
Play
button.

Again I was shocked to see Randy lying naked on the floor with his dog. Staring at Randy’s dick, I could not help but to compare it to the one that I had earlier that morning. Suddenly, I felt sorry for Randy. It wasn’t that he was minuscule, his was long and skinny whereas Sherman was long, thick, and meaty. It was like comparing a hot dog to a Polish sausage. I turned up the volume because I could see Randy’s lips moving.

“
It’s okay, boy. Daddy’s here,” Randy said through the TV speakers.

What in the hell is he talking about? Why is he so close to the dog, and where the fuck are his clothes?
He was close enough to the dog to kiss him. Justus began to lick his balls again and Randy was watching closely. He was acting as if he wanted to lick Justus’s balls, too. My hand reached for the remote; this tape was too sick to watch. I ejected it and looked in the box for the next tape.

Randy was very organized. He had dated each of the tapes. He didn’t give them a title, but they were in order. The next tape was done three weeks later. Once again, Randy was on the floor naked with Justus. This time, however, some of the other dogs were there too, but Randy was focused on Justus. Or shall I have said Justus was focused on Randy? He was licking Randy’s hard dick. I was repulsed.

How could he have allowed a canine, with those sharp teeth, near such a sensitive part of his body? More important, why did this excite him? Based on the date in the corner off the screen, we hadn’t had sex in about six months. It wasn’t because I was telling him no, he was just never home. Shit, he had kicked me to the curb for a fucking dog.

I continued to watch in complete horror. All the dogs were licking each other. Randy was their trainer and the only human voice on the tape. It was no wonder he never wanted any help running the kennel. It was a freaking fuck feast. As the tape progressed, some of the dogs started fucking and this made Randy very happy. In fact, he instigated it by placing the animals onto one another. Was this Randy’s method of breeding?
I fast forwarded through the tape, which was more or less the same.

He had taped the dogs giving birth and even taped them just sleeping. I was struggling to understand. It wasn’t until I popped in the last tape that everything began to make sense. The last tape was dated six months ago. On this tape, Justus was fucking Randy in the ass. Randy’s head was thrown back and he was practically drooling. The camera had caught every nuance of emotions that had come over him. When Randy came, I saw it in vivid detail. But the most horrific part of the whole ordeal was when Justus got stuck in Randy’s ass.

Panic was all over his face. If it wasn’t my ex-husband caught on tape in this position, it might have been funny. To think that I’d actually shared the same bed with this psycho for years was enough to make me throw up. I rushed to the kitchen because I could not make it to the bathroom in time. I almost didn’t make it to the kitchen. I continued to throw up until there was nothing left. I still had the dry heaves every time I recalled the look on Randy’s face.

How long had this shit been going on? What should I do about it, report him to PETA? Do an intervention and have his ass locked up in a nut house? Now I understood why Randy wanted to go through the boxes himself. He wanted to keep his dirty, little secret to himself. There was a term for this type of behavior, but it had escaped me. I needed to know more. When I was able to walk, I went back to my computer and turned it on.

I didn’t know where to begin. Google had never failed me in the past, so I tried them first. I typed
sex with dogs
in the search box. The first two articles confirmed my confidence in Google.

The first article that I had read was disturbing enough. In it, the writer was trying to defend his right to wed his dog and carry on a sexual relationship with it. The writer called the act Zoophilia. He went on to claim that there was no cruelty involved. In fact, he purported to love his dog unconditionally. The article, written in 2001, claimed that over one-third of the Zoophiles were gay and that at a convention of a prominent group of Zoophiles only two of the twenty-five people were male.

Another popular term was Bestiality. Bestiality touched on broader subjects than dogs. It cited cases of humans with horses, lambs, cows—a fucking barnyard fest! I was appalled at the audacity of the writer to even suggest that this behavior was innocent and normal. He questioned why it was okay to eat animals but not fuck them? I didn’t even want to think on that shit for two long, so I went on to the next article listed on Google.

The second article had me back at the kitchen sink trying to puke again. It stated that sleeping with dogs was very common, but the act came with its own perils. Apparently when a dog becomes excited the base of his penis could swell up to the size of a softball. That softball-sized knot could become lodged inside the human’s ass. If either party tried to separate too quickly, severe damage could be done.

The lawyer in me was awakened. All this shit was starting to make sense now. When I had initially seen the tape, I felt like I had failed my husband. I had assumed he would rather sleep with an animal than me. But after reading the second article, it wasn’t about his fucking me at all. It was his desire to be fucked instead; therefore, it was a high probability that he had homosexual tendencies. The question now became whether he had already acted on his probable tendencies.

Everything that had happened between us over the last few years played through my mind. I remembered the first time he had brought Justus home with him, how he even wanted Justus to sleep in the bedroom with us. Now, even the dog’s name had a different meaning. He named it Justus, almost telling on himself. Who better to experiment with than someone who couldn’t tell a soul?

I was just surprised that I hadn’t seen the signs of his curiosity. He never liked for me to go anywhere near his anus when we were having sex. If I played with his butt too long he would either move his body or my hands. I had never paid that any mind. In fact, I thought he was homophobic.

I needed to talk to someone about this shit, but it was still too embarrassing to mention. I still had to decide how I was going to deal with Randy. Would I confront him or just give him his precious boxes and tell him I didn’t have time to go through it? Oh fuck that. I was confronting his ass. I needed to know if he had ever done any of this shit while he was sleeping with
me!
I had to be sensible about this. If I went at him the wrong way, he wouldn’t tell me shit or he would lie and I’d never find out the truth.

I was going to have to seek an outside opinion. My instinct told me to talk to Kenya. She was street smart and I felt like I could trust her with this information. After all, this wasn’t my shame. Not anymore it wasn’t. I called her.

“
Hey girl, what you doing?” I said when she picked up.

“
Just chillin’. What’s up? Long time no here from.” She was being a smart ass.

“
I’ve got something that I need to talk to you about. It’s very personal. If you’re not doing anything, could you come by my house tonight?”

“
I don’t feel like doing anymore hair today.”