The Last Street Novel (10 page)

She thought about their struggles a lot. She didn’t speak about them often. It was not her way to complain about her many stresses, she just worked through them in silence. However, she couldn’t seem to work through her inability to trust her husband to refuse temptation like she could. And she wondered if that temptation was more attractive than she was; more uninhibited, more enticing. And those thoughts only made her more insecure and unwilling to compete. Why should she be in competition with other women anyway? She was married to the man, and he should respect her more, holding her high on her pedestal. But since he had obviously forced her to compete, with disrespectful bitches, then he would have to live with her wrath and her withholding her affection from him.

Yet, she felt helpless and ultimately at his mercy. Shareef had become a national superstar, where she was only his wife, an aspiring event coordinator who had been only halfway successful in her attempts at big events in Florida, or in her hometown of Macon, Georgia, where her father, Daniel Mason, was a county judge. So maybe Shareef could walk away and do better, or most likely worse. For what woman would work as hard as she had to maintain the peace with her husband when more than half of her friends and family were separated or divorced for lesser transgressions?

Jennifer loved Shareef, his boastful swagger and his achievements, as much as she loved her father’s. But submitting her will to her father was natural—he was Daddy. To submit to a husband she could no longer trust was degrading, and she found herself not able to do it. She had pride. She had value. She had self-respect. She loved her husband very much while despising her lack of control over their marriage, and she found herself paralyzed in her emotions. What was the right way to deal with him? Only if the man wasn’t so damned thick-headed and impatient, maybe he could find time to relax with her for a minute, listen to her words, and allow her to develop trust in him again.

Jennifer would sink into deep spells of daydreams about her husband and their marriage at any place or time without warning. All it took was mention of his name or a passing of information to remind her of him. And before she knew it, it was close to ten o’clock at night and their library meeting was adjourning. It would take her another twenty minutes to drive home to relieve him of the children. How would Shareef react to that? He reacted to everything. But if she had reacted as much to him, she may have been forced to stab him.

“I’
M ON MY WAY
to the house now,” Jennifer called and told her husband from inside the Land Rover. By then it was well after ten o’clock, and she had spent an extra ten minutes talking to the youngest member of the fund-raising committee about the best location for a new apartment. That’s what Jennifer was like. Loyal. And her job was never done until everyone had received her full attention.

“Aw’ight,” Shareef grumbled quickly over the phone.

She heard his voice and knew what he was thinking. He had been waiting to leave for more than an hour, and he was now pissed for having to wait that long. But life wasn’t about a clock for Jennifer. Life was to be enjoyed and treasured, regardless of the seconds, minutes, and hours. Time should not control you, you should control it.

So when she arrived home, she was still not pressed.

Shareef, however, was waiting outside the house, on the steps, for her, like an overgrown child who could not wait to catch the minutes that could never be recaptured or replaced.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he told her as he hurried over to his Mercedes.

“How did practice go?” she asked him.

“What?”

“I said how did his practice go.”

“Oh, it went normal. He had a good practice.”

Shareef had already made it to his car, and since he was so eager to leave right then and there to chase eleven o’clock before he missed it, she told him, “All right,” and let the hasty man go.

She then entered the house and walked straight up to the rooms of the children to make sure they had been tucked into bed properly. Because sometimes Shareef didn’t take the time to get them into their pajamas.

S
HAREEF WAS ON THE ROAD
back to Miami at 10:34
PM
, and was madder than a motherfucker.

“That’s the kind of shit I’m talking about,” he fussed to himself about his wife. He already knew what had happened. Jennifer had put in more overtime at her meeting at his expense, but he wasn’t supposed to be upset about it. Nope. He was just supposed to wait until midnight and then sympathize with whatever story she gave him.

There was a cat stuck in the tree outside the library so I called the police, an ambulance, and a fire truck to make sure they could rescue her safely before I left.

Shareef would then holler,
Fuck that damn cat! Nobody else stuck around for that shit! So why did you have to?
After a few more hours, once he had calmed down, after he had lost three more years of his life expectancy through the unnecessary stress she had caused, he would feel like a fool for overreacting to her good deed.

“Shit!” he cursed out loud as he hurried back to Miami. He had not been with his new mistress in a couple of weeks, and they had made plans to go out that evening.

He dialed her cell phone number through the car phone, and awaited her answer.

“Hello.”

“Jacqueline, I’m on my way,” he told her.

“You’re on your way? You were supposed to pick me up an hour ago.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

“You didn’t even answer my calls,” she complained. “I called you three times already.”

The truth was, Shareef didn’t want to talk to her until he knew for certain he was on his way. Otherwise, he would have looked like a henpecked fool to continue telling her that he was waiting to leave. Maybe Jennifer had planned to ruin his night. Maybe her arriving home later than expected was to control his ability to find happiness without her. That’s why his travels away from home and away from her had become liberating, with the only drawback being that he missed his children.

Shareef told his mistress, “I’ll make it all up to you,” only because he knew she would make it up to him later. And if she did not, she would no longer be his mistress. That was the dilemma that every new woman fell into with Shareef. While he continued in his struggle to understand his wife, he remained pressed for time, stressed out for a release, and intolerant of any new relationship that called for his patience. Because he no longer had any. Jennifer had taken it all.

“Oh, you definitely have to make it up to me now,” Jacqueline told him. “You’re talking about getting out of here at close to midnight. Most of the best restaurants are going to be closing.”

Shareef heard her loud and clear through the speakers of his Mercedes, and he shook his head. The last thing he wanted was to owe another damn woman. But that was his reality after his time had been squeezed. He was being pushed out of his cool mode and into an obvious rush again.

He mumbled, “Aw’ight, I’ll be there.” But he no longer looked forward to it. The hastiness of their evening would only add to the stress he was already feeling.

A
T
1:19
AM
, Shareef held on to a Corona beer, sitting at a table at Opium, in the heart of Miami’s South Beach party district. It was an elaborate place of flashy lights, balconies, waterfalls, artwork, men, women, money, alcohol, and an abundance of sex appeal. In this exotic nightclub, the beautiful women rarely waited for a guy to ask them to dance, they danced by themselves or with other girls who were as attractive as they were.

Shareef sat and watched a few of them, paying attention to those he wouldn’t mind having a fling with, or invite into a ménage à trois with himself and Jacqueline. And as he watched the women swaying to the exotic vibe of the music, his mistress was able to sneak in between his legs and stand there.

“Come on, baby, let’s dance,” she teased him in her yellow silk dress and matching heels.

Jacqueline Herrera, a Dominican and black hybrid, with deep, beautiful brown skin, dark eyes, a curvaceous body to kill for, and long, thick hair that flowed past her shoulders, was Shareef’s latest possession.

He liked his women exotic. Why settle for anything less if you could afford it? And he could afford it. So he told her what she wanted to hear.

“You take care of me, and I’ll take care of you.”

He had only two rules for his women. Rule number one: “You never hold out on me.” Rule number two: “If I hear about or even
think
that another man is touching you, then it’s over with, like that.” He snapped his fingers in her dark eyes to make sure she got the point. If she was to be his chosen mistress, then there was no room for a compromise. It was his pussy, and his alone.

Jacqueline responded accordingly, “Only my man can touch me. I’ve
always
been that way.”

So Shareef told her, “Well, from this moment on, until you can’t stand me, or until I can’t stand you, I’m your man.”

And that was it. The chick was in the bag.

However, at the club that night, Shareef wasn’t feeling much of anything.

Jacqueline asked him, “What’s wrong?”

He shook it off and took another sip of his Corona. He didn’t even answer her.

She said, “So, you don’t want to dance with me tonight?”

“Nah,” he told her.

“Well, I’m gonna dance.”

“Go ahead and dance then. That’s what you’re here to do.”

She looked down at his dead energy and said, “Well, what are you here to do?”

He looked up into her eyes and said, “I’m here to watch you.”

She paused and stared at him.

He added, “Then I’ma watch you dance again in front of the windows at the condo.”

She heard that and grinned.

“You’re a freak,” she told him before she moved toward the dance floor.

Shareef mumbled, “Yeah…so are you.”

He proceeded to watch his mistress as she teased him with her curves, her dance, her silk dress, her lips, her hair, her yellow heels, her eyes, her smooth shoulders, and her zest for life.

And while Shareef watched her and analyzed how her seductive moves worked in perfect tandem with the exotic music, he told himself,
I remember when Jennifer used to be that fun.
But his wife was now an older woman and a mother of two, where Jacqueline was twenty-three and single with no children. Was it that simple an assessment? And if it was, then no wonder so many passionate older men went crazy for young mistresses. They just wanted to continue to watch the dance, even if they rarely joined in.

A
T
7:28
IN THE MORNING
, the early waves of the Atlantic swept up on the beaches where joggers ran by themselves or with their dogs. Up on the twenty-seventh floor of his building, Shareef looked east, out into the vast ocean from behind the two-story glass window. He sat in a reclining hammock chair in only a pair of blue boxers. A tall glass of orange juice was set on the floor beside him.

Florida was lovely. And to have a high-rise condo overlooking the Atlantic Ocean was heaven on earth. Shareef had a good life indeed. But the good life was never enough for a hustler. And at the end of the day, Shareef was still a hustler. That’s why he was always up so early. He hustled through grade school with his quick wit and ideas. He hustled through high school with athletics and aspirations. He hustled through college with philosophy and the need for a lifelong mission. And now, as a grown man, he hustled his stories. But if the story hustle was no longer an inspiration, what hustle would replace it?

Jacqueline looked down on Shareef’s relaxed body from the second level of his condo. She wore only an extra long baseball shirt with the imprint of the cover jacket of Shareef’s novel
Chocolate Lovers
on the front. It was a clever marketing idea that had paid off with thousands of fans wearing his book cover jacket to bed at night.

Jacqueline quietly made her way down the spiral staircase and over to her passionate writer, where she stood behind him and massaged his tense shoulders. But Shareef didn’t want it, so he slid her hands away.

Reading his thoughtful mood, she looked away into the kitchen to her left, and took a deep breath.

“I hate it when you get like this,” she spoke into the silence.

Shareef ignored her. Fortunately, Jacqueline had been around him long enough to know his ways. So she was not offended by it.

Instead, she teased him while on her way to the kitchen for her own glass of orange juice.

“You think too much.”

She pulled out a tall glass from a cabinet, opened the stainless-steel refrigerator, pulled out the Tropicana OJ, and poured herself a drink before Shareef bothered to respond to her.

“How you think I’m able to afford all this?” he asked her without budging from the window. He said, “All geniuses think too much. That’s what we do. Some of us do it fast, some of us do it slow, but we’re always doing it.”

His mistress smiled from behind the kitchen counter and returned the orange juice box to the refrigerator. She said, “You’re always doing something else, too.”