Up to No Good (17 page)

I put the first load in the washing machine, and when I bent down to pick up the detergent bottle off the floor, I saw something I ’d never noticed before. Louis kept some things stored under the stairway. I ’d never paid attention to it, thinking it was all junk, but with my suspicions raised, everything was a possible clue. The black briefcase that sat in front of a box marked OLD CLOTHES looked like it was just begging for me to examine it.

I picked up the briefcase, eager to see what was inside, but was quickly disappointed when I saw that it had a combination lock. It took about thirty failed attempts at guessing the combination before I got pissed. By then, I was tempted to just throw the stupid thing against the wall to try breaking it open. I went in search
of the bolt cutters but stopped myself before I actually cut anything off. What if the briefcase was full of insignificant papers and a bunch of stuff that had nothing to do with nothing? How in the world would I explain that one to Louis? I already knew Louis wouldn’t appreciate me going through his stuff. If I damaged it in the process, he’d be even more pissed, and I wasn’t willing to risk it.

After a little thought, I came up with plan B. Living with Daddy, I learned to be smart about finding my way into things. He was constantly hiding naked pictures, letters, sex toys, and anything else he didn’t want me to find, but I always did. I rushed to the hardware store and bought one of those tiny screwdrivers.

Back at the house, I carefully unscrewed the hinges.

“Shit!” I broke a nail with the last screw, but it finally came off.

Inside the briefcase, I found a stack of papers and letters bound with a rubber band. I set them to the side and opened a second compartment, where I found more papers. I pulled them out and shuffled through them, finding a Detroit driver’s license with Louis’s picture. Louis had told me he was from Atlanta; he’d never said anything about living in Detroit. As I inspected the license, I noticed something even more puzzling. It was issued to someone named Rashid Jensen.

I sat down on the floor, my heart beating out of my chest.

I picked up the stack of letters and flipped off the rubber band. The letters were addressed to a Mr. and Mrs. Jensen. A wave of nausea hit me.

I had just seen a TV documentary about this brother who was married to three women—one in Georgia, one in Virginia, and one in North Carolina. He got arrested
for polygamy when two of the wives found out about each other. They put his ass in jail.

Was that it? I wondered as I fought the urge to throw up. Is that why something just hadn’t felt right to me? Did Louis have another family?

I ran upstairs and got that piece of paper out of my purse. I blocked my number and dialed.

“Hello?” a woman answered, and my heart sank. “Is anybody there?”

I hung up the phone and sat back in shock.

As I stepped outside onto the courthouse steps, my parents and Jamie were still jumping up and down, celebrating because the assault charges against me had been dropped.

My dad moved toward me. “Now, be careful, son. God is giving you a second chance,” he warned.

“Thank the Lord for making my son a free man,” my mother shouted, tears glistening in her eyes. It was almost funny to me, because she’d never been a particularly religious person, but now she looked about ready to drop down on her knees right then and there. “Hey, Darnel! Can I speak to you for a minute?” I turned around and saw Omar standing in the courthouse doorway. As he hobbled outside on crutches, I gave him a look meant to squash any expectation of us ever talking again. Now, if he wanted to go toe-to-toe, I was ready to give him another beat down, send him into a wheelchair, or worse, but as far as talking, I didn’t have anything to say to him.

“I ain’t got nothing to say to you, man.” “We need to talk.” Omar came closer, like he didn’t care that I was breathing fire. I was about to ask him if
he had some kind of death wish when my dad put a strong hand on my shoulder. I knew he was trying to calm me down because he didn’t want his only son to spend any more time behind bars. He held his other hand out in a gesture meant to stop Omar from coming any closer.

“I’m cool,” I told my father, not because it was true, but because I didn’t want to worry him any more than I already had.

“We need to talk.” Omar just kept coming with his lame-ass line.

“No, we don’t. I ain’t got nothing to say to you,” I hissed, trying to keep my cool since I was standing in front of the courthouse and within range of the police.

“After all we been through, it’s like that?”

This motherfucker was coming too close to being slammed down on the concrete.

“What? I must have heard you wrong, ’cause you sound like I’m the one who fucked
your
fiancée and not the other way around. I don’t owe you anything!”

“Just one minute. Please.”

“I ain’t got nothin’ for you, man.”

“Maybe I got something for you. Don’t you want to hear the truth? Don’t you wanna know why?” He kept pressing, and I had had enough. I stepped to him, ready to take that crutch and put it up his ass.

“Oh, so now you gonna give me the truth? All those years you been like my brother, and now you gonna give me the truth? I almost walked down the aisle with the stench of your dick on my woman. How is that for truth?”

“Darnel!” my father shouted. “It’s not worth the trouble. Just hear the man out so we can get out of here.”

A policeman standing in the doorway came outside,
giving us his full attention. I took a step back from Omar, because it was the only way to stop myself from going upside his head.

“What you got to say to me that I didn’t already see?” Deep down, I really did want some answers.

“It ain’t worth ending our friendship over no girl.”

We walked away from my family so they couldn’t hear our conversation.

“This wasn’t just no girl. It was my woman…. I love her.” I started to turn away, but his next words stopped me in my tracks.

“So do I.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I love Keisha, too, Darnel.” As long as I ’d known Omar, I could always tell when he was messing with me and when he was laying down the truth. And as much as I wanted to blow this off, something in his expression struck a nerve and wouldn’t let me just dismiss this.

“What do you mean you love her?”

“I wanted her to be my woman, but she wanted to be with you.” He tried to back away. I studied his face.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” I pulled back my fist, ready to jack him up. Omar raised his crutch to block me.

“Darnel, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I love you like the brother I never had.”

“You got a funny way of showing it.” By this time, I was trying to hold back tears. “So how long has this been going on?”

“Since high school, but that night you caught us was supposed to be the last time.”

“You’re lying. There’s no way you could have been doing it that long without me knowing. Keisha would never do that to me.”

“You don’t know Keisha, Darnel. You don’t know her at all. I wasn’t the only one.”

“You fuckin’ liar. You want me to believe that I don’t know the woman I had planned to spend my life with? No, what you want me to think is that she was fuckin’ everybody else so that I don’t have to focus on you stabbing me in the back. But it was you she was screw-in’. It wasn’t some other bitch-ass nigga I caught with his dick shoved inside my woman. That was you. Don’t try and put that shit on nobody else. Your ass was the one who was foul.”

“Yeah, I fucked up.”

“You think?”

“It don’t matter what you think about me, Darnel, but you needed to know the truth.”

“You a dirty dog and a liar. You used your A game to seduce my girl and to take advantage of her naïveté. Isn’t that the big truth?”

“Man, you’re gonna find out one way or another. The truth always comes out.”

“Fuck you, Omar.”

“I’m not lying to you.”

“You ain’t shit.”

“I may not be, but at least I’m not the one lying to you now.”

I would have punched him in the face, but I could see my dad at the bottom of the steps, watching me, and the cop with his hand on his billy club, ready to pounce. I turned and walked away before I did some serious damage.

“I wasn’t the only one, Darnel,” Omar repeated as I stepped off.

I wish I could forget this conversation had ever taken place, but now that it had, Omar’s accusations were something I was going to look into.

One month. It had been one month to the day since Sandra and I went to the Lakers–Nets game, since that night when she sent my world into a spin by doing something no other woman in recent memory had done—she shut me down sexually. But even though she still hadn’t given me any, somehow or another we’d ended up seeing or talking to each other every day since then. We’d gone out a few times, and whenever I knew Darnel wasn’t going to be around, we spent time at my place and a few evenings at hers, but we never made it to the bedroom. This night, we had stayed in to watch a game on TV and were snuggled up together on my couch.

At first I was spending so much time with her just because I felt I had a challenge to conquer. All I really wanted to do was get between her legs and show her who was in charge. But as time went on and one sexless date became ten and so on, I realized I wasn’t in it for the sex anymore. I was in it because I really liked her. With most of my women, we bypassed all the formalities and just jumped into bed, but with Sandra, we were doing all sorts of romantic things that I found myself
actually enjoying. I looked forward to our daily conversations and our picnic lunches and romantic dinners.

As corny as it sounds, Sandra made me feel alive, and that in itself was very confusing, because I ’d never needed any woman to make me feel good about myself. Usually, as long as I got her to take off her clothes for me, I felt great. But this was different. We’d spend hours just hanging out, and she could get me to talk about things that I hadn’t thought about in years. She was funny, easygoing, and smart, and the combination had me “open,” as my daughter would say.

“You comfortable?” Sandra stroked the top of my head as I lay on her lap, watching a movie. We had watched the game, and now we were into a Lifetime flick. Me, watching a Lifetime movie. Everything about that was foreign. Any other time, I would have been showing a sister the door if we had made it this far into the night and still had our clothes on. I dug this woman in a way I hadn’t planned to. I mean, sure, it would be nice to enjoy her body, but I was amazed that I was lying here with her and sex wasn’t my only mission. In fact, at that moment, it wasn’t my mission at all.

“I’m relaxed.” I smiled up at her. She had these dimples that made her look even more beautiful.

Sandra leaned down and kissed me, and it wasn’t no quick peck on the lips. It was passionate, like the one she gave me the night of our first date. I loved those kisses, but if we weren’t going to do anything, I didn’t want to go down that road. I ’d taken my share of cold showers behind Sandra’s give-a-brother-blue-balls kisses, and I was not in the mood to take one so early. I pulled away gently.

“Don’t stop. I really like you, James.”

“Me too,” I said as I sat up and faced her.

“And I want you.” She gave me another killer smile, all intense and self-assured.

I hesitated, hoping like hell she wasn’t just teasing me this time. “You do?”

She nodded, placing her hand in mine. When she pulled it away, she left behind a condom. I stared at it, letting the realization of what we were about to do sink in. I ’d been waiting for this moment for a month, but for some reason, I was still hesitant, which was sure not like me. What in the world was this woman doing to me?

“Are you sure? I need you to be sure.”

She didn’t speak. She just slid from the couch down onto the rug, her knees on the floor; then she leaned over and slid her tongue into my mouth, and damn if I didn’t feel myself start to loosen up.

Next thing I knew, Sandra had unbuckled my belt. Once she got my pants off, she started kissing my inner thighs. I instantly hardened in anticipation, but instead of putting me in her mouth, she tasted every inch surrounding my member.

When I was fully erect, she stopped and stood up. I watched as she untied the sides of her leopard-print wrap dress and sensuously removed it, letting it drop to the floor.

“Damn,” I managed to mutter, though her beauty left me almost speechless.

I was so used to dating women my own age that I had forgotten what a body unaffected by age or childbirth looked like. Now, don’t get me wrong; I have always preferred a woman with some miles on her, but this was something else. I hadn’t seen a figure like this in years, except on visits to a titty bar, which was usually a “look but don’t touch” situation. Sandra definitely
wasn’t the kind of woman you’d find turning on a pole for tips. Her body was nearly perfect, and her standing there offering it to me made me feel like the luckiest man on the planet at that moment. Before now, I ’d thought my days of being in the presence of this kind of beauty were long over.

“You sure?” I asked again.

“I’ve never been surer of anything in my life. Make love to me, James.”

The next morning, I was whistling my rendition of Ray Charles’s “Georgia on My Mind” as I whisked eggs in a ceramic bowl. I make a mean omelet, if I do say so myself. I mixed in mushrooms, tomatoes, and black olives. While the eggs were cooking, I poured a glass of orange juice and buttered the toast. When everything was done, I put my best china and crystal goblet on a tray, placed a rose by the plate, then climbed the stairs to my bedroom.

Sandra was still sound asleep. I couldn’t remember the last time I ’d let a woman spend the whole night and then woken up happy to see her still there. But Sandra was a beautiful vision, looking almost angelic all curled up under the covers. Her face wore the contented look of a woman well satisfied.
Yeah, the old man still has it,
I thought proudly.