Up to No Good (23 page)

Crystal slipped her hand onto my arm in what felt like possessiveness, and I had to step back to separate her hand from my body. She reached for me again, and I avoided her.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I just wasn’t expecting you to come over here today.”

She took a step closer and I moved back.

“What the hell is going on, James? You got somebody over here?” She tried to look past me into the house.

“No. Nobody’s in the house, but somebody is coming over.”

“Well, then I suggest you let her know that your plans have changed.”

“I don’t think so, Crystal.”

She eyed me with surprise. “Why not?”

“Look, I don’t want to hurt you, but I’m in a relationship.” This was the first time I ’d said it out loud to anyone, and it didn’t feel so bad. Yeah, I had definitely made the right decision. Sandra was the one.

“A what?” Her voice was close to a scream.

“A relationship. I’m in a committed relationship.”

“Well, that’s just fuckin’ great. What the hell have I been try’na get you into for the last thirty years?” Crystal looked ready to attack me, something she’d tried once. When we were in our twenties, she caught me with a friend of hers and went ape-shit, but I was young and dumb. Older and wiser now, I knew things had consequences, which was why I was trying to get her out of here before Sandra showed up and a fight broke out.

“It didn’t work out that way between us.”

“’Cause you said you weren’t the type to settle down. You told me how many times, James, that you never wanted to tie yourself to one woman?”

“I know what I said.”

“So you were lying?”

“No, I wasn’t lying. I didn’t know that I would ever want to be in a relationship with anyone, so all those
times, I wasn’t lying. I just didn’t know what the future held for me. This was the last thing I expected.”

“So it’s okay to use me all the time as your sex partner, but I’m not good enough to be in a relationship with?”

“Those are your words, not mine.”

“Well here’s some more words for you: You could fuck me, make a baby with me, and spend almost thirty years having random sex with me, but I’m not girlfriend or wife material?”

“Crystal, you’re married, so clearly you are wife material. And I love my son and am grateful to you for having him, but I never asked you to get pregnant.”

“Well, I didn’t get pregnant by myself.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“So now you saying what? I tricked you into having Darnel?”

“Didn’t you? You thought it would make me settle down.”

We’d had this same discussion years ago. I did believe that Crystal got pregnant on purpose, but after a while I didn’t care, because Darnel was a great kid regardless of why or how he was conceived. But now Crystal was trying to accuse me of playing her all these years, which just wasn’t fair.

“I did not get pregnant on purpose,” she insisted.

“It doesn’t matter now. You’re a good woman, and you been good to me.”

“But—”

“But I never asked you for more than I was willing to give.”

“But I asked you, James. I asked you to get married and to raise our child together.”

“That’s all in the past.”

“No, some things don’t stay in the past. I gave you
almost thirty years of love, and you know I was always waiting for you to settle down.”

“You’re married.”

“And if you asked me to leave my husband for you, I would.”

“He’s a good man, Crystal. He loves you.”

“Fuck you, James Black. You messed up my entire life. I spent my entire adult life waiting for you to grow up, and when you do, it’s for another woman. Ain’t that a bitch!”

“Crystal, I do love you.”

“Yeah, just not in that way,” she said, sounding like the words tasted bad in her mouth. “We’re like brother and sister, except with a bit of incest on the side.” She laughed, but not like she thought it was funny.

“Go home to your husband.”

“So it’s like that?”

Her breasts were heaving up and down like she was trying not to blow her top, but that air had to come out some way. It was only a matter of time before she exploded. I just hoped I could get rid of her before it happened in front of my house.

“Go home to your husband. Remember him? He’s the man you married, not me,” I said impatiently. To tell you the truth, I was getting tired of her pushing this issue. Why did she always seem to go deaf every time I told her something she didn’t want to hear?

“Yeah, I married someone else, but whose fault is that? You know how it feels to wait all these years for a man to love you the way you deserve, and then you find out it’s not that he can’t but that he don’t want to?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Can you stand there and tell me that you ever really tried to love me the way I deserve?” Her eyes were glistening with tears now.

“Love doesn’t happen just because you want it to or because it’s good for you. It happens when you least expect it to, and there is nothing you can do about it.”

She was starting to look like she was running out of arguments, and that might have been the end of it, if Sandra hadn’t chosen that moment to pull up in a cab. Crystal saw the look of excitement and dread on my face and turned to see Sandra approaching the house.

“I guess you couldn’t handle a woman, huh, James? She’s a goddamned baby.” Crystal reached out, and before I could react, she slapped me hard across the face. Then she turned and stomped toward Sandra. “You can have his ass! Maybe he can help you with your training wheels,” she hissed as she passed Sandra and got into her car. Her tires squealed as she raced down the street.

“What was that?” Sandra asked when she approached me.

“That was Darnel’s mother.”

“Oh …” A look of recognition crossed her face. I’m sure Jamie had told her plenty of stories about my ongoing affair with Darnel’s mother, and none of them were complimentary toward Crystal. “She didn’t look too happy.”

“I just told her I was in a committed relationship.”

Sandra’s eyes lit up. She leaned in and gave me a long, wet kiss. “So this means we’re really gonna do this thing, huh?” she said happily.

“Yup. Next step is for you to come to church with me this weekend. What do you think?”

She jumped into my arms and hugged me tight. “Come inside and let me show you just how happy that makes me, Mr. James Black.”

Call me crazy … I’ll show her crazy!

My living room looked like somebody had tossed the place looking for drugs, but that wasn’t what happened. I was looking for something else, and to me, it would bring much more satisfaction than any amount of drugs. After I left Keisha at work, I raced home and spent the next three hours searching through my things, including boxes I hadn’t yet unpacked from my move.

What I was searching for would be the nail in the coffin for Keisha’s antics. She acted like she could behave any way she wanted, and as long as she continued to proclaim her innocence, no one but her would have to know the truth. But now that I ’d read the diary, the cat was out of the bag, and I was going to make sure plenty of other people got to see the real Keisha. Like my father’s friend Bishop Wilson always liked to say, “What’s done in the dark will soon come to light.”

I dug through some stackable plastic boxes I had stored under my bed, full of important papers and mementos I didn’t want to lose. Bingo! I spotted the manila envelope I was looking for. I opened it and
pulled out a stack of photos. Now, these weren’t the kind of pictures you put in a frame and display in your living room. No, these pictures weren’t meant to be viewed by everyone.

Keisha had always liked me to take pictures of her while we were making love. I don’t remember if the first time was my idea or hers, but once she got a taste of being in front of the camera, she was like a porn star, always wanting me to bring the camera into the bedroom. I think it kinda turned her on, because she knew how sexy she looked. And it damn sure turned me on. Whenever she was away and I missed her, I would pull out those photos and let my imagination run wild.

I flipped through the photos and admired the gorgeous body that I ’d once thought was all for me. I came across a snapshot of Keisha spread eagle with her hand between her legs, massaging her kitty kat. She had this gleam in her eyes like she knew exactly how bad she was being and was totally down for whatever. There wasn’t anything shy about her—unfortunately, I knew that now more than ever. She was a straight-up freak.

I kept flipping through the stack, looking for my favorite, a photo of Keisha in some stripper heels and a thong. In it, she was bent over doggy style, her face turned up in a flirty way. But the picture wasn’t there. In fact, there were a few of the more memorable ones missing. Was it possible that Keisha had given them to some of her other dudes? Yeah, I thought, it was possible, because once we moved in together, I basically put the pictures in an envelope in my closet and left them alone. Why look at pictures when I had the real thing in front of me? Keisha could have very easily taken a few and shared them without me ever noticing they were gone.

Just the thought of her sharing herself with so many other dudes sickened me. How could she do that to me—to us? I felt the sudden urge to call her. Maybe she’d be ready to explain herself, and then we could avoid all the ugliness that was sure to ensue if I used these pictures the way I was planning to. This phone call would be her last chance.

“Hey, we really need to talk,” I said when she answered her phone.

“I ain’t got shit to say to you,” she yelled into the receiver.

“I’m telling you right now, if you don’t talk to me, you
will
regret it.”

“Leave me the fuck alone!” She ended the call.

Okay, if that’s how she wanted to play it, then game on! Now she better be ready to play hardball, because that seemed to be the only way I was going to get through to her. This wasn’t all about inflicting pain, though. Yes, I wanted to teach her a lesson, but in the end, everything was designed to bring us back together.

I went to my computer with the stack of pictures and logged onto MySpace. I was going to let Keisha’s family and friends in on her little secret. By the time I was through, everyone would know what a freak she was. Then, once they ostracized her, she’d see that I was the only person who loved her enough to forgive her for her past. This might hurt her now, but in the end, it would bring her right back where she belonged—with me.

I ’d never spent much time on the Internet, but Keisha sure did. She was a MySpace freak, always on there doing God knows what with her cyber-buddies. I never understood the obsession. It used to bug me that she needed to be in constant contact with anonymous people all over the world, like her life with me wasn’t
enough to keep her satisfied. Now I knew my feelings were justified, and I figured she’d probably been using MySpace to chat with some of the other brothers she was screwing.

I opened up Keisha’s MySpace page and scrolled down to her list of friends. Damn! She had almost two thousand names on the list. How can one person have that many friends—at least the real kind, who will have your back when you truly need them? Half the names on Keisha’s list were dudes with pictures of themselves, chests bulging with muscles, wearing nothing but some tight-ass underwear. If I had looked at her page a year ago, maybe I would have put a stop to it then and avoided a whole lot of this shit.

But I hadn’t, so now I was forced to take action in another way. I clicked my way around the Web site for a while until I learned how to create a page of my own and how to invite friends to it. I created a page using the screen name “Sex Addict”; then I took all the naked pictures and scanned them into my computer. The page I created for Keisha was now covered with her porno shots for everyone to enjoy. Underneath a group of photos, I typed: Like what you see? Let’s arrange a date
.
I added Keisha’s e-mail address and her home, cell, and work phone numbers.

I knew MySpace wouldn’t allow the site to stay up for long because of the nude photos, so I had to work fast. I figured out how to send an invitation to every one of Keisha’s MySpace friends, asking them to view the page.

That should have been enough to satisfy me, considering how many cyber-friends she had, but I wasn’t through yet. I wanted to make sure that her page was viewed by her real, live friends, not just her MySpace
friends, who were probably just as freaky as her. I created a new e-mail address; then I went to the Web site for her job and found the employee contact page. I e-mailed all of her coworkers and any of Keisha’s friends who I had addresses for. When I hit SEND, I felt good, like I had dropped a bomb that was sure to hit its target, and hit hard.

Call me crazy. I’ll show her crazy.

“Ma’am, you can’t go in there!”

The next day, I heard Bonita, my new secretary, yelling at someone. Before I could get up to check out the situation, my office door flew open and Keisha stormed in, looking ready to fly across my desk and hit me. Her hair was crazy all over her head, and her makeup was smudged.

“How could you do this to me?” She was screaming at the top of her lungs.

“Excuse me?” I had to force myself not to smile with satisfaction, because my little MySpace page had apparently hit her even harder than I expected. She looked tore up from the floor up.

“Those pictures on MySpace!”

“What are you talking about?” I asked as I walked toward the door. I didn’t want her closing it, because I needed Bonita to be a witness to all of this. I didn’t need Keisha trying to flip the script on me by accusing me of doing something to her behind closed doors.

“Those were the pictures you took of me! Why would you put them on the Internet? Why are you trying to humiliate me?” She struggled to ask the questions, because she was practically hyperventilating at this point.

“Keisha, what are you talking about?” I looked up and saw Bonita standing just where I wanted her, in the doorway, watching everything and looking nervous.

“Look, you’ve got to keep it together,” I told Keisha. “I know you’re having a hard time with the breakup, but you can’t bring our personal stuff into my workplace.”