Zane's the Other Side of the Pillow

Jemistry emerged from the master bathroom of the suite in a lavender satin gown, freshly bathed and smelling like the ocean. I loved the way she played around with using different scents for bathing. She had told me once that she tried to use scents that matched the mood and location, kind of like a florist who makes bouquets based on the occasion. Since we had a suite overlooking the Potomac, and had sailed the Potomac for the reception, I was feeling her flow.

  “You look so beautiful,” I told her. I had taken a shower in another bathroom and was only wearing a pair of black pajama pants tied with a string.

  She giggled and ran her fingers through her hair in a seductive way. “That makes about the hundredth time you’ve told me that today.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  I poured us two glasses of sparkling apple cider. Because of the pregnancy, we skipped the champagne.

  She walked over to me and I handed her a glass. “For you, Mrs. Harris.”

  “I love the sound of that.”

  I leaned in for a quick kiss. “Get used to it. It’s your name now.”

  “Forever.”

  “And a day.”

  We clinked our glasses together.

  “To us,” we said in unison, entwined our arms, and took long gulps.

  Jemistry spilt a little on my chest when we were untangling our arms. “Let me get that,” she said, and then licked the few drops off my chest.

  Then she went lower, sitting down on the sofa, and unfastening my pants with her teeth.

  She set her glass down on the coffee table, pulled my pants down, grabbed my dick, and said, “Let me get this, too.”

  Jemistry had given me some off the chain head since we’d been together. She had never been able to take in all of my mass but she was definitely more into it and more comfortable with it. But I still wasn’t prepared for what came next.

  She started humming on the head of my penis, and whispering, “I want to recite something that I wrote for this special occasion.” She held on tight to my dick and looked up at me. “I penned a poem for my dick.”

  “A poem?” I chuckled. “Let’s hear it.”

  She stared at the head of my dick, at the eye, and started reciting an actual poem. I was blown away—no pun intended.

  “I call this ‘Glaze on my Doughnut.’ You are the glaze on my doughnut. The milk to my shake. The shake to my bake. The twinkle in my eye. The blue in my sky. You are the peanut to my butter. The sweet in my dreams. The sprinkle on my sundae. The spring in my step and the jewel on my crown. You are the beat of my heart. The flip to my flop. The—”

  I couldn’t hold it in another second. I fell out laughing and took my dick out of her hand. “Baby?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Um, that shit doesn’t rhyme.”

  She laughed and then swatted me on my dick. “Well, you get the point.”

  “Yes, you like this dick.”

  “I love this dick. So much so that I started to recite it at the wedding in front of everyone.”

  I chuckled. “Mom would have loved it.”

  Jemistry started sucking me off like she was starving and it took me less than three minutes to explode in her throat. I almost fainted.

  “Damn, I’m going to have to take a break before I can do anything else. You drained me,” I said.

  “Nope, no damn breaks!”

  She led me into the master bedroom and pushed me down on the bed on my back. Then she went over to her overnight bag, pulled something out, and put it behind her back.

  “What’s that?” I asked, sitting up on my elbows.

  “You’ll see. Close your eyes.” I hesitated so she asked, “You don’t trust me, Tevin? You married me but you don’t trust me?”

  “Of course I trust you.”

  I closed my eyes and waited to see what she was going to do next.

  She started sucking my dick again gently, then took more and more of me into her mouth. Miraculously, I achieved another erection.

  “Wow, I didn’t think I could get hard again right now,” I whispered. “Your lips are magic.”

  Then I felt something strange. Her mouth started contracting in and out on my dick but not like normal. I heard a buzzing noise, opened my eyes, and Jemistry had a vibrator on the side of her cheek, causing the sensation to ripple inside onto my dick.

  “Damn, you’re creative,” I practically yelled. “Oh shit!”

  By the time she was done with sucking my dick for the second round, she had my ass curled up in a fetal position behind that shit. She could’ve put the top-of-the-ladder porn stars to shame with that head game.

  “Did you like that, baby?” she asked after I had come again.

  “You see me laid up in bed like your little bitch, don’t you?” I joked, all the while trying to catch my breath.

  I’ll be damned if Jemistry didn’t act like a man on our wedding night and attempt to fuck me half to death. She had been serious about all of those sex positions. She went to work, and put me to work until I literally passed out about three AM.

  * * *

  We went to Sunday brunch at Georgia Brown’s about noon and sat there like two lovesick puppies. The rest of the world ceased to exist. We fed each other and talked about our future. Both of us took guesses on how much TJ would weigh when he was born. Jemistry said nineteen inches long and six pounds eleven ounces. I asked her did she realize how damn big I was. I was thinking more like twenty-three inches long and at least ten pounds.

  “The Devil is a liar!” Jemistry exclaimed. “I’m not giving birth to a toddler.”

  When I informed her that I had actually weighed closer to eleven pounds at birth, she looked like she wanted to pass the hell out.

  “Get the fuck out of here!”

  “No, I really did. You can call Mom and ask her if you don’t believe me.”

  She shook her head in dismay. “If TJ is that big, I’d rather bypass even considering natural birth and go straight for the Caesarean section.”

  I chuckled. “No one’s giving you a C-section that’s not needed, baby.”

  “It is needed. I have to protect my pussy. Ten, eleven pounds, though? Um, no.”

  “Well, missy, it’s not like you can control his size. Two things are for sure: He’s coming and you’re the only one who can push him out.”

  “Like I said, C-section all the way, Big Meech,” she said and giggled. “Besides, if I push him out, his head might get all jacked up coming out of the birth canal. What if he wants to go bald one day, or ends up bald, and the shape of his head is deformed?”

  “You’re tripping, baby,” I replied, scooping some eggs up off my plate. I was starved. “His head will be fine.”

  “I’m just saying. I’ve seen enough men with bald heads that look like a two-year-old’s Play-Doh project gone bad.”

  “Here’s what we’ll do. At your appointment next week, we’ll ask Dr. Horton to guesstimate his size and go from there.”

  Jemistry seemed please. “So you agree? If he’s too big, I can get cut.”

  “No, I agree that we can ask and you’re going to have to push his ass out, big head and all, unless there’s a medical reason not to.”

  Jemistry realized that it was a touchy subject for me. It was. The thought of something actually going wrong during TJ’s birth terrified me.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to prepare myself for the madness. The things us women have to go through.”

  I grinned. “We’re already signed up for Lamaze classes. It’ll be fine.”

  She rolled her eyes playfully. “So both of us going in there and taking fake breaths is going to do exactly what when the time comes? You’re not seriously planning to sit beside me going through the motions and acting like you know exactly what I’m feeling, are you?”

  I didn’t respond. It was a crazy concept now that she put it that way.

  “I sure hope not. I can see me losing it right then and there. If you or the male doctors start trying to tell me to ??
?just push’ or ‘relax,’ I’m going in. Fair warning. I’ll listen to advice from the women but you men don’t know jack shit about labor. Hell, I don’t know jack shit about it yet.”

  I changed the subject. “Are you sure you’re ready to return to work?”

  “Tevin, we have almost four months before I’m due. I’ll be a freaking sociopath if I sit at home all that time. I’d rather watch paint dry than watch another episode of the shows that I’ve been watching.”

  “Baby, there are hundreds of cable channels.”

  “I know, and half the time I still can’t find anything interesting on. Crazy, isn’t it?”

  Again, she had a point. Outside of the few sports- and news-related shows that I watched, there wasn’t much on that interested me either.

  Jemistry pushed her plate away. “I’m tapping out.”

  I pushed mine away as well. “I’m tapping out, too.”

  “Just because it’s a buffet, it doesn’t mean that I have to pig out,” she said.

  “Agreed.”

  She eyed me with “that look.” “You need to take your missus home and put me to bed.”

  I winked. “My pleasure.”

  * * *

  When we got to our house, I carried Jemistry over the threshold. Then I did what she requested: put her back to bed and made love to her for the rest of the day.

  I finally had it all, and I would do whatever it took to keep it.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “Love in its essence is spiritual fire.”

  —Lucius Annaeus Seneca

  November 22nd, 2013, will forever go down on record as being one of the worst days in my life. I will never forget it. We’d been married a little over a month and we were looking forward to spending our first Thanksgiving together as husband and wife. We had decided that we would spend it alone together. The following year, we would have TJ there and would invite a lot of friends and relatives over.

  Jemistry was decorating the house early for Christmas. She had enlisted me to put up a nine-foot tree in the living room for us to enjoy in the evenings, and another seven-foot one in the sunroom with lots of lights so that passersby would see it and hopefully be inspired. She had even almost completed all of her Christmas shopping, so she said. Something told me that once Black Friday sales hit, she would hit the pavement as well with some of her friends. She was really in the spirit.

  I could tell that she was glad that she had decided to go ahead and marry me. I was walking on air. Seriously, it seemed like my back had straightened and I was walking taller, like someone had snuck into my closet and put some lifts into the heels of all my shoes.

  Being back at work had truly helped Jemistry out the most, though. I had never seen someone so committed to changing the lives of children. Her hormones were definitely throwing her for a loop and having to deal with the hectic schedule somehow managed to calm her down instead of overwhelm her. She wasn’t the type of woman who appreciated being able to sit at home and chill. And I actually had never been attracted to that kind of woman. I wanted to be able to talk about each other’s day at the dinner table every night. To be able to give each other career advice and cuddle when a rough day presented itself from time to time. Even if every day ended up being rough, we would be there for each other.

  A lot of men—including “he who walked behind the rows and shall remain nameless”—wanted to control their women economically. They wanted their women to have to rely on their income for everything from toothpaste and toilet paper to maintain their hygiene to lipstick and hairbrushes to maintain their looks. I really had nothing against that theory. No man could force a woman to sign up for that, after all. However, my mother had been a stay-at-home wife and I saw how it had affected her in the end.

  Daddy had to pay her alimony and child support . . . for a while. Like most women who take the option of not pursuing a career or stacking their own savings, Mom assumed that Daddy would always take care of her. Once all of us—their offspring—were grown and the five years of alimony were up, Mom had found herself struggling financially. No money paid into social security. No pension plan or 401K. No stocks, no bonds, and no true net worth.

  She had been given the family home in the divorce, but that was only because Dad didn’t want to look bad in front of my sisters and me. He would’ve never misplaced us out of spite. He had nothing to be spiteful about, really. If not for his actions, there never would have been a divorce. I never blamed my mother for deciding that enough was enough. While my siblings and I surely were not privy to all of what occurred, we knew enough details to determine that Daddy was a disrespectful dog who couldn’t control his dick.

  Mom eventually sold the house after we were all grown. Her funds were low so she needed the equity. When she called to inform me that she planned to sell it, I immediately offered to cover all of the household bills and send her several thousand extra a month to live in the lifestyle she was accustomed to. She refused me and she refused both of my sisters who made similar offers. I will never forget her exact words to me: “Children are not supposed to take care of their parents. Your father and I did not put forth the effort to make you all successful, only for me to have to turn around and financially drain you. I love you, but I will not accept your money.”

  Mom also said that she would be lonely, living in a seven-bedroom mansion by herself. It was pointless. So she sold the house, moved into a condominium in New York City for several years, believing that being in “the city that never sleeps” would make her life exciting. She had several longtime friends there but all of them had lives of their own and she would often feel like the third wheel.

  Eventually, she tapped out of the equity; a lot of it went toward purchasing the condo since the cost of living in New York was so high. Then she had to swallow her pride, call Alexis in Florida, and ask if she could move in. It was devastating to her to have to go there but, out of the three of us and where we were located, Florida made the most sense.

  I sent Mom a few thousand dollars a month despite what she had initially said. I refused to see her worry about money; not the woman who had sacrificed all of her time for me as a child, the woman who made me study and complete my homework on time, the woman who fought for me to be valedictorian when my high school tried to rob me of it because another girl’s relatives were “important people.” While I credited my father for a lot—after all, I had followed in his footsteps and became a vascular surgeon—my mother was the glue that held our family together. Such was the case with many wives who, while married, often felt like single parents because their husbands were workaholics—or “playaholics.”

  Yes, women were amazing creatures. Women who did everything that they promised to do, who took their marriage vows seriously, and who took raising children even more seriously. And yet, that didn’t prevent a lot of men from trying to self-destruct their family units during a divorce. A lot of men who found themselves no longer desired or tolerated by their wives straight up showed their asses. I had seen many male friends and associates do that over the years.

  I bring all of this up for a good reason. November 22nd, 2013, was the day that all of the shit hit the fan in the marriage of my former best friend. And instead of blaming himself, he tried to blame all of his drama on me.

  * * *

  I had been out of the operating room less than ten minutes. I was in the waiting room on the sixth floor speaking with Mrs. Rosella McCoy, whose husband was in recovery after I had cleared up a clot in his leg.

  “Is Michael going to be all right?” she asked, as if she was afraid to know the answer.

  “The surgery went very well.” I grinned at her. “He’s in recovery now. You’ll be able to see him in about an hour.”

  She sighed in relief and hugged me. I was still wearing my scrubs.

  “Oh my God, thank you.” She put her hands in front of her face, palms together as if she was praying, and then lowered them. “So, that’s it? No more complications??
??

  I was always cautious not to mislead patients or their families. The fact of the matter was that something could always go wrong after surgery. A person could do anything, from suddenly bleeding profusely to suffering a stroke or heart attack, to slipping into a coma or ending up with no activity in the brain stem, having to be removed from life support within a matter of hours after what seemed like a successful surgery at the time. No matter how skilled a doctor, nature or undiagnosed health conditions could intervene at any moment.

  “I cleared the clot,” I said, being truthful. “We’re going to monitor him closely over the next several days. Don’t anticipate him coming home until at least Monday. I never release my patients until I’m confident that they’ll be okay without standby care.”

  “I understand, Doctor Harris.” She was fighting off tears. “I’m just glad Michael’s still alive. You hear all those horror stories about people dying on the operating table and—”

  I rubbed her shoulder gently. “He was a trooper. The surgery was by the book.”

  Mrs. McCoy smiled. “I don’t know what I could ever do to repay you. You saved his life.”

  “Ma’am, it was my pleasure to remove the clot. You don’t owe me a thing, except taking care of your husband while he recuperates, and discouraging him from doing anything that may cause another one. He is going to have to stop trying to do a lot of heavy lifting, and he needs to retire from that construction job.”

  “I keep telling his hard head that. Now they’ll probably force him to retire. But it’s for the best.”

  “Definitely for the best, in this case.”

  I reached into the pocket of my scrub pants and hit the button to turn my cell phone back on. I had retrieved it when I left out of the operating room but had neglected to turn it on, both my phone and my hospital pager.

  I felt the initial vibration from it powering up and then it started going off like fireworks.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” I said to Mrs. McCoy and then took a few steps to the side so I could read my text messages.