Zane's the Other Side of the Pillow

  All of them were from Jemistry:

  CALL ME ASAP.

  CALL ME WHEN YOU GET OUT OF SURGERY!

  CALL ME! IT’S URGENT!

  BABY, I REALLY NEED TO SPEAK WITH YOU THE SECOND YOU GET OUT OF THE O.R.

  BABY, I FUCKED UP!

  COURTNEY KNOWS! LOOK OUT FOR FLOYD! SHE LIT HIS ASS UP!

  ARE YOU OKAY? HAVE YOU SEEN FLOYD?

  I was standing there shaking my head and about to text Jemistry back when Floyd came ripping through the double doors of the waiting room. Mrs. McCoy seemed taken aback, like the rest of the people sitting there. They all looked around at one another, to see if one of them was the one about to receive bad news about a loved one. Floyd had on his white coat and had an angry expression on his face that others probably mistook for anguish.

  When the majority of them realized that Floyd had locked eyes on me, they relaxed a bit.

  I walked over to him. “Not here.”

  “I need to talk to you . . . now!”

  “Floyd, I just came out of surgery.” I tried to maintain my composure. “I’m consulting with a family member. I’m aware of your issue, and we will deal with it later.”

  “My issue?” he practically yelled, acting all belligerent. “Is that what you call it? An issue. How could you tell—”

  I was getting pissed off. “How could you not tell me about Jemistry being pregnant?”

  We stared at each other for a few seconds.

  “I can’t believe this shi—”

  Floyd had at least enough sense to prevent that curse word from escaping his lips in front of a dozen people. He scanned the room and realized that his behavior—storming in there as he did—was inappropriate and unprofessional.

  He glared at me. “I’ll wait for you in your office.”

  “Fine by me,” I said, refusing to break eye contact first.

  He straightened his coat and stomped off like a child.

  Mrs. McCoy walked up to me. “Is everything all right? Both of you seem upset. It’s none of my business but I—”

  I looked down at her and forced a chuckle. “Everything is great. He’s a cardiologist and we’re consulting together on a mutual patient. We’ll talk about it later.” I patted her on the shoulder. “I’ll have the nurse come and let you know when Mr. McCoy is awake so you can go up and see him. I’ll be by to check on him in a little while and give you some updates. Just remember that he’s going to be groggy for most of the night until the anesthesia completely wears off. He might not quite be himself.”

  She smiled. “As long as he is alive, that’s all that matters to me. When he gets home, I’m going to wait on him hand and foot. I’m not letting him overexert himself, no matter what.”

  “We’re on the same page. I’m sure that I can count on you.”

  “Yes, Doctor Harris, you can definitely count on me.”

  I walked out of the waiting room, hoping that I could count on myself not to end up getting arrested a few days before Thanksgiving for ramming my foot all the way up Floyd’s ass.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  “Love means to commit yourself without guarantee.”

  —Anne Campbell

  What happened?” Jemistry asked, meeting me at the laundry room door as I entered the house from the garage. “Did you see Floyd?”

  I walked past her into the kitchen and tossed my briefcase down on the table.

  “Jemistry, I really don’t want to talk about this right now,” I finally replied.

  “Let me guess. You’re upset with me because I told Courtney about her husband’s roaming dick.”

  I pulled a chair out, sat down, and pulled the bottom of my tie out of my waistband. Then I slipped out of my jacket.

  “Can you hand me a beer, please?” I asked politely.

  “A beer?” She rolled her eyes at me. “Sure, I’ll get you a beer, Tevin. That’s what wives do when their dictators come home from work.”

  I sighed as she crossed the room, yanked the refrigerator open, and pulled a Bud Light out of the six-pack on the bottom shelf.

  “I’m not trying to be your dictator, baby.”

  She slammed the bottle down on the table then sat across from me. We stared at each other for a few seconds.

  “Oh, my bad!” She stood back up. “Mea culpa! Let me fix your dinner plate. Sorry that I didn’t have it on the table before your arrival.”

  Jemistry walked over to the sink, washed her hands, took out a porcelain plate from a cabinet, then walked over to the stove and started piling what looked to be spaghetti onto it. She put on an oven mitt, yanked a baking sheet out of the oven that had garlic toast on it, and then tossed two pieces beside the pasta on my plate.

  She walked over to a drawer, pulled it open, and grabbed a fork, tossing it on top of everything else on the plate. I kept my eyes glued to her every move, wondering how she could be upset after throwing my ass to the wolves. If she had kept her mouth shut, or had at least warned me that she was about to spill the beans to Courtney, my day would have gone much smoother.

  Jemistry set the plate down in front of me and then retook the other chair. She folded her arms in front of her in defiance and glared at me.

  “This is silly,” I said. “All of it. You don’t need to be all upset and put yourself and the baby under a bunch of stress. We don’t need to be going at each other. Sure, I was upset with you earlier today. I come out of surgery and read your montage of texts, and then Floyd comes storming into a consultation with a patient’s wife.

  “He looks like he’s ready to jump me, right there in the waiting room.”

  Jemistry sucked in a breath. “He didn’t hit you, did he?”

  I smirked. “He thought about it, I’m sure, but Floyd’s not a dummy. I have him by eight inches and at least fifty pounds of muscle.”

  “So what happened then?” she insisted on knowing.

  “Dinner looks delicious. You mind if I eat it while it’s still hot?”

  “You can eat as long as you tell me what the fuck happened while you’re doing it.”

  I was about to sprinkle some pepper on my food when she said that. I put the pepper back down and pushed my plate away. “That’s what microwaves are for. Okay, fine.”

  “So what happened?”

  “You can probably guess most of it. You orchestrated the first part of the chaos, after all.”

  Jemistry rolled her eyes again. “It was time for her to know. Courtney’s always singing Floyd’s accolades. Talking about how faithful and honest a man he is. I couldn’t sit by another second and allow him to pull the wool over her eyes. I couldn’t do it and still consider myself her friend.

  “It’s not like I gave her any details. Hell, you didn’t give me any. All I said was that you had shared with me that Floyd was fucking a lot of women from work. I told her that she needed to be careful.”

  “How did it even come up?” I asked, not that it even mattered much. “I thought that all of that had boiled over, since you’d never said anything.”

  Jemistry calmed down a little. “Tevin, I met Courtney for lunch and she was just leaving her gynecologist’s office. She was going on and on about how offended she was that the nurse always asked her if she wanted to be tested for STDs, since her insurance covered most of the tests. She said that she felt like cursing the nurse out, but instead told her that she was married and not promiscuous like that. She said that those kinds of tests are for single people only.”

  I closed my eyes for a few seconds and allowed her last statement to sink in.

  “Now do you see why I had to tell her?” Jemistry asked.

  I opened my eyes. “Yes, I understand perfectly.”

  “Good.” She paused. “It wasn’t like I woke up this morning intending on turning someone’s world upside down. But what if he’s given her something? Or if I didn’t say anything and he eventually gave her something?”

  “Baby, I hear what you’re saying and I receive it,” I said. “I rec
eive it and I agree with what you decided to do. Like I told Floyd, not only today but also all along, he was dead-ass wrong and it was inevitable that it would come out.

  “Honestly, it’s better that Courtney found out from you, someone who actually cares about her. My mother had to find out from a trifling whore who decided to accost her and throw Daddy’s affair up in her face.

  “That’s what’s so crazy about the entire thing. Time and time again, I told Floyd about how my father’s roving eyes and dick had destroyed our family. How love does not equate to doing unnecessary and unwarranted shit simply because you believe you can get away with it.”

  Jemistry sighed. “Yeah, I know about all of that. Even though she’s not married, I used to preach that same stuff about wilding out for no good reason to Winsome.” She stared at me like she wanted to add something. “Speaking of Winsome, she came by the school today.”

  “For what?” I asked with much disdain. “She needs to stay the hell away from both of us.”

  “And I made that clear. She came by to wish me happy holidays. You have to understand that we’ve spent every holiday season together, in some way, for at least the past decade. That’s not going to be the case this year.

  “Winsome means well, but she has to figure out how to make better choices. I told her that I would pray for her and be there for her in spirit.”

  Jemistry giggled.

  “What?” I asked.

  “She did make one choice and she says that it’s final. She’s now a full lesbian instead of being bisexual. She has sworn off dick for life.”

  I chuckled. “Yeah, right. For life, or until she sees a man she can’t resist.”

  “She said that she has a girlfriend. That she’s committed. Some woman named Sharon that she met on the Metro train.”

  “Great place to pick up people. It’s not going to last.”

  “You picked me up in a bar after I’d just finished delivering a male-bashing poem, and look at us.”

  “You have a point.”

  We both laughed.

  “She also said that she’s been going to counseling,” Jemistry said. “To try to figure out what she wants to truly do with her life and why she keeps making irresponsible decisions.”

  “That’s good. That’s really good. I don’t have anything against Winsome,” I said. “I’m over it. But if you ever let her come back around on the regular, she can’t disrespect our marriage.”

  Jemistry sucked in her bottom lip. “Maybe sometime. She’s my ace and I love her and all. And I miss her. But right now, I want to concentrate on establishing our life together and having a healthy baby. We have so much to still do to the nursery.”

  Her statement about the nursery sounded accusatory, not to mention the look she was giving me, as though I should have been ashamed.

  I lifted my brow. “Don’t look at me. You’re the one who keeps changing your mind about the color scheme. And going all out by having that man paint a mural. We can’t put any furniture in there until the walls are painted and dried.

  “You need to hurry up. It might take me a couple of months to put that fancy crib together that you picked out.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard some nightmares about men trying to follow the instructions to put together cribs. Even for surgeons, common sense isn’t always so common.”

  “Oh, so now you’ve got jokes!” I chuckled. “There are a lot of parts but if I can put a human being back together, I can damn sure get that crib up without tearing up something.”

  “I can’t wait to see that.”

  Jemistry stood up, took my plate, and walked over to the microwave to heat it up. As it was rotating on the glass base, I asked, “Aren’t you going to fix yourself a plate?”

  “Baby, please. I’ve had three servings and four pieces of bread already. I’m going for round three when Criminal Minds comes on at nine.”

  I took a swig of my beer. “What time do we have Lamaze class tomorrow?”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  “To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever.”

  —Henry Drummond

  We arrived in New Orleans two days after Christmas. I was lost about what to get Jemistry for a present, but the choice became obvious when her Nissan Rouge was diagnosed with a bad transmission. Rather than go through all of that, I insisted that she let me purchase her a new vehicle. I wanted to surprise her but decided against it. I wanted her to get what she wanted. She was the one who would have to drive it, and she would be carting my seed, TJ, around in it so it, had to be safe.

  Being quite nerdish when it comes to wanting to know every detail about something before I make a high-price-tag purchase, I surfed the Internet and landed on the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety web site and printed off their list for the top safety picks for 2014. When Jemistry had arrived home on her last day before winter break, we went over it together, selected a few to go check out, and ended up purchasing a forest-green Acura MDX with a butter leather interior.

  Jemistry surprised me with a Breitling Chronomat watch that had to cost at least six grand. I was not expecting such a lavish gift. Even though she made about a hundred forty thousand a year as a principal, I still didn’t think she had to go that far.

  She laughed at me when I tried to get her to take it back. “Two things,” she said. “It’s engraved and if you weren’t so busy complaining, you would’ve seen that already. Secondly, you refuse to let me pay any bills around this mickey so I need to spend money on something. You already bought me a car, so I bought you a watch.” She planted a kiss on my lips as we lay in bed together when she had presented me with the present. “So, Doctor Harris, read your inscription and miss me with all that.”

  We both laughed as I removed the watch from the case and flipped it over. It read:

  Tevin, I want all of my days to begin and end with you. Always yours, Jemistry

  “That’s very sweet, baby.”

  “Glad you like it.” Jemistry reached down under the blanket and started rubbing my dick. “Enough of the sappy, romantic talk. Fuck me like I stole something.”

  I chuckled and reached under the blanket and into her panties and started playing with her pussy. “You’re always so wet.”

  “That’s because you make me that way.”

  She started kissing and licking all over my chest. A lot of women sleep on the fact that men are aroused by that. Just because we don’t have tits, it doesn’t mean that we’re not sensitive there. Jemistry knew that it excited me.

  I started moaning as we continued to play with each other’s privates.

  “You’re going to drive me insane,” I whispered. And I was not even lying. Her scent was driving me wild as we played with each other’s tongues.

  Jemistry tossed the blanket completely off the bed, slid out of her panties while I kicked my pajama pants off, and then impaled her pussy on my dick. She started grinding on me like she was a windmill. Then she started snapping her pussy onto my dick. Crazy!

  “You like that, baby?” she asked, finally breaking the kiss and coming up for air.

  “You know I like it. Work that pussy, sweetheart.”

  She dug her fingertips into my chest and started pouncing up and down on my dick.

  She threw her head back and I watched her breasts, getting more and more succulent as her pregnancy progressed, swirl around in circles. I grabbed a hold of them and squeezed. She let out a moan of pleasure.

  “Oh, Tevin!” she screamed out as she came the first time, and kept going.

  I let go of one of her breasts and rested my hand on her stomach, trying to see if the baby was moving or seemed like he was under stress. Even though I had been given all of the reassurances in the world, I would be concerned until TJ made his entrance into the world. But I had stopped talking about it all the time. I didn’t want to speak anything negative into existence.

  Tevin Harris, Jr. was going to be the man, and Tevin Harris, Sr
. was going to be the man who kept his eye on the man. I was going to make sure that he had everything he could ever want, but he wasn’t going to be a spoiled brat either. I was going to have to find that perfect balance. He was going to play sports—basketball, baseball, football, soccer, and whatever else we could fit in. He wasn’t going to sit on his ass playing video games all day and end up with an obesity issue by the time he hit double digits in age. He was going to learn how to read and write early. He was going to learn his math facts so he never had to struggle once more difficult things were introduced. Like I said, the man.

  I was thinking all of those things when I felt him kick. Then I immediately faked like I was ejaculating so Jemistry would feel like she had done what needed to be done to please me. I was only probably sixty to ninety seconds from busting a nut anyway but, lately, I had been putting on pretenses every now and then, finishing myself off later or just allowing my dick to deflate and calling it a day.

  Jemistry collapsed beside me, breathing heavily. “Nothing like early-morning dick action.”

  “You have a potty mouth,” I said, then chuckled. “If your students heard you talking like that, they’d talk mad shit.”

  “My mouth is nothing compared to theirs. They are doing the most these days. When the spring semester starts, I’m going to have to crack down on kids sneaking off into vacant classrooms and closets trying to fuck or suck all over each other.”

  I glanced over at Jemistry. “Really?”

  “It’s gotten ridiculous. Parents have no clue what their kids are doing at school, or before and after school. I can only do so much and I can’t prevent them from doing whatever off the premises, but I’ll be damned if they continue to disrespect Medgar Evers High.”

  “Go on with your bad self, Joe Clark,” I joked, referencing the biopic Lean on Me and the no-nonsense principal who turned a lot of lives around despite some parents disagreeing with his strict policies.

  Jemistry laughed and started giving me a hand job.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, surprised. “We just finished; you’re not ready for another round, are you?”