I sat there for the next fifteen or twenty minutes, watching lights flick on and off inside the stone house that was obviously worth a couple of million based on the neighborhood alone. I spotted a silhouette here and there but couldn’t make out more than one at a time, so I had no idea if he was in there alone or not. All kinds of crazy thoughts ran through me at the speed of light.
What if he bought the home for us? Yes, that’s it! He purchased the home for us and plans to surprise me with it.
No, that doesn’t make any fucking sense and you know it.
Maybe it’s one of his parents’ numerous homes that I’ve simply never been to.
No, that doesn’t make any fucking sense either.
Maybe he’s feeding the dog, cat, or fish for one of his law firm partners who’s out of town.
No, they wouldn’t ask Patrick to do some shit like that.
Maybe he’s visiting a client.
At this time of night, with his own damn key?
Maybe it’s exactly what you think it is! He’s in there fucking his other woman, in his other house.
“One of his beds, dear. One of his beds.”
I couldn’t take it another second. I started my car, left the lights off, and drove down to the end of the street, parking on the opposite side near the neighbor’s driveway. I exited the vehicle as quietly as I could and walked over to the house that Patrick had entered. No lights were on in the front; even the porch lantern had been turned off. Shit, was he planning on spending the night? In the time that we had lived together, Patrick had never spent the night away except— Oh, hell no! I thought as it hit me. Patrick took a ton of business trips. I never called the hotels because everyone uses their cell phones these days and Patrick had two of them, one for business calls and one for private, but I was one of the few people who had both numbers. What if half of those trips were right across town to be with another woman? But that meant the other woman would have to be cool with his coming home to me nine out of ten times. It was all ludicrous and totally implausible. I’d learned a lot in my twenty-eight years on earth. The most ludicrous and implausible things often turned out to be nothing but the truth.
“One of his beds, dear. One of his beds.”
An adrenaline rush attacked me as I walked to the rear of the house, desperate to catch a glimpse of anything that would answer my questions. A bay window overlooked the stone patio and in-ground pool. I stood there and watched in disbelief as Patrick took another woman—a petite woman with long, brown hair, and a body most woman would slaughter for—into his arms. They were surrounded by candlelight and I could hear faint music playing—soft, romantic music. He kissed her with passion, like he kissed me, and it made me sick. Not sick enough to stop watching. I wanted to watch. I wanted to take it all in, so I could commit his betrayal to memory. Sure, I could have stopped it, but what for? This was not their first, second, or even third time together. He was comfortable with her as they engaged in their sexual ballet. They kissed for a while longer, then she dropped to her knees, on a pillow, and started maneuvering to get his dick out of his pants like her life depended on it.
She engulfed him with her jaws and seemed genuinely happy to be pleasuring him in such a fashion, something that I’d never been too keen about. She was unrelenting with him as, disoriented, he threw his head back and started shaking. She took him deep, for long periods, then would come up for air long enough to work magic with her tongue ring, which I could see even from that distance. Eventually, Patrick collapsed back on the sofa, which caused her only to adjust her position slightly to accommodate him. He grabbed the back of her head and guided it up and down, as she tugged on his balls and kept up a steady pace. Then he exploded and the tears began to stream down my face.
Even after he came, she kept right on sucking, her ass bobbing up and down along with her head, in a pair of tight blue jeans. Patrick’s dick sprang right back up to attention. He pulled her up to him on the sofa and started kissing her again, which was plain old nasty to me. That was about the time when I would have been brushing my teeth and gargling. I couldn’t comprehend his kissing her with the remnants of his own semen in her mouth … then he planned to come home to me and act as if it had never fucking happened. My knees almost gave out on me completely, but I leaned on the windowsill and continued to watch as they removed each other’s clothing and started twisting and turning on the sofa like one large, nude mass.
She climbed on top of Patrick, shoved his dick inside her pussy, and started riding him as he sucked on her nipples one at a time, then pushed her breasts together so he could go at them both … like he always did with mine.
Every woman wants to imagine that the sex she gives her man is the best that he has ever had. Every woman wants to believe that he could never want another. I felt that same exact way until I saw Patrick deriving so much pleasure from being with this woman. Sure, I’d been with men who cheated, but they didn’t mean as much to me. I didn’t live with them and they hadn’t asked for my hand in marriage. Patrick had, even though he was doing this shit behind my back.
They really started going at it. The sex was animalistic. Sweat poured from both their bodies. She began to scream out his name: “Patrick!” I wanted to scream it out as well, but for totally different reasons. Then my cell phone started belting out “U Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer, and I could have killed myself for not thinking to turn the damn thing off before I went on a surveillance mission, and for picking such a loud, attention-getting song for my ringtone. The point was for me not to miss a call, but no one else could miss it either.
Both of them looked toward the window, and Patrick pushed the woman off him.
“Brooke!” I heard him scream.
I don’t think he actually saw me but what were the odds of another woman with the same distinctive ringtone as mine watching him fuck.
I ran back to my car and hopped in, starting it and backing into the neighbor’s driveway so I could turn around and head back up the street. The front door of the house flew open, and Patrick was rushing out, trying to pull his pants up and button his shirt at the same time.
“Brooke!” he yelled out again. “Wait!”
I could see the woman in the background of the doorway. Bitch!
I rolled down the passenger window with the automatic button.
“I hate you!” I yelled back at him. “I hate you and she can have your ass!”
As I turned onto Sixteenth Street, I called Destiny back because she was my missed call.
“What’s going on?” she asked before I could even say hello.
“I’m on my way over there. Be there in twenty minutes.”
I hung up on her as she threw out more questions. I would answer them all soon enough because there was no way that I was going back to that penthouse—never that.
Damon
August 19, 2007
IT was a Sunday when all hell broke loose. Carleigh and I returned from church to find Jordan’s fire-red BMW in the driveway.
“Oh, great! What is she doing here?” I asked in disgust, before I even killed the engine.
“I don’t know,” Carleigh said. “I wasn’t expecting her.”
Jordan climbed out of the driver’s seat as we exited my car. She had on a dress that seemed more suitable for the bedroom than the street. It was thin, lacy, and all her goodies were popping out at the seams. She had on a pair of fuck-me pumps and enough makeup for three women. There was no shame in her game.
Carleigh rushed up to her, in her powder-blue church dress, and they hugged. “Hey, sis, what’s up?” Carleigh asked.
She’s no sister of yours, I wanted to yell out, but walked toward the front door, loosening my tie instead.
As I unlocked the door, I could hear Jordan say, “Do I have some shit to tell you!”
Our house was not a mansion, by any stretch of the imagination, but I wanted to rush in, change into some shorts and a T-shirt, and try to find at least one spot where
that pigeon’s voice wouldn’t carry and irritate the hell out of me.
By the time I came back out of the bedroom in fresh clothes, the two of them were in the kitchen sipping iced tea and talking trash … about my website.
Something told me to leave it alone, to walk right past the kitchen doorway and go bury myself in my office. But I stood there, at the corner where they couldn’t see me, and listened.
“Carleigh, I’m telling you. That website is nothing but a big joke. Have you logged on to it lately?” I knew where Jordan was headed.
“No, I haven’t been on there in months,” Carleigh replied. “I figure the less that I know about it, the better. Damon is constantly accusing me of making disparaging comments—”
That’s because you do!
“—I try to keep my knowledge limited so I won’t have anything to say at all.”
“Well, maybe I shouldn’t say anything.”
I could hear Carleigh sigh when Jordan said that. She wanted to hear the dirt and we all knew it.
After a dramatic pause, Jordan continued, “Last good men, my ass. That site has turned more into pitbull-in-my-bed-dot-com.”
Carleigh gasped. “What do you mean?”
“Damon claims to have that damn screening process. Bullshit! Those pits gnawed right through the damn screen and have been leaving bite marks all over the country.” Jordan paused. “After they tear up some ass, doggie-style, that is.”
“Jordan, speak English.”
Jordan laughed. “Over the past month or so, the feedback comments from women have been fugly.”
“English!”
“Women are coming on there talking about how the men they hooked up with on there are a bunch of users, abusers, losers, and back-door infusers.”
“Back-door infusers?”
“Yeah, you know, as in they like to take it up the ass. They prefer to be on the receiving end of the dick action.”
“You mean they’re gay!”
“Not all of them, but quite a few. They claim that bisexual nonsense, but the hell with that. If you have sex with another man, you’re gay.” Jordan paused, and I could hear ice cubes swirling around in a glass and her gulping the tea down. Then she burped. Nasty-ass whore! “Most of them are straight-up whack. One young woman said she flew from Seattle to Philly to see some man, and it turned out that he was married, broke, and high on coke.”
“Damn!” Carleigh exclaimed, undoubtedly taking it all in so she could throw it in my face later. “I’m going to have to go on there and check it out.”
Just wonderful, I thought.
Things had taken a turn for the worse on the site, but I viewed it as growing pains. I still stood by my contention that a little bit of screening—even if some of the men perpetrated a fraud to get past it—was better than no screening at all.
“Yeah, girl, you have to see the madness for yourself! The chick that flew to Philly … she said she was a virgin and this piece of shit had convinced her to let him bust her cherry.”
“Wow! She must be devastated.”
“She is, but she asked for it.”
“Jordan!”
“She did. I’m sick of these chicks out here, especially the young ones, thinking that throwing pussy at a man is going to get them anything but the motherfucking blues.”
I had to literally clamp both of my hands over my mouth to keep my comment in. No, that hooker was not in there putting other women down for the same shit she did daily.
“How do you know so much?” Carleigh asked. “Were you on there trying to find a man?”
“Please, the day that I have to resort to internet dick is the day I’m slitting my own fucking throat! The girls at the office are always on there, desperate sluts, trying to see what they can see. I kept hearing about the comments and decided to log on to get some good laughs. I’m telling you, it’s better than watching Jerry Springer.”
“Well, there’s only one thing to be done,” Carleigh blurted out. “Damon is going to take that site down, no questions asked.”
“That shit should have been down like yesterday,” Jordan said, cosigning on the idea. “But he’s not going to do it.”
“Oh, yes, the hell he is,” Carleigh stated with authority. “I run this house!”
They both started laughing, and I entered the kitchen with fire in my eyes.
“What did you say?” I asked Carleigh.
Jordan cackled and said, “Uh-oh.” She looked at Carleigh. “Tell him what you said, Carleigh. Repeat it. If you do, you’re one bad bitch, and I will bow down to you.”
“Yeah, Carleigh, repeat it. I dare you,” I said, crossing my arms in defiance.
Carleigh sat there for a moment, drinking some more of her iced tea, then shocked everyone—probably even herself—when she threw the glass at the wall.
She stood up and put her hands on her hips. “Who the fuck do you think you are, talking to me like that in front of my friend?”
“Friend!” I shot a dagger at Jordan. “She’s no friend; she’s in line to be your replacement.”
Jordan got up. “Maybe I should go.”
I grabbed her wrist. “No, Jordan, why don’t you stay awhile? Let’s tell Carleigh about the countless times you’ve offered to suck the skin off of my dick. The times you’ve showed up here, when you knew good and damn well she was showing a house, and tried to take me for the ride of my life. Let’s tell her.”
“Carleigh, he’s lying,” Jordan said uncomfortably, yanking her wrist free. “He must’ve overheard our entire conversation and now he’s being the typical man. Trying to start a bunch of shit and cause a sisterly divide.”
Sisterly divide! Was this chick for real?!
“Jordan, have you been trying to fuck my man?” Carleigh asked.
“Who, me?” Jordan slapped her hand over her chest like she was appalled. “I would never!”
I stared at Carleigh. “You know how all your friends are constantly talking about my looks, how good I must be in bed, how they wanna watch, be a backup, have a threesome? The list goes on and on. You’ve always thought that shit was cute, but they were serious … all of them.” I pointed at Jordan. “Especially this one. She even followed me into the house on the Fourth of July and tried to fuck me in my office while I was putting my camera away.”
Carleigh was so mad that she started trembling. She turned around and faced the sink. The kitchen was so quiet that you could have heard a mouse pissing on a cotton ball. Then she shocked everyone again—definitely even herself—when she suddenly swung back around with a big-ass butcher knife in her hand.
I assumed she was going to go after Jordan, and so did Jordan because she flew out of the kitchen without her purse but grabbed her keys. Carleigh came at me with the knife and tried to stab me. I managed to get a grip on her arm and redirect it.
“Carleigh, what are you doing!?” I yelled.
“You fucked my friend!” she screamed.
“I didn’t fuck anybody!”
“But you just said—”
“—I said that she tried to fuck me! That all of them tried but I never did anything, Carleigh!”
Carleigh collapsed in the kitchen chair as the knife fell to the floor and tires were squealing on the driveway. She broke out in tears.
“How could you?”
How could I? She was still not receiving the data.
I got down on my knees and tried to put my arms around her, but she pushed me away.
“Don’t touch me! Don’t you ever touch me!”
“Carleigh, with God as my witness, I have not been with another woman, in any manner, since we’ve been together.”
“You’re a typical man. Mama was right.”
“Your mother doesn’t know anything about me!” I lashed out. “But you know me! You know that I would never betray you!” I shook her shoulders. “Tell me you know that!”
Carleigh wouldn’t answer. Nor would she look at me. Her eyes took on this glassy look and
she hid herself away in a private place in her mind. I sat there for a good ten minutes, hoping that she would acknowledge my presence, but fearful of saying anything more. I’d done the one thing that I swore to myself I would never do. I’d hurt my wife … intentionally. I knew that by telling on her friends, it would damage her. But when I heard her comment about running the house, something snapped. Something snapped in both of us that Sunday.
I got up from the floor, went outside, and sat in my car with the engine running. There was no place that I wanted to go, no place that I needed to be other than with my wife. I sat there for more than four hours, suffering through crying spell after crying spell, listening to first gospel music and then the jazz that followed on the same station.
I didn’t even realize that Carleigh had come outside until she opened the driver’s-side door.
“Come inside, Damon,” she whispered, staring at me with bloodshot eyes.
“For what? So we can fight some more? So you can actually stab me this time?”
Carleigh reached in and cut off the engine, removing the keys. “I’m not going to hurt you. I love you. I was just … just upset.”
I looked up at her. “I would die for you, Carleigh. Don’t you realize that? I would take a bullet for you!”
“And I you. I’m in this for the long haul … no matter what … unconditionally.”
Carleigh helped me get out of the car, a broken-down man, and we walked into the house—our home—hand in hand.
Brooke
August 22, 2007
MEN amaze me. They can do the most low-down, dirty shit to women, then expect us to simply overlook it. I often wonder if men back in the wild, wild West and other times treated their women the same way—like they were interchangeable pieces of chattel. Most profess to want love—to give it and to receive it—but few believe in doing what is necessary to nurture and sustain that love. Granted, no relationship is ever perfect, but Patrick had taken betrayal to an entirely new level.