I hung up the phone without saying goodbye. I was totally disgusted. I’d been on the dating scene for years and I’d never had a man take a leak while he was talking to me on the phone. Not even Will, and we were together for three years.
Will aka Mr. Know It All. Will was fine. Tall like I prefer, caramel, nice juicy ass. It might sound strange, but I’m an ass woman. I can’t stand looking at a brother nude that has a flat ass. I need something to palm when a man’s grinding in and out of me.
Physically, Will was a dream. Mentally, he left a lot to be desired. Will was from the old school. He held true to the player/pimp mentality. He thought expressing romantic feelings to a woman was taboo. A sign of “sweetness.” On top of that, he never wanted to listen to me. I tried to tell him that a man can listen to a woman and still be hard; just like a woman can listen to a man and not be weak.
Looking back on it, I think there was probably never a time when Will wasn’t cheating on me. I’d ignored all of the signs; until I caught him red-handed. I went by his office one night. He was in the garage banging some tramp inside his car, giving her all that good ass dick that belonged to me. Her greasy ass hair was smearing up against his back window.
I opened the door and she almost fell out the car, tits hanging upside down and all. I pulled the fire extinguisher from behind my back, the one I’d swiped from a nearby wall, and covered both their asses with the spray.
“Maybe that will put out the fire!” I screamed at both of them.
Will came home later that night, begging for forgiveness. I told him that my love life wasn’t a game of Monopoly and I didn’t pass out Get Out of Jail Free cards. I told him to pack his shit and leave.
Will messed up and was wrong for that, but the depth of my hurt was my own fault. I thought I was strong, but in love I was weak. I should’ve had the strength to see that all of his inconsistencies were enough, without hard evidence. I should’ve believed in myself enough to trust what I thought, what my intuition was saying, but I didn’t. My intuition couldn’t be wrong all of the time.
I needed a man who had reached the point where he realized he was accountable for his actions; all of them. A man who realized he had to give what he expected to be rewarded in return. I seriously doubted that Conquesto would be him, but I had to start someplace. Pickings were slim in D.C.—for women—and competition was tight. A date was a date. I simply prayed I wouldn’t regret it.
Eight
Yardley
Felix, Dwayne, and Mike were already on the basketball court when I pulled up on Saturday morning. We met every Saturday morning, without fail, to play hoops. It was a badge of manhood; right behind bragging on getting laid.
Dwayne threw me the ball when I was still about twenty feet away. I took it, palmed it, and threw it right into the small of Felix’s back.
Felix yelped out in pain. He’d been down on one knee, tying his shoe, when I plummeted him without warning.
“Damn, man! What’s that all about?” Mike asked.
“Ask Felix,” I responded.
Felix stood up, reaching behind his back to rub it. “Yardley, that was totally uncalled for. You’re being childish.”
“I’m being childish? You set me up with that skank last night, left me hanging at the restaurant so you could go get some ass you get every night anyway, and I’m being childish? You were wrong for that shit, Felix, and you know it.”
That was when Dwayne jumped all into the mix. “Dang, Felix, you told me you’d hooked our boy up with a fine ass honie.”
“Fine?” I chuckled. “I’ll put it this way, Dwayne. Those brothers you deal with down in the D.C. Jail wouldn’t get with her.”
Dwayne fell out laughing. “That’s pretty bad then. Most of them would fuck anything; even each other.”
Dwayne was a guard in the D.C. Jail. Being demanding and angry, it was the perfect job for him. Dwayne was one of those brothers that was angry about everything. He was an Internet junkie and got all these negative emails encouraging boycotts and phone marathons to lodge complaints against the injustices of the world. A person that went into a restaurant or bookstore and felt like they were treated unfairly because they were black. A security guard or policeman using excessive force on a black man. E
very weekend, it’s something new.
“Speaking of jail, I have to tell you something. This is deep.”
Mike, Felix, and I stared at one another, thinking “here it comes.”
“There’s this brother in prison down in Texas on death row that’s innocent, man.”
“How do you know that?” Felix asked sarcastically.
“I read it in my email. Let me finish telling you about it.”
“I’ve heard enough,” Mike lashed out at him. “We came here to ball, so let’s ball.”
Dwayne got upset, militant even. “You fools don’t care about anyone but yourselves. Don’t you care that our people are being mistreated all over this country?”