Cheaters (11 page)

“What’s going on Tuesday?”

“I’ll be co-teaching a class on fire and emergency medical services. I can’t function on no sleep.”

“Get some rest.”

“Still shook up.” Jake sighed. “Man, sorry to wake you up, but these dreams, man, damn, they mess me up so bad, I have to talk to somebody for a few minutes.”

He was searching for somebody on this earth that he could trust with the weight on his soul. And that was either me or Stephan, but Stephan didn’t take too kindly to middle-of-the-night phone calls from Jake. The talks about dreams left bed-hopping Stephan just as rattled.

Most of Jake’s anxiety crept back as he said, “There’s another part I ain’t told nobody about.”

“What?”

“This part scares me more than anything, because it makes it feel so real.”

“What part you talking about?”

“One of ‘em looked like my momma, another looked kinda like my daddy.”

Carefully I said, “Maybe you just miss your folks.”

His voice softened. “Fifteen, almost sixteen years. God bless ‘em. I miss ‘em all the damn time. Man, Momma

made the hell out of a pineapple cake. She made me one for every birthday. Made it from scratch.”

“I know that’s right.”

“Yeah. Miss ‘em all the time.”

Jake’s parents died in a fire at their house in L.A., off Crenshaw on Sixth Avenue, That was when he was fifteen. When he was tall and skinny. Before he buffed up. Bad wiring set their house ablaze. The bars on the window turned their home into a deathtrap. His daddy had barely saved him, dragged him out on the lawn, then he went back for his mother.

I said, “Your folks were good people.”

He chuckled out some sadness. “They had their problems.”

“Everybody does. I understand that better than anybody.”

“One girl that had me cornered, I swear she looked like she was Daddy and Momma put together. She had their features.”

I closed my eyes and pretended we were two old men resting on a wooden porch down somewhere where peace came to roost, imagined that off-and-on click on the phone line was the sound of crickets chirping, talked to Jake for a while.

It sort of reminded me of the old days. Law school, marriage, and a ruling wife like Dawn, all of those things have made me unavailable for my friends for a long while. But whenever I was stressed, Jake was always a phone call away.

But I had to go to work in the morning, so I couldn’t stay up all night and baby-sit him. After he’d calmed down enough, I babble-babbled a few more minutes, then got ready to let him go.

I asked him, “What you going to do?”

“Call Pamela.”

I said, “You ain’t worried about Charlotte waking up?”

He chuckled. “She sleeps like a log. Don’t even wake up to go pee in the middle of the night. Pamela pees about ten times a night. That pisses me off because she wakes me up every time. But she likes to get some in the middle of the night. Then there’s Charlotte. Man, after Charlotte gets

to sleep, don’t even think about waking her up to make love.”

“Maybe you should try. Kiss her neck.”

“It wouldn’t be worth it. It takes her too long to get off. I just don’t feel like working that damn hard. Pamela don’t take but a hot minute. If I’d have known that Charlotte was gonna sleep the whole time, I would’ve gone by Pamela’s tonight.”

We talked about five more minutes.

When I pulled the covers back to crawl into my bed, Dawn said, “Tell Jake not to call here this late anymore.”

“He was having some problems.”

She repeated what she’d just said.

Thaiheed is cute, heading toward handsome. He has an oval-shaped head, keen gray eyes. Hypnotic eyes. Conservative haircut, thin mustache. Stands about five foot eight, so he’s barely taller than I am, meaning I have to wear flats when we go out. Nice runner’s build. Doesn’t eat pork. Spiritual.

The brother knows how to treat a woman. He took me to lunch three times in a week. When the weekend rolled around, he called and told me that he was going to the Shark Bar in Los Angeles. So me and my girls—Tammy and Karen—wanted to get out of the Pomona valley, and we went up there to hang out in a place packed with Hollywood celebrities.

Thaiheed was so glad to see me. I told him that a sister was feeling a little parched, hadn’t eaten since lunchtime, and brother man pulled out his plastic, paid for everything: dinner, drinks, dessert, even bought me a rose.

Tammy peeped at the bill. “
Dayum.
We did some serious damage up in here.”

Thaiheed smiled. “I got it covered.”

Karen leaned in and asked, “Are you going to at least leave the tip?”

I shook my head. “Hell, no. Let the man be a man.”

Karen’s broke ass didn’t argue. Neither did Tammy.

After the financial and emotional loss I had from dealing with Craig and Michael, I had a new agenda, so that was the way it had to be. From here on out, my coin purse was glued to my hip.

As the old cliché goes, one thing led to another. He was convenient and a gentleman. By the end of March my body needed maintenance before I spontaneously combusted with stress, so I spent the night with him. It was a decent exercise in sexual healing, not the best. He was a little too tame for my liking. After that he was ringing my phone off the hook. The next weekend he drove me south and rented a five-star suite at an exclusive beach club down in Del Mar that faced the Pacific Ocean. We hung out in San Diego all day Saturday. Blouses, shorts, silver jewelry, shoes—I had him buying me everything my eyes touched.

That was cool. For a hot minute.

Something negative always happens, usually when I get comfortable. Some asshole always has to spit in my Kool-Aid.

The next weekend I was at his apartment in the city of Upland—a two-exit municipality in the Inland Empire—and his phone jingled in the darkness. His answering machine came on, the volume loud enough to hear the outgoing message. Before the beep, he crawled over me and snatched the cordless phone off the hook. He stretched, yawned on his way into the hallway, said a few things. I was tired, but his mumbles and my curiosity woke me up. He clicked the phone off, cursed. Scared me. That anger was a side of him I’d never seen before.

I pulled my face out of the pillow. “What’s wrong?”

“That was work. They need me to come in ASAP.”

My eyes went to the digital clock on his oak dresser. It was barely six in the a.m. I put my hand over my mouth, covered my morning breath. “At the crack of dawn?”

He tried to explain to me that one of the Encore systems had crashed and they needed him there to bring it back on-line.

“I hate it when they do this,” Thaiheed complained. “They couldn’t get in contact with those white boys.”

“What you expect? It’s early on a Saturday morning.”

“Something told me not to answer the phone.”

It didn’t bother me, not in the least. I had other things I wanted to do today anyway. Somebody I wanted to see had finally called. More like finally called back. So all Thaiheed did was save me from having to make up an excuse to raise up out of there.

I didn’t mean to be tacky, but I said over a yawn, “You get time and a half on weekends, right?”

“Yep.” He calmed down. Gentleness was back in his face. “Time and a half on weekends.”

“Mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money. Boeing just laid off eight thousand. Be thankful you’re not in that group.”

“I need to learn to be more positive like you.”

With extra dollars going into his pockets, I let him know what I thought he should do. “Save all of your overtime money and put it into a separate money market account. Maybe use it as some investment money. You know, expand your portfolio.”

He checked his watch a couple of times, glanced out the window. “What’s up with you today?”

“Might drop in on a couple of open houses. I want to see what people are selling their condos for in my complex.”

“Thinking about selling?”

“Thinking about trying to get a bigger place, then rent mine out. If it’s in the same complex, it’d be much more convenient for managing. You could help me with some of the handy work.”

“Cool.”

He kissed me, tried to ease on me before I was warm, but that wasn’t about to happen. I made him slow down, put my palms on top of his head, and pushed his mouth down south, held him hostage down there and let him gurgle in my goodness for a few minutes.

Yes, when it comes to oral love, it’s better to receive than to give. ‘Cause you know I wasn’t giving up nothing but hard times and bubble gum, and I was fresh out of bubble gum.

After he left, I wasn’t sleepy anymore. My body was still tingling, aching to cross that threshold one more time, so I

touched myself, massaged slow and easy, and made that explosion come and go over and over. Doing that makes me feel so guilty, maybe because I always feel like I’ll get through squealing and squirming and look up and see somebody gawking down on me.

I showered, cleansed my face, lotioned, let my hair flop, put on one of his CK T-shirts, and sat in the wicker chair in his living room. I played a Nina Simone CD I’d brought along with me, clicked the Magnavox on, and watched the X-
Men
cartoon while I worked on my second bowl of cereal. A commercial came on. Then the phone rang. I debated whether to answer.

It could be Thaiheed.

I picked up on the fourth ring, just as the answering machine clicked on. After the outgoing message finished, I cleared my throat, tried to sound like a man, and said, “Good Morning.”

“
Bee-yatch!
What ‘cha doing answering my eff’n phone?”

I laughed. “Tammy, you know you can’t disguise your voice.”

“Scared you, didn’t I? Tell the truth.”

“I knew it was you.”

Tammy laughed. “Girl, X-
Men
jamming this morning.”

“Sister Storm got it going on. You call Karen?”

“She’s getting dressed. She has to be at Mervyn’s when they open.”

I asked, “You alone?”

“Bobby came over last night, helped me with my French. He’s in the bedroom, in a coma.”

We talked, laughed.

The phone let out an abrupt high-pitched squeal, put terror in my heart, and I screeched. “Stupid answering machine must still be on.”

Tammy said, “Hope we didn’t say nothing juicy.”

I thought about it for a moment, then couldn’t remember what we had talked about. And I didn’t want to take any chances. My conversations were my conversations.

I yelled for her to hold on. The tape was rolling and recording. My machine was different, and I couldn’t figure out which button to push.

I picked up an extension and asked Tammy.

“Push the dot,” Tammy shouted. “The circle.”

I did. The machine stopped. The shrilling did the same.

I asked, “What did we talk about?”

“You know I can’t remember anything that’s not in a script.”

“I say anything about calling Craig?”

She sounded surprised. “When did you call Craig?”

“I didn’t.”

“Oh, God. You’re dating Mr. Disappearing Act again?”

I wanted to kick myself for letting that slip. “I should erase the whole thing.”

“Might erase something important.”

“This is true. What, then?”

“Push the arrows that point to your left, make it rewind, then push the one single arrow pointing forward to make it play.”

The machine clicked, whirred, did the Cabbage Patch, and when it clicked to a halt at the beginning of the tape, it began to play.

“Whoa.” I jumped off the bed. “You hear that?”

“Sister wanted to fry a lot more than some fish, too. Move your ass closer to the phone and turn the volume up.”

My eyes fell on his wrinkled sheets. And I thought about the damp sheets I was left to wallow in the morning Michael had been reclaimed by his wife.

Tammy’s soft voice asked, “You all right?”

“I’m cool.” I sucked my teeth. “This ain’t nothing new.”

Tammy mocked, “His one and only love?”

I humphed. “Thaiheed has had a busy week.”

I said, “Peaches is a trip.”

I said, “That was yesterday.”

“You okay?”

Quite a few freaky-deaky messages played before my trite conversation with Tammy.

I sighed, “At least I know why he left this morning.”

“Why?”

“To keep somebody from coming over. Probably Peaches. After the phone rang, he broke his neck getting ready.”

“Chanté, I want you to do something.”

She told me how to get Thaiheed’s machine to display its retrieval code. Tammy was as scandalous as a politician. I gave her the three-digit code, then she called back and used the sequence, made sure she could play his messages. Made sure I could play his messages.

I decided not say anything to Thaiheed. I’d use the code, play back the messages that his verbal pen pals were leaving day and night, and see what was up. It didn’t matter, not that much. Bluntly, I like Thaiheed, but I didn’t care enough about him for this to hurt.

Time was wasting, though, and I had to get ready for my secret rendezvous. I was going to see Craig Lying Ass Bryant.