Exit Strategy (8 page)

“Probably because Keisha is an infinitely better woman than you are.”

“If she’s so great, where the hell is she now? Why did you solicit me for a blow job in your club? Huh?”

“Because you’re always available with your goddamned mouth open, ready to be defiled like the humiliation whore you are.”

The water works come on cue as the words tumble out of his mouth. Tristan feels sorry for Sara. Inasmuch as she’s pissed him off royally, she
had
done him a favor tonight, so he wants to reciprocate in some small way.

“Listen, Sara. Let’s just call a truce, okay. What happened between us tonight was a mistake. I’m going to try to work things out with Keisha if I can because I’m not ready to let her go yet.”

Tristan feels more certain of this decision than any he’s made since Keisha left. Had he been more inclined to talk things out with her, rather than try to exert his sexual prowess, there might have been a different result in the beginning.

“You can’t tell me that little trollop from the south side is a better sub than me.”

Tristan knows Sara is trying to bait him into giving her another opportunity as his submissive with the name-calling, but he isn’t falling for it. Barely in control of his anger, he manages a tight smile. “Actually, she is, and calling her names doesn’t help your cause.”

“I know she wouldn’t let you do near as much as I’ve let you do to me.”

“That’s just it, Sara. I don’t want her to. We’re perfectly compatible the way she is. Our limits match almost identically.”

Sara tries sarcasm. “She sounds damn near vanilla to me.”

“You’re wrong. She’s taken to everything we’ve tried together without fail. Even in areas I’ve pushed her limits, she’s excelled. I was stupid to let her go.”

“No, you’re stupid to try and get her back. Mark my words; you’ll be in the market for a new sub in less than a year, and you’ll regret not taking me back.”

“I don’t think... I know I won’t. If she’ll have me back, I think I could be with Keisha indefinitely.”

“Okay. If you say so.” Sara puts down her glass just as the driver stops in front of her building. Tristan leans back in the seat, nursing his bottle of water.

“Good night, Sara,” he says. “Thanks for everything.”

She tries to kiss him, but he turns his head and takes another swallow of water at the precise moment she leans into him.

Her mouth pulls into a pout. “Good night, Tristan. Call me when you’re good and ready to stop slumming with Quiana.”

She slides out of the car and slams the door behind her before the driver could get the door open for her. Tristan doesn’t even have the driver wait for her to enter her building. He raps on the partition, and they speed off into the cold Chicago night.

~*~

Tristan knows he’s an oddity, milling around the foyer of the Morning Star Baptist Church, but he doesn’t care. If there’s anyone who’d know Keisha’s triggers, it’s Clara Lee Beale, and he wants to get to the bottom of them once and for all. If avoiding them is the only way he can convince her to come back to him, he needs to figure out a way to do that—and fast.

Granted, he’s taking an enormous leap to believe that Mrs. Beale will share anything with him at all. Of course, she had taken to him early on, and Tristan genuinely likes Keisha’s mother, but that might not translate into any sharing of secrets. He’s about to find out.

They spot each other at the same time as Tristan turns from another short clip of pacing. Clara Lee is chatting it up with Mrs. Searles as they spill through the double doors from the sanctuary where they were finishing up choir practice. For two women who are almost seventy, they are remarkably well preserved.

Tristan grins and bears their fussing over him briefly until Mrs. Searles spots her ride through the glass doors.

“Don’t be a stranger, young man,” she says to Tristan and takes her leave.

Clara Lee narrows her eyes at him. “I know you didn’t come all the way out here to say hello.”

Tristan holds her gaze. “No, I didn’t.”

“Well, give me a ride home so you can tell me what’s on your mind.”

“Of course,” Tristan says and holds the door open for her, but she doesn’t walk through.

She seems to remember something, stops and turns. As she does so, a young man exits the sanctuary and Clara Lee stops him.

“Jerome, please tell Pastor Johnson I got a ride home with Mr. White.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The young man makes a one-eighty and goes back into the sanctuary.

Tristan’s driven the Range Rover, his preferred mode of transportation in Chicago’s harsh winters. He opens the passenger door and helps Clara Lee get settled before taking his seat on the driver’s side and pulling away from the church.

They travel a few blocks in silence before Clara Lee says, “Keisha Anarosa told me about the breakup, but she didn’t tell me why.”

“It was my fault,” he says. “I think I pushed her away... unintentionally, mind you. I didn’t bargain on how much she’d—”

“I know my daughter, Tristan. She can be a bit difficult, a little stubborn. She gets it honest, though.”

He isn’t surprised that Clara Lee see’s through his bullshit. He has to be careful to speak the truth without raising suspicion or making his and Keisha’s relationship into something it isn’t. “And I wouldn’t want her to be any other way. She challenges me like no one else ever has.”

“I can see how them society girls out for the MRS Degrees would take to you like pigs to slop.”

He smiles. “That’s certainly one way of putting it.”

“I ain’t mad at you for pursuing a real woman. I raised Keisha to be a Proverbs 31 woman, but also to have her own mind. She didn’t always take too kindly to what I was trying to teach her, but I don’t think she departed too far from it.”

“I agree. Keisha is an extraordinary woman, but there’s a part of her life she guards with everything in her, even to the detriment of her own happiness.”

“I know what you’re talking about, but I can’t tell you what she hasn’t chosen to share.”

Tristan frowns as he pulls up to the curb in front of Clara Lee’s house and parks. “I was afraid you might say that.”

“But I will tell you this. My late husband was a devoted father and husband while the boys were growing up. He was still making a decent living from his record sales in Brazil, and I was doing the same from my not-so-popular blues albums. We sold every bit of our rights to a record company to buy his dream. That record store consumed him, and when it didn’t pan out like he expected it to, he began to drink. He got meaner and meaner the more he drank, and as the business fell off, he drank more. The last ten years of his life, he made our lives a living hell.”

“I know about the domestic calls, Clara Lee.”

“I figured you might—a man of your means. Anyway, I was getting to that part. Javier began to hit me right around the time Keisha was ten, and the boys had all but left home, going to college and busy with their own lives and whatnot. So when Javier came home from a bad day at the record store, he took it out on me—most of the time.

“I had foolishly promised him when we were younger that I would never leave him. See, his mama had left his daddy and run off with another man, and I don’t think he ever got over that. Pastor Johnson figured out when I didn’t come to church, I was getting over some bruise Javier had put on me. He counseled me to leave after he spent years trying to convince Javier to stop drinking and beating his wife.”

Tristan takes her hand in his. “I’m so sorry you and Keisha had to go through that.”

“I’m sorry, too. Sorrier than you’ll ever know. I should’ve taken Keisha away before it got so bad. So, it’s my fault if Keisha can’t open up. She excelled in her music and got into DePaul without much help from me or her daddy. It was the best thing that ever happened for her. The boys pitched in, and we put her up in the dorm, even though she had a home right here. Javier died of a stroke in her junior year, finally freeing us both from the hell he turned our house into.”

“Keisha began to have anxiety attacks again after you came out of the hospital. I was with her on both occasions. I believe she left because she didn’t want to tell me about her triggers.”

“That’s something she kept between her and her psychologist, but if I was a betting woman—which I’m not—I’d say it’s got something to do with her daddy. Now like I said, I can’t tell you her part of the story. She’ll have to do that when she’s good and ready, because she’s prideful like me when I was her age. It’s been only in the last few years that William has shown me how to recognize things in myself that I’ve known for years but never done anything about.” Clara Lee looks away shyly as she says it, almost as if she has shared too much.

“Sounds like you and the pastor are good for each other.” Unlike his father and Lydia.

Charles White had been a lonely, angry man after his wife died. The union Tristan’s dad forged with Lydia was more out of convenience than anything else. There’s some magical age you reach when you don’t want to be alone anymore, where if you are, you become this sad, older person living your final years with no companionship. His father married to avoid becoming that version of himself.

Clara Lee turns back to him. “We are, and I thank the Lord every day for him. We are a living testimony that it’s never too late to have the kind of relationship God intended for you to have with someone in this world. Time goes faster the older you get, Tristan. I’m not saying you and Keisha will end up together or anything, but if you all know what’s good for you, you’ll figure all this out before you get to be my age and wishing you had all that time back.”

It’s as if Clara Lee’s read his mind, but he still isn’t convinced that he can ever be that man who settles down and takes a wife. He doesn’t see his proclivities changing anytime soon. The only thing he is sure of at the moment is his desire to have Keisha back as his submissive.

“Thanks, Mrs. Beale.”

“You’re welcome.”

Intuiting that their conversation is over, he drags himself out of the car and opens the door for Mrs. Beale. She sits calmly with her arms folded over her purse until he opens the door.

Eyes a darker shade than the hazel ones he’s come to know well lock with his. “You want my advice?” she asks.

“Yes, please.”

“You go home and think long and hard about what you want before you go see Keisha tomorrow. I’ll bet you anything she’ll be about as ready to talk to you as you are to talk to her.”

Tristan finds hope in those words, and as he walks Mrs. Beale to her door with her arm tucked firmly in the crook of his elbow, he decides that he’ll heed them.

CHAPTER FIVE

Keisha

On the way to my place, I tell Carmelo the whole story about Byron and the incident at Wicked. It seems like so long ago. I’d been there just to talk to Princess Danai about backing KSR so I could delve into what I’d believed would be a one-night stand with Tristan White, which backfired. I don’t share my intentions concerning Tristan that night with Carmelo, but he seems shocked when I tell him that Tristan was the one who saved me from Byron.

“Is White the most recent ex you mentioned earlier?”

I’m taken aback. “How did you come to that conclusion?”

“When you mention his name, your eyes light up like you’re speaking of some god-like character or something. It doesn’t take a lot of grey matter to figure that one out.”

“Oh,” I say, thoroughly at a loss for words. Who knew I was such an open book. I’ll need to watch that shit around Tristan.

“If you feel that way about him, why are you not with him?”

“It’s complicated.”
And if I tell you the truth, I’ll break my NDA, KSR will be Tristan’s, and Jada and I will be in the poor house.
Even my thoughts about the situation sound hopeless.

“Meaning he’s got commitment issues. Not surprising for a man of his net worth.”