Hold Me in Contempt (3 page)

That's when I felt it. I was straddling him, and at his middle something was swelling and hardening fast. I'd heard about “wood” and brothers getting “hard,” and I knew what it was, so I pushed my middle to his middle and fell deeper into his chest, grinding my hips around in these kinky circles like I'd seen Patra and Lady Saw do in reggae videos on
Video Music Box
. I let my Janet Jackson in
Poetic Justice
braids swing over my shoulders and rubbed my vagina so hard into him, something shot straight through me and I felt my whole body open up. And I mean literally—from my vagina to my heart. I rubbed harder then, and while we were both still in our jeans, Ronald's penis grew bigger again and more rigid than anything that should be connected to a human. I abandoned my brain to follow my heart, which was begging to feel the thing tapping my middle from the outside in. I am sure I didn't push my hand into Ronald's pants with any elegance. It was more of a shove and grab. I wrapped my hands around his penis and remembered that in seventh grade fast-ass Melissa Montgomery said it should feel like a banana or plantain. I decided that I needed to call Melissa and tell her that she was wrong. Because what I felt hiding below Ronald's tight abs was more like the long, thick salamis my father used to get by taking the train all the way to the Italian butcher in Bensonhurst.

My hands were on his penis, gripping it tightly and slowly fingering it all around, as if trying to confirm that it was real and moving and pulsating to the rhythm in my hips. He let out a little sigh. He placed his hands on my hips over him and next his fingers were undoing my zipper.

“You think you're ready for this?” he asked in a whisper that was more confirming than questioning. I don't think I answered. I don't remember answering. Ronald could never recall if I answered. I just started moving. Pulled off my own pants and panties and everything. Some Lil' Kim song was playing on the radio, so I was feeling all courageous.

I let him enter me while I held my breath and thought of the sounds the A train made when it pulled up at 125th Street (fast-ass Melissa Montgomery's advice). It hurt. It burned like fire. But the more I held my breath and thought of the sounds of the brakes on the subway car screeching against the tracks, the farther behind I left the pain, until I arrived at something that commanded my every sense like nothing else I'd ever experienced. I couldn't worry about anything. Think about anything. Not my mother. My father. Kent. How we were going to pay for senior year. What I wanted to be when I grew up. At that moment, when Ronald was inside of me, I had no worries, no thoughts.

I think that was when my brazen undertaking of our love began. How he stole my heart from the outside in. Because after that, I was never the same. I was sitting on top of that salami for so long and through so many days and nights, skinny Ronald McDonald became a part of me—or maybe I became a part of him, like an appendage. I got a urinary tract infection, a yeast infection, and even popped a muscle in my jaw, but nothing could keep me from that man. I stayed in position on top of him through graduation. Got accepted to Columbia Law
after
he got accepted to NYU Law and we started planning our future together. Then
we
were going to be lawyers and
we
were going to save all the poor black people of the world.

Ronald was more than clear on my plans to be with him . . .  ​forever. He said he wanted to be with me. He said I would make a good “mate.” After we graduated from law school in New York, he announced that he just needed a little more time on his own to get himself together and then he'd propose. I agreed. Hearing the word
propose
come from his lips at twenty-four was like watching a master chef cook a perfect cut of filet mignon—you'd do anything to taste the final product. Because I'd lived in adult housing through law school to avoid going home to my father and Kent, I was newly homeless and staying with my cousin, so I needed to find someplace to live quickly. I searched everywhere, but I was broke and studying for the bar exam and I couldn't find anything I could afford that wasn't far out in Jersey, damn near upstate, or out on Long Island. Going home was just out of the question.

One morning my cousin Tamika, who was a booking agent at the Wilhelmina modeling agency, said she had a client whose roommate had disappeared in the middle of the night. She needed a replacement fast. When I showed up at the rent-controlled two-bedroom loft in Chelsea, this Chinese-looking girl with pecan skin and bushy black hair answered the door in a thin tank dress. “Please be my new roommate!” she begged like a little puppy before I could even get in the door to see the place. “Okay,” I said quickly. We laughed, sensing our equal desperation. I walked in and she pulled me into her arms dramatically. “Wonderful! I just knew we were meant to be when Tamika told me your name was Kim. I'm Kim too! We're meant to be,” she squealed so loudly I knew she couldn't be any older than twenty-one. From that day on she was “Kim 2.” She pulled me to a couch that looked like it had been in the loft since it was built and proceeded to go over a bunch of stuff about sharing the rent and utilities. There was a neon-green bong on the table and a pizza box on the floor near the couch, but I was so busy looking at Kim 2's skin and wondering where she was from, guessing about her parentage, that I hardly paid attention to the details of my surroundings. When she asked if I'd be her roommate, I hadn't even heard how much the rent was. “Yes,” I said. “I will.”

That night I was meeting Ronald for dinner in Gramercy Park near his firm, and Kim kind of invited herself along. That was her way. She didn't take off the nearly see-through tank dress. She slid on some cowgirl boots only a model could get away with, and big black shades. She wrapped her arm around mine and asked me to tell her all about Ronald—my future fiancé. I did. Told everything. Including the rap about his Bensonhurst salami. If my mother had been around, like, ever, I might have had advice to do otherwise.

There were prophetic moments over the next five years, notably an Ecstasy-fueled threesome three years in, during which I passed out after he ejaculated in her. That haunted me day and night, and might have helped me predict the psychological hell down the road when my fiancé left me in an emergency room to go comfort my roommate turned best friend.

Now, in the bathroom at 44 & X, I sat down on the toilet and cried into my hands like a stupid girl. I was done with questions about why that sad moment had happened and how it happened. I'd been numbed by the whole thing. But seeing Kim and Ronald together, knowing they were still dating and eating at my brunch spot, brought all of the pain back.

A text came through on my cell phone as I balled up a bunch of toilet paper to wipe my tears. It was from Kent.

KENT: You coming out of there?

I tried, like, three times to respond with something clear and concise that would hide the full-on breakdown I was having in the stall, something like “I'm on my way out” or “Be back in a sec,” but nothing would come out right. Then Kent started writing again.

KENT: Come on. Don't let this shit go down with you hiding in the bathroom.

KENT: Hello?

KENT: Kiki Mimi, you better bring your ass out here. Yo, Harlem, stand up! I ain't fucking playing.

He was trying to make me laugh. I did chuckle a little bit at how stupid he was, but I was still hiding on the dirty toilet and probably earning a bad case of crabs for it.

KENT: Yo, you know how I am. You know I would've dropped this fool on sight behind what he did to you if I really gave a fuck about him. But I ain't do it.

The best thing about being a twin is that sometimes in such a crazy world you know exactly how someone else feels. It's like if Kent is happy or sad, I can actually feel his emotions inside of me. Like they're my own. I felt that when I read Kent's message. I felt his anger. His compassion for me. In that moment my little brother was being my big brother again. I texted him back.

ME: Why didn't you fuck him up?

He answered immediately.

KENT: Because this nigga ain't good enough for you.

And then:

KENT: He never was. I was glad when he was gone. If I put my hands on him, he would've thought I gave a fuck. I didn't. I wanted him to know that. Man to man. He wasn't good enough.

I can't say my tears went from sad to happy. That would be a full exaggeration. It's more accurate to say Kent made me smile. Made me a little tougher.

I wiped my tears one last time and flushed the tissue down the toilet. I straightened my back and walked out of the stall with the full intention of returning to the table, finishing my brunch, and moving on . . .  ​again.
Harlem . . .  ​stand up
.

When I was looking in the mirror cleaning streaks of mascara from my cheeks, Kent sent more texts:

KENT: Yo, you coming out? I paid the bill, so we can leave when you walk out.

KENT: Yo?

ME: Yes. I'm coming out now.

The phone started vibrating again when I was stuffing it back into my purse, but I knew it was probably just Kent again, so I ignored it and headed out of the bathroom.

I took one of those deep, courage-begging breaths and pulled the bathroom door open.

And there, standing right there in front of me, was Kim 2.

I was so not prepared for that. I'm saying, if I had been, I would've said some slick Dominique Deveraux in
Dynasty
line that would cut her down at the knees and threaten her life. But a good line or practiced uppercut was so far from my mind, I just tried to walk past her. I didn't even roll my eyes.

She put her cold hand on my arm, and my first reaction was to pull away.

But she grabbed for me again.

“No, just wait,” she said, trying to get a hold of me with the thin, pale hand.

“Wait? What?” I threw my arms up to escape her. “Don't touch me. Don't fucking touch me.”

She reached again and I jumped back.

“Kim, stop. I just want to say—”

“I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to hear what you have to say. I've told you that so many times. Just stop,” I said, repeating sentiments I'd expressed in response to the many e-mails and texts Kim had sent me after her relationship with my fiancé came to light. They had been a couple, an actual couple, for over a year before I found out. She'd met his parents. They'd gone to the Poconos together—all of this while I was with him.

“I just want you to hear me out,” she said.

“Hear what? I don't need to hear anything I don't already know. You stole my fiancé. You said you were my best friend, but meanwhile you were sleeping with my man behind my back.”

“We both know that's not how it went down. You guys were—”

“That's how I know the story, and that's all I care to know,” I said. “I'm not one of those people who need to know why. Your motives were obvious. You wanted him from the start. You knew how much I loved him, how much he loved me, but you wanted him for yourself anyway. We were supposed to get married.”

“You didn't have a ring. He never even asked you.”

“So?”

“So . . .  ​look, none of it was done on purpose,” Kim 2 said. “It just happened.”

“You can tell that bullshit to someone else,” I shot back, “someone who wasn't nearly killed in a car your high ass was driving.”

“But you . . .  ​you . . .  ​I never meant for any of that to happen.”

“
You
what?
You
what? You,
Kim
, need to explain how when I was in surgery you were fucking calling Ronald to get
you
out of jail. Explain how when I was laid up in the hospital and the doctors thought I might be paralyzed from the neck down, you never once came to see me and you moved out of the apartment we were sharing and in with Ronald. Explain that. Did you mean for all of that to happen? Or was all of that a surprise to you, too? Because it was certainly a fucking surprise to me.”

I didn't realize I was hollering at Kim 2, had my finger pointed at the little space between her eyebrows like a .22 threatening to lick a shot, until I sensed all of the eyes in the restaurant on me. I turned to see that a little crowd had gathered and right in front were Kent and Ronald.

I slowly lowered my hand and tried to rediscover my sensible mind, where the anger I'd feel over being disbarred and losing my job for beating Kim 2's ass in my favorite restaurant would outweigh the joy I'd feel after I choked her to death. And I think she was waiting for it, too, because she was quiet, and while my hands had been up before, now she was standing there with her hands raised like I was about to arrest her.

“You know what? Don't explain a damn thing,” I said. “Because, as I said, I don't give a fuck.”

I'd finally found my Dominique line, and it was weak at best, but I tossed my purse over my arm and walked right into the crowd, where Kent and Ronald were waiting.

I got to Ronald first, and when he opened his mouth to say God only knows what, I put my hand up to stop him.

“Don't say anything to me,” I shot. “Nothing.”

Kent grabbed me and pulled me out of the restaurant as I went into a list of other things I needed to say that I probably should've kept to myself.

“I sent you a text when she got up. Told you she was coming into the bathroom,” Kent said after I stumbled out behind him. “You okay?”

He pulled me around the corner and pushed me up against the side of a building.

“I'm fine. I'm fine.”

“I was trying to get you out of there. I kept texting you.”

“I know. The phone was in my purse.”

Kent's fists were balled at his sides like he was ready to fight someone.

“I was about to drop that motherfucker,” he fired. “If I wasn't with you and shit, I would've stomped his ass out. But I know how you get down, so I tried to keep cool.”