I’m In Lust With A Stripper (Erotica) (6 page)

The trio stared at each other, neither saying anything. Bernard was the first to break the silence. “Hey, I’m sorry Bryce. We didn’t want you to find out this way, we were going to tell you.”

Bryce snorted. “Tell me what happened.”

Bernard and Vanessa sat down together on the couch, close enough to each other that their legs touched. “Everything wasn’t right from the get go. You can agree with me on that, right? And let’s not forget the
stripper
.”

Bryce rolled her eyes. “I guess.”

“
Nu uh, you’re not getting off that easy, tell me that it wasn’t right from the beginning!” he demanded.

“
Are you trying to get me to condone your affair just because I had one?” Bryce stubbornly crossed her arms over her chest. “Well, I’m not going to do it.”

“
All I want you to do is to recognize your part in all this. You didn’t want to be married, you were screwing around with that stripper, and you were ignoring me. You never came to a counseling session. I did everything within my power to make you happy, but all you did was tear it up and throw it back in my face. How did you think that made me feel?”

“
How do you think I feel finding out that not only is my husband cheating on me but with my best friend? And in my bed…my fucking bed. How come you didn’t go over to her place?”

“
We did,” Bernard retorted sharply and Bryce glared at him.

“
I’m sorry, but neither one of us expected this to happen. Honest we didn’t,” Vanessa interjected. “But he would call me looking for you. And then a couple of times, he wanted to meet, to pick my brain to see what he could do to make you happy. And I gave him suggestions. But the more I got to know him, the more I realized that the problem was you Bryce, not him. He’s a good man. I guess I’ve been brainwashed all these years thinking that he was the one with the problem. But I learned that I was wrong, you are Bry,” Vanessa finished.

Bryce pulled her head back as though she had been slapped. “That’s not true.”

“
Yes it is Bryce,” Bernard said quietly. “I think that we should get a divorce.”

“
Maybe I don’t want one,” Bryce said stubbornly, sounding like a three-year-old.

Bernard shook his head. “Yeah you do. And we’ll get one. Our parents will be disappointed, but they’ll be happy with Vanessa and the baby.”

Bryce suddenly went cold. “What?”

Vanessa smiled shyly and Bernard beamed. “Yep! I’m going to be a Daddy.”

Chapter 9

Bryce and her sister were sitting in the breakfast nook overlooking the backyard. Bernard had let her have the house since Vanessa’s was conveniently closer to both of their jobs. According to her mom, they were flying their parents and a few close friends to Jamaica to their wedding. They really didn’t want a big bash considering that the signatures were still wet on Bernard’s and Bryce’s divorce decree. It didn’t take long for the divorce, they only had the house they purchased together and Bernard gave it to her without a fight.

“
Do you see Vanessa,” Cooper asked tentatively. “Has she tried to call you?”

“
I haven’t seen her or talked to her. But she did send me a three-page letter, telling me how sorry she was and how she didn’t intend to break up my marriage.”

“
Do you believe her?”

Bryce smiled. “I do. Vanessa was my girl, she knew all my dirt and I knew all hers. I’ve known her for a long time and in all that time, she never dated a man who was in a committed relationship. If she even got a whiff of a girlfriend, she was gone. So yeah, I believe her.”

“
So are you going to reach out to her?”

“
I will. You know Vanessa is like a sister to me, so it’s like her little boy is my nephew.” She had heard from her mom that Vanessa had given birth prematurely to a little boy, he had spent a couple of months in the NICU but was home now with his parents.

“
You’re surprisingly calm about this,” Cooper observed.

Bryce snorted. “Not really. When everything went down, I wanted to kill both of them. I couldn’t understand how they could cheat behind my back, two people who claimed to love me. Then I realized my part, and I was wrong on so many different levels. So there’s no reason for me to be indignant or mad at them. I got what I deserved.”

“
Wow. Great attitude.”

“
I wish that I would have done things differently,” she admitted.

Cooper raised a perfectly threaded eyebrow. “Yeah, like what?”

“
I never would’ve gotten married. Instead of trying to make everybody happy, I should’ve listened to my gut and called the whole thing off. Bernard wasn’t right for me and now that he’s with Vanessa, I can imagine that he’s a lot happier.”

“
Let’s hope, at least Mommy and Daddy have forgiven you.”

Bryce smiled. “Yeah that’s true.”

Cooper silently regarded her sister. “Have you forgiven yourself?” she asked quietly.

“
A little bit every day,” she whispered.

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Brooke Witherspoon frowned at the inch-high pile of bills stacked on her coffee table. The first of the month was quickly approaching and the bills were due. She mentally started two lists: The MUST be paid and the MIGHT be paid. She pulled out a small taupe colored envelope, the gas and electric and started the MUST be paid pile. The next to be moved over to the MUST be paid pile, was her car payment, the mortgage, cell phone, daycare and water bills. She left her cable bill, three credit card statements in the MIGHT get paid pile.

She turned to her computer and logged into her checking account to view it, she studied her bank statement, it was horrible. Brooke was afraid to see how awful it really was this month. Sitting next to her stacks of bills was her calculator; she reached for it and began the nasty job of paying her bills.

Her head began to pound as she meticulously reviewed each bill, calculated the amount from her balance, and if there was enough, she’d write the check. If not, it went into the MIGHT get paid pile, which; hopefully, would be paid on the fifteenth, when she got her second paycheck for the month.

Suddenly her four-year-old son, Jaden, ambled into the room, giving her a respite from her bill paying. “Mommy, I want a drink of water.”

All the fear and irritation that Brooke felt a second ago evaporated when she saw her son. Her heart melted, she set down her pen and picked up her baby. Even though he was too big to be held, she couldn’t resist. Jaden was the perfect age, where she could still smother him with kisses without him balking and swatting her face away. After kissing him, she carried him to the kitchen for a cup of water. He took the tiniest sip, which to her, looked like all it did was wet his lips.

He looked just like his father; he had his gray eyes, curly black hair and caramel color. His father, a gorgeous Créole, had come to Atlanta looking for a new life after Hurricane Katrina had destroyed his home.

By the time she carried Jaden upstairs to his room, he was already asleep. She tucked him into bed, kissed him on the forehead, and then marched back to her bill paying.

Brooke meandered across the employee cafeteria to the cashier, occasionally nodding at her co-workers. She had been working for Lionel’s, an international home improvement corporation, as a programmer for ten years; she had made a number of good friends. Normally, she’d join them to catch up on the company gossip while drinking her coffee, but this morning she had a meeting with, Ruben, her manager. And she had some reports she wanted to clean up before meeting with him. She took a sip of her black coffee and grimaced when it stung her tongue. But she liked it hot and black, once it got lukewarm; she couldn’t stomach it and usually tossed it.
I really need to cut this out.
Her two-dollar-a-day treat really added up. She did the calculations the night before and decided that her coffee money could go toward paying a bill.

After she paid for her coffee, she meandered to the elevators. She was sipping her drink when Malynda, one of her colleagues sidled up to her.

She looked around before leaning toward Brooke. “I heard that there’s going to be some layoffs,” she whispered.

“
Really? Which department?” she asked, bored, she really didn’t care, the same layoff rumor floated around every couple of months and nothing ever happened, besides her mind was on getting those reports completed. She shot an impatient glance at the elevator.

“
I don’t know, but my contact in Human Resources, said that these are going to cut deep. A lot of people are going to be affected.”

The elevator’s bell dinged and Brooke stepped forward, poised to step on when the doors slid open. “So when are they going to make the big announcement?” Brooke asked, before stepping on the elevator, with Malynda on her heels. She pushed her floor number, so did Malynda.

“
Sometime within the next couple of days,” Malynda announced excitedly. She loved gossip, and when it came to the goings on of the company, she was better than TMZ.com. “They’re going to do it in waves.”

The elevator stopped on Brooke’s floor and she stepped out. “Thanks for the scoop. I’ll talk to you later.” She waved at Malynda then hurried to her cube. “I need to get those reports done before my meeting with Ruben,” she muttered.

Brooke knocked on Ruben’s office door before entering. He pulled his gaze away from his laptop long enough to nod at her and motioned for her to close the door. Brooke did so and sat in one of his chairs across from his desk.

He had been her manager for the last five years and she loved working for him. Out of all the managers in the company, not only was he the nicest one, but he was also the smartest. He could run rings around his colleagues. While his cohorts had a Master’s in Computer Science, he trumped it with a Doctorate in Computer Science.

“
How are you doing today?” he asked somberly, and a ribbon of fear cut through Brooke.

“
I’m fine,” she answered cautiously.

Ruben sighed. “There’s no easy way to say this.”

“
I’m getting let go, aren’t I?” she asked, her voice quavering.

Ruben nodded. “It’s not just you, it’s the whole department…including me. The head honchos decided that it would be more cost effective to relocate the entire I.T. department to India. I’m sorry,” he said, still reeling from the news himself. He only had a few hours to absorb it, he was told last night, during a late night meeting after most of the employees had left for the day.

Brooke thought about her never ending bills and the possibility that she might not be able to pay her mortgage rattled her. She started crying. “What am I going to do?” she sobbed.

Ruben pushed a box of tissues toward her, Brooke snatched out a few and dabbed at her eyes. “You’ll be fine,” Ruben answered. He opened a folder on his desk. “You’re getting four months of severance pay, you’ll have access to our resource center, they’ll help you write a resume—”

Brooke whimpered and Ruben hesitated at the sound, he hated doing this, especially to Brooke, a single mom whose son’s father was an absentee dickhead. He knew because he served as her mentor and they occasionally lunched together where she updated him on her life.

With a heavy heart Ruben continued, “Since the beginning of the month is quickly approaching the company will let you have health insurance until the end of the upcoming month, after that if you want insurance, you’ll have to sign up for COBRA. There’s information in the folder about rolling over your 401k or keeping it here. I know that this is a lot to absorb right now, I know that you’re in shock.”

She fixed a tear stained gaze on Ruben. “I’m more than in shock, I’m in a shitload of trouble,” she croaked.

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J’Twan, J.T. for short, Morrison, quarterback for the Atlanta Jaguars, sat across from Marcella Narozzi, his publicist. “This is fucked up. You know that don’t you?” she barked not pulling any punches.

J.T. nodded. “I know.”

“
This is a public relations nightmare.” She sighed, then strolled over to the window and looked out over the skyline. The sun was just setting, casting a honeyed glow over the city. After twenty years in the business she had seen it all and had cleaned up more messes than a cleaning lady. No scandal or soon-to-be scandal was too big. Her biggest coup was creating a campaign that convinced the residents of a small town to drink the water after traces of pharmaceutical drugs were found in it. She polished tarnished images, she was
the
Spin Doctor. Marcella was the lady to go to when people needed things fixed and they paid her handsomely for it. She clasped her hands behind her back. “You know that I respect you?”

“
I do.”

“
And you know that I always have your best interest at heart, don’t you?”

He did, Marcella had been his publicist when he first signed to the NFL, he trusted her totally. “I do.”

“
And you know that I don’t give a fuck about your lifestyle don’t you?”

“
I do.”