Big Daddy Sinatra: There Was a Ruthless Man(9)

“Groom,” Charles said. “I’m the father of the groom.”

“Oh the father,” Jenay said, surprised. The wedding was held at a different location, at a church rather than the hotel’s ballroom, and she didn’t attend the wedding. She heard talk and loads of gossip about the groom’s father as she moved around the room, mainly from the bride’s side of the wedding party, but she never bothered to seek out who this man was. Now she was sitting in front of him. She was surprised she hadn’t noticed him earlier, because he definitely stood out. “Congratulations,” she said to him. “Now I see my observation was right. To have a father your age, the groom has to be very young.”

“He’s eighteen,” Charles responded. “So yeah, you’ve got that right. He’s very young.”

“Very,” she said. She got married young, when she was twenty-two. But eighteen? “I don’t think my father would have allowed me to even think about getting married at eighteen.”

“It’s not that unusual where I come from,” Charles pointed out, “but that doesn’t mean it would have been my preference for him. It wasn’t. I talked to him about it. But he was sooo in love with the girl he considered to be the catch of the century, that he made it clear if I objected, he was going to run off and get married and I would never see him again.”

“Oh my,” Jenay said. “What did you do?”

“I slapped the shit out of him,” Charles said, and Jenay laughed. When she realized he wasn’t kidding at all, she turned serious too. “I still noted my objection,” Charles continued, “but I didn’t stand in his way. You marry young when you blow it. My son got carried away one night and got his cute little girlfriend knocked up. Now the kid’s expecting a kid. He blew it. He played the piper, now he’s got to pay the piper. Her old man is some judge of some sort, and he wasn’t about to let his daughter shame their supposedly blue blood name, so he’s shot-gunning this wedding as if he had sharpshooters on the roof.”

Jenay was surprised that he would be so candid. She wasn’t quite sure how to take it.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s no secret. It’s like a point of pride with young people nowadays. They know all about condoms and birth control, but they don’t use either.” He looked at Jenay, at those sizeable breasts of hers, and then into her big, gorgeous gray eyes. “I’d bet you wouldn’t be so reckless.”

He and Jenay exchanged a glance. Whatever passed between them when their eyes met, caused a searing heat to rise within her. Which, her experience taught her, meant that it was time to go. Although her feet were still killing her, she began putting back on her shoe. “I’m sure they love each other very much,” she said as an aside.

“Love each other my foot,” Charles responded as a fact. “They lust each other. They want it and want it all the time. This isn’t about love. This has lust written all over it.” He glanced at the curvature of Jenay’s waist. And then at her breasts again. So plump and tight. He could suck the life out of those two breasts.

He leaned forward, as his dick began to throb. “What would an eighteen year old kid know about love?” he continued. “But I’m sure it’s all my fault, so what can I complain about? They say these things are cyclical; that they run in a vicious cycle. My oldest son is twenty-two. I was seventeen when I knocked up his mother so definitively that she was showing within a week.”

Jenay laughed. “Yeah, right.”

“No lie,” he said with a smile of his own. “And her old man was the same way. ‘You impregnated my daughter,’ he said to me, ‘you’re going to marry her.’ So I called myself doing the right thing and we got married. A shot-gun affair too. Now my boy, my youngest, is in the same predicament.”

His smile dissolved. “Other than the sons my marriage produced,” he said as he looked across the room at one of those sons, “it was the worst mistake of my life.”

Jenay was taken aback by the man’s bluntness. Rarely did she get to hear raw truth anymore. It was refreshing. She looked across the room where he was now looking. His son, the groom, an upbeat young man still in his tuxedo, was grinning like a kid as his new bride shoved a handful of cake into his mouth.

“Probably going to be the worst mistake of his life too,” Charles said as he watched his son. “Poor kid.” He had sadness in his voice. Jenay looked back at him. He had sadness in his eyes too.