After we finished eating, Tahiry gathered the boys and announced that she was taking them upstairs to play on the Wii and watch a movie. She would make sure they were quiet so I could enjoy the rest of my day. I studied my daughter and my three sons, who were all standing there looking angelic, and I wondered what they were up to.
“Okay, what’s going on?”
“Nothing. Granny just told us that you were sad and so we’re going to be on our best behavior today,” Tahiry said.
“Yeah, but we can’t make any promises for tomorrow,” Stevie added.
I laughed as Tahiry shuffled them out of the room. I picked up my cell phone and called Steven again. I’d already called him twice this morning. He still didn’t answer, but this time I left a message.
“Hey, babe. It’s me. I’m so sorry about last night. I want to talk to you about what’s going on with me and figure out how we can fix this. Okay? Love you. Please come home.”
I hung the phone up and wandered into the living room to watch TV. I started flipping through the channels until I came across the movie Love & Basketball. I smiled because that was Steven’s favorite movie. As the familiar scenes appeared on the screen, my mind drifted back to our first date. He’d done the cooking as we watched Love & Basketball.
“So, how was the food?” Steven had asked.
I smiled and patted my stomach. “You don’t meet many college students that can cook.”
“Yeah, I wanted to be a chef, but my parents weren’t trying to hear that at all.” He grinned. “But I like cooking, and I like having someone to cook for.”
“Well, aren’t I the lucky one?” I had come to his tiny Georgetown apartment. It was sparsely decorated—a sofa, coffee table, TV, and a Muhammad Ali picture on the wall. But that didn’t faze me. I was just enjoying his company.
“I’m trippin’ that we never got to meet in the entire four years I was at UT,” Steven said. “Felise said you guys used to be the best of friends.”
I shrugged. “We are from DC, but my dad moved us to Houston when I was little. Felise and I became best friends in middle school. But then she went to UT, I came back up here to Howard, and we kinda drifted apart. Once my dad remarried, I didn’t go back to Houston much. But that’s the good thing about real friends. You can go forever without talking and still pick up like you were together yesterday.”
Steven and I chatted all evening. He told me about him and Felise, and it sounded like he really cared about her. I recalled the times she’d told me about him, and she’d always made it clear that they were just friends. Watching him, though, I don’t know why she wouldn’t want more with him. He was intelligent, funny, charismatic, handsome, and just an all-around good guy. I made a mental note to get the real deal from her, but in the meantime, I was going to hit him up for all the information I could get.
“So, are you and Felise really just friends?”
He hesitated, long enough that I didn’t know what to make of it, but then he said, “Yeah, we really are. I guess I took your best friend slot. Besides, she has her man now.”
“You talking about Greg?”
“Yeah, she loves her some Greg.”
He had a look cross his face that I couldn’t make out, which led me to ask him, “Are you sure?”
“Oh, yeah. What did Felise tell you?”
“She told me that you guys were just friends. That you were like a brother to her.”
He forced a smile. “See. A brother.”
“So, that means you’re on the market?”
He shrugged. “I’m not trying to get in a serious relationship right now. I want to focus on law school. But I wouldn’t mind having a good friend to hang out with and whip up my meals for.”
I leaned back and nibbled on a raspberry soufflé he’d cooked for dessert. “I wouldn’t mind being that friend.”
Before long our friendship escalated into something more, and before I knew it, we were sleeping together on a regular basis.
When I got pregnant with Tahiry, just two months after we started sleeping together, we decided to do what was right—and that had been the story of my life ever since.
I SHOOK AWAY THE MEMORY. I needed to focus on the positive and stop thinking about what-ifs and what could’ve been. This was the life God had given me. It was time that I learned to appreciate it.
I lay back on the couch as I made all kinds of mental promises of how things were going to change as soon as Steven got home. I could be happy as a wife and a mother if I took my mother’s advice and found something outside my home that gave me purpose. Yeah, I thought. I had a good life. And getting an outside life was all I needed to get myself back on track.