Total pages in book: 159
Estimated words: 149301 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 747(@200wpm)___ 597(@250wpm)___ 498(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 149301 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 747(@200wpm)___ 597(@250wpm)___ 498(@300wpm)
“So, a little after that, she started workin’ longer shifts. When she was at work, so was I, but one day I decided to take off. I followed her in a friend’s car.” He noticed Poet’s fingers slow down, her eyes narrowing on the thread she was now using, pushing the clear fiber beneath a row of soft feathers. “I followed her right into the parkin’ lot of an old motel. By this point, I knew she wasn’t there to talk about our Lord and Savior with the patrons. My heart was racin’, Poet, and I was seeing red. But I waited. I kept still. I kept quiet. She went up the motel steps, knocked on one of the doors, and some curly-headed blond guy answered it. He ain’t look nothin’ like me. He was average height. Plain lookin’, and shirtless. All of her exes, includin’ me, were tall, tatted up, and wild motherfuckers. Then she turned around and started datin’ Napoleon Dynamite.”
She chuckled at that. “I suppose it’s human to compare ourselves with the competition.”
“I ’spose it is, too. If you’re gonna mess around on a son of a bitch like me, get a motherfucker better than I am at least, but I know that’s not really the point. Anyway, she kissed him. A long, slow, passionate kiss. My greatest fears had come true. This woman was givin’ her body, her heart and her time to another man right in front of me.”
“Being cheated on is a hurtful thing. Boy, do I know it.”
“I got out of my car after she went inside the room. I walked to that door, pacing myself. I waited outside that room for ten minutes.”
“Why’d you wait so long?”
“I wanted them to get a head start so there couldn’t be any room to tryna explain the shit away… like, ‘Oh, we’re just friends!’, ‘You’re so crazy and jealous,’ that sort of thing. She used to say shit like that to throw me off the path. Naw, I couldn’t chance them being fully clothed so she could lie and explain it away. As hot and heavy as they appeared to be when she first showed up, I knew it wouldn’t be long before they got down to business.”
“How’d you feel as you were standing there waiting?”
“Huh?” He didn’t understand why she’d ask such a thing.
“How’d you feel as you stood there waitin’ all that time to confront your wife about sleeping with another man?” She stopped working and stared at him.
“Well, how in tha fuck do you think I felt, Poet?” He chuckled incredulously. “I was mad. I wanted to tear some shit up!”
“Yeah, but see, that’s the thing with you men. Y’all never dig deeper. You have to dig deeper, baby. You have to dig so deep that you pull out the emotions you didn’t even know you had, and process it. I can tell you are still angry about this on some lowkey level. You are still hurt, and that’s okay. It was clearly disturbing. So, let me ask again in a different way. What emotion led to that? That anger you were—”
“Heartbroken. Sad. I lost trust in who I thought was my soulmate. I felt like someone that I had sacrificed for had gone away, something I poured everything into, gave my all, but then I realized my efforts were in vain ’cause she shitted on everything we had. Like that dead bird you got there… she just flew over our lives and took a dump on it. I did everything for this woman. I’m not a romantic, but I tried to be. I’m not always eloquent with words, but I tried to be a better communicator and not shut down. I had some problems, we all do, but I wanted to be fair with her. I was closed off emotionally sometimes—my mama said my father was the same way—so I tried to break that cycle. I wanted to be different from my daddy and grandfather. I thought she deserved a man who at least tried to be good to her. I stopped just tryin’ and became that man, yet it still wasn’t good enough.”
He felt himself getting all hot and irritated.
His gut knotted up like a hot ball of yarn, surprised by his rising emotions as he told the tale. He meant what he’d said to himself during this discussion about his first love. He didn’t feel upset about Lorna anymore, so much time had passed, but the way Poet shoved him back into the memory in a different way, much deeper than he’d been in a long time, made everything resurface. And it hurt. Maybe because here he was all over again… falling in love… and a small part of him didn’t want to admit that he was afraid she may crush his heart, too.