“I can’t do this, Demi,” Lauren said. “I can’t become the woman worrying about my husband’s dick every time he steps foot outside. “I will divorce you and I’m not talking about a nice, neat divorce. I will leave this marriage with what I’m owed and take my son so far away from your existence that you won’t even be able to find us. I’ll be bitter. So, you decide right now what happens next. Is it over? Because if it’s over, we can move on from this. You forgave me once; I could do the same.”
“I never forgave you, Lo.” His words silenced her. She stood, painfully slow before facing Demi with wet eyes.
“You don’t forgive shit like this. You just learn to live with it,” he said. He turned his back on her and recaptured his cognac, pouring another glass... neat. “I ain’t never letting a soul keep me from my son. You know that. We don’t play that game with one another. You either leave or stay, but using DJ as a pawn, it’s not your best move. He’s a king. He’s my young. I’m asking you not to do that because I know how it’ll end.”
The eerie void that lived in the room after that made the silk hair stand up on the back of his neck. He could practically hear her breathing it was so tense. He hated that it felt this way in his home. It wasn’t what he wanted.
“I can’t heal if you’re still hurting me, Demi.” Her voice was almost non-existent. Had he beaten her down that low? Demi tipped the drink to his lips and then lowered his head as he nodded
“I know. It’s over.”
The words echoed in his mind, reverberating in his gut, ripping through his soul. Charlize Woods. His time with her. He recalled her entire face with every blink of his eyes. Her deep and doe-shaped eyes. Her dewy skin. Her pretty, little Chiclet teeth and those full lips that he had learned to love to kiss. It was over. Damn if he wasn’t losing all his gangster from just the thought of that. Charlie had served him a single dose of his own medicine and it was so bitter he couldn’t swallow it.
“Damn,” he said.
He downed the last of his drink and kicked one foot up on the coffee table in front of the couch.
“I’ma sleep out here tonight. Go to bed.”
Chapter 22
Humility was a motherfucker. Charlie stood on her father’s doorstep, too nervous to ring the doorbell as she replayed her last encounter with him over again in her mind.
“Your key still works, Charlize.”
Her father’s voice oozed through the Ring camera and she looked up at it.
“Can we talk, Daddy?” she asked.
“Yeah, come on in,” he replied.
At least I’m welcome,she thought as she pulled out her keys and unlocked the door.
She never thought she would be here. Begging for forgiveness. Her pride was too big, but her desperation was greater. She had nowhere to go. Her old place had been leased to someone else, she had no money, no job, and no plan.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded, but her nods quickly transformed to her head moving left to right. She wasn’t okay. She didn’t know if she would ever be “okay” again. Charlie ran into her father’s arms. She bawled as he hugged her. She couldn’t remember the last time he had done this, been her haven, and held her close.
“I miss Mommy,” she wailed. She didn’t know where it had come from. That wasn’t the reason for her tears. Or was it? Was everything she had been through with men a reflection of the love she had lost when her mother had died? Charlie had never been lonelier than she was in this moment.
“I know you do, Charlize.”
“I need a place to stay,” she said. “I won’t make it long. I just need a little help while I figure out what I want to do with my life.”
Charlie felt him pull back and he walked to the sofa and took a seat.
“You’re at a point in your life, Charlize, where you have to figure things out on your own,” he said.
“If I could do that, do you think I’d be here, Daddy? I’m asking you for help because I need it, not because I want to. I need my father. I don’t have any other options.”
Charlie knew it sounded a lot like begging and she hated herself for it.
“I have a family. You can’t just run in and out when I have a wife to look after. It’s disruptive to my marriage. It makes things hard.”
The audacity. The motherfucking audacity. Charlie might as well have been breathing flames.
“And what am I, Daddy?” she asked.
