He leaned forward as she drew him in. “Forgive me, it’s been a long day.”
“You could tell me about it. Or I could make it go away. That’s completely up to you,” Aura replied, her body never releasing the beat of the music.
Khalif clenched his jaw and looked around at his groomsmen having the time of their lives, the way Synful was twerking her body in front of them. He caught his best friend’s attention briefly.
“After tomorrow, all this shit is going to be off-limits. Man, enjoy yourself.” His best friend emphasized his statement bysnapping at Aura. “Baby girl, make his shoulders relax or something. Shenae won’t know shit about it. Enjoy your last night a single man.”
The thought of what tomorrow meant made his head drop slightly. Aura stepped closer, gripping his chin and lifting it back up. Then she removed his designer sunglasses and studied the handsomeness of his face. Thick brows over wide eyes trimmed with thick lashes.
“Shenae?” Aura asked with a smirk. “Tell me about her.”
Khalif groaned before searching his mind for the script he’d repeated time after time. “She’s the love of my life.”
“Lucky girl. She makes you feel like a man?”
That was the question she used to test men like him. The reserved ones who tucked their emotions behind tight shoulders and even expressions. His eyes didn’t light up nor did his lip twitch with happiness. He didn’t look or feel like a man in love.
Aura smirked softly, finding her in. She leaned in, her jewel-covered breasts close enough for him to inhale the scent she’d spritzed on them over an hour ago. She made his intoxicated brain fuzzy. “Tell me how to make you feel like a man.”
two
. . .
“Tellme how to make you feel like a man.” Echoed in Khalif’s drunk mind as he sat in his home that felt anything but. His boys opted to stay in the city and invite the strippers from Splash back to their hotel for an afterparty. None of it was ever his scene. While his best friend and cousins were soaking up the prewedding debauchery, he was sitting in his living room daydreaming.
That lingering statement was accompanied by images of Aura’s body moving to the music with ease as if the melodies were produced just for her. His mind and body recalled the scent between her breast, and in her hair, as the softness of her voice pulled him deeper into his trance.
She evoked passion. Passion he hadn’t felt since falling in love with football. One night. One moment with a woman he wouldn’t see again made him reconsider everything – especially the woman he was set to marry in a few short hours.
Aura was haunting him. Every syllable she spoke.
“Do you need to be affirmed?” she asked, dancing in front of him, taunting him to touch her. “Do you need someone to see you?”
The answers to both wereyes. He needed all of it. He’d walk off the field on a high, day in and day out, only to enter this space where Shenae didn’t see him, nor cared to see him. She never asked how he was or what he needed. She just checked the boxes and played the part. Outside of being the “it” couple. The couple that their parents could be proud of when it came to their legacies, there was nothing there. No passion, no love, and barely any respect.
Until tonight, by an exotic dancer, Khalif had gone unseen and unheard in a home he’d built. Regardless of how his or her parents felt about their union, he couldn’t do it. No, he wasn’t calling off the wedding because of Aura. He was calling it off because spending the rest of his life locked in with Shenae like this would be an injustice to them both. She’d end up resenting him, and he’d end up disrespecting her in the worst way.
Despite who his father was now, he didn’t want to be the man he was before. A lying, cheating man who’d dragged his mother through the mud looking for something he wanted in his wife or in himself.
Khalif closed his eyes, hoping to rid the images ofthatwoman. It didn’t help. Sleep wasn’t going to find him.
He stood from the sofa, leaving the bottle of liquor abandoned on the coffee table he hated. Khalif stumbled slightly to the island in the middle of the kitchen, picking up the phone. Dialing his brother’s number again, he put the phone on speaker, expecting to get his voicemail like before.
Instead, a barrage of moans flooded his kitchen. Moans he knew.
“Khalil, baby, right there,” Shenae moaned. “Yessss.”
Khalif was frozen in his tracks, unable to move, to yell, to do anything other than be tortured by the truth. Khalil hadn’t answered his phone all night. He hadn’t bothered checking in. It could have been anyone making his fiancée experience theecstasy she was… but his brother? When he couldn’t stomach another second of the treason, he grabbed the phone and sent it crashing into the cement wall.
Stalking back into the kitchen where he’d abandoned the bottle of liquor, Khalif fell back into that swimming pool of intoxication. Drowning out the sounds, the images in his head, the knowing, Khalif drank himself into a stupor.
By the time the morning came, he was slumped on the couch in a hangover of grief.
“’Lif,” his best friend called through the industrial-styled mansion. “Where you at, man! You finna be late!”
Rodney’s bellows startled Khalif.
“Shit,” he groaned, softly rubbing his head. It was going to take him more than a day to recover from his night of angry drinking. The headache brought back the brutal recall of why it was there in the first place.
