Chapter One
RHAPSODY
The waitress smiledat me as I did a little dance in my seat while waiting for her to set my strawberry lemon drop on the table. It didn’t even matter to me that I probably looked like a lush. I had a reason to celebrate.
Before I could pick my drink up, my sister, Melody grabbed her glass and lifted it in the air. “To healthy lungs and being able to walk up the stairs without dying, bitch.”
Placing a fist over my mouth, I cackled like a witch. “You are sick!”
“But did I lie?”
“No, you did not.” Lifting my glass, I clinked it with hers. “To healthy lungs.”
As a toddler, I was diagnosed with asthma. As a teenager, I began to have really bad seasonal allergies. Aside from that, strong scents like certain perfumes and other fragrances triggered my allergies which then triggered the asthma. Two and a half months ago, I almost died when I couldn’t breathe one day, and my inhaler wasn’t helping. By the time the ambulance arrived, my lips were turning blue. At the ER I was diagnosed with pneumonia. It just so happened that I got pneumonia amida bad allergy flare up. The pollen was out in record numbers. All those things combined almost killed me.
I was in the hospital for four days on oxygen. I was prescribed antibiotics, steroids, and an inhaler to take every day rather than just a rescue inhaler for emergencies. After almost three months on the steroids, I had gained twenty-five pounds, and I absolutely hated it. Before the steroids, I wasn’t necessarily small. At five foot six, I weighed 165 pounds. Currently, I was at 190. It was the biggest that I’d ever been in my life. There was no use in trying to diet while on the medication, and it made my appetite increase tenfold.
Finally, I had taken the last dose a few days before, and the following week, I was starting with a personal trainer. My ideal weight was 150. I didn’t want to be a stick. I just wanted to be at a good healthy weight and be toned.
“It’s almost time for sassy’s lease to be up, right?” Melody gave me a pointed glare. “Have you all decided what you’re going to do?”
Glass almost to my mouth, I froze. The only movement I made was cutting my eyes into slits and staring at my sister.
“I’m just asking,” she held her hands up in mock surrender.
I decided to sip my drink before addressing her comment. “First of all, I’ve asked you not to call my man sassy. Second, no. He hasn’t said anything, and I haven’t either. I’m not about to feel like I’m begging a man to move in with me.”
“Exactly! You don’t have to beg nobody for shit. You and he have been together for two years. If he isn’t thinking about proposing or at the very least moving in together, I say fuck him.”
All I could do was sigh because Melody technically wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t one to rush or pressure a man, but I was thirty, and Jeremiah and I had been together for two years. He wasn’t hinting at marriage, kids, living together, or anything remotelyclose to the next level. Melody ran a strict program when it came to men and dating, and she swore he was playing in my face. Honestly, I didn’t think two years was a super long time. Marriage was a huge step, and a person needed to be sure.
I did have some concerns, however, and had I expressed them to my sister, she would have been livid. The weight gain from the steroids had my man looking at me different. Not only that, he was acting different. In the past three weeks, we had only had sex once which was very abnormal for us. When he would see me snacking, he’d make little jokes like, “Damn, you eating again?”
It didn’t take me long to realize he definitely noticed my weight gain, and he didn’t think I looked good with the weight. I was already self-conscious, and his behavior didn’t make me feel any better. There were no encouraging words or suggestions of us dieting or working out together. Crazy thing was, Jeremiah was 5’9 and had gained some weight himself since we met. His stomach was rounder than mine, and he had breasts. They weren’t huge, but they for sure weren’t supposed to be there. I didn’t find that sexy at all. Not to mention, my dream man would be at least six feet tall.
But I loved Jeremiah, and I dealt with what I viewed as his short comings because at the end of the day, they didn’t hold any weight. I loved him because of who he was and how he treated me. Unfortunately, I was finding out the hard way that he didn’t give me the same grace when I began to change. If the weight gain from steroids had him tripping, how would he act if I got pregnant with his child and gained even more weight?
Maybe something as small as him grabbing my love handles shouldn’t have made me feel as insecure as it did. That was a personal problem, so I decided to do something about it. For the next few days, I was going to drink alcohol and eat whatever my heart desired. The day I started with my trainer, would be theday all of the snacking, terrible eating, and indulging stopped until I was at my desired weight.
“Anyway,” Melody knew I was ready to change the subject. “You still coming with me to the cookout tomorrow?”
“Yes ma’am.” Finishing off my drink, I waved the waitress over for round two. “I am not passing up grilled food right before my diet starts. That’s like the perfect ending for my gluttonous ways before I have to start eating grass and tumbleweeds.”
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with you wanting to be healthy. I need to change my eating habits too, but you don’t even have to do too much. You’re not obese, and you are pretty as hell.”
Melody knew how insecure my weight gain made me. Clamping my teeth down, I literally had to bite my tongue. Jeremiah had his faults, but I loved him. And Melody loved me. My sister only wanted the best for me, and I loved her for that. However, it didn’t make me feel good when she downed Jeremiah. If she didn’t like him, cool. She didn’t have to, but I had learned not to give her reasons to hate him even more. Had I mentioned how he’d been acting lately, she would have gone the hell off. That wasn’t what I wanted.
Swallowing hard, I refused to confess to her that my gut was twisting at the moment because my man was about to go out of town for a week, and he hadn’t been sexing me like he should have been. Call it being delusional or maybe even a little naïve, but I didn’t want to believe the man that I ‘d been with for two years was cheating on me over weight gain. The sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and sensations of my gut twisting had been way too common as of late. I felt it three weeks ago when he made me aware that he was going to Louisiana and didn’t invite me.
I met his mother and siblings once. Being a medical billing and coding specialist allowed me to work from home. I had useda week of sick time when I was in the hospital, but I still had vacation time. Really, I didn’t have to take off when I went out of town because as long as I had my laptop, I could work from anywhere. Per usual, I kept my concerns to myself and chose not to nag Jeremiah.
He knew I was going out with Melody, and the only thing he said was have fun. When it came to us there was no real passion or affection anymore, and I didn’t like it. Strawberry lemon drop number two had me deciding to pop up at his house and talk to him. Everything I felt, I was going to get it off my chest. That was the point of relationships, right?
If I couldn’t communicate with my boyfriend that was a problem. Melody and I parted ways after we were done with our second round of drinks. Settling into my Impala, I cracked the window and started the drive to Jeremiah’s house. We actually didn’t live too far from one another. Jeremiah was going to Louisiana for his great-grandmother’s birthday. The lady was almost a hundred years old. He hadn’t seen his family in Louisiana in almost a year, so he decided to stay for an entire week, and he was leaving in less than twelve hours.
The entire drive, I rehearsed in my head all the things I wanted to say to him. Gripping my steering wheel with both hands, I pushed out a groan. I was stressing like I was on the way to have an important conversation with a stranger. Turning into his driveway and parking behind his Altima caused my nerves to settle just a bit. The lemon drops had me feeling warm and tingly inside. Maybe we could have a conversationafterwe had sex. Grabbing my keys, I opened the door and emerged from the car. Despite us not living together, we both had keys to one another’s homes.
When I pushed the door open, I heard the television playing lowly, but the living room was empty. Jeremiah lived in a small two-bedroom house. The sounds of his muffled voice came fromthe direction of the bathroom, so that’s where I went. The door wasn’t closed all the way, but I couldn’t see him. It appeared that Jeremiah was in the house alone, so why he was talking in such a low tone had me curious. Unless he was trying to sound sexy.
