I pulled off from his house with my heart still beating too fast. I drove a few streets over before grabbing my phone and calling Coffee. If I didn’t talk to someone, I was going to explode.
She answered on the second ring.
“I already ordered the cake. I’ll be there Friday to help with any last-minute stuff for Saturday.”
I laughed, shaking my head. “That’s not why I called.”
“Then what do you want, girl?” she sighed dramatically. “You’ve been driving us crazy with this sweet sixteen party all week.”
“I’m headed home. I just left Stacks’ house.”
There was a long pause.
“Okay,” she said, annoyed. “Go ahead.”
“I wish I could just figure out what I’m doing.”
“Meaning?”
“I love my husband,” I said quickly, like I needed her to know that first. “We’ve been spending more time together. He’s home more. He’s trying. But it feels… forced. Like why now? Why after I’ve been begging for years?”
Coffee stayed quiet.
“It’s like he could feel that I was giving someone else my attention. And now he wants to be everything I asked for. And I don’t even know how to receive it.”
“Mhmm.”
“And I enjoy my time with Stacks,” I admitted softly. “He makes me feel like that teen girl that just gets to experience fun. The kind of fun I didn’t get because I was in school and rocking a baby. We do dumb shit together. We had a naked pillow fight last week and just laid there laughing until our stomachs hurt.”
Coffee made a low sound in her throat.
“The guilt is starting to wear me down,” I whispered. “I’ve always been a good girl. And now I’m lying about my whereabouts, sneaking around, and looking at my husband in the face like I’m not doing this. It makes it hard to even discipline Kennedi. How can I tell her anything when I’m doing reckless shit?”
Coffee couldn’t wait to speak.
“You opened a can of worms,” she said. “And now you have worms crawling everywhere.”
I sighed.
“You wanted to feel something. You felt it. Now you gotta deal with it.”
I pulled up to a red light, staring straight ahead.
“That mental and sexual bond you built with him is dangerous,” she continued. “It ain’t just physical, and that’s where you messed up.”
I swallowed hard. “What if he starts wanting more?”
“I think he already does.”
“Yeahhh… He asked me if I ever considered separation. It caught me off guard. Like why would you even ask that?”
Coffee sucked her teeth. “See? That’s that shit I be talking about. This was supposed to be fucking only. But you let that man mentally fuck you too.”
I laughed, trying to lighten the blow, but she wasn’t laughing.
“You playing house in two different worlds,” she said. “And both of them are real.”
“I don’t want to hurt either one of them,” I said. “But I know I owe everything to my husband.”
