Before I Let Go, page 17
“Are you guys gonna just…” I lift my brows expectantly, hoping they’ll scurry and give me some privacy, but no one moves. “Ugh.”
Plastering on my first-date smile, I open the door. Mark Lancaster stands on the front porch holding a bouquet of flowers. An immaculately tailored dark suit and slate-colored open-collared shirt contrast with his brushed-back blond hair. Despite the weight of three sets of eyes on my back, my mood lightens with genuine pleasure at the sight of the flowers and at the sight of him. He’s tall and handsome and is looking at me like he wants dessert first.
It’s me. I’m dessert.
“Mark, hi.” I accept the bouquet, lowering my nose to the wildflowers wrapped in paper. “These are lovely. Thank you.”
“Hi, Yasmen. You look…” His blue eyes gleam, heating as they roam my face and figure, and then widen when he notices my family congregated behind me in the foyer. “Ummm, great. You look great.”
“Thank you.” I don’t want to invite him in, not with the gang all here and clocking our every move. I turn, unseeingly shoving the flowers at the nearest Wade, which happens to be Josiah. “Could you put these in water for me? Thanks.”
After a hesitation, and a long look at Mark that seems to simultaneously probe and warn, he accepts. The man’s running for Congress. Does Josiah think he’ll slit my throat and stuff me in the trunk of his Tesla? He’s not my husband anymore. I know exactly how little he cares about who I’m dating. I also know how Vashti looks wearing nothing except his shirt. With that mental reminder, I check inside my clutch for essentials and turn to the spectators.
“You guys know Mr. Lancaster.” I gesture to the tall man on the porch. “Mark, my family.”
“Hi.” Mark smiles, his gaze spending more time on my children and skidding across the ex-husband awkwardly hovering and holding the flowers he brought for me.
“Hello,” Kassim says. “Where are you taking her?”
I cast a half-mortified, half-amused glance up the stairs at my son’s serious expression.
“Um, the Rail,” Mark replies. “It’s this new place a little ways north.”
“I read about that spot,” Josiah says, interest entering his eyes. He’s nothing if not a restaurateur, and the concept intrigues him. “They converted an old train into a restaurant.”
Mark’s smile loosens at the edges, his shoulders lowering a centimeter or two. “It’s getting rave reviews.”
“I heard that—”
“I’ll let you know what I think,” I say, interrupting Josiah. Then I turn back to Mark and nod to the front porch and my escape. “Ready?”
“Sure.” His grin widens, and he gestures for me to walk ahead. Sailing out to the front porch, I close the door on the watching Wades and turn to my date with a bright smile.
“Let’s go. I’m starved!”
Chapter Seventeen
Yasmen
Mark Lancaster could charm the shell off a turtle.
Classic politician, he’s got the looks, and the low, smooth voice that lulls you to lean in. Wealthy. Well-dressed.
Well-hung?
Nope. Not going there. Not finding out tonight. Baby steps. Joisah may be ready for sleepovers, but I’m not. Dinner, drinks, conversation, and maybe a kiss if I’m feeling it. A peck or some tongue, I’ll decide in the moment. Otherwise, this will be a chaste evening. The only thing I’m falling for tonight is the roasted chicken and garlic mashed potatoes on my plate.
“This food is amazing,” I say, glancing around the train repurposed as an elegant dining room. “And this place is beautiful. Great choice.”
“As the owner of one of Skyland’s best restaurants,” he says, his eyes smiling at me over the rim of his wineglass, “you’re a hard woman to impress, but I was determined.”
“My daughter would say you understood the assignment.”
“The assignment?” Confusion wrinkles his brow.
“Sorry.” I swallow the food and take a quick sip of water. “It’s something the kids say.”
“My daughter would be rolling her eyes right now that I didn’t know that.”
“You have a daughter? What’s her name? How old is she?”
“Her name is Brenna, and she’s sixteen. She hates being in the public eye for the campaign, so I try to protect her privacy. Her mother’s, too, for that matter. Neither one of them signed up for office. My ex likes to say we divorced just in time so she wouldn’t have to go through all this campaign stuff.”
“How long have you been divorced?”
“Five years,” he says. “I wasn’t the best husband or father. I generally neglected my family in favor of work. My ambition paid off, but it also cost me everything. I’m still rebuilding my life.”
“Is that what running for office is? You rebuilding?”
“Maybe some. My family was gone, and that left me with the business I’d poured everything into. I guess I found it wasn’t as satisfying as I thought it would be, and I started wondering what else there could be.”
“Well, you’ll probably get my vote,” I say, only half teasing.
“Probably?”
I laugh as he intended and shrug. “What can I say? My vote cost too many people too much for me to just give it away.”
“Seriously.” He tosses his napkin onto the table and leans forward, holding my eyes. “What concerns would you want to see addressed?”
“Many, but the thing I’m really curious about is how you plan to deal with gentrification.”
The same groups bringing money and resources into Atlanta’s historically Black communities are the same ones pushing longtime citizens out.
“I think there are solutions that can benefit all involved,” he says.
“Don’t get diplomatic on me.” My smile holds, but stiffens. “People who have lived in those communities for decades have the right to stay there if they want, not be bullied or taxed out of them, and that’s what’s happening.”
“My plan includes affordable housing for those being displaced and protections for most who live in those communities currently.”
He grins, a rakish sketch of unnaturally white teeth that’s probably been getting him in and out of trouble since high school. “We could spend the rest of the night discussing my plans for the district, but I was hoping for a night off with a beautiful woman.”
I huff out a laugh and resume eating. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrogate you.”
“Hey, if I can’t take it from my date, I’m not ready for the big stage.” He leans back in his seat. “But I can think of a better use for our time.”
His eyes wander over my face, moving to my bare shoulder and then, inevitably, as men always do, to rest on my breasts. I resist the temptation to snap my fingers and remind him that I’m up here, but what’s the use of dressing to draw his attention if I can’t enjoy it when I get it? It’s been a long time since a man looked at me this way, not counting wolf whistles and rude comments from random men on the street. This focused, sustained, intense regard heated by desire. I let it warm my skin and I return his smile.
“So I’m your first date since the divorce,” he says.
“Yes.” I raise my glass and smile at him before taking a sip. “What gave it away? The Wade welcome committee assembled in my foyer? My ten-year-old demanding to know your intentions?”
“I’m pretty sure those flowers are in the trash by now.”
I almost spit out my wine. “Why would you say that?”
He hesitates, narrowing his eyes and watching me closely before going on. “Do you mind if I ask what broke you and Josiah up? Everyone was shocked by it. You guys seemed so unshakable.”
“We were until we weren’t.” I laugh bitterly. “There’s no Richter scale for the size of our earthquakes, one after the other.”
“You loved him,” he says it as fact, not a question.
I swallow the sudden heat in my throat. “Very much.”
“And he loved you.”
I will love you until the day I die.
“Very much,” I agree, setting my wineglass down carefully and lowering my eyes.
“I know about all the loss you guys experienced, but a couple as strong as you were, I thought it would bring you together.”
“I hoped it would, but maybe we weren’t okay enough at the same time to comfort each other. I know I was…not much help with the state I was in.”
“Depressed?” he asks, his tone a gentle probe I can handle.
“Yeah.” I smile sadly at him. “Very and for a long time. I just couldn’t come out of it. Complicated grief. Depression. I’ve been told both. I was always able to get up and dust myself off, but after Byrd and Henry…I just couldn’t. I don’t really know why. My therapist says sometimes the people who are always keeping things together are the least prepared when they actually fall apart.”
“That would have been a lot for anyone. We all process loss differently.”
“Yeah, back then I didn’t understand that while I needed to be absolutely still, Josiah had to be in motion all the time, avoiding the pain I was stuck in.”
I remember the nights he’d drag himself up the steps and down the hall to the nursery, staring at me in the rocker, his weariness at a standoff with my grief-induced lassitude. Two shipwrecked souls unable to figure out how to save each other. Both sinking.
How did I turn my first date since the divorce into an autopsy of my marriage? Everything always seems to circle back to Josiah. Not tonight.
“Let’s talk about something much more pressing,” I say, flashing Mark my sweetest smile. “Dessert.”
Chapter Eighteen
Josiah
Shouldn’t you be getting ready for bed?” I ask, leaning against the doorjamb of Deja’s bedroom. She’s setting up her light and tripod like she’s preparing to record, but it’s a school night and it’s getting late.
“Shouldn’t you be headed home?” she counters. “Or are you waiting up for Mom?”
Smart-ass.
“I was helping your brother with homework.”
Deja quirks a skeptical brow. “You were helping our resident genius with homework he could literally do in his sleep?”
“And we were also talking about therapy.” I step deeper into her room. “He was telling me how things have been going with Dr. Cabbot and I was telling him about my sessions.”
“How’s it been?”
I weigh my words. Therapy may not be my bag, but based on the conversations I’ve had with Kassim, he’s enjoying it. Thinks it’s helping, and I have to agree. It’s hard for me to admit even to my thirteen-year-old daughter that maybe…just maybe…I’m getting something out of therapy too.
And what does that say about me?
“Dr. Musa’s cool,” I say.
She sets the phone down on her desk and studies me from beneath the lacy edge of her black hair bonnet, which is decked with orange and white ghosts in honor of Halloween next week.
“You guys talk about Henry?” she asks. “And Aunt Byrd?”
My jaws clamp around the answer, and I make a conscious effort to release the words because I’ve discussed this so little before.
“Yeah.” I clear my throat and sit on her bed, wanting to signal that I’m willing to talk more if she needs to. Even a few weeks ago, I probably would have found a way out of here, cut the conversation off at its knees. Something changed after discussing it with Dr. Musa, unpacking how losing my parents at such a young age damaged something in me that I’ve never acknowledged, much less repaired. It’s opened the door for us to go deeper and connect that trauma to how I processed losing Aunt Byrd and Henry.
Or how I didn’t process losing them at all, which seems to be the case.
Deja flips the chair at her desk around and straddles it, facing me.
“You were so strong when they died. You held everything together,” she says, her young features, so like her mother’s, hardening. “And Mom just fell apart. Blew everything up.”
“Deja, what did I tell you about saying things like that about your mom? She did her best. We all did. Grief looks different for everyone. You saw her as falling apart and me as strong, when maybe she was doing something I wasn’t able to do.”
I swallow and look down at my linked hands, elbows on my knees.
“Maybe she was feeling it. Accepting that they were gone when on some level I couldn’t. Doing what it took for her to heal.” I meet the dredges of resentment in Deja’s eyes. “That takes strength.”
I’m not sure I believed that when we were going through it. Did I make Yasmen feel weak? With my expectations? With my impatience to get our lives back and to move on, with my inability to deal with all we had lost, did I add to Yasmen’s pain?
“You don’t have to defend her, Dad. I was there.”
“There?” I frown at her use of the word. “Where? You were where, Day?”
Standing and turning her back to me, she flicks off the tripod light and folds the legs in. “I just meant the divorce and all that happened. I saw it for myself.”
She walks toward the bed, yawning and not looking at me.
“You’re right,” she says, turning back her comforter. “It’s late. Night, Dad.”
Did my daughter just dismiss me?
She straightens her bonnet and climbs into bed, drawing the sheer canopy suspended over her pillow and headboard, so I’m left seeing a vague shape topped with ghosts and goblins.
“Could you turn off the big light, Daddy?” she asks.
Definitely dismissed.
I don’t call her on the avoidance tactic, but make a note to get to the bottom of her resentment toward Yasmen. I can’t just put it down to typical teenage angst anymore.
I turn off the light and close the door behind me. I make my way down the stairs, pausing on the bottom step at the sound of Clint and Brock’s garage door lifting. With our next-door neighbors home, I can leave without worrying about the kids, but I don’t move.
Am I waiting up for Yasmen?
She should be home soon, right? It’s a school night.
“Bruh, she’s not sixteen,” I say as I enter the kitchen. “And you’re not her daddy.”
I stop by the dog bed in the corner of the kitchen, where Otis lies curled up and drowsing, and pat my leg for him to come. You’d think I asked him to run a marathon instead of walk with me a few blocks to our place the way he breathes wearily through his nose, refusing to rise.
“Let’s get out of here before she comes home.”
Despite my words, I walk over to the counter where I left Mark’s damn bouquet.
“Put these in water,” I say, imitating Yasmen. “The hell I will. They’ll be compost if you’re counting on me to put your shit flowers in water.”
It would be so easy to “accidentally” knock the flowers into the trash can, but that would be immature. I glance up to find Otis watching me.
“Judgmental bastard,” I mutter.
I look past the flowers to the lasagna Kassim didn’t bother putting away. It smells good. Yasmen has many talents, but culinary skills have never been among them, so I’m curious to see how this turned out. I grab a fork from the nearby drawer and scoop up a hearty sample.
“Mmmm,” I grunt, chewing through the noodles, cheese, and ground turkey. “It’s even good cold.”
Otis walks over to see for himself, so tall he can rest his head on the counter. He sniffs, staring at the glass pan and whining plaintively.
“No way,” I tell him, tugging his collar until he slides away from the counter. “All the trouble I go to following your fancy raw diet, you think I’m gonna give you lasagna? Then I’ll be the one who—”
A small screen coming to life on the wall snares my attention. The security system we installed has a few monitors in various places—living room, our bedroom, and the kitchen. The camera captures any activity on the porch in real time. I know what I’ll see when I walk over to the small monitor on the wall.
Yasmen’s home from her date. I should leave, slip out the back door and mind my business. It’s been a long damn day, and I have a networking breakfast for Black entrepreneurs at 7:00 a.m.
But I can’t make myself go.
My feet are bolted to the floor. My eyes, riveted on the screen.
I can’t hear what Yasmen and Mark are saying, but it’s the classic first-date dance. He’s nearly as tall as I am, so she has to tip her head back to laugh up at him, and it exposes the sleek column of her neck. His smile is innocent enough, but his gaze is a torch, singeing her throat, the bare line of her arm and shoulder, lingering on her breasts.
God, she looks good tonight. I mean, it’s Yasmen, so she always looks good to me, but when she answered the door, out of habit, I almost reached for her. It used to be a game with us. She’d get dressed, then do her makeup, knowing damn well I was going to smudge it when I kissed her. Knowing there was a good chance my hand would end up down her pants, taking off her bra, cupping her breasts. I couldn’t get enough of her. Couldn’t keep my hands off her.
Once.
We were once that way, and then…we were what we became in the end. Stiff. Cold. Silent.
Mark steps closer, white teeth gleaming in the warm light of the porch. He twines his fingers with hers, and my hand clenches into a fist. Why don’t I just go? This is intrusive. She deserves privacy, but I can’t stop watching what could be their first kiss. He pulls her closer, touching the small of her back with his free hand, drawing her to him until their bodies are flush.
My teeth hurt, and I realize I’m biting down hard, a low growl rumbling at the back of my throat. Otis’s ears twitch, his senses attuned to the animalistic sound. Mark is touching her in a way that, for years, only I could, and it feels wrong. It feels like I still have every right to charge out to the porch and break his hand if he doesn’t move it from the rounded sweep of her hip, the lush curve of her ass.
But I stay where I am, knowing I should leave, but unable to.
