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  CHARDONNAY

  A Novel

  JACQUILYNN MARTINE

  Omnipresent Sky Publishing

  Kansas City, MO

  Chardonnay: A Novel

  by Jacquilynn Martine

  Copyright © 2013 Jacquilynn Martine

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  First Printing – April 2013

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-60047-856-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013936035

  EXCEPT FOR BRIEF TEXT QUOTED AND APPROPRIATELY CITED IN OTHER WORKS, NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM, BY PHOTOCOPYING OR BY ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL MEANS, INCLUDING INFORMATION STORAGE OR RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE COPYRIGHT OWNER/AUTHOR.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  “Sometimes God has to drop us off the cliff in order for us to learn how to spread our wings and fly. So as the wind picks up and blows I hear it sing, Fly girl Jai. Fly!”

  ~Jacquilynn Martine

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Dear Heavenly Father…three words: You are excellent! I cannot explain or put into words how much you mean to me. I thank you daily for this passion you have put in me to be able to make people laugh, cry, think provokingly, feel convicted for change or just simply relate to human life. Thank you Lord—thank you. Hallelujah, I praise your name! Secondly, I would like to thank a very special man in my life, my love Vincent Edwards. From the day you met me, you believed in me. We are blessed to be able to share this gift of writing in this life together. I admire your determination for your purpose in this life, our family, and the rare unconditional love you feed me daily. I never go malnourished. I didn’t know love until the day I. Met. You. You have pushed me and I surely call you the baby daddy of this book LOL. What an abundant blessing you are. Infinity and beyond ;-) To my children, Airi and D.J…I see all the wonders of this world when I look into both of your beautiful eyes. I see the imagination, surprise, magic, rainbows, stars and secrets of the universe from which a child’s heart beats. You both have been my motivation and inspiration. Mommy thanks you for loving me even when I’m in my writing hibernation mode. The sacrifices I have made have been for you and your future and to prove to you that you can be whatever you want to be in life. This is my testament to never give up on your dreams no matter how hard, how long they take, how crazy they may seem. Mommy loves you both more. I thank my family as well, my cousin Fatima, my very first reader who is boldly honest and told me, “You have a best seller! Now give me part two.” And especially my mom who kept asking, “When are you going to publish that book?” The time is now mom LOL.

  To my fans, supporters, and friends thank you for reading what many would call, my book. But I call the story of Chardonnay my baby. Some writers take weeks, months, or just a few years to write their book. The birth of this story took a decade. In so many ways I’m attached to not only Chardonnay, but all of the characters in this novel. I have grown with them and watched them unfold before my eyes. While writing this story I have experienced many lives it seems. I’ve been the young girl fighting to have a voice. I’ve been the lady fighting to feel liberated, and I’ve been the vulnerable woman hunting for my strength and fighting for my soul. To have a place in this world and to have a “purpose” is all we as human beings really want. In the beginning I just had a love for words and a thing for dancing with sentences. But what turned from a hobby into a passion of mine, would create its very own destiny. One that God had to pull me to the side very many times and say, keep going…your almost there. So for the many women who are bound and still trying to find their way whether it be in the projects of an urban city trying to feed your babies, maybe the house wife held down by the restraints and duties that engulf her identity, or the woman from the third world country hungry for an education and life with normalcy, Chardonnay is for you…sip slowly, let her marinate, and unwind. Let her courage be your light on the path to victory.

  1

  I’m Not Me

  March 2006

  Joplin, Missouri

  Lincoln University

  As fear panics my face I open my eyes to the bright iridescent lights above me. The sounds of beeping machines and silence engulf my conscience and I wince at the pain inside my body. My mouth forms an O, however no words pass through. I lean up to try and pull the IV out my arm but as if they knew my great escape plans, a nurse rushed in and gently pushed me back. She tells me everything is going to be okay and that my family would be on their way for me in the morning. I fight, beg, and plead for her to release me yet there is no appeal and five other nurses come to the nurse’s aide and restraints are placed on my wrist and ankles. For hours I cry and wonder why I am here and after my cries were not heard my body grew tired; I drifted off to sleep. I fly off into a deep sleep and hear the torment but unsure from where. I see shadows lurking over me dancing to the devils drum as they taunt my soul. They beg for my soul while they do things I can’t understand. As much as I fight it seems the battle is not mine to win.

  I run away from the danger. Fast. Breathing hard as I come upon a wheat field. As I stand in the stark shadows of a wheat stalk, hiding, crying, floating with time on each electric impulse, I am now of my mind’s imaginable euphoria.

  The winds of my breath slightly ease away each cuticle from the stem of a dandelion nestled in my small palm. My eyes look on in wonderment as its seed floats from me, lifting its self-up and far away into life’s being. Even as a child I knew my existence was meant for more. The rustling of hard footfalls startle me into the fear I just thought I’d let go with that seed of life rushing from me. And that’s when I saw him. I look up to see eyes, eyes that have never seen me before. Their slanted slits drew curiosity. The hand of these eyes reached out for me and that one gesture alone changed my life forever. As this little boy helped me back through the dusk settling into night, I found myself looking back searching for that dandelion seed long gone from this place I wanted to leave as well. I couldn’t help but want the strange boy leading the way to let me go and be free to fly away just as it had done. But he stopped and turned to face me. Even then his features stirred an emotion in me I couldn’t understand to be called love later on. And there in the silent wilderness and the darkness swallowing our short statures whole, he says to me,

  “What’s your name?”

  “Why you gotta know?” I responded back.

  Even as a child he was perfect, his eyebrows frowning and a sheer awkwardness panicking his puppyish face.

  “It’s ‘why do you have to know’.”

  “Whatever.” I say with the swirl of my hand. At seven-years-old I didn’t know what ghetto was and what it meant to most people. As a matter fact, I didn’t grow up in the ghetto. But just from his drawn reaction I knew I wasn’t like most children, he knew that as well. He gently smiled and said, “I’ll never let you go, okay. Just follow me and I’ll lead the way.”

  I nodded my head and took his words literally from the time we were children to now, as adults putting the frames to our picture perfect lives. And without notice I can still remember those very first words he spoke to me as flashes throw me into a harbored trap...

  ...Him perspiring, throbbing, thrusting, while on top of me. Whispering candy coated words of him wanting my flesh and his to be entangled raw. He never listens to my plead to wear a rubber since he knows the dick he’s already pushing in me is a good sampler of a lust I can’t distrust. The slight tingle of his fleshy tongue slowly drifts down the mid-drift of my stomach pumping slow, yet hard in and out of my radiated womb. I gasped for leveled stamina. I had never been this hypnotized. The room twirled around and I cried moans of pain. I wished that he would stop making his territory permanent, but I wished
that he would go deeper.

  He hit my soul, making me cry harder. He kissed my tears away. This durance was inescapable. My legs hung in the balance of me moving from a girl to an official woman. “Ah, I’m coming!” he belts out. My tears slow their flow, in shock from what he just said. I could never make it to the Atlantic and English Channel now. Our natural scents fill the air, intertwining into one scent, making me feel closer to him. He moved from me. His cum is sticky and warm, pouring out of me and trickling down my behind to the crease were my meaty thighs meet and down my shaking legs. I didn’t move, scared to step into the future. He go gets a towel, comes back, and cleans me. He turns on the shower, gesturing his head for me to come his way. Once I get up and move to the bathroom door, he picks me up and carries me to the tub. We engage again in this wet sin and I never blink twice because I love this man.

  I awake gasping for air and come face to face with the doctor and nurse. They check my vitals and the doctor takes a light to my eyes, asking me to look above his head. Once he is done he signs some paper work and hands it to the nurse as he trots out the room. She gives a meek smile and tells me I will be released today. However I am confused as to why I am here in the first place. I hear a commotion outside my hospital room and a few moments later my parents walk in. My mother walked over to me and touched my head.

  “Chardonnay, sweetie, are you okay?” she stated.

  I blink my eyes and ask, “Why am I here? How did I get here?”

  She looks over at my father and he gives an apologetic smile.

  “Honey that does not matter. What matters is that you get well.” He calmly says.

  I nod my head and listen on to my mother tell my father that I need to get back to school and that they need to gather my things.

  My father appears surprised at my cooperation and we prepare to go home.

  * * * *

  May 2006

  When I was born, my eyes were a blue and my hair was the color of spun gold. My hair was a rare gold blond hair, even for a Creole child. My mother told me my eyes changed like a chameleon every day. One morning she woke up and they were just plain gold. As radiant as the color of my hair. That was the morning they named me. For three months I had been a child without a name...can you believe that? Needless to say that’s how stubborn my mother could be.

  Like most Black little girls, I thought of my eyes and locks as . . . pretty. The prettiest a black girl could get. My gold hair wouldn’t stop growing and I strayed from any red coats and hoods in fear of being called Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks. One day, at the age of six, I got a reality check about myself. I was coming from ballet practice with my mother. We stopped by a local McDonald’s and two women were in line behind us. I couldn’t stay still and my patience was sheer to none. One of the women caught me staring at her. She was startled by me and winced her eyes at me. She bent down and said,

  “You are the prettiest black little girl I’ve ever seen.”

  My cocoa skinned mother snapped her neck around at the woman while I smiled at her. I was used to being called pretty. It was nothing new to me. But to my mother it was insulting. Her hair was jet black and her eyes were the color of the Earth’s richest soil.

  I viewed her as pretty, but she opened my eyes that day. Said not everyone thought of her that way. She pulled me to the front of her and we walked out of McDonald’s that day without my happy meal. And this child was not happy. When we got to the car she swung me around and pressed her hands on my shoulders.

  “You listen to me. And you listen to me good. Don’t you ever let anyone tell you that you’re the prettiest anything especially of your own race. She doesn’t know shit about you or where you get those gold ass locks of hair and glowing hazel eyes from.”

  I whined back saying, “But I thought—”

  “You thought wrong.” She said cutting me off.

  I cried in her face. She didn’t console me or tell me why she was in frantic mode. It wouldn’t be until years later I would get what my mother meant. It wouldn’t be until years later I would get tired of people telling me I had the pretty hair. You see, that woman was a white woman. She debased my culture, and even though she told me I was beautiful, she told me I was ugly all in the same sentence. Told me my beauty was close to what was emphasized in the magazines that only showed blue eyes, eyes I was born with, and blond hair, hair that I was two shades of color away from. In that light, it helped to hang around girls of indifferent yet diverse back grounds. Zasmyth’s family was right out of Jamaica. None of her ancestors were slaves, and she had a hint of the accent. Katura was an African queen from Ethiopia, or she carried herself that way. Her skin was dark as night and as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Fianna was . . . at first glance white. But if you asked her she would tell you she was African. And she was. From Berber, Africa. She was like my fish in the pond, and was down with the pound. Konstance, my cousin, was the All-American girl. Did the latest dances before anyone, owned the latest gadget before anyone, and was the sweetest one out of any of us. It may have been because of her baby face and the fact that she was the youngest at the age of nineteen. Life hadn’t hit her in the face yet.

  Being a college girl didn’t prepare me for automatic success. I was ranked top of my class, with all the qualities of a poignant adolescent, seemingly to the outside world, that culturally mistaken my skin for the next of impossible kin. To some that was supposed to make me special...looking white, being light skinned, or high yellow. And I hadn’t grown mentally into my nearly perfect measurements of 38, 28, 42 that could make a Coke bottle go flat. But unlike most easily absorbed young women, I was not a sponge. I was a brick. No one could change my view on me even with what was brought upon me in the past months of my life.

  My fiancé, Myron Kent, is a newly Magna Cum Laude graduate from Howard University with a pending NFL contract in his hands. He’s a six foot even Adonis and has everything a girl . . . or groupie could want. Our history goes back to ancient times. As sapient as I was about his ways, I held on for more destructive blows to my muscular organ. A heart disease I was causing and fighting silently, to discourage his blood vessels inside of me to never supply my heart again. Or I could say it was my need to feel as if I had control of my own life. Either way, I did the most destructive thing I could to gain power back of my life. I did everything I could so far to rebel from what people projected on me. I joined a sorority, kept my grades up to where anyone would hire me (even Donald Trump), and died my hair a different color it seemed every month. I was a normal girl, but to society I was obscure. When I woke up this morning I fought with myself about how I would break the news to him. News of a pent up tension I couldn’t hold anymore.

  “Chardonnay, get the phone!” hollered Zasmyth from the dorm bedroom. She was my college dorm roommate as well. “I’m not here.” I said rushing out the shower with a towel around me, and tripping over Jimmy Choo’s shoes I took off the night before, leaving them for death traps in the morning.

  “Well, mi not lying for you an-t-more.” She said throwing me our cordless phone. It nearly slipped through my hands, contrasting from its slick texture.

  My fiancé was in town and looking for an opportunity to tell me how much he missed me, but I needed to tell him about my sudden change of heart. I looked at the caller I.D. and saw the name Mychale Kent. He was at his parent’s home.

  “You know you’ll have to tell him anyway, right?” said Zasmyth dryly as I walked towards my bed. She was one of my closest best friends from my childhood. She was damn near like a sister to me and told me the truth and the whole truth. Zasmyth was tall, approximately five foot eight inches, with thick, shoulder length fire truck red hair that had caramel highlights. Her complexion was light brown and her attitude was a nonsense razor sharp wave that would hit anyone who wanted to crash it. Zasmyth was tough. She had to be. Her mother worked hard to get her and her sister Zourtni out the hood after they came here from Jamaica. She grew up on 26th street and Prospect. The
Dirty South of Kansas City, Missouri’s metro area. Her mother sent her to Pembroke Hill elementary and we’ve been close ever since. So her frame of mind was feed when in need. Be it her stomach or some chick’s face. But with one glance of her beauty and grace, you would guess she was a proper, home trained young woman. She had class like that.

  “I’m not sure if I’m strong enough.”

  “What do you mean? If your unhappy, your unhappy.” she said not understanding my frame of mind. She was all for me dumping Myron.

  I couldn’t help that I was confused about this decision in my life along with the added tension of learning to release the old and get in with the new. New for me would turn Myron’s life around. New for me was his best friend Skylar aka Slim. I wanted to relish in the thought of me leaving Myron was not because of another guy. Although I knew more than anything I wanted to find myself, I also knew there was more out there to see and men who would appreciate me more than Myron could began to. I didn’t know the thing I had for Slim. The boy was smooth at six foot three inches, with cocoa skin, a runner’s body, dimpled baby face and hair the softest of new born tresses that cascaded down his back.

  His infatuation with me turned from concern after seeing Myron do me wrong to sincere care. I glanced over at Zasmyth who was putting on her True Religion jeans and said,

  “Right, but...then I think that it may be me just having cold feet. I would ask that you or Konnie tell him for me but I need to be a woman about this. I don’t want him to find out from someone else.”

  She smirked at me, “I bet Slim would tell him...”

  We became silent.

  “Like I said, he needs to hear this from me.”