Chardonnay: A Novel Page 4

  “Tell me,” he began softly

  “We can handle whatever it is...we’re stronger than that.”

  I hesitated with soundless attempts and then huffed out,

  “I—I don’t know if you’re ready to hear it.”

  He took his time before he answered,

  “What do you mean?” His pupils grew and his tone became strained. I swallowed hard and wondered were his faith in us “handling it” had went.

  “What I’m trying to say is that something won’t let me...commit myself totally to you.”

  “Commit, baby what do you mean—that’s what you’ve been doing.” he chuckled as if what I just said was a minor issue that could be fixed.

  “That’s right. I’ve been the committed one...until recently.”

  He became silent. Then his breathing became unsteady as his face turned completely flushed. Myron got out the car and started walking towards the lake. I jumped out after him.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “To kill myself, because if you talking about what I think you are, I won’t be able to take it.”

  Myron stood on the edge of the rock waiting for me to tell him something different. I didn’t speak. He stared at his image in the water. Wanted to become that image in the water of himself. I touched his elbow and pulled him to me.

  “I—I know that this is out of character for me, but, there’s so many things that we haven’t talked about.”

  He still stared out at the water and didn’t speak.

  “I want a love that treasures can’t be spent. At least by anyone else but me.”

  “That water,” he began.

  “I see you floating in it every day. I—I can’t jump out there and get you be—because my body is paralyzed.”

  I frowned my eyebrows and glanced over his face. A face so blank as it looked to the lake that I didn’t think his soul was present.

  “What, what do you mean you see me in water?”

  “I know what you’re thinking...I’m crazy right?” he said finally looking at me in the face.

  “No, but from what you say about my dreams, I would think you wouldn’t have—”

  “Have you ever noticed how real dreams can seem? It’s like, when I wake up the first thing I do is call you...” he said as he leaned on a tree trunk that limbs and leaves hovered over us like a grandmother’s warm protective arms.

  “You just started doing that. Two months ago.” I said wondering why I was getting morning calls from Myron now more than ever in the past.

  “Yeah. But mine isn’t a dream while I’m asleep. It’s... a day dream. I can’t escape you...you floating from me.”

  I stood in front of him. His serious, one raised brow, stark face staring back at me. A breeze blew around us. Hugging us. Pushing us closer together. My eyes welled, confirming his fear. Just abruptly as my tears fall, Myron’s body sluggishly fell to my feet. His head nestling between my thighs, and sheer groans and cries of hurt leaving his lungs. They then turn to a loud scream. An aggravated, horrible scream. I almost thought he was dying.

  “I—I was right there—but I couldn’t save you!” Myron said leaving me lost.

  “Save me from what?”

  He looked up at me. His nose now turned up and anguish rinsing his tears away. He stood from my feet and began talking to himself.

  Then he broke down again swinging in mid-air at nothing. Whatever he was doing, I knew he was battling himself. Myron sat on a rock close to the water. His deep curls and waves in his hair sparkled off the sun. I sat down beside him.

  “I’m sorry.” I said.

  He didn’t respond. He just kept throwing rocks.

  We sat there silent for twenty minutes before he spoke again, suddenly asking,

  “Who is he?”

  I felt the second storm about to roll in as I closed my eyes and slowly said,

  “Slim.”

  He looked at me, his eyes blinking repetitively. His face became stone, his stare mirroring betrayal beyond belief.

  “Slim?” he asked.

  I nodded my head yes.

  “Sky? Nah, not my boy.” he chuckled until he saw that I was serious.

  “It—it just happened.”

  “When?”

  “I—I—”

  “WHEN—DAMNIT?! How could you do this...now I see what this all is about. Him.”

  “No, I don’t want to marry you because of your scandalous ways.”

  “I changed and I’ve told you this.”

  I laughed at him making him sneer at me a hateful glance.

  “You are full of it!”

  He looked at me, his nose flared and eyes dilated.

  “Tell me what happened?” his voice strained.

  “I don’t know. Time changed us? It seemed you never really cared either.”

  Although I could see the hurt in his face, I couldn’t hear it in his voice. In fact his voice was now calm and in a state of tranquil it seemed. I readjusted my attitude towards him, balancing the faults of his habituating past with my now, as he was making it seem, “malleable promiscuity”. I simply just wanted my freedom.

  “I thought you loved me,” he began as his voice cracked.

  “Was down for me!” his hand gripped my wrist tightly.

  “Myron you’re hurting me. I do love you!”

  “I told you I was sorry. Damn!”

  Myron grabbed both of my arms tightly.

  “Yeah, we gone get through this...we’ll handle it a’ight, ‘cause we gettin’ fuckin’ married! I know what I got to do!”

  He picked me up and tracked over to his truck, kicking the earth’s rocks and dirt under his fuming

  Tim’s. One of my Jimmy Choo’s stiletto heels fell off my foot, but Myron kept tracking towards the Escalade. He swung open the door and placed me on the plush leather of his backseat.

  “Put me down! Stop. What are you doing?” I shrieked.

  “One of the things I cherished about you was that you were a virgin. That’s why I didn’t want to tamper with you—but they made me . . .made...” Myron’s words faded into his aggression and he began to hold back the tears forming in his eyes. He continued his ranting while looking me in my face. I wanted to know who they were and why he had hesitated with his words.

  “What—what you are talking ab—”

  “I loved knowing I wouldn’t run into no other dude who had had my wife before. And I fucked that up!” he said cutting me off and seemingly bringing condemnable faults to himself for my actions.

  Myron had tears strolling down his face and forcefully tried to kiss me. He unzipped my khaki cargo short shorts, pulled them down, and hiked up my legs.

  “Oh God no, please Myron stop! Stop!” I said as I hit him. At first I didn’t yell too loud. I loved him. I thought he was just trying to scare me. But when he ripped my panties off, when he pushed my shirt up and ripped my bra off, revealing my erect nipples—I knew he had lost it. I screamed to the top of my lungs but he just covered my mouth.

  “You don’t want to kiss me?”

  Everything swarmed around me and began to go in slow motion. Everything I knew was now void...sound, taste, sight, emotion. And then Deja vu’ held me in a crypt. Panic washed over my body and Myron began to cry harder as he unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants. I screamed through his palm over my mouth and tried to bite his hand. Never thought he would go this far. I thought he loved me. Then I thought maybe he was doing this because he loved me. Then I stopped fighting.

  Myron climbed on top of me and tried in go inside my walls. He took his hand off my mouth and covered it with his mouth. I moved my face and pulled my hips back.

  “Myron, don’t do this.” I begged and then I fought, but he just buckled down his chest on me. I couldn’t move to save my life.

  That’s when I felt it. Him in my womb searching for a solution to my dishonor to him. Ripping, tearing, while my head was hitting the door handle while he was thrusted in me. His p
anting squeezed stronger as he began pacifying my panic, whispering,

  “It’s okay, I gotta do this for your own good. Feel it, okay, take it baby.”

  And I did. My nails stopped clawing at the back of his amber skin and instead I felt a different throbbing in my womb I had never felt before. Butterflies in a sense, rippling throughout my entire body. This feeling I was experiencing contradicted to his primary actions and instead I welcomed a fey euphoria I knew would change my innocence forever.

  4

  Fearfully in Love

  “She’s a beautiful girl.” his father began.

  Myron looked up from his feet to his father’s face.

  “But, you know if you touch her, things might not ever be the same, son.”

  “I—I know that pops but that’s the chan—”

  “NO. You will not take that chance. Under no circumstances. She’ll feen it if you let her understand the body’s weakness of the flesh. And then you’ll regret it and have to take back what you took...you know how to do that?”

  Myron shook his head no. But he looked away as if he knew and didn’t want to hear his father say it again.

  “You’ll have to rape her.”

  “What?” said Myron in a tone that told his father what he was saying was ridiculous.

  “Rape—her.”

  “And what does that do?”

  “It makes her understand who belongs to who, and what belongs to who.

  It drawls back her submissive manners to what they were before you touched her flesh. If she’s ever to lead astray... you take her against her own will and that will make her obey.”

  I could hear those words in my mind still. It wasn’t too long ago I had accepted them in my cerebrum. As a child I was taught to speak only when spoken to and to question nothing. Had I done that, I may not of been laying here now, my clothes ripped to shreds, hair in disrepair, and heart torn out my chest. As my golden eyes stared to the cerulean sky, the only thing I could see from me being on the bare of my back, I thought of the first time I heard his father say those words.

  Myron and I were laying in his king sized bed that resided in his childhood bedroom of his parent’s home during winter break on New Year’s Eve of 2005, and us being cuddled up together tight with no clothes on. This was the farthest we had gone as far as sex went and somehow Myron had found his way to the depths of my pleasure zone. He was so close to getting some of my, dripping wet with juices, peach, sliding his chilled index finger down the opening of my labia and sucking my sensitive spot on the side of my neck. Almost, until his parents came home and found us with no sheets covering our naked bodies. We had been so into each other that we didn’t even hear them enter the home or pull into the drive way which we had always been keen to hearing. I was far beyond embarrassed and ashamed, from hearing all the stories Mrs. Lim-Kent had told my mother over many brunches of how girls just threw themselves at Myron, and of how proud she was of me for holding onto my virginity and not being a promiscuous girl dropping my panties for Myron. And as well with the arranged marriage, there was an agreement during a ceremony when we were seventeen and eighteen that there would be no sex before marriage.

  After Myron and I had been caught, we had quickly gotten dressed and Mrs. Lim-Kent took me to the family room while Myron was taken to the huge garage with his father. They talked to us both separately and then together. However, before Mrs. Lim-Kent and I’s talk began, she let me go to the restroom to get myself together. The rest room was off the kitchen in a small hallway leading from the family den, and the garage door, which was creaked open and horizontal from it. I could see Myron as I peeked through with his clothes halfway on right. His button down Oxford shirt was lopped sided and his jeans were baggy from his belt being displaced. His father’s voice was one that traveled far.

  As he began talking I could see how frigid Myron’s body language was, yet how relaxed his face seemed, and how I couldn’t believe what my ears were hearing.

  All I knew at that moment was that I was so scared I couldn’t move. My body felt dead and my weight buried itself to my feet. Mr. Kent face told me he was dead serious, and that shall anything disburse from my actions, those were the doctor’s orders. Myron was however, rebellious to these actions. He stepped back while saying,

  “Pops, that—that’s not right.”

  “You gotta teach your woman right. Ain’t saying you’ll have to do it because Chardonnay seems like a nice home trained young woman...but I saw her body at its purest tonight. And she’ ripe and fresh as a baby born on a summer day, son. You got you a sweet little pussy right there,”

  I couldn’t see Myron after he had backed up, stepping out of seeing view. But I could see Mr. Kent’s face. He was licking the edge of a cigar while he pranced about how ripe my body was. He lit the cigar, inhaled it and finished,

  “...you pop that cherry now, before she takes her vowels, and its seeds will sprout in other gardens.”

  The shuffles of Myron’s feet headed towards the door. However, they stopped when Mr. Kent’s gun cocked. I took a deep breath trying to figure out why a gun was necessary for this occasion. Why would he pull a gun out on his son?

  “You listen when I talk to you boy. Don’t you ever turn you back on a man. You’ll never know what he might put in it. Man or woman. Knife or bullet. And I don’t want you fuckin’ in my house with that girl in particular. You want to fuck her, get your own shit. If you planning on marrying her anyway.

  But you got some smut or a milf,” Mr. Kent chuckled.

  “Fuck ‘em in your room here...they don’t deserve the decency and privacy of a shack...they hoe’s. You hear me?”

  I didn’t hear Myron’s response. I just assumed he had nodded yes, especially when he had gotten that penthouse that year in downtown Kansas City for 1.2 million dollars. Whatever the case, I couldn’t hear anymore. I returned back to the den were Mrs. Lim-Kent waited, never to go to the restroom to get myself together. She didn’t ask me what had taken so long or why I had a look of despair on my face. All she did was walk over to me, sit down beside me on the love seat, and rubbed my back. During the talk where Myron and I were in the room together, I was crying the whole time. My parents weren’t called and Mrs. Lim-Kent let me stay at their home in the guest room, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. She assured me that she wasn’t mad at me and that when the love is good, sometimes two people can’t help but want to express it in the most intimate way. She didn’t tell me that sometimes people couldn’t help but express it in the most demoniacal way nevertheless.

  Now he lay atop me gazing into my eyes, full of fear, lust, pain and then he. . . stopped. He suddenly came to and looked shocked, realizing his insanity and scooped my flaccid body into his arms holding me tight as my tears fell through my eyes. Like nothing I’d ever seen Myron attempt to do, he tried to pray to God. He wasn’t a God fearing man and that’s when I saw it in his eyes—there was something he wanted to say.

  “Oh Lord, what did I do? I—I don’t know what to do. Tell me—please tell me.”

  He let me go and sat quiet in the back seat staring off at nothing. Suddenly he let go of a building outburst.

  “Aaaahhh! Damn I can’t believe you!” he screamed.

  Myron looked over at me with so much anger and hurt.

  “You don’t love me or sumthin’?” he whispered, through clinched teeth.

  “Do-you-know-what-you’ve-just-done to me?! And you’re asking me if I love you are not? How dare you!” I hollered through my tears.

  Myron retorted his hate written eyes out the window. A man could not take defeat.

  He could not take any form of defiance. His ego was hurt. His heart was hurt. Although through unfortunate circumstance, I could finally tell he truly loved me. If this is what you called love. Young and with the first. I was his first love as well. Hardest fucking break-up in the history of mankind to get over. He climbed to the front seat and then asked,

  “You coming up here?” he
said

  I got out the car, limping, and got in the passenger seat, but Myron didn’t start the car.

  “What was the good news you had to tell me?” I asked curiously remembering what his mother asked before we went out the door.

  “You really want to know?” his tone taut and frank.

  “What is it?” I said in an annoyed high pitched tone.

  “I’m in the NFL draft. First round pick. Top ten, number two.”

  I inhaled and then exhaled his good news and looked straight ahead on, my middle throbbing and burning.

  “You don’t care.” he asked.

  “No...but that’s good for you.”

  “It ain’t if I don’t have you to share it all with.” he said as he looked at me with his glassy, blood shot red eyes.

  Tears rolled down his face again. As a young impressionable girl, that sounded really tempting. But I had been accustomed to all the delicacies Myron could provide me. For example: his world renowned trip to Italy we took in his senior year of high school, his caviar dinner’s in the summer time at his parents time share in Montego Bay. Or even this past Valentine’s day gift of a red and silver Coach purse with matching heels. When I opened the damned purse a week later I found a platinum ring with a red crushed diamond forming a C on it. Myron got a kick out of wondering how long it would take me to realize it was in there.

  Of course I was a little taken aback that he hadn’t told me it was in there, yet I lost my fudging mind once I found it and promised I would never let him go. Even knowing he had flaws. But...not this time. I was standing my ground.