Decadence (2 page)

Chris leaned against the wall and pulled me
close to him, nearly holding me as he asked, “What’s up? And don’t
tell me ‘nothing’ because you didn’t call me earlier to bring you
here and then request a ménage a trios with a random person for
‘nothing’. Whatever is up with you is definitely something, so
don’t lie.” He paused, caught his breath, looked at me like he
wanted to rescue me from what it was that was bothering me. Before
I could answer, he added, “It’s Scott, isn’t it?”

I let an airy laugh holding not a shred of
humor to it. “Like you wouldn’t believe, and not like you, or
anyone else, has never seen him before.”

“What is it now?” Concern etched his words
and his features.

Suddenly it was just us. The world had fallen
away; the people living it up in Oasis may as well have been a
planet away. I appreciated his concern. It was both welcome and
needed. His right hand placed firmly against my lower back was the
anchor that I felt that told me he was with me all the way. He was
a listening ear, the shoulder to cry on, the man that knew me
better than anyone. I trusted him. I trusted him a little too much
and we both knew that, but I would have it no other way.

“He’s claiming fraud,” I rubbed my neck, felt
the knot of nerves in it. Saying it out loud made it real. “He’s
saying that I misled him into thinking I’d wanted a family as much
as he did.”

“Is it true?”

“He’s half right,” I admitted. “The thing is,
I still want a family, I still want a baby one of these days, I
just don’t want any of that with him.”

“You broke his heart.”

“He fucked with mine,” I retorted. “I guess
we’re both getting what we deserve if you’re placing blame.”

“No, no. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not
placing any blame. I’m just saying…what did you expect?”

“Not this circus,” I told him. “It’s been
over a year and a half of this bull, of him fighting me. I just
want it to end. I want it over.”

Chris paused, and then he asked, “If this
fraud thing goes through, what will you get?”

I felt like laughing and crying all at once,
the urges of a crazy person. “Not a damn thing. Squat. Shit. Zero.
Zilch--”

“I get the point,” he said holding up his
hand.

“No, I don’t think you do,” my throat
tightened, but I’d cried enough over the past two years to last a
lifetime. My past relationship that wouldn’t let me breathe didn’t
deserve anymore of my tears. I refused to let the thought of Scott
ruin the smoky eye effect that had taken me a half hour to perfect
by making me cry. Fuck him. “He is worth sixty million alone; his
family fortune is just a little over a billion. And their
corporations….don’t even get me started on them.” I shook my head
and shut my eyes wishing I could wish away all my pain and hurt
feelings. “All that money, and what happens? What does he do? After
he had our prenup thrown out of court on some so-called
technically, which I didn’t even know he could do, my lawyer told
me to go for half. I refused. I didn’t want a long drawn out
battle, I wanted to be the bigger person and show him that I just
wanted what I thought I deserved for staying with him as long as I
did after finding out what I had about him.

“I went for ten million and the house. He
fought me on that till I reduced it to five million and told him he
could keep the house. Then it was two million and he acted like I
was crazy. The last amount I threw at him was a mil. One million is
nothing to him and he knows it. Settling for a million should’ve
been a relief. He paid more than that keeping us married for this
long.”

“He didn’t want to let you go.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“Yours…baby. Always. But,” he scratched his
head, looked like my dilemma was his dilemma, like we had both
shared a week from hell. “You stood by his side during that trial.
Before that, you were happily married, or something close enough to
it. I think he was looking for forgiveness.”

“Trust me, he’s one man that doesn’t deserve
to be forgiven,” I heard the darkened tone of my voice and I saw
Chris’s expression change as well.

“I take it the whole story of what happened
hadn’t been on the news.”

“Not half of what he’d done and who he really
is was on the news.”

“That bad?”

“Worse.”

That was the thing about people. Boyfriends
didn’t tell their girlfriends about all their demons, girlfriends
had their deep dark secrets and their lies, but once you were
married, once you became husband and wife, I used to think all bets
were off. Maybe I hadn’t known everything, but I’d believed I’d
known enough when I’d said ‘I do’. I was more wrong than I’d ever
thought possible.

Scott’s demons had come out of the depths of
the area of Hades they had buried themselves in and bit us both in
the ass, but his family not only had money, they had connections.
They knew powerful people in high places. They had been covering up
enough of their family’s dirt over the years to overflow a
landfill, and my (hopefully) soon-to-be ex’s troubles had been
nothing. They’d covered up the mess that could’ve tarnished their
family’s good name, but the trial had been inevitable. He’d gotten
off, though, and that was always the bottom line.

Chris talked about a broken heart, but I
seriously doubt my ex ever had one to begin with. I knew things
about him that could crush him, obliterate his reputation, ruin his
business. I thought he would’ve been happy to pay me off, have me
sign a gag order, and never see me again, but that was the thing.
He knew I wouldn’t talk. He knew me better than I cared to think.
He’d been my husband, and I still felt some sort of loyalty towards
him.

It felt unfair. I felt as if my own heart had
somehow betrayed me.

He was doing all he was to try and strong arm
me into coming back to him. He’d tried bribes at first, promises,
you name it and it came out of his mouth or in emails, or in
letters sent by snail mail. He wanted me back, he wanted me to
change my mind, but that wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t going to
be with him again knowing what I knew now. I couldn’t fuck him, sex
him, make love to him ever again. Not in this lifetime or any
other. What we had was over, and it was time to bury it the way his
family had buried his misdeeds.

Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I
had the nagging feeling that maybe, just maybe, Scott had a point.
Not that he truly knew that he did.

Ever since he’d thrown out those fraud
allegations against me I’d begun to think about all the things I’d
been indulging in now, some of the secrets I’d kept from him all
along, of my desires, of a part of myself that had laid dormant for
years because it was safer to keep it that way. My secrets wouldn’t
send me to prison, but there other ways of punishing people on
earth--and if you believed in it, after leaving the earth as
well--for some of the things I was partaking in. There was the
possibility that if he knew who I really was, what I really did
during my free time post relationship with him, maybe he wouldn’t
like me so much either.

“Leila, we don’t have to go back in there and
do this,” Chris’s tone was reasonable and reassuring. “We can just
go back to my place and talk--”

I waved my hand, indicating that he may as
well not even suggest it. Not rudely, just enough to let him know
that I wanted to stay right where we were, that I had every
intention of going through with what we’d started earlier--on the
prowl, the hunt, seeking prey. We may as well have been in the
jungle, a king and queen, a lion with his lioness.

“Does it sound like I want to wallow in what
I’m going through with Scott?”

“Is it healthy to pretend it isn’t
happening?”

“I’m not pretending, I just want…relief,” I
said to him.

He nodded, leaning his head back against the
cool concrete of the parking garage wall.

I was being selfish. He had his crap to deal
with as well. I knew that better than anybody.

I moved closer to him, put my hand against
his neck, stroked it, leaned in and kissed him on the forehead.
Leaned back far enough to look into his eyes again while I cupped
his face.

“How was your week, baby?” I asked him
softly.

“Valerie.”

One word, one name, one person in each of our
lives dangling nooses around our necks aching for us to take that
one step forward so we could hang ourselves. There were two people
in each of our lives eager to suck the life out of us.

“What’s the Wicked Bitch doing now?” I asked
him, venom in my voice towards Valerie. She was always doing
something; she never stopped, never slowed down, the consummate
drama queen who was psycho to boot.

I wouldn’t have ever thought half the things
Valerie had done over the years were real if I hadn’t seen most of
it with my own two eyes or heard it with my own ears. I would
probably find a few of her antics comical if she weren’t causing
someone I loved so much pain.

“She wants to move to Chicago of all places.”
Chris said as his voice seemed heavier, older somehow in just a few
seconds of saying those nine little words.

“What? Why?”

“Her father lives there.”

“Oh.”

“Valerie’s father, Rick, who she claims is
ill,” Chris explained. “Rick is also the father she’s always told
me she hated, and who she told me she’d never visit dead or alive.
Now she’s saying he’s ill and she’s getting sentimental enough to
want to go back and make amends. She thinks that she should be the
one to go back to Chicago and take care of him. And,” his tone
sounded weighted down, his eyes were sad in the dim lighting, he
held onto me tighter than he’d been holding on before. “She thinks
Chimene should know her grandfather.”

From another person those words would be
heart wrenching, tear inducing. Understandable and commendable. But
those words had come from Valerie, a master manipulator. Something
else was up.

“What’s the underlying message behind that?”
I asked.

He gave way to a sad smile. A weary smile. A
smile that said he felt as if the world were on his shoulders.

“She wants a new house,” he said. “We got
into an argument over it about two months ago. After she laid out
her sob story for me I checked the market listings and it’s still
up for sale.”

I could tell by the look on his face that
he’d been backed into a corner. He didn’t have to tell me he was
going to give in and buy it.

I asked the only question worth asking at the
moment. “How much is it?”

He sucked in a deep breath, shut his eyes,
practically exhaled the number, “Four hundred.”

My mouth hung open and I couldn’t close
it.

“Is she joking?” I asked, unable to say
anything else at the moment.

“I don’t know anybody who jokes about four
hundred grand, buying a house, or taking away somebody’s kid.”

“She’s using Chimene as a bargaining chip
again.”

“She’s always used our daughter to get what
she wanted out of me since we broke up.”

Chris was bringing home a decent annual
income and he was a good man that wanted to take care of his
daughter and the mother of his child, but his hard work and good
intentions seemed to be working against him. He lived in a nice
modest house in a part of our city between the urban streets where
we both grew up and the land of suburbia where most people strived
to live once they started families and wanted stability and good
education for their offspring. Valerie and Chimene lived in an
upscale townhouse downtown that transcended either neighborhood and
put them in a class of their own. It was the townhouse that Chris
and Valerie had lived in for nearly four years before their
breakup, and only a year after Chimene was born, and he had given
it to Valerie, waved the white flag of defeat and surrendered the
place he’d bought with his hard earned cash to the women in his
life. Moved out. Moved away, but hadn’t moved too far. Only went
back to see his child.

But that was never enough, not for Valerie.
Not for what she considered to be her family; and whether Chris
liked it or not, when he’d laid down with Valerie and had Chimene
with her he’d made them a family. They’d helped create a life and
brought a child into the world and they would forever be linked by
her. Valerie wanted Chris, but she was determined that if she
couldn’t have him nobody else was going to get him. No other woman
was going to call Chris her man if she couldn’t.

Valerie had covered the clichéd maneuvers in
making her ex’s life a living hell: Bricks through windows, slashed
tires, public screaming matches that only accomplished to humiliate
the parties involved. Then she pumped up the volume. Broke into his
old apartment in the nice building he’d been living in at the time,
trashed it and left him a note. Not too long after that she’d
claimed Chimene was missing just to get Chris to come over. She’d
kept driving him to court for more child support; she put Chimene
in the most expensive daycare she could find and then the most
expensive private preschool. Then came the even more expensive
private schools the older she got along with the private tutoring.
And she made Chris pay for it all in addition to the sky high child
support he was already dishing out. Any girlfriend, or potential
girlfriend, that came into Chris’s life Valerie threatened them to
the point where their sanity and well being wasn’t worth losing
over a close association with a guy they hardly knew no matter how
sexy or smart or kind he was. And he is all of those things. Sure,
he has his flaws, but he’s a good man who had a baby with the wrong
woman. Or, in this case, the wrong crazy bitch.

Having Valerie in his life had scared him so
bad he’d had a vasectomy. No more kids. He had enough drama in his
life. Chimene, his little lady, was all he wanted and needed.