“No, Zack. You got to promise me that you’ll never tell anybody about this. We can’t talk about this. Please, Zack, promise me.”
“No, Angelique, I can’t promise you that. And you have to talk to somebody who can help you talk about what happened to you. That’s the only way you’re gonna get past it, is to deal with it. You can’t hide from it anymore. You gotta let it out. You just said you feel better now that you told me.”
“That’s you. I can’t talk about this with a complete stranger. It’s too hard.”
“I’ll be with you every minute, baby.”
We sat up for hours talking about what he did to her and how it made her feel. How she couldn’t believe that her mother didn’t know what was going on. Angelique became withdrawn and fearful. She would cry for no reason. Her mother never questioned why Angelique had an intense dislike for him and was afraid to be left alone with him.
I always wondered, and could never understand why a man would do that to a child. How anybody could betray that trust children naturally have.
I was glad that she was finally able to tell me about this. At that point, I felt closer to Angelique than I have at any time in our relationship. I thought about Tyhedra and Maritza and what I had done, and it was then that I realized that my dream wasn’t to have wild sex with two women, my dream was always to have wild sex with the woman that I was so in love with—my wife.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chris
I didn’t know how I got down here, and at this point, it didn’t matter. The real question was how I was going to get up. I could figure out how I ended up in my empty bedroom, lying flat on my back, later.
I tried to get up. Every time I raised my head it hurt, and the room started spinning. “Okay, bad idea.” Maybe if I could roll over, I could crawl over to the door and pull myself up by the doorknob.
Slowly.
I rolled myself over and started crawling. But what if the doorknob isn’t strong enough to support my weight. I looked around the room.
“The window ledge.”
It was close enough to the door that if one didn’t work, I could try the other. If all else failed, I’d crawl into my bedroom and pull myself up on the bed. I felt like such a fool down here on all fours. So drunk that I passed out in here. Which reminds me, what was I doing in here anyway? I had no idea. Finally, I made it to the window and pulled myself up.
That wasn’t so bad. I leaned against the wall and looked out the window. I felt my head, there was a good size bump on the right side of my forehead.
“Probably from hitting the floor.”
A brilliant bit of deductive reasoning.
Even though my head hurt, my legs seemed to be okay, so I made my way into my room and headed for the shower. I turned on the shower, got undressed, and got in. The water was cold, but I didn’t care. It would warm up soon enough.
The cold water did me some good; it cleared my head. Now I remembered how I got in that room. I was thinking about what to do with that empty room. I thought about putting a home theater in there and went in to look around, when the phone rang.
“That’s probably when the floor came up to meet my face.” I got a plastic bag and filled it with ice. It felt good. On my way back to the bedroom, the doorbell rang. I opened the door. “CJ?”
“What happened to you?” I guess she noticed the bag of ice. “You are all right?”
“It’s a long story, CJ. Come on in.”
I let CJ in and went into the living room. CJ followed me in and sat down on the couch. “What happened to you?” she asked.
I plopped down in my chair and turned on the lamp. I looked over at CJ. “Forget what happened to me. What happened to you?” Her eye was swollen almost to the point of being shut. Her bottom lip was swollen, too, and she had a bump like mine, only hers was on the left side. “Did Manny do that?”
“Yeah, we got into it again.”
“Did you call the police?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He needs help, Chris, not jail.”