a great drunken adventure.
“That’s it,” Keithe mumbled under tightened lips. Hard steps led him toward the exit. Only once did he stop, and that was when he arrived in front of the valet’s booth. Standing and waiting, Keithe silently scolded himself about not hiring a driver for the evening. He hadn’t partially because Michelle had begged him to just let her drive them.
For the last five years, he’d been under a doctor’s order: no driving. His stressful marriage and career had taken a toll on his body, producing violent grand mal seizures that came out of left field. Tonight he didn’t care. It would just be the chance he’d have to take.
When he turned around to kill time, still waiting for Michelle’s Jaguar to arrive, he caught his sour reflection in the glassed pane.
Decked out in his owned, never rented, tuxedo, Keithe couldn’t understand what it was about him that wasn’t enough for Michelle. Beyond being a dark chocolate kind of handsome, and having deep, chiseled eyes that were only for her, Keithe was a respectful and loving husband. Head over heels in love with Michelle, Keithe had never wanted to stray as she had. He’d never wanted to make her hurt as she had made him time and time again. Even when Keithe wanted children and knew that being a father was a blessing beyond compare but she didn’t, he still loved her through it all.
God-fearing, a praying man who seemed to be what all the women on the talk shows said they wanted was exactly what Keithe was. Sunday after Sunday, sitting as a deacon in the front pew, he had to fight off women and their advances. Anywhere he went, for that matter. Even at a gathering at his wife’s expense.
“Hope you’re having a good evening,” Chasity, the young, white court reporter who worked out of Michelle’s courtroom, spoke toward his reflection, then to him. “Are you leaving? Is the judge on her way down?” she checked to see if she had a few moments to push up on him, as she frequently did.
“Yes, I’m leaving.” he took a step forward to add space between the two. Peering around her as she took the same amount of steps he did, still looking out for the judge, Chasity wasn’t giving up that easily.
With a quick look down at her plummeting bust line, Chasity spoke to Keithe, hoping that he caught her drift. “Hmm. Well, I’m waiting for a cab, but if the judge is not going with you, maybe I can catch a quick ride. If you know what I mean.” her eyes told her truth.
Squeezing his own eyes shut, Keithe, for a brief moment, thought what it would be like to actually take Chasity up on her offer. Or any woman who had called, texted, or boldly walked up to him, offering her services. Shaking his thoughts clear, Keithe believed, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
Taking the key from the valet driver, Keithe added another tip to the driver on top of the one he’d given when he and Michelle first arrived. Without so much as a slight glance, Keithe got into the leather-interior car and sped toward his home.
On the ride away from the live and bright downtown Houston’s nightlife, a world he didn’t care to be a part of, Keithe wondered why he still cared. Better yet, why he still tried. His wife wasn’t a team player, and she definitely wasn’t planning on switching her Patrón for Communion anytime soon. But then again, he knew this, and if he were being honest with himself, he had known it from their very beginning.
At age twenty-five, when he married the then forty-year-old Michelle, he had been on the same level as she had. He partied, tossed them back, and hung out late with her. But through it all he still made it to church service; he still made time for the Lord. Then it didn’t matter that she had stayed home from church and never made promises to attend. But now he was forty and more than just saved. He had a relationship with God and wanted to share that experience with his wife. Something that Michelle obviously wasn’t trying to do.
Pulling to the back of their gorgeously landscaped stucco house with a four-car garage in the rear, Keithe shut off the engine and just sat. “Thank you for the ride home, Jesus.” he openly thanked God for allowing him to make it home safely. “Jesus, take the wheel.” he just couldn’t help but do the reenactment of the very funny Mr. Brown from Tyler Perry’s movies. “Oowee.” he stretched to get out of the driver’s side.
He already knew the devil’s hell Michelle would bring when she got home, and almost opted to undo his bow tie and sleep in the car. The thought of them arguing almost made him crank the car once more and go to the nearest five-star hotel. Instead, he thought about all the hard work he did on a daily basis to try to make his marriage work. He knew he had as much right to their bed as she did. Her ignorance would just have to go ignored as far as he was concerned.
As soon as he made his way into their abode with the lofty ceiling, Keithe did exactly as he felt. Instead of doing what Michelle would have recommended, taking clothes off in the bedroom only, Keithe undressed as he made his way through the winding house. Shoes here, pants there, shirt elsewhere. When it was all said and done, Keithe only had his socks on to show evidence of his no longer caring what Michelle thought.
By the time his head hit his favorite pillow, the only rhythm in the marriage bed was that of his pounding headache. The BC powder, a crushed aspirin concoction, was the only thing that helped him doze to sleep. Twelve-thirty was the time the loyal and dependable husband fell asleep. Without any sound of an alarm, two twenty-eight in the morning was the time he awoke to his wife’s drunken stupor.
“How dare you! how dare you leave me. In my own car! Do you know how humiliating that was for me?” Michelle barged into their master suite and turned on every light within her reach.
Her energy level never letting up, she raced around to where Keithe had been in deep sleep and snatched the 1000-thread-count sheet from his body.
“Did you hear me, Keithe?” she slurred from her drunken lips. “Keithe, are you listening to me?” she stood over his head. “Not to mention, sir, you aren’t supposed to be driving. What, you want to kill yourself on my watch?”
“Michelle, leave me alone,” Keithe managed to get out with one stale and heavy breath. “I have to get up and be at church early.” Thinking for only a millisecond, Keithe didn’t give her a second thought as he pulled his goose-down pillow over his head to ward off the light.
“I don’t give a—” Right as Michelle was about to make an obscene gesture toward the house of God, Keithe flew from the bed with only his boxers on, and stood in her face.
“I don’t have the time or the energy for this or you. But you, you better watch your mouth when you talk about something that means so much to me.” he tried his best to be civil.
“More than me, right?” Michelle already knew the answer, but wanted him to say it. “I said, more than me?” she asked as her husband grabbed his pillow and walked away from her.
Stopping to make himself clear to his disrespectful, yet breathtakingly beautiful, wife, Keithe fought the urge to hold her once more.
“Yes. Much more than you, Michelle. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
CHAPTER 3
Michelle
Michelle was no longer sleeping off her drunken trance, but still couldn’t bring herself to get out of the comfortable and curve-catching silk queen-sized bed. When she glanced at the open space on her husband’s side of the bed, she figured Keithe had long ago dressed and called his driver to take him to church. Then she abruptly remembered that he had removed himself from their shared quarters after the entrance she had made.
