Chapter 11
Jade
Seeing the aftermath of some lunatic’s redecoration of my condo and car had me crying because I remembered the day I first purchased my place and how excited I was.
Now I felt violated in the worst way. After a good cry on the porch, Oden and I returned to the kitchen where he immediately had his phone to his ear, calling somebody.
I listened to him talking to whoever and describing the situation while I stayed in my head.
I responded to Ava who assured me my building would take care of the damages seeing how their security was nowhere around when somebody broke in my place.
According to the building, once again that footage had been erased from their system.
She was handling it there and I was traumatized here, wondering how somebody had so much access to me.
They had to have not only been in my home but were good at computers.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that whoever this was knew me and they only pulled this where they deemed they had some type of control.
That control being my home, so they had to have been in my house, right?
They had to have been someone I had allowed in, but I was extremely picky about who I allowed to cross the threshold into my home, so that list was short.
For the remainder of the evening, I found myself stuck in my mind, not on purpose, but just there. I was heartbroken about my apartment, but more so pissed at how little it seemed my building was doing to deal with it.
“Jade, can you help me do my braid for sleep?” Aja asked, making me look up from my computer. We had long since had dinner and settled into the house. While I opted to take over Oden’s office to look over some contracts, Aja was in her bedroom and Oden had gone out to harvest.
“Sure baby, come on over here.” I smiled in her direction and moved to make space for her to sit between my legs. I wasn’t the best with braids, but she said they were braids for her to go to sleep, so I didn’t imagine her needing them to be perfect.
“Jade, do you spend a lot of time with my dad?”
I choked on the saliva in my mouth. “Uh yes, I do. Why do you ask?”
She shrugged. “Will you be there when I come live with him? So you can spend a lot of time with me too?”
I began parting her hair before I responded. “Is that what you want?”
“Yes. I wanna live with you and my daddy. Just the three of us. I mean, unless you can guarantee you’ll give me a brother. We can all spend lots of time together.”
I was choking yet again on the spit in my mouth. “Whoa now, Aja, a baby is crazy. How about it just be me, you, and your father for a while?” I finished the first braid and began to smooth her hair down for the second. Her hair was so soft and malleable I didn’t need a comb.
She giggled. “You promise?”
“Pinky swear.” I then extended my pinky, but of course she laughed at me. “Jade, that's for babies. I’m not a baby.”
I laughed. “Fine. Then I promise.” About forty-five seconds later I finished her hair and she retreated to her bedroom.
Instead of going back to work like I had been doing since after dinner, I went to find Oden.
I hadn’t come out here to work, but something about stress and trauma made me work, even when there was no more work to be done.
My fear of not being able to deal with this issue made me tune everything out and hyperfocus on things that didn’t even need to be done.
I pushed thoughts of work to the back of my mind, remembering that when I got that message from Jade, Oden and I were in the midst of talking and he point blank blamed himself for why his wife wasn’t in his daughter’s life. “I’m very well the reason she doesn’t have Ashley.”
When I walked onto the back porch, I spotted him.
He was shirtless, back muscles and tattoos creating a pool in my underwear immediately.
He was chopping wood, something he had mumbled about earlier when he informed me that it got cold out here in the evenings and wee hours of the morning.
He told me he was harvesting and cutting firewood and absolutely nothing about that sounded remotely enticing until now.
The man was shirtless with a hatchet in his hand, swinging it, splitting the wood with ease.
I never thought I’d be into the lumberjack type until now.
Shit, he looked so good. I got so caught up mentally stalking him that I momentarily forgot why I had brought my ass out here.
I could have stood there and watched him for an eternity, about to drool like a rabid dog, but then he turned around and caught me. That handsome smile and those tight eyes found me. Shit, I was indeed obsessed with this man.
“How long have you been standing there?” He dropped the long-handled hatchet, moving toward me.
“Not long, but then again probably long enough to be considered obsessed with you.” I ascended the first two steps, stopping directly in front of him.
That handsome smirk settled in. “Oh really?” By me standing on the third step from the bottom, I was able to look directly at him without looking up like normal.
“Yes, really. I’m sorry about earlier. I’m so used to mentally just shutting down when things become too heavy or unbearable.”
He leaned in and pecked my lips. “You good, love. That shit will be handled very soon. I was just giving you time to breathe.”
“And you know that how?” My eyes were on something serious.
“Because I do. Are you good with going back to the city Sunday evening instead of Monday?”
I nodded. “I figured. Because baby girl has school on Monday, right?”
He threw his head forward. I could tell that while he was trying to make sure everything was alright with my world; something was very much wrong in his eyes. They were what held the darkness his mouth never uttered.
My hands found the sides of his face. “Talk to me, tell me what you meant earlier.”
His eyes traced the frame of my face before he sighed. “Walk with me.”
He grabbed my hand and we walked toward a short, pebbled path into the woods.
It wasn’t really the woods, just a couple trees and seemingly uninhabited greenage.
Once we were through it, we were faced with a body of water so beautiful I wanted to jump into it.
He then led me down to a wooden dock. It didn’t go out too far, just far enough to house a small boat on one side in the water right in front of the ladder, and on the other side, a wooden bench.
I stood at the end of the dock, feeling a peace I had never quite known enter my body. Everything besides the water was still.
“Ashley is never coming back… because she’s dead.” His heavy voice had me turning around immediately.
“What do you mean? How do you know that?” My eyes traced his being as he never looked up at me because he was too busy glaring at the wooden planks beneath us.
“Because I killed her.” It was almost like he breathed the words from his chest instead of speaking them from his lips.
I blinked a few times, completely taken aback by his revelation. He had to be joking. Shit! Was he? My heart beat rapidly, about to escape my chest cavity. “What?” I asked, my tone so low I didn’t know if he heard me.
“I returned home from a business trip early. I heard voices and followed them. She had him in my home where I lay my head. He was redressing and. Ironically. holding his gun. I turned the corner and he started to shoot at me. I didn’t think, I just reacted.
Because before I knew it, I was shooting back.
Silence filled the room, and when I peeked in, my wife was unclothed under a top sheet, freshly fucked.
She had taken one to the head and he was lying across the bed having taken one to the chest. It didn’t hit me until after everything happened.
I’ve lived in that day every single day until I met you.
Until I saw you seated in my dining room enjoying what I cooked. ”
I just looked at him, tears in my eyes and pain in my chest. Crazily enough, nothing in me wanted to cry for Ashley, but instead cry for him and Aja. Oh Aja!
“Does she know?” I asked, horror in my tone. I was a child who’d lost my mother early, so I couldn’t imagine the loss Aja carried.
He immediately knew who I was talking about when I said she. “No. It was covered up just as fast as it happened.”
I nodded. That was the only thing I could do at this point.
He had shared his darkest and lowest moment with me, and somehow, I didn’t look at him any differently.
It made me feel like I needed to hold him close.
He carried this like jewelry to the flashiest nigga when he didn’t have to.
In the moment everything transpired it was either his life or the man his wife had laid up with in his home.
I knew plenty of niggas who would’ve made that decision and slept peacefully the next night.
He didn’t. He carried pain so deep that he couldn’t look at his child for months and felt undeserving of any type of happiness.
“So what, are you going to leave me now?” He was still seated on the bench, still looking at everything but me. His heart was in his shoulders, slumped, and I just wanted to hold it in my hands.
His question shattered my heart. “That’s what you think?”
“I don’t know, Jade. I don’t want you feeling like you hav?—”
“I love you, Oden. Shit, I told you I thought I was falling in love with you, so if you told me that to make me walk away from you then you gotta come harder than that. You didn’t deliberately kill her…” I started, but my sentence trailed off when his heated gaze landed on me.
“But I left her without her mother.” He pointed back toward the house.