Chapter 9 #3
“Anyway, I’m giving Aunt Reese the small bedroom off the loft. Nee and Hi, you want to rock, paper, scissors to see who gets which room or what?”
They laughed.
“We’ll take whichever,” Ayden said with a shrug.
“Cool.”
I turned the doorknob on the room that looked out on the beach. The other room looked out on the side lawn.
Once I got them settled, I went back downstairs. My dad was on the screened in porch with the girls. We used it as a playroom.
Destin sat on Gannon’s lap, while Dakota leaned against him, occasionally standing to move a checker piece on the table near them. Somebody had changed them out of their wet swimsuits and back into their regular clothes.
“You can go out there on the deck. The swim lesson is over.” He teased me with a sly grin on his face.
“How’d it go?”
“I watched him give lessons to my granddaughters, then I watched him give lessons to Xarielle. Seems to me like he treated my granddaughters like they were the more advanced students.”
“What?”
He answered my question with a question. “Did you pay for a specific amount of lessons? How are you paying this guy?”
“I wasn’t sure how many lessons it would take, so I’m paying him per lesson.”
“He’s going as slowly as he possibly can with Xarielle. I’m no swim expert, but when you have a two and a three year old doing more than you have a grown woman doing, the math ain’t mathing.
“I watched my grandbabies hold on to the edge and kick their legs for five minutes, while he stayed on the deck and called out directives to them. Funny thing is, he wasn’t out of the water one time when Xarielle was in it.
When she was holding on to the side of the pool kicking her legs, he was right beside her with his hands on her waist. He has more confidence in babies than he has in a grown woman?
This,” he looked down at my girls, “n-i-g-g-a is getting free feels. Fire him!”
Right before we sat down to eat the meal that Vivienne prepared for us, Aunt Reese arrived by rideshare.
Either Nehemiah or Yahirah had already alerted her that Vivienne had her face in the place because she didn’t seem taken aback to see Vivienne at all.
She was totally cool about it. She was also distracted with loving on the girls and catching up with Xarielle and her new life on Jackson Island.
After dinner, all of the ladies minus Vivienne went out to the deck. She and Gannon opted to bathe the girls and read them a bedtime story. The four of them headed upstairs. That left Nehemiah, Ayden, and me to clean the kitchen.
I was about to start the dishwasher when my phone chimed with an alert that a vehicle was on my property.
“Who could that be?” I mused. My eyebrows furrowed, and my face frowned.
“I thought everybody was here already,” Ayden commented.
“Maybe it’s another long lost relative. What if it’s Priscilla? What if she found out about Gannon and Vivienne?” Nehemiah was a clown.
I laughed, but not that heartily, because what if it was Priscilla?
I walked to the front double doors, opened them, and waited. Seconds later, a familiar frame exited the black Porche sitting in the middle of my driveway. My heart gave a thump before it started to gallop in my chest.
The fuck?
I watched in both astonishment and horror as Jayla Wilson hurried from the car toward me.
“Kept. Kept,” she called out softly in her molasses thick, Southern Georgia accent.
“What the fuck?” I muttered to myself, taking in the strapless, lacy, mini dress that actually looked like lingerie.
It hugged curves that were . . . new? Jayla had always been stacked. She was perfectly thick in all the right places when I met her. She had the quintessential coke-bottle shaped figure. But as she hustled toward me on high heeled sandals, everything about her body looked enhanced, larger.
“Kept.” She tipped up the brick stairs and almost fell into me. Her arms snaked around my waist, and her face landed in my chest.
“Jay?”
“Yes, baby.”
Baby? I wasn’t her baby. Dude, the Middle Eastern real-estate investor who lived in London, was her baby. He was the one she ditched her actual babies to be with.
“What’s up, Jayla?” I eased her off me as nicely as I could.
I didn’t have beef with Jayla. I understood when she walked away.
I mean, it hurt. Most relationships left hurt in their wake when they ended, but I wasn’t devastated, except for my girls.
Except for the fact that they would grow up like me .
. . very much motherless. But I wasn’t devastated to see her go, and I wasn’t necessarily happy to see her back.
“There weren’t any planes into the city tonight. I had to fly into Atlanta and drive. I’ve been driving for five hours. I’m tired, hungry, and I have to pee.”
“What are you doing here?”
Her eyes ballooned. “What do you mean what am I doing here? Dakota’s fourth birthday is tomorrow. I want to celebrate it with her.”
“You didn’t celebrate her third birthday with her.” I wasn’t trying to be an asshole. I was genuinely confused. The fact that Vivienne showed up unexpectedly with Gannon had me over my surprise visitor quota for the weekend.
“I was out of the country on her third birthday, Kept. We’ve been stateside since last month. I made Ahmed promise that I could see my daughters on this trip.”
“You’ve been stateside for a month, and I’m just finding out?”
I saw the exact second that she registered her fuck up. “I mean, we’ve been crisscrossing the country, Kept. Ahmed does a lot of business on the West Coast and in Miami. It’s not like I’ve been in South Carolina.”
“I’m not about to debate the finer points of parenthood with you, Jayla. If you’ve been in America for a month and taking the time to visit your girls wasn’t a priority . . .” I let my words trail off.
She rolled her . . . blue eyes? They weren’t blue when we were together. Her hair wasn’t blonde either, but that wasn’t my business.
“I’m here, and I want to spend Dakota’s birthday with her. Are you gonna make that difficult for me, or what? Because I can have Ahmed get me an attorney.”
I took a deep breath to regain some patience.
“First of all, I don’t appreciate the threat.
You gave up your parental rights to traipse across the globe behind old boy from Abu Dhabi.
Don’t come here acting like the court would ever rule in your favor.
Dakota and Destin’s mental and emotional health is the only thing I care about.
I’m the one who has to put them back together when people disappoint them. ”
She stared at me, eyeing me like I was pissing her off. She was pissing me off.
“They’re already down for the night. You can come in for a minute, and I’ll write down the information for the party tomorrow. It’ll be a small thing. Just a few friends, some family members, a cake, and presents at the Butterfly Garden.”
Her smile was wistful, and there wasn’t any doubt in my mind that she probably had at least a few regrets about walking away from her children.
“She’s still my sensitive girl.”
“She is.”
“I was concentrating so hard on getting a flight into town to make it for Dakota’s birthday that I didn’t book a hotel room for the night. Please tell me you have space for me to stay, just for tonight. Ahmed’s coming into town tomorrow, and we’re getting a suite at The Excelsior Grand.”
“That’s messed up. To be honest with you, there’s no room at the inn. I got family members in every extra bedroom.”
“Please, Kept. I’ll sleep on the sofa. I?—”
I eyed her suspiciously. Jayla had been bougie since the day I met her. Now, she was tied to an international millionaire, yet she was offering to sleep on sofas? That didn’t sound right.
“Since when?”
Her hands flew to her hips, her head fell to the side, and she rolled her eyes long and strong.
I wanted to laugh. I bet the Middle Eastern dude never got this kind of attitude from her.
“Since desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“The best I can offer you is an air mattress in the loft.”
I only had one air mattress, which I’d just offered to Jayla.
That meant I was on a pallet on the family room floor.
Of course, I had several sofas in my house, but I’d grown up with my great grandmother in a one-bedroom apartment in a low-income complex.
I’d grown up with a sofa for a bed. Though I hadn’t realized it at the time, that apparently traumatized me.
I couldn’t stomach the thought of anybody sleeping on a sofa, particularly myself.
“I’ll take it!” she practically cheered, bouncing on the high heeled sandals.
“Get your bag and come on.”