2. Nala
Have you ever met a man who sets your soul on fire … and you also happen to hate him? Yes, no, maybe? Well for me, that man was Zaire Booker. I couldn’t stand his guts and yet I craved feeling his large hands roaming on my body nearly every moment of every day. Again.
And he knew it.
That’s probably what pissed me off more than me wanting him—it was that he knew. He knew because he had had me already, even if it was only a little bit. He knew because I couldn’t hide it no matter how hard I tried. He knew it because I wanted him to know. Yes, I said it. Denying it would only be a lie and lies serve no good purpose but to confuse ourselves and I was confused enough already. God, I wanted this man. Again. And he wanted me too. He never hid that. Didn’t try to, either. But I couldn’t stand him.
I’d been as equally turned onto him, and turned off from the moment I met him in graduate school. He had a reputation across campus, and it wasn’t for being a heaux or anything although I never got into his business to know if that was the case or not. I wasn’t nosey enough to ask questions but the women I was in classes with spent a lot of time talking about Zaire. Most of the whispers about him were about his good looks and the wish of wanting to get with him though he seemed unattainable.
However, some of that could be explained. From what I now know, Zaire was taking care of his younger brother and sister due to his mom passing away when he was an undergrad. As a result, he worked full time, went to school practically full time, and whatever available time he had, he spent looking after them. He shared some of his background during my new hire orientation at Higher Pathways where he’d already been working for over six months and I considered maybe I had him pegged wrong when I knew him back then. His situation of being a young man forced to grow up and take care of his siblings made the only other new hire, and future childcare worker, Sheena, moon-eyed over him.
Me too, if we are keeping it one hundred, but I had some dignity at least and knew how to pretend like he wasn’t fine as hell and that I didn’t notice his big ass hands and feet. If you know, you know, that the myth is mostly true. God wouldn’t give a man a hand too small to grab his wood, now would he? But none of that mattered because I was playing it cool. He was not going to know that I only found him more appealing than those years before especially since I could never say I liked him. He was built like a god, with dark brown skin and eyes even darker that could drink you in with a stare. Was his voice a deep baritone coated in molasses that could probably talk you through an orgasm without even a swivel of his hips? Yes, and yes.
But I reminded myself that when I saw him around campus, I didn’t like him. Not knowing him didn’t matter because back then I disliked him simply because he reminded me of boyfriends in the past who were too slick and convincing for their own good. Now I hated him because he reminded me of a recent boyfriend that I wished to hell.
Zaire was everything I said I wouldn’t give into anymore—not after Eric and his philandering ways and community dick. Not to mention, Eric had a growing weed-smoking addiction that gave him stinky breath that would turn my stomach whenever he leaned in to kiss me. Anyway, men like Zaire wouldn’t see the problem in freely loving multiple women. Nope. Because Zaire was freedom. It didn’t take my education degrees hung on the wall behind me to help me figure out he would only break my already hardened heart.
One might ask how I could hate someone who seemed so loving at least when it came to his siblings. Well for one, he was a sex therapist. Of all the specialties to take on, he chose the one with mostly vulnerable women. I rolled my eyes every time I thought about it. And don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t implying he was a creep, not by any means. I didn’t sense that, and that would have been unfair to place on him because he was a man. It’s just that a man like him seemed to like women and the presence of them. Being around women was his occupation.
Don’t you want him to like women, Nala? Don’t you want him to like… you?
When I whispered into the deep crevices of myself, I admitted I did want him to like me but not everyone else. Was it too much to ask for a man who was into me and only me?
I’d spoken to my therapist about him recently because let’s face it, therapists need therapists and I had issues to work through myself. Mostly issues surrounding trust because of so many liars and cheats I’d given my heart to. Seeing my therapist helped me to unload so I didn’t take my cynicism into my sessions with patients. My shit was my shit. Theirs was theirs.
She assessed that my issue with Zaire was one I needed to resolve internally. That it had little to do with him and more to do with issues surrounding trust. She sounded like me with my patients and I told her so.
“My job isn’t to create some new wheel, Nala,” Dr. Daniels said around her gentle smile.
“I’m telling you what you know and need to be reminded of. You know as well as I do that if you can’t learn to release control of the outcomes of human interaction, you’ll never completely trust, and from that, you can never have completely healthy experiences.”
Being read like that, when it was my job to do the reading, shut me up but this was what I paid her for. Hearing the truth got a nod out of me before she gave me some homework.
“I want you to try to talk to your coworker without expectation. See what he says. It might surprise you to learn something about him that you don’t know… because everything you’ve shared in here about him sounds superficial. It is hearsay. Maybe none of that is him. Just like all of you can’t be seen by looking at you. This is a basic fundamental one-on-one approach, I know, but sometimes, being able to read people and assess them with ease gives us all a God complex as if we know it all and that is impossible. We know what they share. We know patterns. And from that, we use our training to assess because they allow us to. On the surface, we can assume we know what we see, and sometimes that turns out to be right, but it isn’t law. I’m sure you have patients who left parts of the story out only for you to discover in couple’s therapy or some other way. We don’t know them. We discover them.”
She was right, and I wanted to do what she suggested and allow Zaire to teach me something about him that I didn’t know but when I saw him walking his patient out, something about him looking delicious while standing there in dark brown slacks, a cream button up top and modern tweed blazer, made me want to punch him. I didn’t want to know a damn thing.