CHAPTER FIVE
After midnight and she dropped off the last passenger she was going to deliver. She loved the cash she made, and the financial freedom she had, when she worked long hours. That was the only reason she did it. But she was beat. She was calling it a day.
But she was way too tired to drive all the way across town where she lived when her boyfriend’s apartment was only a couple blocks away.
And she had a key. And he was out of town on a business trip until Friday.
She could get some good sleep, without being bothered by his constant need for sex, and get back at it in the morning.
But when she unlocked the door of his third-floor apartment and made her way inside, she immediately knew something wasn’t right.
His briefcase was sitting on the table in his foyer.
And his keys had been tossed up there too.
When she saw his dress shoes in the middle of his living room floor, she knew he had to be back.
Why didn’t he call her like he always did when he got back in town, was her first question.
And what the hell was that noise, was her second question.
She made her way down the hall to his bedroom where the noise was coming from.
The closer she got, the more she had a good idea what that noise was.
The closer she got, the more her heart sank.
The closer she got, the more she didn’t want to believe, couldn’t believe, dared not to believe that Darius could do this to her.
Not Darius too!
They’d been dating for over a year. She thought he was finally going to be her ride or die, and a real brother she could depend on through thick and thin. Now he was pulling this shit on her too? He was just like all the others? It couldn’t be!
But when she flung that bedroom door wide open, and she saw Darius on top of some big white girl and was going hard at it, she knew it was déjà vu all over again. Just a different boyfriend doing a different chick.
Her heart sank. “Darius?” Her voice was agony personified. Her face was anguish on steroids. She was outdone.
But as soon as Darius heard her voice, and turned and saw her standing there, he jumped his dark-brown, muscular body off of that woman so fast it seemed as if she had the Bubonic plague.
“Tabby, what are you doing here?” His naked ass was grabbing for his pants.
“You didn’t tell me you was coming over here! ”
Tabby couldn’t believe it. He thought her being unannounced was the issue?
And the white girl sat up in bed, looking annoyed, like who did Tabby think she was busting in on them like that?
But Tabby didn’t give a shit about that woman.
She was just some random as far as she was concerned.
It was her boyfriend that had stunned her.
It was her boyfriend that had betrayed her.
“How could you do this to me, Darius? How could you do this? I told you not to be with me if you couldn’t keep it in your pants! ”
“I did keep it in my pants,” he said as he was losing his balance trying to put on his pants. “This not what it looks like! We were just talking.” He turned to the white woman. “Tell her we were just talking. Tell her!” he yelled out when that woman looked at him like he was crazy.
“We was talking,” the woman said with no enthusiasm, like a mocking bird rather than somebody clarifying a deeply disturbing situation.
Tabby was so angry that she wanted to kick Darius’s ass. And for him to try and gaslight her like that too? It was crushing.
But he was still pleading with her as he stopped even trying to get dressed. “Tabby, listen to me. We can work this out. She’s just somebody I was helping out, that’s all this is. We were just having a conversation.”
He hurried to Tabby, with one leg in and one leg out of his pants as he held them up with his hand. “Tabby, please listen to me.” He grabbed her arm.
But as soon as he touched her, she snatched her arm away from him and slapped him so hard across his face that it staggered him.
“Leave. Me. Alone,” she said to him with clenched teeth as she pointed at him with venom in her eyes.
“I was just beginning to believe that maybe we could make this work. I was just beginning to trust you, Darius. And you do this to me?!”
“It’s not what it looks like. We were just talking,” he tried to say again but Tabby wasn’t going for it.
“Quit lying!” she screamed at him. “Just stop!”
Then, as if a lightbulb had just flicked on, she realized he was never going to do right by her.
He was never going to stop. Because the signs had been there all along.
There had been so many suspicions. But she could never prove any of them.
But those suspicions kept her from giving him all of her heart. Those suspicions kept her on edge.
But now they weren’t suspicions anymore. It was proven. Darius was a cheating, lying dog just like those men before him. He was no different than any of them.
She looked at him again, only this time she wasn’t sad or hurt: she was enraged. The idea that she gave a man like him the benefit of the doubt when she should have followed her gut from the beginning.
She began hurrying out of that bedroom without looking back. She wasn’t beating that dead horse another second. She was done.
But Darius wasn’t. “Tabby, wait!” he cried out as he reached out to her but missed her. “Tabby!” He tried to hurry after her still trying to get that second leg in his pants, but he fell on his face. “Gotdammit! Tabby wait. Tabby!”
Although he got up, put on his pants and ran, by the time he made it outside of his apartment complex, Tabby had already run down those stairs, got in her car, and was speeding away. He lifted his arms in the air and dropped them to his side. He was so disappointed that he didn’t know what to do.
The brothers hanging out on his stoop were disappointed in him too. Everybody knew Tabby Morgan was a hard worker. A good woman. A keeper. She was the kind of girl brothers weren’t supposed to treat any kind of way. She was the bitch you saved for when you were ready to settle down.
But they also knew Darius always had some random girl in that apartment with him whenever baby sister was out hustling on her jobs and what not.
The man code didn’t allow them to tell her that, since they weren’t angels either, but now, after they saw her rush from that apartment with tears in her eyes, they wished they had.
But to add insult to injury, that fat-ass girl that had been in his bed, had put on his bathrobe and made her way outside too. “What you doing, Darius? What you begging her for? Don’t nobody care about that skinny bitch.”
When he turned and saw her, and saw how his people were looking at him with disgust on their faces, as if they were saying you chose her over Tabby, he took it out on her. “Get your ass back upstairs!” he yelled at his bedmate.
But she just stood there, her pink, meaty arms folded, as if she was defying him too.
It was not his night.
He lifted his arms in the air again, dropped them to his side again, and then made his own way back upstairs. Then, and only then, did his bedmate go back upstairs too.
But as Tabby drove away from that apartment building, she kept wiping away tears.
And she still wasn’t thinking about that woman.
She was thinking about how foolish she had been to even fall for a guy like him.
Darius wasn’t even her type. He was arrogant and self-serving and was always around town claiming he was doing so much for her when he wasn’t doing shit for her.
When she never took a dime from him. Then he’d declare he never said it and all those people were just jealous of their relationship and lying on him.
But now she knew who was the real liar. She couldn’t believe she fell for a dude like that.
And it wasn’t like she was some high school idiot still.
She was twenty-seven years old. She’d be thirty in just three years.
She was tired of short-term relationships or guys who left her when she refused to give it up to them on the first date as if that was all they were after anyway.
She was tired of being all by herself in this world.
Darius, she thought, was at least a hardworking brother who wouldn’t be a burden on her.
He might even be a decent father to the children she wanted to have, even though she knew he didn’t have the temperament for fatherhood.
But she was willing to overlook all of that because she wanted to have somebody so badly.
She wanted to have children so badly. It was a terrible combination.
But because the pickings in Larkin were thin, she figured she had to settle and she thought she was settling for Darius. She thought she could do way better than him. Only to find out he was settling for her. He thought he could do way better than her!
She squeezed her steering wheel as tight as she could and screamed out in the privacy of her own car. She could stop the stress from making her sick when she screamed out that way.
It could stop the stress, but it couldn’t stop the tears. And it couldn’t stop the reality that she had reached another dead end in a relationship that had wasted another year of her life. And she would have to turn around, go all the way back to the beginning, and start over.
But the thought of starting over yet again made her physically ill.
She shook her head as she drove. She was destined to be alone in this life.
That was all there was to it. No children for her.
No husband for her. No life outside of hard work and more hard work: a life of struggle for her.
That was just the way it was and she’d better start getting used to it.
Because she would take that reality any day of the week than to go back to the beginning again with another joker that would break her heart in the end anyway. That wasn’t going to happen.
She was done.
She was not going back.