CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
But instead of forcing her to relive all of those unpleasantries in her life, Grayson grabbed a remote from off of the side table, pressed a button, and what sounded like piano music, maybe classical music, began playing over the stereo.
Toya had hoped he would put on some R&B.
A little Anita Baker or Mary J. would have been great. But she was hoping for too much.
But it sounded great. “Very catchy composition,” she said. “Who is it?”
“Camden Stewart. It’s called Lost.”
“Very haunting, isn’t it? Especially the hook.”
Grayson nodded. “I agree.”
“What year did the composer die?”
Grayson at first looked at her confused.
“What?” Then he realized she apparently thought they were listening to the masters of old.
“Camden Stewart is the performer, but he’s also the composer.
He’s a young black man, matter of fact. From England I believe.
And it’s my understanding that he’s very much alive. ”
“Oh!” Toya had to smile at herself. “It just sounded so yesteryear.”
“That’s the genius of his work. He’s quite good.”
But then Toya looked at Grayson. She had to go there. “Can I ask you something, Gracie?”
He inwardly smiled when she gave him that nickname without batting an eye. As if surely everybody called him that! But she appeared very serious, so he remained serious too. “You may ask me anything you like.”
Toya cleared her throat. But she needed to know. “Why did you believe me when I called and told you what happened at that gas station?”
Grayson hesitated, and then he took another sip of his wine. Then he exhaled. “You combed my hair in a bathroom.”
She was at first confused. Then she smiled. “What?”
“How could anybody be a liar who would comb a man’s hair, a man she didn’t know, and do so in a bathroom?”
Then it was his turn to show his sincerity. “You’re not ordinary, Latoya, in other words. I would say you’re rather inexplicably exemplary.”
Toya stared at him. What he said probably would have been no big deal to everybody else, but it was a huge deal to Toya. Because she understood what he meant. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s the nicest thing anybody has ever said to me.”
She and Grayson stared at each other. Because he couldn’t believe it. “What a sad thing to say,” he found himself saying to her.
She tried to smile it off, but he saw the pain in her eyes.
She tried to explain. “It’s just that . .
. If people are always treating you bad, that’s what you get used to.
You get used to being treated bad. And then you start to doubt yourself.
You start wondering if it’s you since everybody’s treating you that way. Since you’re the common denominator.”
She paused before continuing. Grayson was riveted by her.
“On that day when I was supposed to get my promotion, Mrs. Lowe said that the only reason they were promoting me was because they needed a black face in a supervisory position and I was all they had. Although she was lying about me attacking her husband, that part did have a ring of truth to it to me. They didn’t like me there.
Nobody in that office, except for maybe the other black girl Angie, didn’t like me at all. ”
That was the part Grayson couldn’t work out. “But why?” he asked her.
“It was a number of reasons I think. The main one was all about men. Some of those ladies accused me of liking their men when I wasn’t thinking about those men.
What I look like liking somebody that doesn’t belong to me?
They were the ones who had everything. They were the ones married and with children and with big families.
But I didn’t belong to anybody. Nobody wanted me.
But they were always treating me like I was the problem.
Like I was coming for their men. I didn’t understand it either. ”
Grayson understood it. “It was jealousy,” he said.
But Toya was shaking her head. “I’m certain that’s not it, Gracie. They were women in high positions. They had way more going for themselves than I did.”
But Grayson was still stuck on the sudden nickname she called him and how it rolled so easily off her tongue. He’d never had a nickname in his life. He wasn’t sure how he felt about acquiring one at this late stage.
“And even the girls that worked with me in clerical were younger than me and a lot of them were prettier than me and even smarter than me. What did they have to be jealous about?”
“They weren’t you,” he said. “They were ordinary, Latoya. You’re anything but.”
She smiled. “To you maybe,” she said, “but not to the rest of the world.”
“Then the rest of the world be damned,” he said, lifted his glass in an air toast, and took another sip of his wine.
She laughed. She really liked this dude! As in she really liked him. But was he even available?
Then she caught herself. Why would it matter if he was? He was rich and highly educated and so far above her in terms of achievements that it was laughable for her to even think such a thing.
But she couldn’t help it. She thought such a thing. Just because she was poor and didn’t have all the advantages he had didn’t make her less than. “What about you?” she asked him.
He looked at her again. “What about me?”
“What are your attributes? Are you married? Do you have children? Or siblings?”
He smiled at the way she referred to marriage and children as attributes. He’d never heard it said that way before. “No ma’am, I am not married nor have I ever been. I have no children. I had a brother, an older brother, but he . . . passed away.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“That’s life. And life is tough. That’s why, what did the guy in the movie Hud say? ‘Nobody gets out of it alive?’”
But that was too glib for Toya. “Do you even think about getting married and having children?”
He shook his head. “I do not. Marriage is not for me. And neither are kids.”
There’s that, she thought, as a part of her was greatly disappointed. But at least he put it out there.
He could see that she was disappointed like every woman he’d ever said that to was disappointed. But unlike all those other times, it bothered him that he had disappointed her.
And he felt a need to know where she stood. “What about you?” he asked her.
He loved the way she didn’t pretend she didn’t know what he meant. “I thought about getting married again, yes. And I very much want children. But I’m pretty sure that dream has passed me by.”
Grayson frowned. “Why would you say that?”
She smiled. “I’m thirty-one years old, Gracie. What would I look like having a baby at my age? Why I’ll be pushing fifty when he or she graduates high school.”
“So what? I’ll be over sixty. Who cares? They’ll be happy, well-adjusted kids who’ll take great care of us in our old age. Isn’t that what kids are for?”
They both laughed. Until Grayson realized he had assumed that if she ever did get married and have children it would be with him. Which would be ludicrous. He’d only known her for two months, and barely even for that long.
Although he knew, in this day and age of social media where people were getting married within days, or after reality TV romances where the first time they saw each other in person was on their wedding day. But all of that was preposterous to Grayson too.
It wasn’t lost on Toya that he had injected himself into her biological clock story.
Which was contradictory AF. He’d never get married or have kids, he said in one breath, then he was telling her she wasn’t too old to marry him and have his kid in another breath.
It was both exhilarating that he would even think such a thing, but pretty confusing to her too.
She decided to move on. “What about your folks? I know about your father, but is your mother still alive too?”
His parents. Not a story he wished to know about. “They are both alive, yes.”
“Are you close with your parents?” For her sake, specifically regarding his father, Toya needed to know this information.
But Grayson was shaking his head. “Not particularly, no.”
Her heart sank. “Why not? The commissioner made your father sound like he was the most beloved man in the whole state.”
“Oh he is. To this day. He’s revered.”
“But not by you?”
Grayson thought about all the shit his father had gotten him into. He took another sip of his drink before he answered her. Anybody else he would not have answered at all. But Latoya wasn’t anybody else. “Not by me,” he admitted
“Why?”
“My older brother was beloved just as my father is. I did all the work. I was the work horse that turned our longstanding corporate decline around. I completely turned around Carrington, Incorporated, which was the company my grandfather founded and that my father and big brother ran into near receivership. I then incorporated Carrington, Inc into Carrington Capital, which is my own company, and the merger worked. But only if my father and I were fifty-fifty partners (with my father and mother owning twenty-five percent each), and my father had to remain Chairman of the Board.”
“That explains how successful you are. But that doesn’t explain why you and your father aren’t close.”
“The wrong son died,” Grayson said bluntly. “That’s why.”
Latoya felt his anguish in that moment as he stared back at her. Then he looked away and sipped more wine.
But Toya was distressed too. Not just because of Grayson’s bad relationship with his father, but what it meant for her circumstance.
“We don’t have a father-son relationship,” Grayson further explained. “We never have had such a relationship.”
“Then what kind of relationship do you have?”
“I bear my father’s burdens,” he said. “That kind.”
Toya didn’t quite know what that meant, but she didn’t feel comfortable enough to ask him.
And then they fell into silent reflection.
Especially Toya. How in the world was he going to convince his father to help her by endorsing the state’s attorney when their relationship seemed so toxic?
It seemed even more far-fetched now than it did when he broached it.
You let her out, he said in essence, and I’ll guarantee you a victory by getting for you my father’s endorsement and support.
When he couldn’t guarantee either one. Did that mean she would be returned to jail any day now?
Did that mean she would have to face a jury?
She didn’t know, but she didn’t discuss her fears with him. He did all he could for her. Expecting him to keep those charges dropped forever was expecting too much from one man. And she should have known it all along.
“I need a shower,” she said as she stood up. “That jail smelled terrible.”
“You can most certainly take a shower,” Grayson said.
“Point me to where and I’ll be happy to do so.”
“You can go in the room where my driver deposited your luggage. There’s an ensuite bath in there. Use anything you need.”
“I brought everything I’ll need,” Toya said, “but thanks.”
She placed her drink on the side table, and made her way to the bedroom. The same bedroom that he said earlier was his bedroom. But she didn’t trip or question it or anything else. She was exhausted. She truly just wanted to wash away that entire day.