Chapter 2 Lily
I wipe down the leaf of my fiddle leaf fig. I can’t believe I let her get so dusty. Then I sit down in my egg chair on my porch, surrounded by my loves, my plants, and click into the group chat to FaceTime them.
It’s been a long day, and I want to unwind.
And I need to tell them that I saw Javonte, even though I know exactly how each one of them is going to respond.
Charisse answers first, but the phone is pointing up at the ceiling, and I see her ceiling fan swirling around and around.
That’s all I see, and I already know what’s going on. Naya has a tendency to have her nose in a book or be climbing on something, but Sky is always going to have a screen in her hand.
“Charisse,” I call out. “Charisse. The baby got your phone.”
“Oh my God,” she says.
Her face comes into view as she bends down, picks the phone up off the floor, and scoops up the baby. Now Sky and Charisse fill my screen, and I smile.
Something about watching your best friend become a mom makes your heart happy.
“I’m sorry. I thought I had my phone on me, but this little stinker is a little bit of a thief.”
“She’s clever,” I say.
Porsche clicks on, in her bra, in her bathroom, brushing her teeth.
“Ma’am,” Charisse says, “you could have finished brushing your teeth and called us back. And you could have put a shirt on.”
“You’d have seen all of this,” Porsche says, shaking her breasts into the camera. “This ain’t nothing. I got them covered. Let me be. What’s up?”
Her toothbrush is still in her mouth.
“I just wanted to do a check-in, y’all. Today I had a Lit with Lily event—”
Click.
Charisse is gone.
Porsche rolls her eyes. “Oh my God. Why doesn’t she have a nanny? I’m not having any kids, but if I had anything that needed to be cared for other than my cat, I would have a nanny for it. I can’t be doing all that watching.”
“She’s got two. Oh, hell no.”
Charisse pops back in. She’s in her closet, in the dark, with the door closed.
“My bad. I turned on Cocomelon and slipped out. What’s up?”
“Javonte was at my event today.”
They both stop and stare dead at the camera.
“What?” they both say in unison.
“He was at the event. He showed up with a teenager. I don’t know who the teenager was.”
Porsche’s eyes go big, but Charisse wags her finger.
“He found out he had a sister last season, I think. She should be a teenager. On his dad’s side. Papa was a rolling stone or whatever they say.”
“I do remember that,” Porsche says. “Yeah, that’s his sister. Her name starts with a Z, I think.”
“Zea,” Charisse adds.
“How do y’all know this?”
“We scroll.”
“And my man owns the team,” Porsche says. “I got to know stuff.”
Fair enough.
“So why was he there?” Porsche asks, scrunching up her face.
“His sister, I guess, wanted to do an event. She painted a beautiful axolotl. She’s very talented. She added a lot of extra details. It was very lifelike.”
“The hell is an axolotl?” Porsche asks.
“It’s a little amphibian. The kids love it. I don’t get it. They look weird in person, but the kids love to paint them, and they’re easy to put in different situations for my paint and sips. Let it be. Anyway, not the point. He was there. He painted.”
“How did that go?” Charisse asks.
“I did the class, and that was that. They painted.”
“You didn’t talk to him?”
“I don’t usually sit and talk with anybody. There’s little chit-chat as I paint, but it was a kid event. I had to entertain the kids.”
Porsche laughs. “And his big ass was in there? Did you have baby chairs? Please tell me there were baby chairs and he had to scrunch his big old long legs up in those chairs.”
“I did have baby chairs, but he found an adult chair,” I say, laughing at the thought of him sitting in one of those toddler chairs, looking like Goldilocks in the wrong chair.
“So you didn’t talk to him?” Porsche asks again.
“No, I didn’t. He was trying to talk to me after class, I think, but too many kids wanted to take pictures with me, and he left.”
“Did you want to talk to him?” Charisse asks.
I stop and think.
And the one thing that flashes in my mind is that party.
We were at a club. He knows I hate clubs. It’s not my scene. It’s not what I do, but he dragged me out there to hang out with the rest of his team and all of their girlfriends and wives.
And one girlfriend, not even a wife, came up to me and said something ugly.
I was ready to go.
But Javonte blew it off.
It seems small. My friends even told me it wasn’t that big of a deal. I could’ve talked to him about it, but it represented something bigger to me.
So I left.
And we haven’t spoken since.
He literally hasn’t called me since then.
“I don’t think so,” I tell them finally. “I put it behind me. I’m done.”
Charisse looks into the camera with an eyebrow raised.
Porsche claps. “Good girl. Give him dust. He doesn’t deserve you.”
I don’t know if Porsche is 100% right.
We had some fun. When it was Lily and Javonte, just a man and a woman in love, we worked.
He’s younger than me. And he’s rich and famous. But it worked.
When it was just us.
It’s the out and about that killed it for us.
We really loved each other.
“Are you sure you didn’t want to talk to him?” Porsche asks. “You didn’t even get a chance to cuss his ass out.”
I run my hand over my face and take a deep breath as I look out from my porch at the backyard I’ve landscaped beautifully.
It’s like a jungle out here. So peaceful.
This conversation is making me anxious.
I fake a yawn. “I had a long day tomorrow, y’all, so I gotta go. Talk to you guys another time. Love you.”
I quickly click out of the call and set my phone down.
I wasn’t ready for that conversation.
I wasn’t ready to see him today.
In my bed, I can’t resist the urge to pull up the pictures I have of him. I type his name into my Google Photos, and every picture I took of him, that we took together, pops up.
I didn’t post any of these on social media.
They were private. Moments I captured to hold close to my heart.
I look through almost every moment and remember how it felt to be with him. To have his focus. To be his number one.
It gave me everything, but it doesn’t feel real anymore.
It stopped feeling real when he dismissed me, and I won’t let myself forget that.
Do I want to talk to him?
I look at the last picture in my feed of him and us. We’re at that party, and the look on my face tells me I never wanted to be there in the first place, that I just went because he wanted me to.
I’mnot longer in the business of doing things because people want me to.
No, I don’t want to talk to him.