Chapter 20
The next two days passed quietly and I hated every minute of it.
No calls. No unknown numbers lighting up my phone. No roses showing up anywhere. Nothing.
I called him twice the first day and it rang out. Three times the second day and same thing. By the third day I was doing something I had not done since I was a teenager which was checking my phone every twenty minutes waiting on a notification that wasn’t coming.
I had told myself I was done with him. He had apparently decided the same thing about me first and now I was the one sitting in my feelings about it, which was so far outside of how I operated that I didn’t even know what to do with myself.
Griz had seen Brendon coming into my office.
That had to be what it was. Saw him walk into my spot with food and decided to fall back.
Which made no sense given that he had been the one pushing me to end the engagement, but men didn’t always make sense and this one in particular seemed to operate on a system that I didn’t fully have the manual for yet.
What was really getting under my skin was how uneven this whole thing was.
He knew everything about me. My home address, where I worked, that I had a fiancé, what my business looked like, how many staff I had on deck, apparently.
He had shown up at my office like he had mapped the place out beforehand which knowing him he probably had.
And I knew nothing. I didn’t know where he lived, didn’t know if he had someone, didn’t know anything about the life he was living beyond what little he had let slide through in conversation.
Was he out here doing this with someone else?
Was there a woman somewhere who knew him the way he I didn’t.
This nigga had me acting and thinking like a weak ass bitch.
I didn’t know how to accept the feeling of being cut off.
He’d done all that tough taking about taking me from my man, and now this nigga was ghosting me. Fuck no!
The thought of it moved through me in a way that I was embarrassed about privately because I had a fiancé. I had a whole man at home who loved me without conditions and I was spiraling over whether Griz was entertaining somebody else.
I ordered the tracker on day three.
Small, flat, magnetic. Discreet enough to slide anywhere without being noticed. It arrived in two days and I put it in my bag and told myself I was just leveling the field. He wanted to know everything about my life, fine. I was going to know where he went too.
More days passed. Nothing.
He had gone completely quiet and the silence was louder than anything he had actually said to me. This was an unfamiliar feeling, and if I could describe it as anything, I would describe it is hurt.
—
Now over a week had passed and my man could see the shift in my mood, but I tried to keep it together.
I was sad as hell without my bear. Griz was rough, but soft and sweet to me.
Well, somewhat. Brendon kept asking me what was wrong and I wanted to tell him, “because of yo ass, I done lost the love of my fuckin life!” But, of course I didn’t say that.
I just told him that running both businesses had me exhausted.
So what did he do, he ordered me a spa day, and got with my girls for them to run the class so that I could take the entire day off.
This was the man that I had cheated on. This was the man that I was growing to despise because I was in love with a nigga I had no business ever entertaining. A nigga who had ghosted me for over a fucking week now. I was disappointed in myself. I needed to get it together and just do better.
—
Brendon brought it up over dinner on a Thursday.
“I have a new client I’m excited about,” he said, cutting into his food.
“Met him the end of last week. He wants to purchase two properties. One for himself, it’s a surprise for his wife.
I’m guessing she lives in another state or something because he wants it be a welcome home, this is your house kind of thing.
And he wants a vacation getaway home, something in downtown near everything.
”Both cash purchases, proof of funds already verified.
” He shook his head like he still couldn’t believe it.
“I don’t know what it is about this guy but I like him already.
He’s straightforward. Knows what he wants and these will be my biggest individual sales of the year. Can you believe this?” He boasted.
I was listening but I was also somewhere else. I just smiled and tried to match his excitement.
“There’s a dinner tomorrow night,” he said.
“I want you to come. He picked a nice restaurant, five star, for us to finalize the first purchase. I want to make a good impression. Just be warm, be interested, you know how you are when you’re on.
These things with me. You have that charm. Please use it for me babe.”
“I’ll be there,” I said.
“This is one of the bigger ones baby. Cash buyer, two properties, this is a great start to Q4.”
“I said I’ll be there Brendon.”
He looked at me for a second. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. Just tired.”
He reached across and put his hand over mine and I looked at his face and felt something hollow move through my chest. He was so genuinely unbothered.
So certain that everything in his life was exactly what it looked like.
I almost wanted to warn him about something and I didn’t even know how I would begin to do that.
“Thank you,” he said. “For always showing up for me.”
I smiled and said of course and picked up my fork.
—
I wore the black dress. Fitted, stopped above the knee, open toe heels, hair pinned up.
I looked good and I knew it and honestly getting dressed was the most present I had felt all week because it gave me something to focus on that wasn’t the silence coming from the man I was waiting to get an explanation from.
The restaurant was Dakota’s Steakhouse. Proper five star, dim lighting, the kind of place where everything on the menu was described in three sentences and the portions were small and perfect. We arrived and the host walked us to the table and Brendon was already scanning the room for his client.
I excused myself to the restroom first.
As soon as I got into the restroom, I pulled out my phone and called Griz again. Straight to voicemail. I stood there for a second looking at myself in the mirror and then put the phone back in my bag and fixed my face and went back out.
Brendon was standing at the table greeting someone. He had the biggest smile on his face. When it came to securing a bag, this man was gonna put on a damn show.
I walked up.
And stopped.
Griz turned around in a tailored suit that fit him like it had been made specifically for his body, which knowing what I knew about his body it probably had.
Dark, clean, a watch on his wrist that caught the light.
He looked like a completely different version of himself from every other time I had seen him and also exactly the same.
He looked at me when I walked up and his face didn’t move.
My heart dropped directly through the floor.
Brendon put his hand on my back. “Baby, this is my client. And—” he laughed a little, “—it’s a small world, he’s also from corsicana, Texas. You two don’t know each other do you?”
“No,” I said. The word came out immediately. “Never met.”
Griz smiled at me. Slow and deliberate. Held out his hand. “Nice to meet you.”
I shook it and felt his thumb press into my palm for half a second longer than a handshake required and pulled my hand back.
We sat down.
I looked at him across that table and the questions were already stacking up in my throat.
Brendon had said this man was buying a house for himself and his wife.
Wife. I stared at Griz across the breadsticks and the candlelight and felt something ugly move through me.
I think it was jealousy, mixed with the feeling of betrayal.
“I hear you are buying a home for your wife. That’s sweet. My fiancé bought my home for me months into our relationship. Where is she from? Here or back home?” I asked, making what seems like small talk.
He chucked, and looked at me directly. “She’s from back home.”
“She’ll be joining you here in Dallas?”
“Soon,” he said. He held my eyes. “I just call her my wife out of habit. We’re not married yet. But I plan to handle that as soon as I bring her home.”
I picked up my water glass.
“She must be excited,” I said. “New city, new home.”
“She doesn’t know everything yet,” he said. “But she will.”
Brendon was nodding along, completely inside his own excitement about the deal, about the cash buyer, about Q4.
He was talking about square footage and neighborhoods and school districts for future reference and I sat there in my black dress looking at a man I had been trying to call for ten days who had been completely unreachable, sitting across from my fiancé in a suit, buying a house that he had told me was for his wife.
Who the fuck was this bitch getting his time, attention and money?
The dinner went on.
Griz was smooth across that table. He knew exactly how to talk to a man like Brendon, matched his energy without performing it, asked the right questions, made the right comments.
Brendon was practically glowing by the time they got to the second course.
I watched him work the table and felt simultaneously impressed and completely unhinged.
When Brendon excused himself to take a call outside, I looked at Griz.
“A wife? That’s where you been? Who is this bitch?” I said. Mad as hell, I was damn near shaking.
“You,” he said simply.
“I’ve been calling you for ten days.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t answer.”
“I know that too.”
I leaned forward slightly and kept my voice low. “So what was that? You just disappeared? And what the fuck are you doing here? Leave this man alone please! This is too far Griz. You’ve crossed a big line.”
“I needed you to feel what it felt like to not be able to find me,” he said. “Now you know. You wanna feel that shit for the rest of your life? If not, stop fuckin playing with me!”
I stared at him.
“The roses,” he said. “The hotel. Showing up at your job. You kept telling me it was nothing. I needed you to figure out whether it was nothing or not.” He said, coldly.
“That’s manipulative,” I said.
“Did it work?”
I didn’t answer.
He smiled and picked up his glass.
Brendon came back to the table and the dinner finished and by the end of it they had agreed to move forward and scheduled a follow-up for the following week.
Brendon was in the best mood I had seen him in months.
He shook Griz’s hand at the door and told him he was looking forward to it and Griz told him likewise and looked at me one more time before he walked to his car.
I watched the valet bring Brendon’s car around and when Brendon went to tip the attendant I turned and looked at the parking lot and found Griz’s car and made a decision.
I walked over fast, tracker already in my hand from my clutch where I had been carrying it for a week and a half on the chance that this moment arrived.
I bent down like I had dropped something and pressed it up under the rear bumper and felt the magnetic click and stood back up and walked back to the entrance before Brendon turned around and before Griz could make it outside.
He’d going back inside to grab his wallet off the table.
Tonight Griz paid for the entire dinner, and unbeknownst to my fiancé, that was Griz playing him like a hoe.
The whole time Brendon was smiling like a fool.
He put his arm around me on the way to the car. “I really like him,” he said. “Good energy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He seems like someone who always gets exactly what he wants.”
My phone buzzed in my clutch.
Unknown number.
One text. No words. Just an address.
I looked at it for three seconds and then looked at Brendon while he drove and felt the war happening inside my chest play out in real time.
I texted back. Give me an hour.
I didn’t know what I was doing anymore. What I knew was that ten days of silence had told me something about myself that I didn’t have a clean answer for.
And that man in a suit across a dinner table had just looked at me like I was already his and somehow that felt more true than anything I had been telling myself for the past week and a half.
I was in trouble.
And the most honest part of me had stopped pretending I wanted to get out of it. I needed Griz. Maybe he was right. Maybe I did need to let Brendon go. Hell. I didn’t know what to do.