Chapter 2
two
. . .
“Tell me how to make you feel like a man.” Echoed in Khalif’s drunk mind as he sat in his home that felt anything but.
His boys opted to stay in the city and invite the strippers from Splash back to their hotel for an afterparty.
None of it was ever his scene. While his best friend and cousins were soaking up the prewedding debauchery, he was sitting in his living room daydreaming.
That lingering statement was accompanied by images of Aura’s body moving to the music with ease as if the melodies were produced just for her. His mind and body recalled the scent between her breast, and in her hair, as the softness of her voice pulled him deeper into his trance.
She evoked passion. Passion he hadn’t felt since falling in love with football. One night. One moment with a woman he wouldn’t see again made him reconsider everything – especially the woman he was set to marry in a few short hours.
Aura was haunting him. Every syllable she spoke.
“Do you need to be affirmed?” she asked, dancing in front of him, taunting him to touch her. “Do you need someone to see you?”
The answers to both were yes. He needed all of it.
He’d walk off the field on a high, day in and day out, only to enter this space where Shenae didn’t see him, nor cared to see him.
She never asked how he was or what he needed.
She just checked the boxes and played the part.
Outside of being the “it” couple. The couple that their parents could be proud of when it came to their legacies, there was nothing there.
No passion, no love, and barely any respect.
Until tonight, by an exotic dancer, Khalif had gone unseen and unheard in a home he’d built.
Regardless of how his or her parents felt about their union, he couldn’t do it.
No, he wasn’t calling off the wedding because of Aura.
He was calling it off because spending the rest of his life locked in with Shenae like this would be an injustice to them both.
She’d end up resenting him, and he’d end up disrespecting her in the worst way.
Despite who his father was now, he didn’t want to be the man he was before. A lying, cheating man who’d dragged his mother through the mud looking for something he wanted in his wife or in himself.
Khalif closed his eyes, hoping to rid the images of that woman. It didn’t help. Sleep wasn’t going to find him.
He stood from the sofa, leaving the bottle of liquor abandoned on the coffee table he hated. Khalif stumbled slightly to the island in the middle of the kitchen, picking up the phone. Dialing his brother’s number again, he put the phone on speaker, expecting to get his voicemail like before.
Instead, a barrage of moans flooded his kitchen. Moans he knew.
“Khalil, baby, right there,” Shenae moaned. “Yessss.”
Khalif was frozen in his tracks, unable to move, to yell, to do anything other than be tortured by the truth.
Khalil hadn’t answered his phone all night.
He hadn’t bothered checking in. It could have been anyone making his fiancée experience the ecstasy she was…
but his brother? When he couldn’t stomach another second of the treason, he grabbed the phone and sent it crashing into the cement wall.
Stalking back into the kitchen where he’d abandoned the bottle of liquor, Khalif fell back into that swimming pool of intoxication. Drowning out the sounds, the images in his head, the knowing, Khalif drank himself into a stupor.
By the time the morning came, he was slumped on the couch in a hangover of grief.
“’Lif,” his best friend called through the industrial-styled mansion. “Where you at, man! You finna be late!”
Rodney’s bellows startled Khalif.
“Shit,” he groaned, softly rubbing his head. It was going to take him more than a day to recover from his night of angry drinking. The headache brought back the brutal recall of why it was there in the first place.
Rodney entered the space where Khalif was slouched atop the leather. “You don’t hear me calling you, man? We got to go. You getting married in an hour and you look like shit.”
Khalif grunted again, feeling like it.
Rodney placed the phone to his ear. “Momma Wright… I’ll have him at the church in a minute.”
Khalif was sure his mother had given everyone an earful while they scrambled to call and locate him. The latter wasn’t difficult. While Rodney promised his mother he’d have him at the church, Khalif showered and dressed in a pair of sweats to combat December in the valley of Los Oceania.
Rodney watched as Khalif roamed down the stairs void of a garment bag and enthusiasm.
“Bruh, you not going to perk up? Where is your shit?” Rodney questioned slight concern in his voice for his friend. “You’re about to marry the love of your life. Look alive, nigga.”
Khalif walked past him toward the door and asked, “Am I?”
In confusion, Rodney trailed him out of the house. “What does that mean?”
“You’ll see. Let’s go.”
Khalif sat in the passenger seat in silence, letting everything he ignored play on a loop in his head.
With every mile that led them closer to the church, he became more and more infuriated.
The church was full to the brim with guests, only a handful of which were people he’d invited.
Khalif avoided his mother and went straight to the groom’s suite to settle a score with his brother.