Page 5 of Without You
“I don’t know if you can hang with us. We go hard,” he warned. The NARAS party was not the place to cut loose, but he and Bo would definitely hit a club or two afterward. They’d get drunk off top shelf liquor, and if they were lucky, get high on some good weed.
“I may surprise you. Maybe I don’t know if you can hang with me.”
Well, damn.
Terrence grinned, certain she’d help him forget the woman he really wanted to be with tonight. The woman he met fourteen years ago, married two years later, and who changed his life. The woman whose name he tattooed over his heart on their four-year anniversary to prove his love after too many fuck ups—and never removed it, even after they split.
Yeah, Kim should help him forget Charisse.
At least, he hoped so. If only for a few hours.
3
Terrence and Bo sat in a booth at Darn Good, a locally owned restaurant off Candler Road in existence for over thirty years. The menu hadn’t changed in all that time.
From the outside, the place looked like a hole in the wall, but they served delicious meals—simple but hearty breakfasts and simple but hearty lunches that consisted of one meat and two vegetables. Terrence had been coming here for years, and he and the owner, Miss Margaret, were good friends. In the early days when cash was low, he could always stop by and Miss Margaret would fill his arms with leftovers so he could feed his wife and adopted son. In appreciation of her kindness, he shouted out Darn Good in a couple of songs when he became famous. The free publicity made the little restaurant popular and its owner a minor celebrity.
Stopping in from time to time did more than feed his belly. The visits satisfied his appetite for nostalgia and reminded him of where he came from. Still bleary-eyed after flying back from New York after a promotional gig and time spent in the studio doing a feature for one of the record company’s popular R&B artists, he and Bo remained inconspicuous in thick jackets and skull caps pulled low on their foreheads.
Terrence checked messages on his phone while Bo wolfed down grits with sugar sprinkled on them—full-on blasphemy in a place like this—and shoveled eggs and toast into his mouth. When he finally took a break, he asked, “What are you working on?”
“I asked Kamisha to check on vacation spots for this summer’s trip,” Terrence said, referring to his other assistant. Kamisha handled travel arrangements, organized his calendar, and worked from the office. Bo was a Jack-of-All-Trades who traveled with him and acted as a go-between for any and all issues he didn’t want to address directly.
“You taking Charisse and the kids on a trip this summer, too?”
He glanced up at his friend, who studied him from across the table. “Yes.”
Bo knew the answer to the question before he asked. Terrence and Charisse had been divorced for five years, but the past two summers, he took her and the kids on a two-week vacation and made it plain that would be their annual ritual for years to come. This year he was thinking about the Galapagos Islands, since Charisse and Ennis liked to snorkel.
Of course, he knew why Bo asked. He thought it was weird Terrence vacationed with his ex.
Bo wiped his mouth and dropped the crumpled napkin on the table. “Yo, I still don’t get it. I think Charisse is a sweetheart, and God knows she put up with a lot of shit from your ass, but she’s yourex.”
Terrence sighed and set down the phone. “What’s the big deal? She’s the mother of my children, and we’re still friends. We get along. There’s nothing wrong with us spending time together with the kids. It’s good for them to see us getting along.”
Bo eyed him skeptically. “So the only reason you plan these vacations is to present a united front for the kids?”
That wasn’t the only reason he arranged these trips. During those two weeks, he experienced their family life again, as if they weren’t divorced and living apart. They ate together, went sightseeing, and because they were five people with five different opinions, they argued about what they wanted to do from day to day. And he loved every minute of it.
He also loved to watch his ex. She was a darn good mother who played with the kids, kissing on them even in the middle of an intense water volleyball match. Half the time he didn’t join in. Under the pretense of working, he sat on the side of the private pool and watched behind dark sunglasses.Watched Charisse. She was beautiful and sexy in a one-piece bathing suit that she thought was more modest but made his imagination run wild.
Charisse still turned him on, and if she turned him on, she turned on other men—which he could barely stand to think about. Thank goodness she kept her relationships low-key. In all these years he’d never actually seen her with another man. He liked to think there was no one else, because he couldn’t tolerate the thought of another man touching her. Quite ironic, considering his track record. Before the blow up that ended their marriage, he never flaunted his extramarital hookups, but there had been plenty of questionable photos, rumor, and innuendo—some true, some false—and she’d have to be blind and deaf not to know what he’d been up to.
“Of course I’m organizing these vacations for the kids,” Terrence said.
“Come on dawg, it’s me.”
Terrence chuckled. “I’m serious.”
Bo drummed thick fingers on the table as Terrence resumed scrolling through emails, pretending not to notice.
“I think it’s great you and Charisse have such a solid relationship, but how do you think your new woman is going to handle the fact that you’re vacationing with your ex?”
Terrence continued scrolling. “I don’t have a new woman.”
“When you do, you think she’s gon’ like you hanging out on the beach or whatever with your ex-wife? Any woman with half a brain would be threatened by that. Come on man, you’re looking for trouble.”
Terrence put down the phone and glared at Bo. He firmed his voice to make it clear the conversation should come to an end. “My ex-wife and my kids are part of my life. Whoever enters my life now will simply have to deal.”
