Page 2 of Nikki Sinatra: For Her Lover
And Nikki held true to her word that day. And Emilio gave up and let it go.
But five months later, after Emilio was talking about how they were going to get married and have a baby, which he knew was her heart’s desire, Nikki was sitting in an airport in Thailand. She followed every rule Emilio had taught her, even down to looking everybody in the eye and smiling incessantly and talking and being pleasant. Contrary to popular belief it was the quiet ones, Emilio had said, that the authorities always paid attention to. Not the loudmouths. He told Nikki to be a loudmouth that day. A loudmouth with a small fortune in opioids hidden deep down in her luggage in a compartment Emilio swore could not be detected on radar screens nor human searches.
She was sitting happily in that shiny airport in that foreign country as she watched a group of serious police officers do exactly what Emilio said they wouldn’t do: They were paying attention to her and her alone. Very close attention. Every time she looked their way they were looking at her. But she knew she could never show nervousness. She continued to laugh and talk with those who spoke English around her. She thought she was good at it.
Until those same police officers that wouldn’t stop staring at her left their post as a group. They were all skinny, all serious, all with guns on their slim hips and batons down their sides. And they were coming, not for the quiet ones, but straight for the loudmouth Emilio had insisted would keep her off their radar.
Her heart was hammering.
It would begin the darkest forty-eight hours of Nikki’s entire life. Forty-eight hours that she would do everything in her power, to the very depths of her soul, to keep forever tucked away deep down into the furthest reaches of her being.
When Nikki Baker got married to her first husband and became Nikki Tarver, and when Nikki Tarver got married to her second husband and became Nikki Sinatra, she never oncespoke about those forty-eight hours, those horrific dark days, to a living soul.
And she aimed to keep it that way until her dying day.
Until circumstances intervened, despite her best efforts, and she could remain silent no longer.
CHAPTER ONE
PRESENT DAY
“What about Teddy?”
Nikki had only just sat down and gave the waiter her drink order, but already they were going there. “What about him?” she asked.
“Is he finally going to come on the couples trip with us this time?”
“I have no idea. All I can do is ask him. Where’s Shanice?”
Deja and Raven looked at each other. Both were longtime friends of Nikki’s, but both had grown closer to each other than they were to Nikki. Not that they didn’t want to be closer to her: they did. Especially Deja. She and Nikki were best friends by the time Raven came into their girls’ group. But Nikki’s crazy work schedule always caused her to miss too many girls-night outs. She barely showed up half the time.
“Shanice can’t make it. She had to work late.”
“Well there ya’ go,” Nikki said.
But even Deja, her closest friend, wasn’t buying that. “What do you mean there ya’ go?”
“Teddy had to work too.”
“But all the time, Nikki? I don’t understand why you don’t get on his case more. And don’t get me wrong. I love Teddy. We all do. When he’s around he’s a lot of fun and he knows how to get down for a white boy. But damn, Nick. He’s never around.”
“And when we say never,” Raven chimed in, “we mean never ever. I can’t remember the last time Teddy came to any of our get-togethers, let alone our couples’ trips. We never see him anymore.”
Nikki wanted to roll her eyes. They had to know how over it she was about them and theirwhere’s Teddybullshit. “How many times I got to tell y’all that he works a lot and can’t get away? He don’t have no nine-to-five. He works hard.”
“And we don’t?” asked Deja. “Hell we’re both professional black women in a white man’s world. You don’t think that’s hard work? And our men do even harder work than that. But we make it our business to show up. So do our men. They show up. What’s Teddy’s problem? And it can’t be that he works all the time because nobody works all the time.” Then Deja pointed a finger at Nikki. “You let that man get away with way too much, girl.”
“Way, way, way too much,” echoed Raven.
Nikki took a sip of her drink. She wasn’t trying to hear none of their criticisms about her man when theirs wasn’t shit either. And Deja, who she used to be really close with, was beginning to sound more and more like Raven, who criticized everything. She moved on. “What’s the trip this year?” she asked them. “Y’all decided yet?”
“I want us to go to Australia,” Deja said. “To the Outback you know? Something different. But everybody else is leaning toward Nova Scotia.”
“Nova Scotia?” Nikki was surprised.
“It’s mainly the guys,” said Raven. “They want to go fly fishing and stuff like that.”
“I doubt seriously if Teddy will wanna go to Nova Scotia,” Nikki said. “And this is going to be a winter trip too? I doubt if I’m going to a cold-behind place like that.”
