I nodded. “I figured. Because baby girl has school on Monday, right?”
He threw his head forward. I could tell that while he was trying to make sure everything was alright with my world; something was very much wrong in his eyes. They were what held the darkness his mouth never uttered.
My hands found the sides of his face. “Talk to me, tell me what you meant earlier.”
His eyes traced the frame of my face before he sighed. “Walk with me.”
He grabbed my hand and we walked toward a short, pebbled path into the woods. It wasn’t really the woods, just a couple trees and seemingly uninhabited greenage. Once we were through it, we were faced with a body of water so beautiful I wanted to jump into it. He then led me down to a wooden dock. It didn’t go out too far, just far enough to house a small boat on one side in the water right in front of the ladder, and on the other side, a wooden bench.
I stood at the end of the dock, feeling a peace I had never quite known enter my body. Everything besides the water was still.
“Ashley is never coming back… because she’s dead.” His heavy voice had me turning around immediately.
“What do you mean? How do you know that?” My eyes traced his being as he never looked up at me because he was too busy glaring at the wooden planks beneath us.
“Because I killed her.” It was almost like he breathed the words from his chest instead of speaking them from his lips.
I blinked a few times, completely taken aback by his revelation. He had to be joking. Shit! Was he? My heart beat rapidly, about to escape my chest cavity. “What?” I asked, my tone so low I didn’t know if he heard me.
“I returned home from a business trip early. I heard voices and followed them. She had him in my home where I lay my head. He was redressing and. Ironically. holding his gun. I turned the corner and he started to shoot at me. I didn’t think, I just reacted. Because before I knew it, I was shooting back. Silence filled the room, and when I peeked in, my wife was unclothed under a top sheet, freshly fucked. She had taken one to the head and he was lying across the bed having taken one to the chest. It didn’t hit me until after everything happened. I’ve lived in that day every single day until I met you. Until I saw you seated in my dining room enjoying what I cooked.”
I just looked at him, tears in my eyes and pain in my chest. Crazily enough, nothing in me wanted to cry for Ashley, but instead cry for him and Aja.Oh Aja!
“Does she know?” I asked, horror in my tone. I was a child who’d lost my mother early, so I couldn’t imagine the loss Aja carried.
He immediately knew who I was talking about when I said she. “No. It was covered up just as fast as it happened.”
I nodded. That was the only thing I could do at this point. He had shared his darkest and lowest moment with me, and somehow, I didn’t look at him any differently. It made me feellike I needed to hold him close. He carried this like jewelry to the flashiest nigga when he didn’t have to. In the moment everything transpired it was either his life or the man his wife had laid up with in his home. I knew plenty of niggas who would’ve made that decision and slept peacefully the next night. He didn’t. He carried pain so deep that he couldn’t look at his child for months and felt undeserving of any type of happiness.
“So what, are you going to leave me now?” He was still seated on the bench, still looking at everything but me. His heart was in his shoulders, slumped, and I just wanted to hold it in my hands.
His question shattered my heart. “That’s what you think?”
“I don’t know, Jade. I don’t want you feeling like you hav?—”
“I love you, Oden. Shit, I told you I thought I was falling in love with you, so if you told me that to make me walk away from you then you gotta come harder than that. You didn’t deliberately kill her…” I started, but my sentence trailed off when his heated gaze landed on me.
“But I left her without her mother.” He pointed back toward the house.
“Yes, you did but you can’t go back and change that. All you can do is show up for her every single time she looks up. Coming from experience, you never forget your mother’s absence, but being surrounded by people who love you unconditionally will lighten the blow. You don’t think you can make this up, but you can, by just being there. By never allowing her to feel alone in a world filled with isolation.” I moved in front of him while I spoke.
He nodded. “So. You're not leaving me?”
“Not by a longshot, Chef. I happen to like them kind of dark with a lil baggage.” I cracked a smile, knowing maybe it wasn’t the right moment.
He leaned forward, his forehead finding my abdomen. “I love you too, Jade.”
“You better.”
When I asked him what was wrong, I never imagined what was wrong was the fact that he had murdered his wife and her side dude. That was quite the burden to carry, even though he shouldn’t have been. It was crazy because what should have been a red flag for me was bright green like the streetlights on a Monday summer night in the city. Where he felt monstrous and undeserving of love, I saw a man who deserved love so unconditional, so intentional, that he felt it with every motion. The wildest love with no containment.
“So,let me get this straight, y’all put a marshmallow between chocolate and two graham crackers? That’s just disrespectful to the graham crackers.” My expression probably mirrored how I felt about it.
Aja laughed and so did her father. “It’s a s’more, Jade.”
“I mean I see, but this is so dangerous and how do we even taste the chocolate?” I watched Aja bite into the semi melted chocolate marshmallow sandwich.
“Baby, just try it.”
