30 Love, page 3
I look into Marcia’s eyes. “I love her. Seriously. And I always hoped we would get married one day. Dominic and Dominique, you know.”
“Well, I already told you what I think. Y’all are two peas in a pod anyway.”
“So what should I do then?”
“Have you tried calling her?”
“Yeah, she won’t answer or call me back.”
“I figured,” she says, pondering the situation. “I tell you what. Just trail me over to her house.”
She can probably tell by my reaction that I’m confused as hell by her suggestion.
“You love her, right?”
“No doubt.”
“Well, I know she’ll answer the door for me. You just make sure you’re standing there when she does.”
When Lailah answers the door, Marcia immediately says, “I brought someone over here with me.”
“Oh girl!” Lailah responds when she sees me step into view.
“Y’all need to talk to each other and not around each other. I’m out of here. Call me next week, girl!” Marcia says over her shoulder as she returns to her car.
Now Lailah and I are standing alone at the door, facing each other. She looks disheveled, but beautiful. I can tell she’s been vegging out because her curly hair is flying in every direction and she’s wearing a large t-shirt that falls low on her thighs, just above the tights she’s wearing.
“Are you going to invite me in?” I finally ask.
“Come in.”
As I step into the foyer of her two-level suburban tract house, I admire the tranquil vibe. There’s some heavy feng shui shit going on up in here.
“I can’t believe she just brought you over here like that,” she says, leading me to the couch in the den.
“You wouldn’t take my calls or get back with me.”
“Don’t take it personal. I’ve just been thinking. You know how I get when I get inside my head. I can get lost in there.”
“I’ve been lost in my own head, too. I was praying like hell that I hadn’t lost you after what I said.”
She closes her eyes for a moment, as if preparing her thoughts. When she opens them, she angles her body toward mine.
“What was the other night about?” she finally says.
“It was about me trying, for once, to tell you what I wanted out of our friendship.”
“So you really want to marry me?” she asks. “Is that even possible, given that we’ve never even dated?”
“Anything is possible. And as far as I’m concerned, our relationship is above dating anyway. Dating is what people do when they are trying to get to know each other. We know each other already.”
“Not intimately.”
“We can always work that out,” I say coyly.
She doesn’t give me her usual smile. “I’m still tripping that you asked me.”
“I told you that I would ten years ago.”
“Dizzy, people say all kinds of shit when they’re young. I was convinced I would marry Brian McKnight one day.”
“Stop lying, La. You know you had a thing for Stoney Jackson.”
“Boy, I don’t do jheri curls.”
“Well, that rules out half the niggas in Memphis.”
At this, she finally laughs, and I am so relieved that all I want to do is bask in her laughter for the next few minutes.
“Seriously, while you were pining over Brian, I was trying to keep from letting you know that you were my number one.”
“Oh, so you never had a celebrity crush?”
“Well, there was Janet.”
She smiles. “Why do all guys want to get with Janet Jackson?”
“I didn’t say Janet Jackson. I’m talking about Janet Jacme.”
“Who?”
“She’s a porn star.”
Lailah shakes her head. “I should have known.”
“But she doesn’t hold a candle to you,” I add with a smile.
“I hope not,” she responds, chuckling.
I take her hand, and she allows me to hold it.
“See, this is why I know we’re made for each other. We’re the only ones who really get us.”
“But is that enough of a reason to get married? Marriage is serious. It’s not just a ceremony. It’s a lifetime together.”
“I know. I would still want you—even if you looked like you just rolled out of bed with your hair sticking up all over your head like Who Shot John and Why.”
She touches her hair. “Oh shit!” she says, jumping off the couch and running for the bathroom down the hall.
“Don’t worry,” I call out. “You don’t have to get all Scott Pilgrim on me. I love the natural look.”
I can hear her laughing, and she returns moments later with a long-billed baseball cap pulled low on her head.
“No, take that thing off. You’re too beautiful to be rocking something that fugly.”
“I’m not taking it off, so you’ll have to just get used to it, pal.”
“Fair enough.”
She looks at me for a moment, her eyes barely visible beneath the brim of the hat. “I don’t know about all of this, Dizzy.”
“Just answer one question for me. Do you love me?”
“Yes, but I don’t know if it’s the same way that you say you love me.”
I chew on my bottom lip for a moment. “So you’re saying you’re not attracted to me?”
“I am attracted to you.”
“Well, are you saying that you can’t view me as your man?”
“I’m not exactly saying that either.”
“Well, what are you saying then?”
Lailah lowers her head and stares at her toes. “I don’t know what I’m saying, man.”
“Just tell me how you really feel. That’s the only way we’ll know which direction we need to take things.”
She looks up slowly and stares at me for what seems like an eternity. I can’t make out her thoughts. After all, I did just pop up here unannounced and put all of this stuff in her face while I stood by waiting for her response.
She leans toward me, and I see her eyes beginning to close, so I lean forward, quickly kissing her. Her lips are soft as they press against mine, and I all I want is to stay with her in this moment. When she pulls away, I have no idea of what she is thinking.
“You know all of this is crazy, right?” she says.
“Yeah, but if you’re gonna do something crazy, you should do it with me. In the whole scope of things, this is just an extension of the crazy things that we’ve already done in our lives.”
She ponders this for a moment. “So you are serious about all of this then?”
“Dead serious.”
“Will you always love me and want me?”
“Definitely.”
“Will you still be in love with me if I gain fifty pounds or I lose my arm in an accident or something?”
“Yes—and why are you asking me all of this?”
She takes my hand. “Because in marriage, people change and things happen. I don’t ever want to get divorced, so I just need to know that what you’re telling me is a commitment you can make for the rest of your life.”
I lift her hand to my lips and kiss it softly. “I want to get old with you.”
She smiles before leaning in and kissing me again. This kiss is even softer and nicer than the first. When she pulls away this time, she tosses that ugly ass baseball cap onto the floor.
“Okay, Dizzy. Let’s do it.”
4
Only after I’ve had a chance to get a good night’s sleep does the magnitude of what we’re doing truly sink in. Somehow the word “marriage” feels different than it did yesterday. Before, it was something I was aspiring to, but now it is something I’m about to actually do.
I look around my apartment and realize at some point in the not-so-distant future I will be sharing all of the stuff in here: the Star Wars posters, the electric guitar I bought just because the shit looked cool (even though I never learned to play a lick), my funky ass futon (if that thing could talk, oh my god!), my original Macintosh computer case (which is empty, but serves as an insanely great paper weight), and a baseball cap collection that would put Mr. Marcus to shame. In all honesty, she’ll probably push to get rid of some of this stuff—especially the futon. I might have to fight for the other stuff though.
What’s of even greater concern now is that we have to let everyone else in on our plans, including our parents. I have no freaking idea of what they’re going to say. Truthfully, I wasn’t convinced that Lailah would even say “yes,” so the notion of actually calling her parents in advance to talk about the proposal didn’t make much sense to me. I figured if she said “no” then no one would have to ever know about this hiccup in our friendship. Now, I have to not only tell my parents about all of this, but I also need to talk to her parents first. Before I left her house last night, I told her to keep everything under wraps until I could get Mr. Landfair and Mrs. Landfair’s permission. She thought that was such a gentleman’s gesture, but I know the Landfairs and I know my parents, and all of them are old school and don’t play that neo-styled cowboy shit where a guy ducks and dodges the family until the wedding. Granted some things about Mississippi have changed through the years, that isn’t one of them.
The more I think about calling Mr. and Mrs. Landfair, the more I realize that’s nearly as crass as just not asking their permission at all. I can only imagine some dude tweeting me in thirty years to ask my permission to marry my daughter. That would suck ass to the extreme, so I call Lailah and ask her if she wouldn’t mind the two of us driving down to Mississippi together so we could do all of this the right way. She agrees, but asks me how I plan to go about it.
“Well, I think it would work if we acted like we’d already been dating for a minute.”
“How long do you think?” she asks. “Six months? A year?”
I shrug my shoulders, but then I realize that she can’t see me since we’re on the phone. “Maybe somewhere between six months and year.”
It seems as though we’re completely abandoning the idea of just telling our parents the truth, because deep down we both know what we’re doing would probably sound ridiculous to anyone who wasn’t us.
“So when we go to see your folks, I guess I’ll get your father somewhere off by himself and start telling him how I feel about you,” I say.
“And I can be talking about us to my mother so she knows how serious we are.”
I smile. We’re already playing like a team, and that just reinforces how much alike we really are.
“Do you think your father will be cool?” I ask.
“Well, he always thought you were a good person. I don’t see why he would start tripping now. You’re the son of his best friend, so I’m thinking he probably knew this was a possibility all along.”
“And your mother will be cool?”
“Oh yeah,” Lailah says. “She has actually told me on several occasions that I needed to just hook up with you anyway. This will be music to her ears.”
“Cool,” I say, relieved. “Now we just have to tell my parents.”
“Do you think they’ll trip?” she asks.
“Not at all. I’ve never made a secret of how much I liked you.”
“You told your parents about your feelings for me?”
“It’s not like I just bring it up every time we talk, but there have been times when I told them that I’d like to settle down with a woman like you. They agreed that I should make a play for you—and I did—but you know how all of that went down,” I say, laughing. “You kept playing a brotha to the side.”
“I can’t believe that you were telling them about us the entire time. Now I’m going to feel strange around them.”
“Why?”
“I’m the woman who kept turning down their son. That would make me like the enemy or something.”
“Seriously? Please. The fact that you’re saying yes now will magically undo anything else. I think in the end the result is all I’d care about, so it’s probably all that they’d care about, too.”
When we get off the phone, I start packing my bag. We’ll leave on Saturday morning and should arrive in Daily in roughly five hours. At that point, we’ll stop by her parents’ house first and then go on to see my parents.
Everything is happening so quickly that I’m still trying to catch up with my thoughts, but I can’t help but smile when I realize that I’m finally in a relationship with Lailah.
I drive over to Lailah’s after I finish packing. As I pull into her driveway, a number of things start to dawn on me, and I realize that I have a million questions to ask her. In a way, it seems silly that I’d even have to ask them, but when you haven’t been in an intimate relationship with someone, there’s a whole side to a person that you just don’t know.
That’s when it hits me that we should probably be intimate soon. The thought feels almost mechanical when it comes to mind, and I find myself ashamed that I could think of having sex with her as being a requirement for anything, but sadly I can’t think of any situation in the modern era where sampling the goods wasn’t encouraged.
Standing at the door, I feel the pressure in my guts starting to build, and I hope like hell that intimacy between us comes naturally, because it would suck major ass if it didn’t.
“Hey, you,” she says, letting me in.
I lean down and kiss her, relishing the feel of her thin, strong arms wrapping themselves around me. I can feel myself coming to attention, so I position myself slightly so that she can better feel that “poke” coming through.
She steps back slowly with a crooked smile on her face. “Well, okay then.”
“Boo, you know I can’t help it,” I offer, singing the lyrics from that song by Next. I know I’m being cheesy, but I can’t think of any other response.
“So did you finish packing yet?” she asks.
“Huh?”
“Packing. Did you finish packing for the trip?”
I shake my head trying to understand how we shifted to talking about the trip. “Is everything okay?”
She nods. “Yeah. Why? What’s up?”
“It’s just,” I start, but I can’t seem to find the right words to finish.
“Speak your mind, Dizzy, because I can’t read it.”
I take her hand, and we walk into the den and sit on the couch. I don’t even know where to start. In the past few minutes all I could think about was having sex with her—needing to have sex with her—and it’s not like we haven’t had conversations about sex at least a thousand times over the year (although never about having it with each other), but now I find myself unsure of exactly what to say or how I want to say it. A part of me is even nervous about bringing this issue up with her in such an isolated manner.
Even more, as we sit here, I sense that she already knows what’s on my mind but is still insisting that I put the words out there anyway. More than anything I wish that she would be the same old Lailah that I’ve always known, the kind of person who could read my thoughts and spare me the embarrassment of having to say certain things aloud.
Maybe this is a part of the new relationship we’re sharing. If so, I’m going to have to grow a serious pair, because it doesn’t seem like she’s going to cut me a lot of slack going forward.
“Dizzy, what’s up?”
It’s only when she speaks that I realize all of my internal debating is causing a room full of silence. By this time I feel embarrassed, so I shift gears.
“How does it feel to be getting married?” I ask.
“Truthfully, I’m still trying to process all of this.”
“I feel you.” Then I admit, “I wasn’t sure you’d even accept my proposal, so I guess I hadn’t really thought all that far past our birthday.”
“What made you do it? I mean, if you had never brought any of this up, I wouldn’t have remembered our agreement—at least not like you did. It might’ve come to me in six months while I was cleaning the house or something, but it feels like you might have been planning this from the day we talked about it in my dorm room.”
I rub the back of her hand softly with my thumb, moving it in slow circles. “I can’t believe that we’re even here right now,” I finally say. “The thought has crossed my mind like a hundred times over the last few years, and now I’m just trying to get used to actually being in this moment after all of this time.”
“I don’t want our friendship to change, though,” she says. “I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk to me anymore. Not now. If you start changing on me, that would be my biggest fear coming to life.”
“That’s your biggest fear?”
“I’ve been telling you that ever since the first time you told me you liked me. I value our friendship that much. You are the one constant denominator in my life, and if you start acting all brand new and switching the script, I think we might need to step back and rethink things.”
I shake my head. “I wouldn’t change on you, and I definitely wouldn’t give you a reason to change your mind. I’m convinced that we can be lovers and friends. Aren’t you?”
“I’m definitely open to finding out.”
I smile, and she leans over and kisses me.
“So are you going to tell me what you were thinking when you got here and why you were acting so funny, or do we have to do some kind of guessing game to get at the truth?” she says.
I know she’s right. Even if some of my ideas are crude, silly, or crazy, I can’t afford to keep them away from her, especially if they’ll affect how we’re going to be interacting with each other. “I’ve been thinking a lot about sex—and about us,” I finally say.
I watch as she arches one eyebrow and angles her head toward me. She looks at me with that quizzical expression for a moment before finally asking me, “So what were you thinking?”
It hadn’t even occurred to me that we were both so out of practice with sex that we would be craving the same thing. I thought I was stretching it with my four-month dry spell (a feat that can only be accomplished and sustained with massive amounts of internet porn and lotion), but when she told me that she was approaching a year, I was dumbfounded—in a good way. It was clear that we needed to make up for lost time very soon. The thing was how to do that while still preserving the “integrity” of the situation. The fact that we were having to have an actual conversation about something that two people, in theory, would never really have to have a conversation about ahead of time—not in the mechanical detail that we were—revealed more than a little bit about the awkwardness that has descended upon us.
