We pulled into a luxury home complex thirty minutes later; shame on her for lying to get me alone. The complex completely impressed me on every level, although I knew it wasn’t hers.
She unlocked the front door and held it for me to walk through. The second she shut the door, I attacked her with ravenous desire. Our first kiss involved the acrobatic process of taking clothes off while shuffling backward to the bedroom. We never made it to any restaurant. When we finally woke up, Rhonda was seated on the couch, watching television. She threw her head back to shout down the hall. “Ya’ll had fun, I heard. I knew you weren’t coming back, Mandy, you could have told me.”
“Hey, girl, I planned to come back but I got attacked,” Mandy said with a smile as she chuckled and walked to the kitchen.
I stood in the hallway, yawning, in Mandy’s shirt with my arms folded over my chest. It seemed to me that Rhonda’s tone carried a hint of jealousy. I stood there for a minute, pretending to watch whatever Rhonda had on the television, then headed back to the bedroom. Mandy followed me to the bedroom with a glass of water. Again, we had ridiculously insane sex, which drove Rhonda out of the house sometime after the first half hour.
Mandy and I saw each other regularly for about two weeks, but marathon sex had to stop after missing morning formation twice. While soldiers walked past her car like zombies, my dumb ass ran to my barracks room to change out of club clothes.
Sex was amazing; however, the best thing that happened between us was friendship. As clueless as I am to the thing that unites two people, I’m even more oblivious to the thing that divides. During our short time as a couple, our relationship grew from whatever it was into a meaningful friendship. As connected as we were together, it wasn’t in the cards and, although we tried, we never put a finger on why.
My guess is that one conversation, in particular, may have gently nudged us into the friend zone for good. It was in her car after Mandy picked me up for a sushi date. She commented on how upset I looked. She pried a little further when I tried to deflect her concern, and I lost my composure almost immediately. I sobbed about going through some serious shit that she wouldn’t understand.
“Just tell me. What is going on?” Mandy begged and placed her hand on my thigh.
“Please don’t hate me when I tell you this, okay?”
She removed her hand from my thigh and folded her hands in her lap. “All right, I won’t. What is it?”
“I’m gay, but I am married. Then, there is my girlfriend, and we all live together back in Vegas. I love them, but I can’t do this anymore and it’s fuckin’ me up.” An explosion of words and emotions poured out of me as I slobbered my way through the story.
She listened to every mumbled word and pieced together every hyperventilated sentence before she offered her thoughts. “Ya’ll are not the only people in the world. I was with my boyfriend, off and on, for eight years, girl. We tried to do the same thing. He let me have girlfriends and everything. I loved him, I’m…still in love with him, but I can’t because I am gay. It broke his heart, girl, and he asked me to marry him, said he would live like that as long as I was in his life. And…well…that isn’t right. It ain’t right to be with a person if you can’t be with them one hundred percent. So, I know. I know exactly what you are going through, believe me. The only difference is, we were never married, but we might as well have been.”
While repeatedly wiping my eyes free of tears, she comforted me with details and parallels of her previous relationship. “I tried. We tried. My family loves him, I mean…” She trailed off into a private thought of her own before snapping back.
“I cannot suck dick to save my life, girl; it makes me want to vomit.” She pressed her hand to her throat and made a gagging noise after emphasizing the ‘t’ at the end of the word. I laughed so hard a snot bubble popped out of my nose. “You think I’m joking. It got to the point where dick grossed me out so bad, I got physically sick to my stomach when we had sex. Phiz-ick-ally sick. Like, puke in my mouth…Oh, dear God…I’m gonna throw up just thinking about it.” She took a breath and swallowed hard. Then she fanned her misty eyes. With the other hand she rolled down her window.
“Ya’ll are just like me and him.” She grabbed the top of her shirt and began tugging at it to create a breeze. “Girl, it ain’t right to love somebody and feel like that.”
My laughter at the puke comment subsided as I shook my head in total concurrence. It was as if she was preaching the Bible and the Holy Spirit was settling in on me. A calmness swept over my soul because, on the deepest level, she didn’t just understand; she knew my intense pain.
Our sexual relationship faded after that conversation and instantly we became platonic.
Within the week, Charlene asked for my company. We too had become friends, but I’m sure she still had hope of another sexual experience, minus the drunken fall we took out of the shower and the hangover that followed.
She drove me to a gas station with a donut shop built within the service area. We sat at a back corner table with our pastries and coffee to chat. She asked what was going on with Mandy, how I came to Georgia, how Doug and Patty became part of my life, and how I handled things back home.
Whatever she wanted to know was explained to include my version of falling out of the shower. We chuckled about the sound of the curtain ripping from the rod and how the shampoos and soaps went flying across the bathroom. Charlene’s laugh was hearty and loud, but I loved making her cackle because it threw me into hysterics. She was good for my soul.
The next thing you know the coffee kicked in and we were on a caffeine high. My objective was to make her piss in her pants with stories that make you want to slap your mama.
“So, this couple must have been wealthy because they gave us fake names, but who cares, right? They were so fucking rich I nearly shit my pants when Doug and I walked into their house. There were big game heads mounted high into the cathedral ceilings. I’m not talking about five, I’m guessing about thirty! Girl, it was like moose heads and wild boar and shit!”
“Where was Patty?” she asked to get the story straight.
“I don’t think I was with her yet. Anyway, we are in the Jacuzzi, which by the way was connected to a pool that had a waterfall, and the husband starts kissing up on Doug.”
“Wait, he is straight, right?” she interjected. She held the coffee cup to her mouth, but she was too involved in the story to actually take a sip.
“Totally. And you should have seen the look on his poor face. So me and the dude’s wife, a hot redheaded totally fuckable mom, rush over to rescue him, and we start having a foursome in the Jacuzzi. Then the wife says we should take this to the bedroom, so we go back into the mansion and start doing it. Imagine: the wife sits on Doug’s face, the husband starts sucking him off, and I’m bored like a motherfucker, so I participate as little as possible by giving the burly husband a hand job.”
“No, you did not!” Her eyes widened with the steaming coffee cup still in front of her face.
“Yes, girl. They were rich and we were hoping to get something out of it, shit. So Douglas gets a little overzealous and bites the chick’s clit too hard…”
“Oh shit! I fucking hate that!” She set the cup down on the table and sat back in her chair with a grimace.
“I know, right? So I rush over, start eating her out, and make her cum. Then I’m like, fuck, how do I get out of this? I don’t want to continue. So I told the mother fuckers I started my period. Nobody was banging me that night.”
Charlene laughed and refilled our coffee cups. “You are crazy.”
“Char, it gets worse. The couple wanted to see us again. They told Doug that they wanted to find another couple to take to Africa for a month to go big game hunting. Let me break this shit down, an all-expense-paid, thirty-day vacation… Vay-cay-shon, you hear me? To mother fuckin’ Af-ree-ka!”