Once Was Blind ~ Part 2

“This is Roshelle’s first night out and you know she wants to spend some time with me,” Darnell said. He had called me at work so I couldn’t curse him out like I wanted to.

“Do you want to come over and hang out with us?” he asked.

I declined. I knew she wanted to have sex with him and I wasn’t about to sit there and watch them, and I definitely wasn’t going to participate in any freaky stuff.

My dad helped us move that next day. Once we got most of the furniture into the house, we all just sat around trying to catch our breath. I went in what was to be Darnell’s room, to think about what I had gotten myself into when Daddy walked in.

“Hey, Baby?” he asked.

“What’s up?”

“You know you can always come home when you want to, don’t you?”

“Yeah, everything’s all right though.” I wasn’t’ ready to let my dad know that I had royally screwed up, but I think he could read my expression anyway.

“Well, you have a key, so you can come get some air whenever you need to,” he said as he hugged me.

Roshelle spent the night every Monday and Tuesday. Darnell would ask me to help her dry him off when he got out of the shower. I always refused. I already had to deal with the fact that my man was sleeping with another woman, in the very next room; there was no way I was going to act like I was happy about it. I remember a couple of conversations Darnell and I had about his dream of marrying an older woman who was an ex-hooker. So, whenever I looked at Roshelle with spandex clung to her heavy-set body, I wondered why I was even there. I often took Darnell outside to talk about some of the things that made me uncomfortable. Like the love letters she left around the house. Especially one that went into graphic detail about how much she enjoyed performing oral sex on him (I guess that’s why she didn’t bother to wear her false teeth that much).

“Like it, like it, or dislike it. You can roll whenever you get ready,” he would say in response to my complaints. It was as if he didn’t even care if I was happy or not. It didn’t matter that he was only working part-time for a guy who threatened to fire him every week, when I’d had two steady jobs for several years and I paid the majority of the bills. It didn’t matter that his family and friends loved me, but couldn’t stand Roshelle. It didn’t matter that I had stuck by him for his last three years in prison, and all she could do was write him letters for a year and a half. None of that mattered. He felt that he had tried to make other people happy for most of his life. I realized that I had been doing the same thing myself and I was sick of it. So one night, when he had returned from Roshelle’s house, I was in my room packing. When he walked into my bedroom, I snatched my car keys from him and put them in my pocket.

“Don’t you ever snatch anything from me,” he growled. He raised his hand as if to strike me, but I hit him first. He pushed me down on the floor. I got back up and started taking my boxes to the car.

“So, you’re just going to change horses in the middle of the race?” he asked, walking behind me.

“I don’t feel like hearing that pimp shit tonight. Leave me alone.”

“You don’t tell me what you feel and don’t feel. I tell you what you CAN feel and CANNOT feel.”

I wanted to scream but I didn’t want to wake up his children. I wanted to tell him that I had wasted my time and money on him and that I hated him for putting me through all of that nonsense. It felt like I was going to have a heart attack and a stroke trying to hold in all of my emotions, but I made it through.

I know it sounds foolish, but I still miss him sometimes, but not enough to go back. Darnell and Roshelle made me mad enough to kill, but I’m not going to give up on finding a good guy. I just have to keep my eyes open.