Prologue
~Mahogany Jefferson~
In the penthouse apartment at the top of the building that Chance Middleton designed and lived in, the kitchen was where I felt the most comfortable because in another kitchen was where I’d discovered I could take care of myself at eight-years-old. This one was huge and had all the amenities that a woman who hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in her mouth could dream of and hadn’t dreamed of. Before my move from Spindle, Colorado to college in Fredrickson, Utah where I met Chance, hand to mouth was my means of survival as far back as my memories went. Out of necessity, I learned to cook. My foster parents, who gave me their last name but never adopted me, didn’t seem to think I needed to eat on a regular basis, only when Mrs. Lyons, my social worker, was coming by for a scheduled visit. If she showed up unannounced just once when I was a child, she would’ve learned how things really were in the household I grew up in.
As I rambled around the stainless-steel appliances and green marble top island with a built-in six-aisle stove just off the center of the room, my childhood and cooking should’ve been the furthest things from my mind after the day I had. Yet, I was cooking because I didn’t want to go out. Chance and I had to eat something and, if I didn’t want a repeat of history, I damn well had better remember every detail of my childhood. But it was my future that was giving me the most trouble. How the rest of my days would go was up in the air at this point, and where they moved from there depended on Chance’s second reaction to the news I had to give him. His first one wasn’t going to be a good one, and I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
After dumping noodles out of a strainer into a pot of homemade spaghetti sauce, my feet autopiloted themselves toward the dishwasher behind me. I tucked a stray strand behind my ear that slipped from the band holding the rest at the back of my neck. Absentmindedly, the same hand glided down to clutch at the long rectangular box in the pocket stitched to the front of my apron, which was protecting the designer navy-blue, sleeveless dress that no one on government assistance could ever afford. Chance Middleton could though.
He insisted that I wore the best and to keep for myself the monthly payment from the state of Colorado for me being in its piss-poor foster care system for seventeen years and still sane enough to further my education after I graduated high school. Too bad I wasn’t feeling the best today, hadn’t for the last three months. First came the flu, then my present problem that would make or break my relationship with Chance, who was due home in the next thirty minutes. Couldn’t get here fast enough for me. At the same time, a part of me wished he’d develop amnesia and forget where the hell he lived.
Chance hated when life took turns he hadn’t prepared for or put in motion himself. I didn’t know how he was going to take the nosedive off a cliff that I was about to push him over.
“Mahogany, I’m home, baby!” His announcement in the foyer caught me by surprise.
A quick glance at my Cartier watch notified me that I’d been standing at the dishwasher with the empty strainer that I used for the noodles still in my hand for the last half hour. I should’ve used that time to figure out how to broach the hot topic currently residing in my apron’s pocket, but my mind had drifted. Probably needed a break from reality. Good thing the food was done and almost ready to be served or we’d be going out to eat tonight after the fire department put out the fire I’d have started if my mind had floated away while I was still cooking. Now, I was going to have to wing it through dinner that was planned. I had all day to get my thoughts together. They were more jumbled than ever.
You’ve been winging it all your life though, so you should be good, Mahogany. Only if I could convince Chance that I truly loved him, never wanted him to do something he didn’t want to, and accidents happened. If he was the man I thought he was, he’d understand and step up to the plate as I was having to do.
Without his briefcase that was more than likely lounging in the all-white living area, he strolled into the kitchen with the biggest smile on his pinkish lips, the top fuller than the bottom and encased in a dark-haired, neatly-trimmed five o’clock shadow. He wore his suit like it was a second skin. His swagger was just as potent as his masculinity that wafted off his six-two medium build like cologne, and God, he always smelled good. For the last two years, he’d come home and found me in whatever room I was in, took me in his muscled arms, and waited for me to tilt my head back to receive his kiss. That was how I knew he loved me too, and one of those kisses had led to our current dilemma. If tonight doesn’t go like I hoped for, the dilemma would be all mine to deal with. I didn’t know if I could do it on my own though. Didn’t want to either.
Chance’s tongue twisted and winded around mine. Draping my arms around his shoulders, I absorbed his affection like a sponge, giving him back as much as I could with a sensitive matter laying on my brain like dead weight.
He brought the kiss to a halt slowly, then gazed down at me. “Now can you tell me why you were adamant that we eat at home tonight?”
My fingers on one hand played with the short hair at the nape of his neck, while the others stroked his chiseled jaw. I was memorizing his face by touch and how it felt to be in his arms. There was a good chance he was about to take all his love away from me, and this may be the last time we were this close. My body switched from heated up by his kiss to cold because of his question, my heart wanting me to put off the looming shit storm on the horizon, but it was better to face all storms head on and to do it quickly.
“I’m going to tell you, sweetheart, but after you sit down.” He needed to be seated for what was coming and so did I.
His palms glided from the tops of my behind before he stepped back to probe my face with his gray eyes, then frowned. “What’s wrong, baby?”
His stare was like the abyss that looked back into you as you looked into it. I wrung my hands together like they were soaking wet dishcloths, praying I could keep my secret hid until I knew which way his feelings swung toward the matter that I had to put on the figurative table. First, I had to put dinner on the real one.
“I need to talk to you. That’s why I wanted to stay here tonight. I couldn’t do this with an audience.” His reaction could be every bit of explosive. “Go sit while I fix the food, and then I’ll tell you what’s up.”
His dark gray eyes narrowed on me, then he nodded. “Alright.”
As he entered the connected dining room that was lit with soft light from tapered candles on a silver-scroll stand in the middle of the four-chair table, along with his favorite wine chilling and breathing in the ice bucket, I situated the spaghetti, garlic bread, and salad on China dinnerware then carried it all to the table. My plate was for show: I couldn’t eat with my stomach tossing and turning. It had been doing that a lot lately. Now, I knew why.
While taking a seat in the ladder-back chair across from his, I deliberated on where to begin. Since I couldn’t bring myself to cruelly hit him from the blindside, I decided to beat around the bushes, while holding on for dear life to the pocket of my apron that I hadn’t bothered to take off.
“Chance, since we’ve been together, has your view on having children changed even a little bit?”
He dead-eyed me. “No, Mahogany. I told you from the beginning that I did. Not. Want. Kids. And you”
I swiped my hand through the air, cutting him off. “Stop! I told you I didn’t want any kids while I was still in school and not married, Chance. There’s a difference. But what if—”
“Why are we discussing this again?”
I couldn’t look at him, so I eyeballed my lap. “Something’s been bothering me for a while.” A whole day exactly. “First, I’d like to know the specific reason why you don’t want kids. At some point, I’ll graduate from school and I’ll want some, and then what happens to us?”
“It doesn’t matter why I don’t want kids, I just don’t. When you decide you do, then…” He trailed off and dragged my heart through the dirt. I knew what he couldn’t say but that he damn well meant it.
“Then we break up,” I finished for him.
“Yes,” he whispered.
Was it that easy for him to let me go? I didn’t ask because, well, the answer was obvious but didn’t come from the part of his feelings that I wanted access to right now.
“What if I told you one day that I was pregnant? That the birth control pills I take didn’t work for… whatever reason.” Oh, but I knew two reasons why they wouldn’t. “What would you do, Chance?”
When he didn’t respond right away, I peeked up at him. As usual when he’s confused, he stared at the problem until he did understand. Right now, the problem was me, and he wasn’t just looking at me, no, he was looking through me. It felt like an eternity had passed before he spoke.
“I’d tell you to get an abortion… but we don’t have to worry that because even if your birth control pills didn’t work for whatever reason, I use condoms as back up. What’s the point of this discussion, Mahogany?”
Bile rose in my throat, scorching it. What was I thinking when I fell in love with this man? He had to be a coldblooded reptile to let the love of his life walk away because he didn’t want to procreate. Maybe I wasn’t the love of his life as he’d said. Or maybe he thought he was being kind in letting me go so I could have what I wanted with someone else. That just begged the question how could he love the act of making children so much, but not so much what came after the act. Sometimes, three times a day, he swayed my body into making love. He didn’t have to do much to get my juices flowing either, and the ease he had of slipping inside my body had come back to haunt us both.
I clenched the box a little tighter, determined to dig into Chance’s psyche until he told me what was it about children that put him off so badly. “Just like that, you’d tell me to kill a part of you, with no deeper explanation than the surface one you’re giving me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” I murmured, heartbroken, suffering more than I ever had. “There is something else to this for you, Chance, and—”
“Because I. Do. Not. Want. Kids,” he reiterated, his steely-grey eyes ripping into the flesh on my face.
In that moment, I was done with the conversation, had the only answer I was going to get from him of which direction his feelings flowed. Unless, I could crack his skull open and retrieve the real reason for myself, there was no changing his mind, nothing more to say. I couldn’t stay here or with him any longer, so I got up from the table, with something splintering torturously slow in my chest. The pain emerging made breathing almost impossible.
“Mahogany, where are you going?” he called after me stumbling into the well-lighted kitchen where the radiance from the halogen lamp suspended over the island seemed to be reflecting off the walls right into my eyes.
“To bed, Chance.”
A headache was coming on and my strength was evaporating. Sitting across from him any longer would’ve required the amount of power to move heaven and earth.
“You haven’t eaten yet.”
“I know that, and I don’t have an appetite.”
“Mahogany, tell me what the hell is going on with you,” he demanded loudly. “You don’t act like this.”
He was right; I wouldn’t have just walked out on him. Just like me to stay and try to talk to him until we both were okay with the situation. Midway between the dining room’s doorway and the long island, I paused, then swiveled around to face him. He was sitting sideways in his chair, fuming.
“I’ll tell you why I’m acting like this, Chance. I deserve to know why if I stayed with you, I’d be cut off from something that is a part of life. Something that happens sometimes despite the birth control pills and condoms we use. And if it did happen, I would think that it was meant to be, so I couldn’t just wipe a part of me from the face of the earth. So now, I’m wondering what is the point of being with you if you’re not willing to go through thick and thin with me, mistakes as well as the things you plan out. And if you close your deepest thoughts off from me when I mention a hypothetical pregnancy to you, how would you act if I told you I was really pregnant? Now, tell me why you really don’t want kids. Because if it was as simple as you just not liking them or didn’t want them dirtying up this goddamn museum we live in, you’d just say that.”
He turned to sit correctly in his seat again, took a big gulp of wine, then stared off into the space in front of him. God, why wouldn’t he tell me more than just he didn’t want kids? It was his choice, but it wasn’t his reason.
Instead of stomping away like I wanted to do, I listened to his silence. It spoke to me louder than anything he’d said since we became a couple. I learned that some parts of him were off limits to me, and I was on my own if he’d ever knocked me up with a child that I wouldn’t get rid of. It was then I really walked away from him in every way, the equivalent of tearing my flesh apart with my teeth. As I bypassed the island, I halted at the trashcan beside it, took off my apron with the box inside, and threw both away.
That night, I laid in the guest’s bedroom. Sleep wouldn’t come because the feeling of being helpless and utterly alone brought tears that wouldn’t go away. The next morning, he went off to work, angry as hell and giving me the cold shoulder because he wasn’t allowed to even breathe on me from his side of the bed during the night. Well, I was furious because he was holding back his support and the most important part of himself: his deepest feelings that possibly made him who he was. Instead of going to class, I placed my laptop on the island and searched for somewhere else to live. Staying in Utah was too close to Chance and our mutual friends who would reveal my real reasons for leaving him to him in about, oh, four more months. Only God knew how bad he’d react then.
Finding a small apartment online in my range was proving to be difficult. Unable to afford anything for more than a few months, I would have to get a job immediately. Once I dropped out of school, my financial aid from the state would dry up, which was my only means to support myself, and now, the life inside me, but I had to leave this city where Chance was well known and therefore school, too. Moving back to Spindle with my foster parents wasn’t a choice, nor was relocating to another state I knew nothing about. Cheryl and Michael Jefferson wouldn’t let me return to their home anyway, not without me signing over the check I received from the state to them first, which was why they never adopted me. At this rate, I had to stay in school to keep receiving it, but it wouldn’t do me any good because they’d take it, and I’d still need another way to support myself and pay for child care. They sure as hell wasn’t going to be keeping my baby. Though their house was clean and beautiful on the outside, it wasn’t a home, at least never for me. The inside was a cold hell that I was not going back to. Not with my child in tow.
I drummed my fingertips on the countertop, while skimming the long list of apartments in Colorado. The cheapest one in a decent area was a one-bedroom in Arrow, thirty miles from Spindle. I could move there. It wasn’t like Chance or my foster parents would come looking for me. Wasn’t about to give the Jefferson’s anything to suck up and Chance had already decided that, at some point, he had to let me go. What’s a few years earlier?
Whether I had a boy or girl, it won’t experience what I had with the Jefferson’s, neglect of perhaps the worst kind: being ignored and treated as a payday. As a child, it was like I didn’t really exist until the fifth of the month when Mrs. Lyons arrived. Rarely did I ever see a penny of the money that the state paid for me, but the child inside me would be loved and know it was wanted even if I had to kill something like the only relationship that once benefited me emotionally. It slayed me to know that Chance wasn’t capable of doing right by a child any more than the Jefferson’s were. Who was I to make him? Why would I? He told me in no uncertain terms on our first date that he. Did. Not. Want. Kids. And he wouldn’t have one… that he knew of. I won’t ever forget how he had let me down when I, no, when we needed him the most.