Some Day One Day

38

After experiencing the best sex that I had in my entire life, the next morning, like the night before, wasn't one that I'd expected. Our carelessness led Marissa to hear everything that had transpired in that room. Shawn was alarmed as he always was whenever his sister was upset and when he stepped into the room, Marissa was crouched up into a shaking ball at the corner. Usually she clung onto Shawn before he even made his way to her, but this time when he so much as took a cautionary step towards her, she screamed fearsomely at him, freezing him into the spot in the middle of her room. Guilt washed over me because of Shawn's earlier warnings and how they were taking effect now.
Marissa appeared so lost and distraught, her face wet and red, her hair frazzled and her clothes disheveled.
The first few seconds had been filled with nothing but confusion and mind numbing worry.
'Marissa? Babygirl...What's wrong...?' he'd asked her softly, quietly...in a grave tone filled with fear. There was an amount of trepidation on his face that made me shiver.
'You're hurting Beyonce!' no one had expected those words. They felt like slashes from broken glass slitting my heart and sounded like unbearable screeches from a horning whistle. To say the least, she was mortified and it all seemed to be this bad dream for her that she couldn't get out of her mind.
'Why were you hurting her like that man hurt me?'
In that soul-splitting moment, time froze and so did the rest of the world. Magnification focused on both Shawn and Marissa-Shawn who was struck with paralysis and Marissa was flayed with intense convulsing.
At first Shawn didn't say anything, then he'd asked her to repeat herself...and she did.
Again, Shawn stood there...numbed by shock.
Tears had bludgeoned my eyes at the realization of what Marissa was saying. She began to ramble nervously, asking Shawn why, why he was doing me that way. Had this been one of her innocent, curious questions I would've laughed it off and corrected her-but it was evidently stark what had happened to Marissa. Someone had taken advantage of her. Someone had done the one thing Shawn always strove not to allow to happen to her.
'Why were you hurting her?' she'd demanded for some sort of explanation to quell down or help her understand why the only person she loved to her heart's core would do something like that.
What Marissa said was enough to kill a person's spirit. The naïve way in which she described the man exploiting her was just as painful as a knife holder curving into someone's throat. She sounded so confused, so hurt. After a while, when the room became painfully quiet, I spoke up.
'Honey Shawn wasn't hurting me. I-It's called making love.' I croaked out, heat rushing to my face and setting it ablaze with stigma.
Eyes glistening and far more bewildered than before, Marissa drew her thinly defined eyebrows together discomfortingly.
'So was I supposed to like what that, that man did?' contorting her face, she looked straight ahead and said with repulsion, 'It felt painful. I didn't like it. He told me not to tell anyone. It felt funny and I felt bad. Dirty and...I-I felt sad Beyonce, just sad afterwards,' she looked up at me again with a deep, confused frown, 'Did you feel sad?'
That was the day I recognized the attachment I had to Marissa had surpassed mere obligatory friendship one had to have because they were with the person's sibling. I loved her like a mother, a sister, and the pain that gathered in my chest was enough to make me wince. It hurt to know that the one thing Shawn had tried to prevent form happening to Marissa had happened, and what made the hurt more excruciating was that she hadn't told anyone about it.
When I looked over at Shawn, I'd never been so heartbroken in my life. His eyes were gazing at an imaginable spot on the floor...vacuous, void and...suspiciously moist and the site of that tightened my throat with frantic pain. He was standing too immotile, the dark coloring in his eyes too cabalistic. Sucking in his bottom lip with an overlapping tongue, Shawn hefted his chin, his eyes still glued to the floor.
'Who was it?' his voice was coarsely husky and I shivered restlessly because I'd never heard him that way. Knotting his hands before he'd shoved them into his pockets, he rocked on the ball of his heels with barely tamed patience.
'I-I don't know. Some boy from school. He-he wears those funny jackets-Beyonce told me they call them varsity jackets. And, and I think his name is George or, or Gregory."
Not so much as a blink of an eye had Shawn bolted out of the room. Stricken with overflowing fear, I'd left Marissa's side and flew after him. I actually had to run to catch up with him to the front door. I hadn't even called out his name before he was already out. Not knowing whether to stay and console Marissa or go chase him, I decided to go after Shawn in fear of what he would get himself into. When I'd stopped him, the smoldering look in his eyes was so combustible that I couldn't even talk him out of going out and doing something out of wrath that he'd regret later. When it came to Marissa though, I knew Shawn's fury had no limitations despite the fact that obedience was one of his strong points. Someone had hurt his heart-Marissa-and they would pay. He would make them suffer the full extent no matter what I did or tried to say...so I'd let him go.
After talking Marissa into getting some rest since me and Shawn's shameless lovemaking had put her in a horrific daze, I left when her incapable mother had returned. Right when I was about to call Angie, she'd surprisingly called me to inform me that Ojay had told her that Shawn was up GreenForest Street-which was in the upper-class side of town-waiting for someone and I knew it was Gregory because he usually hang out with his boys every Saturday morning, scrounging for trouble to havoc. It was also the place where my mother usually went to get her hair done. Scalding heat abraded me with sheer shock coupled with mind-numbing fear that for a couple of seconds I had been unable to respond.
By the time I got there after picking Angie up, the scene was already in shambles and chaos was the main theme. The neon blue and screaming red lights from the police's sirens flickered like a warning in front of my eyes. Shattered glass blanketed the floor with streams of a gory substance that made my blood curdle. Lying in a heap of unconsciousness was Gregory, his head busted wide open as the nurses from the ambulance scuttled to his aid. Putting two and two together, the grotesque scenery led me to believe that Shawn had rammed Gregory's head through the plate of glass.
Then I saw him.
My love.
And it was one of the most painful sites I'd ever seen.
I remember it like it was yesterday. He'd been dressed with his black hoodie over his head, baggy dark jeans and ecru timberland boots. Much to my dismay he didn't blend in with the once merrily bright sidewalk and those who roamed around gave him occasional questioning glances that queried him of his ubiety because to them he obviously didn't belong there, especially with his hands paralyzed behind him in binding handcuffs with the policemen escorting him to their vehicle.
I thought that when he saw me, his expression would change, but it didn't. He looked through me in a way that made an unnerving trickle go through me. He looked at me as though I was one of the people surrounding him...looked at me as though last night had even happened...like I was just a mirage and all he had to do was simply blink and I'd become nonexistent to him.
The porcelain skinned policeman roughened him up, spilled a few derogatory terms that angered the hell out of me and made me pounce into an action that had never been there-I would've never reacted the way I did that morning.
When I started to scream like a hysterical woman for them to let him go, Angie had to hold me back before the cop's partner did it and took me to jail too. It was when I started fighting and screaming, flailing my arms every which way that Shawn's expression began to change. It altered into a deep frown, a regretful frown that made my eyes smart with tears.
I tried to go after him as they took him away, forgetting about Gregory and half-believing he deserved whatever condition he was in, until I heard that stern maternal voice from behind, 'What are you doing young lady? What has gotten into you?'
Freezing into place, I turned around to find my mother whom was obviously caught off guard by this scene with a cluster of rollers in her mane of hair. The window Shawn had blasted thanks to Gregory's bullet-head was that of the salon my mother usually went to.
The fear that crept up in me was quick as lightning.
That was the first time my mother had met my Shawn...and under the circumstances, it had certainly not been a good look.
Damn, of all ways for them to meet, why had it had to be that way?
She'd taken me home, interrogated me of why I was running after such a hoodlum, where I'd actually been at night because she'd spoken to Angie's parents who'd told her I hadn't been at their place, continued questioning me until she caught me in a catch twenty-two session, making me surrender and confess that he was in fact 'the man that I was in love with'.
I'd called him a man and I'd told her that I was in love with him...what a thing for a seventeen year old to tell her mother. At that time I hadn't even told Shawn that I loved him yet I was feverishly telling my mother that it was what I felt and when she'd scoffed and asked me if I'd lost my mind, I'd told her that I was sure it was what I felt.
Once my father had been dragged into the mess, it all went downhill from there. He really hot blooded because of all this-he would've been suspicious had it been any other guy, but the fact that it was someone who was being hauled into jail augmented the situation's seriousness. My car got taken away. I'd been forbidden to leave the house unless under scrutinizing supervision enough to keep me uninspired to the point where I didn't even want to go out. Luckily I talked them into letting me have my cell phone...and I also talked them out of trying to put me into private school where my somewhat estranged sister was.
Over and over, I'd tried to explain to them that Shawn wasn't the kind of guy that they thought he was-you know, the old cliché. I told them he wasn't the type to get mixed up with the law, hell he tried to help his friends stay out of it. He was not that kind of a guy, but no matter what I said, my parents didn't budge. They continuously used his stereo-typical image of oversized clothes and permanently stoic expression as their justification that he was in fact, 'one of them' whatever 'they' were.
Two weeks had gone by, and the first snow had finally fallen. I'd previously learned that Gregory was hospitalized for severe injuries. He was in a traction for an entire month because as I'd heard, Shawn had punched him so hard his neck had snapped, all his front teeth were imaginary now for the blow he'd received had knocked them all off, and he'd needed up to fifty stitches to the head. A bystander further leaked information that Shawn had kicked him so hard in the gut that his spleen had been ruptured.
He deserved it...and I swear he deserved so much more for hurting Marissa like that. I wasn't even mad at Shawn for doing that to him, but what I was mad at was where the outcome of his revengeful actions had placed him.
Throughout that time, I hadn't seen Shawn around school and it was because he was still in jail with no one to bail him out. The word about Shawn being in jail spread throughout school fast and to say the least, everyone was beyond surprised. Then again they weren't because he'd found himself in a couple of fights here and there in school whenever someone pushed him to the limit...and it was as obvious as daylight that if anyone crossed the line when it came to Marissa then the line was definitely being crossed. Everyday since he'd been taken in I'd had nightmare after torturous nightmare of him being in there. Depression struck me like a freight train moving at full speed and I hadn't known the intensity of my feelings for Shawn up until that moment. I didn't like not hearing from him or talking to him...it had been terrible which made me spend so much of my time in solitude. Especially since I could only reach Marissa by phone and to hear her as heartbroken as she was, was all I could take. I nearly lost my mind that winter.
Tapping into my own account knowing my parents would have knowledge of it since it was joined with theirs, I'd purloined money from it and given it to Shawn's mother to let him out. At first I was antsy because I thought his mother would use it on her prescription drugs, but she surprised me when she actually did bail him out. I guess it was because she knew that she needed him.
Ojay's father decided to help with the case by supplying Shawn a lawyer that would help Shawn's charge be only a misdemeanor and not a felony. Thankfully the lawyer was proficient enough to let Shawn only end up with a misdemeanor, pay a huge fine that Mr. Grandberry assisted him with, and partake in some community service here and there.
Gregory hadn't pressed any charges, which up to this day left me dumbstruck. I'll never understand why he didn't when I knew he had so much power to. A part of me thought it had to do with some of Shawn's friends who somehow always managed to stay invisible to the law but managed to continuously commit crime. They must have threatened him, somehow, someway, all I know was that I was glad Gregory didn't try to make the situation much worse than it was.
Although my parents told me I couldn't see Shawn, they couldn't stop me from seeing him at school. I remember the first day he'd come back to school, I'd run to him shamelessly with everyone watching but I didn't care who saw. He'd wrapped me in his arms and we'd stayed that way in the snow for a long time, not wanting to let go of each other. The teachers had to break us apart like they did most of the time. His acuteness had helped him manage to catch up with school quicker than any of us could've thought and I knew then that that's what had mattered to him the most. I'd just been so glad to have him back.
I noticed though that after that experience although Shawn and I were forbidden to see one another, we went through tumultuous extremes just to be in each other's presence. It got to the point where when I wasn't beside him, I felt void with many missing pieces. Anytime I was with him though, I felt like everything had come full circle. I felt complete.
With my head resting against the windowpane, I stared blankly out of it. Although I had impeccable eyesight, I couldn't see a thing and barely heard anything even when Shawn called me.
"Beyonce...are you alive?"
Snapping out of my reverie, I turned to the sound of my name and looked at him for a long time. I got the impression he'd been calling me for a while now but I'd been delving so deep in my musings that I hadn't heard him.
In front of me were dark hazy and nebulous eyes. I could've sworn I was looking at my own eyes but realized that they belonged to Shawn.
To answer his question...no, I wasn't alive. I think I'd died the day I left him without looking back, way before my parent's death.
I'd just had a problem admitting it.
"We're here." Shawn announced, nodding his head towards the windshield. Following his nod, I saw the hotel where I worked standing monstrously in front of us and grimaced at the reality that lay ahead of me, the reality that was my life.
Like earlier when I'd gotten ready to go to work and Shawn had readied himself to take me, the aura was a thickly awkward one. It felt really strange because just being around each other in the wee hours of the morning had been odd in a very familiar way...
We hadn't said anything to each other except for a measly 'good morning' that had been painfully forced. It had been weird though...being in the same vicinity that early in the morning. It had taken me back to a time in our past that had been so beautiful.
Now as we sat here in this car, two strangers with a tied past, it was still the same...odd yet strikingly familiar.
Sighing heavily, I tucked some lofty locks of hair behind my ear with trembling fingers. A faint burning coruscated my nose and I predicted spring's early-morning pollen was readily attacking earth's inhabitants.
"Hey um, do you have any tissue?" I asked him in a shaky voice, eyes searching everywhere but his face.
"In there." He directed tersely, and when I finally looked at him, he hitched his chin towards the glove compartment. Somehow able to open it even with my trembling fingers, I reached for the small packet stashed in there, only for a gold glint to grasp my immediate attention. Acting on impulse and not on manners or proper thinking, I pulled out a thin gold chain with a cross pendant dangling from it. My heart came to a screeching halt that made me suck in a shocked breath.
When I whipped my head to Shawn, I saw that he was just as appalled as I was, as though he didn't know that it had been there.
It was quiet for a long time as both questions and answers swirled confusedly in the air.
"Wow," I laughed softly as I held up the delicate chain in the tenebrous darkness of dusk where it flickered like a candle in the night, "You actually kept this..."
I'd given it to him in the past when he'd started to get involved in endeavors that could've place his life in great peril. I'd told him to use it as some sort of shield to ward off anything that would be hazardous to his safety.
Shawn's dark brows shot up as though he'd been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Shifting restlessly, he scratched the side of his head with a strange look on his face, the type little boys wore when they were trying to come up with a plausible lie but couldn't.
"I forgot it was in there."
He was lying and I knew it, and by the way he was looking at me, he knew that I knew.
And I smiled faintly.
"Hmph...okay. If you say so Mr. Carter." I said while putting it back where I found it and took the tissue that I'd originally wanted.
"What you doing going through my stuff anyway?" Shawn asked and to my surprise his voice was light and a little bit playful. Smiling despite myself even under the tension-filled atmosphere, I sat back up and looked at him strangely.
"What you doing watching me going through your stuff?" I asked him shrewdly and my heart flipped a million and one times when Shawn smirked at me the way he would do when we were younger. Confusion, need, love, pain and all sorts of emotion filled me up when I had the sudden urge to wrap my arms around him, kiss him and thank him for the ride.
Either I was losing my mind or Shawn was actually looking at me with a faint hopefulness in his eyes that made me want to break down and go to him.
Licking his lips and shifting while keeping his eyes averted, Shawn spoke, "What time do you get off?"
"I can find my own way home." I hedged defensively with flushed cheeks.
"I know that. I'm just asking what time you get off." He said casually with an unbothered expression that said it didn't really matter to him and that he was just making light conversation.
"At around eight." I answered; telling myself to calm down. At my answer, Shawn twisted his face incredulously.
"Eight? At night?" he flashed his eyes at the digital numbers of the clock ingrained on the dashboard, "It's not even five yet."
We'd both left his place at four thirty right when the sun was creeping up the horizon. Earlier in the night I'd had to go downstairs and dry Marissa's loose-fitting clothes so that I could go to work with cleaner attire. I knew they'd excuse me from not wearing my uniform so today I was going to work with a t-shirt and sweatpants.
"I'm working in the kitchen early morning and doing housekeeping later on." I explained to him oddly, squishing the napkin in my hand, diminishing of its original purpose for my itchy nose. Leaning into the chair with his head rested against the headrest, Shawn stared at me with bothersome quietude.
"That's sixteen hours Beyonce." He pointed out quietly with a small frown and I gulped hard when sirens of insecurity began wailing in my body.
"And?" I tried to keep the heat out of my voice but found that it was difficult. I was frustrated by the fact that I had to be there all day and then some-not to mention the fact that it was back breaking work.
Our eyes held for a long time before Shawn sighed heavily and looked the other way, "Nothing...nevermind."
"Have a nice day. Thank you for the ride. I appreciate it." I told him while clasping my bag.
Not looking back, I opened the car door and got out to start my long day.
~0~0~0~

By the time I got off work I was aching all over. Dreux had left earlier, offering to come pick me up later on. When I'd called him, he'd given me a hearty apology that a close friend of his had ended up in the hospital due to a calamitous fight he'd been mismatched in and I'd told him to go on ahead no questions asked. I was more than tired I was fatigued. I couldn't buy anything to quell my angry hunger because I was saving every single penny that I had now to fix my broke down car. And then to add insult to injury I still had bills to pay, especially those damn debts that continuously haunted me from the past.

Feeling dejected and weak, I held all my things close to my body as I got ready to walk to the bus stop to sit and wait for another hour until it came by.

When I walked out through the back door, the air was that clean crisp kind of air that always roamed around during spring. Inhaling deeply, I clutched to my belongings tighter and began a tiresome gait towards my destination.

"You're late."

Letting out a short scream of fright, my body jerked in reflex to the fear that caroused through me in a speedy fashion. Panting heavily, I placed one hand on my chest, which began to ache and sought out the person who spoke.

When my eyes fell upon him, my heart rocketed to my throat as it always did before falling back where it belonged and started pounding voraciously. There he was, the way I always knew him, dark hood hovering his head until his eyes were shielded but only the lower half of his face was out to be seen. He was leaning against the trunk of his car with his hands shoved in his pockets.

"What are you doing here?" I asked him the first question that came to mind, rubbing the center of my chest where a pain stirred.

For a while, Shawn said nothing but only looked at me, his lips in a comfortable line that said he didn't plan on answering me anytime soon.

I wondered why he took so long to answer, why he was looking at me like that.

We stared at each other for an indeterminably long time and I waited, becoming more and more not only antsy but anxious even though my question had been the simplest of questions.

"You know why I'm here." He finally said in the quietest of voices and there was something about the way he said it that made shivers cascade through me. As he said the words, he'd lowered his eyes to an angle that hit the light and let me see his eyes

My lips parted when I had this burning urge to ask him if he meant what I thought he meant.

He was frowning slightly and I felt my heart aching, my throat tightening, my head spinning...

Blinking away from me, Shawn pushed himself off of his car, taking one hand out of his pockets with a jingling sound only to reveal his keys.

"Come on, lemme take you home. It's getting late." He said as he rounded the car.

After standing there for another second, it finally hit me that what he meant by 'your late' was due to the fact that he'd probably been waiting for me since I'd told him that I'd be out at eight.

I was too tired to let pride get in the way this time, and I knew if I argued with him, I'd seem ungrateful, and that was one thing that I was not.

Releasing a shuddering sigh, I made my way to the passenger's seat where he'd opened the door for me with my insides feeling fluttery and my head feeling light.