Worth The Risk

50

A/n: so I originally wrote the poem that I used in this chapter for another book but it sorta applies to Norminah in this story so yolo 🤷🏾‍♀️
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'Are you sure you're fine? Because I can just stay and hang out with you today.'

'I'm okay, a guy came over from New York just to work with you. You should go into the studio. But can we talk later?'

Dinah sighed, 'that talk that we never had?'

'Kind of.'

'Okay I'll try to leave as early as possible.'

I picked up my phone and called one of the only two numbers that I had called in the last few days. She picked up immediately. 'Normani hey, is she gone?'

'Yeah. Same place as yesterday?'

'S-sure.'

Two hours later, I was in the break room of a small café just up the street from the club that we'd gone to a few days earlier. I sat across from Liv and examined her more thoroughly than I had the night we met. She was beautiful, even more so when I wasn't drunk and despite the brief flashes I'd seen where she grabbed my face and kissed me, I felt nothing, not even attraction, which made the feelings of guilt tugging at my conscience from the pit of my stomach that much harder to bear. I cheated on the girl I loved with a girl I wouldn't have even given a second glance.

Liv recounted her own vague memories of what had happened. She initially kissed me to make her ex boyfriend jealous, and after that, she vaguely remembered me helping her into a cab and then waking up beside me when Claire came into the room. I found some small measure of comfort in knowing that she felt just as horrible as I did.

Dinah texted saying she was home about an hour later. I took a little longer getting home because of traffic, and I took the long way home. The closer I got, the more knotted my stomach became, and the more my resolve started to crumble. I was about to tell Dinah the last thing she wanted to hear and there would be no way to make her understand, not that I knew what I wanted her to understand.

She was in the kitchen. 'Hey... you're back early.'

'Yeah,' Dinah answered as she turned to face me. She pulled out her phone and after unlocking it, pressed play and slid it towards me. My insides sank as I watched Liv kiss me. I couldn't even claim that because I was too drunk to be aware of what I was doing because I was clearly reciprocating her kiss, and it was clearly me in the video too.

'Did you fuck her?' Dinah asked, her voice breaking at the end of her question. 'Is that who you went to see just now?'

I opened my mouth to speak but no words came out; the sound of her broken sobs soon filled the room. Comforting her was instinctual at this point. We had been on opposite sides of the kitchen, perhaps a telltale sign of the chasm that my infidelity had created in such a short space of time.

Dinah shook her head slightly and pushed me away so she could move to the other side of the room. 'Why? Is it because I said no?'

'No-'

'-because I just wasn't ready yet and I was going to say yes the next time you asked. I just needed time to deal with my shit, to situate myself and figure out where I am and where I'm going professionally.'

'I know.'

She frowned, 'so why? I know we've been fighting a lot more but I thought we were getting past it? I thought you were going to come down to New York and we'd talk it out and start getting back to where we were before.'