Since You Been Gone

Since You Been Gone: Chapter 4

Chapter 5

*Que's Last Moments*

"What?" shouted Dawn. "What are you talking about? He's not gone! I just talked to him a few minutes ago!" she continued to shout in Aundrea's troubled face hysterically. If anything happened to him, if anything happened to Que, it would be her fault.

"Dawn, honey," Aundrea repeated again, this time squeezing Dawn's hand in an attempt to calm her down. "Que's gone! He's been missing for two hours! We thought maybe since you talked to him earlier, you might've known where he went. I can see that's not the case," she whispered with a heartbreaking expression. "The last person he talked to was Willie on the phone, and..."

"Well, what did he say? Where did he go?" Dawn interrupted.

She looked over to Willie who was sitting on Aundrea's white, suede couch across from them. Aundrea glanced over at Willie briefly. He held his chin on top of his knuckles and was leaning forward and gazing absently at a flower on the island in the kitchen. There was a large muscle twitching in his lower cheek.

"Will?" Aundrea whispered softly. "Will?" she repeated. Willie's head snapped up and stared at them. Dawn watched with eager eyes. "Can you tell her what Que told you?" He didn't say anything, but merely nodded his head. Mike, Brian, and Robert gathered around to hear Que's final words before his mysterious disappearance:

Qwanell shut the door softly behind him. He just couldn't believe that it turned out the way it did. Dawn was still in the room on the bed. He decided to wait outside the bedroom door for another five minutes, just to see if she really wasn't forgiving him...he ended up waiting twenty minutes. When he realized that Dawn wasn't coming, his heart jumped forward and almost felt like it was going to be ripped out of his chest. He just spilled his heart to this girl, and she wasn't forgiving his mistake. Que knew better: she'd gone through a synopsis of her past love lives, only to end it by telling of their adulteries.

"I would never do that to you, girl," he told her. "Never! So don't fall back, come forward."

Que trudged down the stairs in a world of his own, seeing nothing, just as he'd told her, but Dawn's angelic face. All he saw was the curve of her flawless full lips that he longed to kiss right now. All he saw was her warm, milk chocolate skin that he longed to soothe his aching soul. All he smelled was her perfume that he so desperately wanted to smell coming off her body whenever she was near him.

"Hey, Que," gushed Aundrea when he finished his gloomy walk down the stairs. "How'd it...go?" Her voice faltered as she saw the dead look on his face. He stalked past her, shaking his head. Aundrea stared after him until he went out the front door, then she looked back up the stairs. "Oh, no!" she said.

As soon as Que stepped outside, he saw Willie sitting in his car; he hadn't budged an inch. "So how did it go, man? Ya'll talk?"

"Yeah, we talked?" Que said after getting into the silver car and buckling up his seatbelt. Willie moved the gear stick in reverse and backed up out of Aundrea's driveway. He moved out into the middle of the street, put it in drive, and sped away. "So how'd it turn out? She forgive you?"

Que hesitated. He glanced quickly and briefly at Willie's face. Willie was looking at him periodically, while trying to keep his eyes on the road.

Que looked down at his hands. "Yeah, she forgave me," he lied. "Just drop me of at the crib. She said she'll meet me there when she done talking to Drea," he improvised.