Free After The Dance by Lori D. Johnson Page B

all caught up in the sappy sweetness of the momentand before it even occurred to me to think about it twice, I’d told him, “Sure, I can stay for a little while.”

HIM
    It’s probably safe to say that listening to me vent my frustrations about being a father isn’t what Faye had in mind when she sat down and cuddled up next to me on the couch. And hey, it’s not like I didn’t want to give the sister a little play. I just knew I wouldn’t have wanted to stop at a little is all.
    And what would that have looked like? Me and ol’ girl getting busy with the twins right around the corner and subject to pop in on us at any second? Oh sure, I could have waited until the girls were sound asleep, snuck Faye back into my bedroom, locked the door, and coaxed her into keeping the moaning to a minimum. Maybe I would’ve, had the understanding between the five of us—meaning me, her, the kids, and my ex—been that Faye was gonna be my lady on something like a full-time, permanent basis. But that wasn’t the case, and wasn’t no good bound to come out of any of us pretending otherwise. Besides, these days I’m all about trying to set a better example for my girls, and exposing them to the sad, sordid details of my sex life is definitely not the road that’s most liable to lead me there.
    I took Faye telling me how much she admired my no-nonsense approach to raising my two princesses as a sure sign that she not only understood my position but felt the same way, too. Looking back on things, that may have been where I made my mistake.
    Man, an honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned purging is what I pulled on this girl. I let it all out—my feelings of inadequacyabout my son, my fears of having already done irreparable damage to my daughters by virtue of the divorce, and my inability to give as much of myself as I’d like to any of my kids. After unloading all my baggage on her I was too spent to do much of anything but sit there quietly, soaking up bits and pieces of the ten o’clock news.
    I bet the only reason she didn’t run screaming from the room is that I’d probably bored her to the point of being too stiff to move. Stupid me, I thought her silence was some sort of indication that we’d finally made a real connection. Man, little did I know that what I thought was the sound of me and Faye clicking was actually the sound of ol’ girl ticking.
    To borrow a line from one of the Gap Band’s greatest hits, “she dropped a bomb on me.” I’m serious, man, come Sunday not only did the sister stand me up without even bothering to extend me the simple courtesy of a phone call, but when I finally did catch up with her jive behind, she was flapping her jaws and grinning all up in some other dude’s face.

HER
    Carl needs to stop tripping. Why after spending four and a half hours with him and his kids on a Saturday night would I turn around the next day and deliberately leave him hanging? I had every intention of seeing him that Sunday. But the real of it is, things happen sometimes—things over which we often have little or no control.
    Girl, please, had anybody told me when I woke up that morning I was destined to spend durn near half my day with the likes of one Scoobie, aka Venard Nathaniel Payne,I would have called them a bald-faced liar and then crawled back into bed to make sure it didn’t happen.
    My first mistake, besides leaving the house at all that Sunday, was arriving at church with a thirst that couldn’t wait to be quenched. So there I was in the vestibule, right, bent over the water fountain getting my drink on, when I felt this presence behind me and heard this gravelly voice.
    “My, my, Sistah Abrahams. Aren’t we looking mighty blessed this morning?”
    No, it wasn’t Scoobie. Worse. It was old lecherous Deacon Jones, who, though very much married and supposedly sanctified, is always trying to hit on somebody—as if his seventy-some-year-old, ancient behind would even be able to handle it if