Free Nasty by Dr. Xyz

she added, “Which one is it tonight? Hmmm?”
    “Let’s see. If today is Tuesday and tomorrow is Wednesday, I should be with…”
    Concerned by his admission, Ophelia warned, “It’s not nice or
healthy
to be with too many different woman and you do know what I mean by
healthy
, don’t you?”
    “Yes, I
do
, and I always protect myself. Besides, it’s easier to have lots of women ’stead of just one.”
    “How the hell you figure that?”
    “One girl demands all your time. When they know they’re part of a harem, they’re happy to get a few seconds with King Carlos.” He winked at Ophelia.
    She shook her head and pointed her finger in his face, trying not to laugh at his bodacious bragging.
    “One day, boy, with God as my witness, you will find the one who will make you lose your mind. Mark my words, young man.”
    He leaned over and gave her a hug. “T’aint a woman alive could make me lose my mind. I got control of all of this.”
    Carlos performed a little moonwalk dance, and exited out the kitchen, all the while waving his hand at Ophelia. She laughed so loud and hard she had to hold her belly to keep it from bursting. Ever since he was a boy, he could always make her laugh. It was his humor that had captured her heart so many years ago.
    As she placed dishes in the washer, Ophelia’s mind drifted back to the time when she had given birth to Jonathan. Pops received a call from the Miami police in the middle of night. His twin sister, Ernestine, had been shot and killed by her husband, Hector Salinas. When the police had cornered him in the couple’s home, they had begged Hector, a highly decorated police officer, to release their seven-year-old son, Carlos. Instead, he had turned the gun on himself and blown his brains out.
    She and Pops decided, on the spot, that they would raise his sister’s only child. Money wasn’t a problem. They could afford it. He owned a successful architectural firm and she was a nurse practitioner, adding one more person to their family would not be a problem.
    Expecting to see a depressed, solemn, withdrawn seven-yearold boy who had witnessed an atrocious event, she had insisted they schedule him for counseling. Pops disagreed. Though he was a well-educated architect, trained at Tuskegee and Georgia Tech, Pops didn’t trust mental health professionals. He thought lots of love and attention would be all Carlos needed. If that didn’t work, he promised he’d personally take him to the shrink. Ophelia wanted to push the issue, but she was so busy raising Tarik and her new baby, Jonathan that she didn’t have time to fight Pops.
    Ophelia didn’t have anything to worry about. Right from the start, Carlos did appear to be a well-adjusted boy. With the exception of an almost pathological aversion to ice cream, thehandsome little boy had shown no signs of mental instability. He had excelled in school and easily made friends. When they adopted him a year after he arrived, it was as if he had been in the family all along.
    The only time he seemed to have trouble with his past, was the day they were looking at Pops’ old home movies. Carlos was fifteen years old. Pops popped in a reel that turned out to be footage of Carlos’s parents’ wedding. Before Pops had a chance to pull the plug, Carlos was confronted with scenes of a happier time for his parents. Tarik, not knowing who the people were in the film, innocently commented that the groom looked a lot like Carlos. Obviously upset, Carlos immediately got up and ran out the room.
    And Tarik was right. Carlos was the chocolate version of his Cuban father. It was a resemblance that proved too much for the teenager. The next day when he returned from school, Carlos had cut off all of his curly black hair. In his ear was a tiny diamond stud that had belonged to his mother. He had found it next to her body the day she was murdered.
    From that day on, he wore a clean-shaven head and always had his mother’s earring in his left