TURN THE PAGE: Part Eight
Preface:
Theresa 'Terri' Murphy is now twenty-five, divorced, a successful writer, a mother to a beautiful daughter called Adilah, and she is still hooked on dominant black men.
She has also come to realize that the first black man she fell for, Dontrell, is the only one she keeps thinking about, even two years on.
Terri was meant to travel with Louise Lambert, her French publisher, to Jamaica on a research trip for her next book. However, her adventures and misadventures in New Orleans have left her with the notion that some things need to be resolved ahead of any trip.
Dontrell, and what they may mean to each other, needs to be settled once and for all.
Chapter 1:
Terri stood outside the building's main door.
The summer heat of the Savannah morning, the familiar sounds, sights and smells brought her back in time. Back to where her life had changed.
Had it changed for the better?
She felt it had. Before she had been nervous, shy, unfulfilled sexually and lacking a direction in life. Now she was a lot more confident in herself, she had a beautiful child and a career she would never have dreamt herself capable of doing.
And it had all started inside this building- with Dontrell.
She walked inside the lobby, veering towards the stairwell that led to the basement. At first, she had hated going down these steps, lugging bags of laundry down flights of stairs, staring morosely at the machines as they churned her clothing round and round. Then they became a pathway to pleasure. These steps led to his apartment.
Now she was outside his door. She was tempted just to open it up and step inside without invitation as she had become used to doing when she'd lived in the apartment upstairs. But whatever else had changed for Terri, her manners had remained. Terri knocked on the door, three brisk knocks.
The door opened after a few moments and Terri fought to keep her smile fixed in place.
It wasn't Dontrell.
It was still his apartment. That much she could tell from the easily recognizable stacks of books that dominated the small living space. Books, some tattered and worn, others still pristine in their dust jackets, all piled in unstable, Jenga styled towers. The old green couch in the center of the room, a colorful throw rug that had been a gift from her to him strewn across the back of it.
But it wasn't Dontrell answering the door.
It was a petite blonde white woman, not much older than Terri and in fact quite similar to her in looks and build. She was looking disheveled, as if she had been engaged in some physical activity when she'd been forced to answer the door.
"Help you?" the stranger asked.
"No...no sorry. Ummm wrong apartment." Terri muttered and spun on her heel, walking away rapidly.
She wanted to run, run screaming up the stairs and out into the morning light. But she contained herself. Barely. Terri settled with a fast trot up the stairs, not stopping or slowing her speed until she had left her old apartment building two blocks behind her. Then she allowed herself to stop, lean against a wall and release the choking sobs of disappointment that had been bursting inside her from the moment the stranger had opened the door to her.
In the end it took two things to settle Terri down. The first was the three large gin and tonics she had knocked back at a small bar close to where she had been crying on the street. They hadn't calmed her as such, but the time it had taken for her to drink them back had given her space to reflect-reflect and mourn. The odd thing about disappointment is that there is no one cure for all, everyone deals with it differently. Terri had only one sure outlet for the despair she was feeling. That brought her to the second thing that helped her settle.
She picked up her cellphone, found a number she had been carrying around since she'd been in New Orleans with Louise and then dialed it. On the third ring a deep voice answered...
By noon Terri was sitting at the airport waiting to board her flight. There was a layover in Atlanta but she would still be in Shreveport by late afternoon.
The hotel check-in went smoothly. Terri texted her arrival to the same number she had called earlier. While she waited for a reply, she took a shower to freshen up. A change of clothing followed, a long sleeve denim shirt dress with eyelet lace-up corset. Terri rolled up the sleeves as a nod to the heat down here in the south and she went without a bra, liking how the dress flattered her now fuller cleavage.
She stood in front of the mirror in her room. Terri had worried that having Adilah, the late nights and early mornings that came with having a child would age her prematurely. But she looked in the mirror and the reflection she saw back was that of a woman barely twenty-one or twenty-two at most, not her actual twenty-five. Her body was back to its pre-pregnancy tightness. At 5'0", her slim petite form added to her air of youth. Her breasts were now 34DD since she'd had Adilah but even they remained firm. The blonde pixie cut was now a thing of the past, long blonde hair fell loosely around her shoulders, her bright green eyes peering back at her from the mirror.
The texted reply gave her an hour to kill so she took a book down to the hotel bar to relax with while she waited.
Almost to the minute, one hour later Terri glazed up from the book she was reading on the life of Julius Caesar to see Jonah Crewel walk through the door of the hotel bar. She couldn't miss him really. Not least the fact that he stood at 6'8 and was built like power lifter, if that wasn't enough to draw the casual observer's eye then the bright red tracksuit he was wearing would.
