Hold Me in Contempt Read online

  “Real recognize real. Don’t act like she ain’t fine.” Kent laughed like I was being petty and looked at me sinking deeper into my seat. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Look, are you ready?” I asked quickly, covering my half-eaten omelet with the napkin that had been sitting on my lap.

  “Ready? What? I ain’t finished eating yet.” He pointed down at his smoked salmon omelet, which was covered in so much ketchup, it made me want to vomit. “I know you ain’t that jealous. She’s fine, but—”

  “I know her.”

  “Oh, that’s what’s up. Hook a nigga up.” Kent sounded relieved and probably completely missed how his suggestion undermined everything he’d invited me to the restaurant to achieve.

  “That would be impossible,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Well, because you’re allegedly in love with someone you met, like, five minutes ago and about to get married—”

  “I ain’t married yet—”

  “And she’s . . . ​on a date.” Hot tears were gathering behind my eyes at that reality.

  “Fuck that. Ain’t no way that little nigga is hitting that shit right. I’d bag shorty in a minute.” Kent laughed. “Put me in the game, Coach Kim. Hook a nig—”

  “Look at the man sitting at the table, Kent,” I directed, irritated. “Look at him.”

  “What I need to look at this nigga for?” Kent squinted for a minute, and then his mouth fell open like he was looking at a dead body for the first time. “Yooooo, that’s Ronald McDonald. Your ex—” He stopped himself and looked at me. “Oh, that’s the . . .  ​Asian Kim? Wait, he’s fucking Asian Kim? You ain’t tell me that.” He looked back at her. “I thought I recognized that ass.”

  “I did so tell you,” I said, feeling a little tear slide from my left eye. “I told you what she did, and—”

  “Oh, don’t start on that shit, Kiki Mimi,” Kent said, leaning toward me like a basketball coach about to pull me out of the game. “You can’t let that lame nigga see you over here crying. That shit was, like, two years ago when y’all called off the wedding.”

  “One year, two months,” I divulged.

  “So. Yo, dead that. You moved on. You better than that nigga Ronald McDonald. I mean, that nigga’s real name is Ronald McDonald. Come on. You couldn’t marry that clown.”

  He was trying to build me up, but hearing the word marry tore me apart, and a few more tears escaped my eyes. Then Kent placing his hand on my shoulder to comfort me opened the floodgates, so I jumped up from the table to rush inside to the bathroom before I unraveled into a mess.

  I went into a stall and locked the door behind me like a monster was on my tail when really it was just my past. Ronald McDonald was a funny name, but my history with him was nothing to laugh about. I loved that man intensely and without warranty. We’d met our sophomore year at Morgan State. He was skinny and too smart. He was always talking about how he was going to be a lawyer when he graduated from college and how he was going to save all the poor black people of the world. I’d always been really smart, but I had no idea what I intended to do after Morgan State. I was the first person in my family to go to college, and all I knew was that after I graduated I wanted to get a good job so I could go home, find my mother, and pay for her to go to a good rehab place in someplace like Malibu or Denver like all of the white celebrities did on television.

  Needless to say, skinny Ronald McDonald and all of his big talk about plans and the future was more than attractive to me. I just craved his direction, and soon his dream became my dream. By junior year, he was my best guy friend, and we planned to go to law school together after college. But there was only one thing missing from our dynamic duo: both Ronald and I were virgins. Kent and his drug-dealing crew had scared all the neighborhood boys off when I was in high school, so I hadn’t so much as made out with anyone.

  All of that changed one night during homecoming weekend junior year. Ronald had pledged Kappa the semester before, and he was in his chapter’s step show. I got there early with my girls and sat in the front row ready to cheer him on. We were debating who’d look the hottest onstage and who’d likely drop his cane mid-performance. I mean, some of these guys we’d known since our freshman year, and now they’d pledged and become pseudo celebrities on campus—or so they thought.

  When the Kappas hit the stage, Ronald was in front of me. And he was moving his body in ways that tickled the little space behind my ears. By the middle of the show, he was shirtless and working his cane so fast, beads of sweat trickled down hard abs I’d never seen. I kept thinking, “What has he been doing all summer?” My girls were cheering and screaming his name, but I was speechless, standing there with my arms folded over my chest and feeling something new, twitching and hot, between my thighs.

  Ronald didn’t drop that damn cane at all, and by the time he shimmied off the stage with his frat brothers, snaking his body back and forth, I knew I was going to be waiting for him in his dorm after we finished partying that night.

  I didn’t say a word to my girls. In two years on the yard, I’d learned that every single one of them had a big mouth, and I was so afraid that if I did something with Ronald and told them, it would get out and people would call me a “Kappa set-out” (code for “whore”). But there was nothing wrong with doing and not telling, and I knew Ronald wasn’t the type of guy to go telling his frat brothers all of his business, so once we all left the club where Ronald had been strolling with his brothers through the party before drooling freshman girls, I was waiting right outside his door.

  He smiled and invited me in like it was any other night and we were about to have one of our “bestie” sleepovers and watch old reruns of Martin after smoking a little weed, but I told him not to turn on the television. I was already drunk enough to act out what I was feeling between my thighs, and while he was in the middle of a panicky retelling of his performance, like I hadn’t been there, I jumped right on top of him on his bed. I could tell he was nervous. He hadn’t ever seen me like that. His hands were sweating and I could feel his heart beating into my chest as he kissed me like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.

  That’s when I felt it. I was straddling him, and at his middle something was swelling and hardening fast. I’d heard about “wood” and brothers getting “hard,” and I knew what it was, so I pushed my middle to his middle and fell deeper into his chest, grinding my hips around in these kinky circles like I’d seen Patra and Lady Saw do in reggae videos on Video Music Box. I let my Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice braids swing over my shoulders and rubbed my vagina so hard into him, something shot straight through me and I felt my whole body open up. And I mean literally—from my vagina to my heart. I rubbed harder then, and while we were both still in our jeans, Ronald’s penis grew bigger again and more rigid than anything that should be connected to a human. I abandoned my brain to follow my heart, which was begging to feel the thing tapping my middle from the outside in. I am sure I didn’t push my hand into Ronald’s pants with any elegance. It was more of a shove and grab. I wrapped my hands around his penis and remembered that in seventh grade fast-ass Melissa Montgomery said it should feel like a banana or plantain. I decided that I needed to call Melissa and tell her that she was wrong. Because what I felt hiding below Ronald’s tight abs was more like the long, thick salamis my father used to get by taking the train all the way to the Italian butcher in Bensonhurst.

  My hands were on his penis, gripping it tightly and slowly fingering it all around, as if trying to confirm that it was real and moving and pulsating to the rhythm in my hips. He let out a little sigh. He placed his hands on my hips over him and next his fingers were undoing my zipper.

  “You think you’re ready for this?” he asked in a whisper that was more confirming than questioning. I don’t think I answered. I don’t remember answering. Ronald could never recall if I answered. I just started moving. Pulled off my own pants and panties and everything. Some Lil’ Kim song was pla
ying on the radio, so I was feeling all courageous.

  I let him enter me while I held my breath and thought of the sounds the A train made when it pulled up at 125th Street (fast-ass Melissa Montgomery’s advice). It hurt. It burned like fire. But the more I held my breath and thought of the sounds of the brakes on the subway car screeching against the tracks, the farther behind I left the pain, until I arrived at something that commanded my every sense like nothing else I’d ever experienced. I couldn’t worry about anything. Think about anything. Not my mother. My father. Kent. How we were going to pay for senior year. What I wanted to be when I grew up. At that moment, when Ronald was inside of me, I had no worries, no thoughts.

  I think that was when my brazen undertaking of our love began. How he stole my heart from the outside in. Because after that, I was never the same. I was sitting on top of that salami for so long and through so many days and nights, skinny Ronald McDonald became a part of me—or maybe I became a part of him, like an appendage. I got a urinary tract infection, a yeast infection, and even popped a muscle in my jaw, but nothing could keep me from that man. I stayed in position on top of him through graduation. Got accepted to Columbia Law after he got accepted to NYU Law and we started planning our future together. Then we were going to be lawyers and we were going to save all the poor black people of the world.

  Ronald was more than clear on my plans to be with him . . .  ​forever. He said he wanted to be with me. He said I would make a good “mate.” After we graduated from law school in New York, he announced that he just needed a little more time on his own to get himself together and then he’d propose. I agreed. Hearing the word propose come from his lips at twenty-four was like watching a master chef cook a perfect cut of filet mignon—you’d do anything to taste the final product. Because I’d lived in adult housing through law school to avoid going home to my father and Kent, I was newly homeless and staying with my cousin, so I needed to find someplace to live quickly. I searched everywhere, but I was broke and studying for the bar exam and I couldn’t find anything I could afford that wasn’t far out in Jersey, damn near upstate, or out on Long Island. Going home was just out of the question.

  One morning my cousin Tamika, who was a booking agent at the Wilhelmina modeling agency, said she had a client whose roommate had disappeared in the middle of the night. She needed a replacement fast. When I showed up at the rent-controlled two-bedroom loft in Chelsea, this Chinese-looking girl with pecan skin and bushy black hair answered the door in a thin tank dress. “Please be my new roommate!” she begged like a little puppy before I could even get in the door to see the place. “Okay,” I said quickly. We laughed, sensing our equal desperation. I walked in and she pulled me into her arms dramatically. “Wonderful! I just knew we were meant to be when Tamika told me your name was Kim. I’m Kim too! We’re meant to be,” she squealed so loudly I knew she couldn’t be any older than twenty-one. From that day on she was “Kim 2.” She pulled me to a couch that looked like it had been in the loft since it was built and proceeded to go over a bunch of stuff about sharing the rent and utilities. There was a neon-green bong on the table and a pizza box on the floor near the couch, but I was so busy looking at Kim 2’s skin and wondering where she was from, guessing about her parentage, that I hardly paid attention to the details of my surroundings. When she asked if I’d be her roommate, I hadn’t even heard how much the rent was. “Yes,” I said. “I will.”

  That night I was meeting Ronald for dinner in Gramercy Park near his firm, and Kim kind of invited herself along. That was her way. She didn’t take off the nearly see-through tank dress. She slid on some cowgirl boots only a model could get away with, and big black shades. She wrapped her arm around mine and asked me to tell her all about Ronald—my future fiancé. I did. Told everything. Including the rap about his Bensonhurst salami. If my mother had been around, like, ever, I might have had advice to do otherwise.

  There were prophetic moments over the next five years, notably an Ecstasy-fueled threesome three years in, during which I passed out after he ejaculated in her. That haunted me day and night, and might have helped me predict the psychological hell down the road when my fiancé left me in an emergency room to go comfort my roommate turned best friend.

  Now, in the bathroom at 44 & X, I sat down on the toilet and cried into my hands like a stupid girl. I was done with questions about why that sad moment had happened and how it happened. I’d been numbed by the whole thing. But seeing Kim and Ronald together, knowing they were still dating and eating at my brunch spot, brought all of the pain back.

  A text came through on my cell phone as I balled up a bunch of toilet paper to wipe my tears. It was from Kent.

  KENT: You coming out of there?

  I tried, like, three times to respond with something clear and concise that would hide the full-on breakdown I was having in the stall, something like “I’m on my way out” or “Be back in a sec,” but nothing would come out right. Then Kent started writing again.

  KENT: Come on. Don’t let this shit go down with you hiding in the bathroom.

  KENT: Hello?

  KENT: Kiki Mimi, you better bring your ass out here. Yo, Harlem, stand up! I ain’t fucking playing.

  He was trying to make me laugh. I did chuckle a little bit at how stupid he was, but I was still hiding on the dirty toilet and probably earning a bad case of crabs for it.

  KENT: Yo, you know how I am. You know I would’ve dropped this fool on sight behind what he did to you if I really gave a fuck about him. But I ain’t do it.

  The best thing about being a twin is that sometimes in such a crazy world you know exactly how someone else feels. It’s like if Kent is happy or sad, I can actually feel his emotions inside of me. Like they’re my own. I felt that when I read Kent’s message. I felt his anger. His compassion for me. In that moment my little brother was being my big brother again. I texted him back.

  ME: Why didn’t you fuck him up?

  He answered immediately.

  KENT: Because this nigga ain’t good enough for you.

  And then:

  KENT: He never was. I was glad when he was gone. If I put my hands on him, he would’ve thought I gave a fuck. I didn’t. I wanted him to know that. Man to man. He wasn’t good enough.

  I can’t say my tears went from sad to happy. That would be a full exaggeration. It’s more accurate to say Kent made me smile. Made me a little tougher.

  I wiped my tears one last time and flushed the tissue down the toilet. I straightened my back and walked out of the stall with the full intention of returning to the table, finishing my brunch, and moving on . . .  ​again. Harlem . . .  ​stand up.

  When I was looking in the mirror cleaning streaks of mascara from my cheeks, Kent sent more texts:

  KENT: Yo, you coming out? I paid the bill, so we can leave when you walk out.

  KENT: Yo?

  ME: Yes. I’m coming out now.

  The phone started vibrating again when I was stuffing it back into my purse, but I knew it was probably just Kent again, so I ignored it and headed out of the bathroom.

  I took one of those deep, courage-begging breaths and pulled the bathroom door open.

  And there, standing right there in front of me, was Kim 2.

  I was so not prepared for that. I’m saying, if I had been, I would’ve said some slick Dominique Deveraux in Dynasty line that would cut her down at the knees and threaten her life. But a good line or practiced uppercut was so far from my mind, I just tried to walk past her. I didn’t even roll my eyes.

  She put her cold hand on my arm, and my first reaction was to pull away.

  But she grabbed for me again.

  “No, just wait,” she said, trying to get a hold of me with the thin, pale hand.

  “Wait? What?” I threw my arms up to escape her. “Don’t touch me. Don’t fucking touch me.”

  She reached again and I jumped back.

  “Kim, stop. I just want to say—”

  �
�I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to hear what you have to say. I’ve told you that so many times. Just stop,” I said, repeating sentiments I’d expressed in response to the many e-mails and texts Kim had sent me after her relationship with my fiancé came to light. They had been a couple, an actual couple, for over a year before I found out. She’d met his parents. They’d gone to the Poconos together—all of this while I was with him.

  “I just want you to hear me out,” she said.

  “Hear what? I don’t need to hear anything I don’t already know. You stole my fiancé. You said you were my best friend, but meanwhile you were sleeping with my man behind my back.”

  “We both know that’s not how it went down. You guys were—”

  “That’s how I know the story, and that’s all I care to know,” I said. “I’m not one of those people who need to know why. Your motives were obvious. You wanted him from the start. You knew how much I loved him, how much he loved me, but you wanted him for yourself anyway. We were supposed to get married.”

  “You didn’t have a ring. He never even asked you.”

  “So?”

  “So . . .  ​look, none of it was done on purpose,” Kim 2 said. “It just happened.”

  “You can tell that bullshit to someone else,” I shot back, “someone who wasn’t nearly killed in a car your high ass was driving.”

  “But you . . .  ​you . . .  ​I never meant for any of that to happen.”