Who's Loving You. Mary B. Morrison

time and eventually heal. My problem was I couldn’t purge myself of the beautiful memories I had of Grant. I was determined to get my man back while rescuing as many suffering women as I could.

      Each of those peaches clinging to my trees represented beautiful women, bruised women, succulent women, spoiled women, sexy women, ripe women, and premature women. The fruit that had fallen from those trees, decomposed, and returned to the earth, were the women I wanted to help the most, before they let go of life. No man should ever savor a bite of a precious peach without first caressing her in the palms of his hands, cleansing her soul, appreciating her, and giving thanks for all that she’d given him, especially if she was his mother, daughter, sister, significant other, wife, or friend.

      Ka-boom!

      Backing away from the window, I gasped at the crackling thunder, which shook my mansion from the ground up. I beheld a ray of sunshine beaming brightly through the pillows of dark clouds. It left a warmth across my face, and a remnant of the one woman I’d never forget appeared in the silhouette of an angel. With just a few blinks of my eyes, Mother Nature had shrunk the raindrops to speckles and dissolved the black clouds, clearing the way for blue skies. I guessed the weatherman was right, after all.

      Closing my eyes and then slowly opening them, I glanced at Sunny’s picture resting on my desk, accepting that I was the reason my favorite escort had been shot in the head the day before her twenty-first birthday. I couldn’t bring Sunny back, but I felt obligated to keep a close watch on her identical twin sister, Summer, who was pregnant with Valentino’s twins. Looking out the patio window and admiring the green leaves, I squinted and noticed the streaks remaining on my windowpane, which were as visible as my flaws. That was a good thing. No longer would I hide my past from anyone, especially Grant.

      Peaches couldn’t grow on trees that had no roots or had roots that had no soil, or in soil that had no nutrients or had nutrients but no water, or with water that had no clouds or under clouds that couldn’t give way to the sunshine warming my face. Like those peach trees, a woman without the basic elements of life would die before she blossomed.

      I’d heard that people who were too proud, too embarrassed, or too afraid to cry in front of others were hiding something. Shame. Guilt. Insecurities. Vulnerabilities. Secrets even. At one point in my life, I had experienced all of that and added a few more reasons why I incarcerated my salty sadness. I’d turned away from life, not wanting anyone to look into my eyes. I was afraid they’d see I’d been molested, abused as a child, beaten by my ex-husbands, and assaulted by some of my johns.

      The real reason I killed Reynolds wasn’t because he’d raped Onyx. I shot that motherfucker in the head because I was tired of men who felt justified forcing their dicks inside of women to bust a fuckin’ nut or to establish dominance. Punk-ass, bitch-ass men deserved to die. If I saw Reynolds in the afterlife, I’d kill his ass again.

      Women weren’t put on this earth for men to control them. God gave men women to love. For Reynolds’s death, I had no remorse. I had no blood on my hands or my conscience. If I ever got arrested, my trial would undoubtedly empower women everywhere to stop hanging their heads and stand up for themselves.

      You could tell a lot by looking into a woman’s eyes, especially if that woman had low self-esteem or if she was smiling from her nose down, struggling to keep from crying. There’d been a haziness obstructing my judgment of others. At first, all I’d wanted to do was please people, hoping that would make them like me and, if I was lucky, love me. The harder I tried, the less they cared about me.

      The men, oh, how the men had loved the way I circled my juicy tongue around their dick heads, letting them shoot cum in my mouth. For eleven years, I had been their fantasy come true, granting their deepest desires, the ones their wives or girlfriends wouldn’t. My pussy had possessed the kind of power that made men sign their names to payday loans so they could experience my unforgettable lingam massage.

      Unconsciously, I’d picked up Sunny’s picture and placed it inside my top desk drawer. Before closing the drawer, I took it out and put it back. Today was as good as any day to stop living inside my head, to stop agonizing over Grant, to stop dwelling on depressing memories, to get off of my ass, and to go out into world and save Red Velvet.

      I went upstairs to the entertainment room, where the girls were gathered, and announced, “I have a surprise!”

      They all stopped watching Oprah and stared at me. “This had better be important,” Onyx said.

      “Forget it. I apologize. I shouldn’t have interrupted,” I said. “Go back to watching television. I was going to buy each of you your own car today and give you each a million dollars as I’d promised, but Oprah can do that for—”

      “Aaahhhh!” they all screamed at the same time. Titties and asses joyfully bounced up and down.

      It wasn’t the money or the materialistic luxury cars I was giving them that excited me. I was giving each of them their independence. Having enough money to enjoy life did good things for women…Money empowered women. If women had the right amount of money, they could buy themselves a few good men. But the one thing money couldn’t buy was love.

      “Oh, shit,” I said, laughing. Instantly, I found myself buried under eleven very excited women. For a moment, in that moment, I couldn’t say we all loved one another or that we had anyone out there that loved us, but I knew in that moment, we were all truly happy.