“Robin Harrison?” he said having become an actor in the blink of an eye, “That name sounds familiar, but I can’t say I know her right off hand.”
“She about my height. Long hair. Really pretty face. Big butt.” Sasha said giving her description of Jay’s wife who was still hiding in the bedroom.
“Big butt? Why’d you throw that part in there?” he said acting as if he were somewhat offended by her last comment.
“Because I know how you like a big booty. “ Sasha giggled a little and continued, “She’s a nurse at First General Hospital. You don’t know her.”
“Should I.”
“I don’t know. Should you?"
“I told you I don’t know her.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. What is this about?”
Just then, Robin emerged from the bedroom, making her way down the hall and into the living room where Jay was still denying knowing her. Her face was still wet from tears as she stood in the silent tension of the room. She wanted to kick his teeth down his throat or rip his heart out of his chest and stomp on it, so that he could feel some of the pain she was going through.
“Robin?” he said knowing that he had been caught but not ready to give up on his lie. He was stunned beyond belief and the feeling of being a trapped animal quickly closed in on him but he wasn’t ready to just lie down and let his marriage die. He knew that no matter what his relationship with Sasha was pretty much over, but Robin was a different kind of woman, a weaker woman, and there was a chance he could salvage their relationship. “Robin Baby, it’s not what it looks like.”
“You don’t know me! You don’t know me!” Her voice did a crescendo as he pushed pass Sasha and over to Robin where he placed his hands on her shoulder. “Get your hands off of me!”
“Baby listen.” He pleaded, staring into Robin’s eyes looking for a sign of her trademark weakness, but it wasn’t there. He could usually look her in the eyes and see that she was reasoning with herself to believe whatever lie he had told her. But this time it wasn’t there. He tried to embrace her but she resisted pushing him away. He persisted knowing that if he could just hold her in his arms, that he could convince her to believe anything he told her.
She glared at him with the will of a woman scorned for the last time and repeated calmly, “get your hands off me”
“She set this up. Can’t you see she just trying to destroy what we have?” Jay frantically replied grasping at straws trying to find the right words…any words that would save his marriage. He had worked out things to say for every scenario but this one. He wasn’t quit sure how to rectify this situation but he was willing to do or say anything. He continued to try to hold Robin but was continually met with determined resistance.
Robin stood firm in her denial of his affection, repeatedly saying only, “Get your hands off of me.”
“Set you up!” Sasha, who at this point felt betrayed and down right stupid for ever having loved this man, yelled. It was painfully obvious that she was indeed…the other woman. This unfortunate reality was being painfully displayed right in her face. She was second best to this woman, the woman who really held the key to Jay’s heart. She looked at his wife with envy and contempt. She was his wife, his partner, the person he was willing to deny all other women for…she was holding the position that Sasha wanted to be in. Still, she couldn’t believe how easily he had gone from hugging and kissing on her only a few minutes ago, to begging this woman to believe that she was the liar in the situation. She shouted, “You set yourself up! Engaged to me and married to her!”
“She a lie! Baby, she lying. I‘m not engaged to her. I barely know-“
“I heard you, Jay. I heard you! I heard you! GET YOUR DAMN HAND OFF OF ME!!!” Robin screamed pushing Jay away for the last time. “Not two minutes ago you were in here denying that you knew me and now this! Five years? Five years of this bullshit! I put up with the phone calls…the numbers…the “she’s just my friend”…but this…this is it baby.”
“Robin I can explain-“ Jay started to interrupted.
“Fuck you and your explanation! I wasted five years of my life on you. Five freakin years! You have a baby with this girl. A baby!” Robin continued at times losing the sound of her voice to tears, “ I knew something was going on. I knew it. I knew it…but…but I never would have thought that you had a whole other family…Look at this.” Robin said as her eye caught sight of the family portrait hanging on the wall. She pointed to it and frantically continued, “This…this is the same…the same damn picture hanging over our fireplace at home. The girls are wearing…wearing the same damn dress…THE ONLY THING DIFFERENT IS ME! You have the nerve to be wearing the SAME DAMN SHIRT AND…You son of bitch.” Her voice trailed off as she stared at the picture and lost contact with reality for a moment as she thought back to how he had stayed behind at the portrait studio to pay for the pictures that day. “Oh my god. You took these pictures on the same day.” She realized as she stared at the stain on his tie. Their daughter had spit up on him while they were taking the pictures. Robin jolted back to reality enraged. “Give me my keys!”
“What? Baby listen” Jay begged to plead his case but it was too late. Robin’s mind was made up, demonstrated by her stern tone and expressionless face.
“Give…me…my…damn…keys!” she shouted and held her hand out to him, “RIGHT NOW!!!”
“Can’t we talk about this?” Jay pleaded making no effort to get his keys out for her.
“Hell no! Give me my keys.” Robin shot back. After seeing that he was still making no effort to give her car keys to her she said “You can give them to me now or I can have my brothers come and get them from your job and you know Ross would love to come and get them from you.”
“You willing to throw away our marriage over something this bitch said.” He said this time digging in his pocket to get out his keys. He fumbled with the keys as he tried to separate his keys from hers.
“Bitch!!” Sasha responded shocked that such a description of her would fall from Jay’s lips. She shot back, “Who you calling a bitch?”
He ignored her question and continued to try to convince his wife that he was the victim of a set up. He continued, “If you would take a minute and just listen. I know…I know I messed up. I messed up, but I was just stringing her along enough to figure out what to do. See we had a one-night stand and she said she was going to tell you if I didn’t do what she said. So I figured I’d just play along until I could find a way to get her out of our lives.”
“What about the baby, Jay.” Robin asked and she could feel the vulnerable side of her heart wanting to give him a way out of the mess he had gotten himself into.
Seeing an opening he quickly seized it and without hesitation replied. “That baby ain’t mine.”
“What?!” Sasha shouted in complete disbelief, “what do you mean she’s not yours?”
“That’s how she been blackmailing me. She knew I couldn’t get a DNA test without you finding out and she used that against me.”
“You son of a bitch!” Sasha yelled and immediately jumped on Jay’s back and started punching him in the head. Jay was quickly able to get her off of him and held her at bay with one hand.
“See she’s fighting me because she knows it’s the truth.” He said to Robin while still holding Sasha back, but his comment made Sasha even more enraged. She scanned the room for something heavy to hit him with. She spotted a vase on a secretary desk by her front door, so she ran over, grabbed it and threw it at him. She missed causing the vase to shatter into pieces on her marble floor.
“You lying bastard! He signed her birth certificate and everything. Hell he was in the delivery room when she was being born! “ Sasha said to Robin as if she had to also plead her case to get Robin to believe her and not Jay.
“But the children look like twins” Robin said still looking for an excuse to believe him. If he could logically explain that then she would have to give his story some consideration. She had, after all, just met this woman. How did she know that Jay wasn’t telling the truth? That this woman hadn’t set up the whole thing just to get back at Jay for having had a one-night stand with her. For all she knew, this could be some kind of trick to steal her man away from her. Sasha could have known about her all the time and finally gotten tired of waiting for Jay to tell her about the affair and taken this drastic step to get her man.
Sasha went back to the secretary desk and opened a top draw searching frantically through the papers. She came across the document she was searching for and offered it to Robin as proof. She said, “Here’s his signature on her birth certificate.” But it wasn’t the signature that would cause the almost instant shattering of Robin’s world. She opened her mouth but the sound was lost in the sorrow that was building in her heart. Her eyes watered and big plump tears fell down her cheeks and onto the document. She stood there dazed and emotionally shaken.
Her voice quivered as she read the contents of the document out loud, “Cree Jordan Harrison born May 15th to Sasha Letrice Houston and Jason Jordan Harrison at First General Hospital.” Her hands trembled and she was still swallowing her words as she continued, “My baby’s name is Justine Jordan Harrison and her birthday is May 15th and when we were at First General-“ Robin’s words were becoming almost incomprehensible through the sobs “ I saw your baby. I saw her, but it just had the footprints, her name and your name. I said then…. I said…look that baby’s name is almost the same is my baby. I never thought…” and with that she couldn’t take another minute in the condo.
Her marriage was over and now she just wanted to get out of this place. She just wanted to leave and get to the sanctity of home, as fast as possible. She didn’t want to hear the sound of Jay’s voice or be anywhere in his presence for the rest of her life. She just wanted to go, to flee, to escape to find solace in a place far from the lies and deceit surrounding her. Had she brought this pain on herself? If only she had made her appointment for Thursday instead of Tuesday or just made it for that afternoon, she wouldn’t have this pain exploding inside of her chest tearing her heart apart. At that moment she wished that she were still in the dark about this whole situation. At least there was love and happiness in the darkness of his deceit. In the light, there was only pain and suffering for her. She wanted to scream, to cry, to yell, to fuss and cuss, to fight…to fight Jay…Sasha…herself...at that moment she wished that she could just lay down and die to save herself from this terrible pain that was hurting every fiber of her being. She wanted to beat herself up for being so naive, but she didn’t. She just let the tears run down like rivers over her cheeks and fall off her face creating pools on her blouse.
She pulled herself together as best as she could, wiping the tears from her face. Her hands were still trembling when she handed the birth certificate back to Sasha. In the deepest part of her being she was grateful to Sasha for revealing her marriage for the sham it really was, but in her heart she hated her. She hated that their children shared the same father and she hated that they were in love with the same man. Most of all she hated her for being the other woman. The woman who provided something that Jay apparently could not get from her. She secretly wondered what that might be but was afraid to ask. The whole situation had made her feel inadequate in some way but she didn’t how. She would have lain down and died for Jay and to find out that he was willing to deny her existence to save his relationship with this other woman, well that was more than her pride and her heart could take.
She looked at herself in the large mirror hanging on the wall in Sasha’s dining room, she looked a mess, but she was still beautiful. She glowed with the beauty of a woman finally ready to let go of a diluted dream. She could feel this weight lifting off of her shoulders and she could feel a new breath…a deep breath. A breath deeper than any she had ever taken. She welcomed it into her soul through her lungs and closed her eyes and slowly let it out releasing all of the frustration she had suppressed over the years. She looked over at Sasha who seemed to have witnessed this moment with her and said, “Girl, he’s your problem now.” She then went into a joyous laughter, as she walked over and snatched her keys from Jay and made her way out of the front door, the sound of her laughter echoing down the breezeway.
“Give me my keys too! All of them and get the hell out of my house!” Sasha fumed. Jay knew that there was no reasoning with Sasha when she was mad. He simply took her keys off his ring and handed them to her. It was then that he realized that he had given Robin the keys to the car he was driving. He shrugged it off. Their other car must be out there. How else did she get over to Sasha’s place, right? He knew that there no way Sasha had driven her over there.
He was about to leave without so much as an apology or goodbye when Sasha called his name, “Jay” She called out in the most seductive and sweetest sounding voice. “Got her,” he thought, as he stood there with the door open.
“Yeah.” He said trying to maintain the joy he was feeling knowing one of them still wanted him. If he could pull this one off he would go down in the player’s hall of fame.
“You know that promotion you were talking about.” Sasha said coyly.
“Well this is straight out of left field.” He thought as he took a step back into the apartment to hear what she was going to say. “Yeah, What about it?” he questioned.
“Wilson, called me in his office and gave it to me this morning. I’m the new head of Network Security, Southeastern Division. So that makes me your boss, Bitch!” With that comment, Jay had finally had all that he could stand of Sasha. Whatever feelings he did have for her were definitely gone after this little trick she’d pulled on him. Jay slammed her door shut and left her to looking as if she wanted to say some other smart remark.
