Megan Abbott - Mississippi Noir

“Why? Why does it have to go this way? Why does she get every damn minute of your time?”

“She’s my wife. You know that. I made promises to her. I told you I wasn’t looking to end my marriage when we first hooked up. I thought you understood that.”

Jada rose up on her knees, letting the sheet fall away to reveal her naked body. “You made promises to me. Every time you bust a nut, you tellin’ me you love me. That’s a promise.”

“C’mon. That’s just nuttin’ talk.” He looked at Jada’s body with longing.

“You know you want this. You can have it... if you stay a little longer.”

Derek leaned over to Jada, his knee on the bed and the other foot still on the floor. He grabbed one of Jada’s breasts and put it in his mouth. She threw her head back in pleasure — the physical pleasure of his tongue and the emotional pleasure of winning the battle. Jada didn’t beg men to stay — ever. It unnerved her that she begged now. But at least she had him; he was staying. His tongue traveled from her breast to her neck. Jada grabbed the back of his head, and guided him to her mouth. His tongue tasted like mint. She pulled him down on top of her, but he pushed back up.

“I’ll see you at work on Monday.” He flicked her wet nipple and walked out of her bedroom after grabbing his cell phone.

Jada pulled the cover over her cold, naked body and wondered how she’d gotten into this position in the first place and how she could get out of it.

Gray clouds held the sun hostage at 6:45 in the morning. The sun tried to break free of the rain clouds’ prison, glowing faintly on the horizon every so often as Jada sped up I-55 to Madison. She had left later than she intended which meant that she would probably be late all day. She tried not to take this as a bad omen, but the dreary cloud jailers seemed impossible to ignore. But sign or no sign, she would make her pilgrimage; she had made it every Sunday for the past month and would continue to do so until she had reached the nirvana she sought. The journey itself was a sanctifying ritual, working her into a passionate fervor. As she drove, she didn’t see the stores — Char, Chili’s, Target — that she had grown up with most of her life and which lined the sides of the interstate like silent sentinels. Instead she focused on her relationship with Derek, recounting what they had done and said the week before, smiling at the funny exchange they had on their way back from the pep rally for school-wide testing. She remembered the sex the night before, and a gentle shiver fell over her body. Already she felt sacred.

By the time she pulled over into the driveway of the house next to the two-story brick Tudor, she was almost ready for prayer. She prepared by pushing aside the pocket New Testament and the small pistol she always carried in her purse, and in calming solitude, she pulled out, then applied her Red Revival lipstick. Gently rubbing the velvety color between her lips, she surveyed the house’s landscaping, checking whether any changes had been made since the last Sunday. Fresh straw had been laid on the flowerbed that held budding tulips. It seemed a few branches had been cut back from one of the two large trees in the neatly manicured lawn. Jada closed her eyes and imagined she had been working in the yard yesterday morning; she had laid the straw. Dressed in her bright green capris and a peach T-shirt, she had kneeled in front of the flowerbed and removed most of the old, graying straw, placing it in a pile behind her. She worked hard, stopping every now and then to pull up some newly sprouted weeds. It was important to remove ugly, unwanted weeds so that the beautiful could grow. The sun had come out and she had begun to sweat. She wiped her brow with the back of her wrist. One of her neighbors, an older white gentleman, called to her. She smiled and waved at him. Returning to her work, she didn’t even notice Derek walking out with a glass of lemonade and her straw hat. He startled her by placing the hat on her head. She smiled up at him and stood. They shared a long kiss before she took the glass from him and drank the lemonade. He took the glass back, slapped her butt, and walked back in their house.

Jada exhaled, willing the fantasy to become reality. She would speak it to the universe so that which she named, she could claim. She and Derek were meant for beautiful things. She had not known it when they first met two years earlier on her first day at the high school where they both taught, but a year later, after they hooked up a few times, it became overwhelmingly clear.

“I want us to be together. God, I claim his love. I claim our love, in the name of Jesus,” she declared in the car sitting in the driveway next door to his house. “Please.”

Just as she opened her eyes, Derek’s front door opened and his wife came outside. She is so ordinary, Jada thought. What does he see in her?

Jada wasn’t sure when she started viewing her as a rival, but as she scrutinized her now, she couldn’t help but notice how uninteresting her wild curly brown hair and her pale, oval face were. The only thing that made her interesting was the olive undertone that hinted at her biracial heritage. She was thin and straight, like a boy. Derek said she played tennis in high school. Of course, that was fifteen years ago.

Jada peered a little closer, noting that she was gaining weight; at five four, her widening hips made her look short and sloppy. She certainly was no match for Jada’s shapely five seven. Summing her up, Jada assessed that she was not very formidable competition.

She got into her car and blew the horn. That was Jada’s cue to leave. Derek’s wife was calling him to come out so they could go to church. He probably wouldn’t have noticed Jada in the driveway, but she thought it better to leave.

Driving back down I-55, she observed the city coming awake. More cars were on the road even if the parking lots of the stores on the side were still empty. She loved the look of the city, having grown up in it most of her life. She learned to drive on the wide, open curves near Tougaloo College, one of the city’s two historically black colleges. In Fondren, the artsy part of town, she and her high school boyfriend went on her first date to eat at Brent’s Drugs. At Jackson State University, the other HBCU, she fell in love with biology and decided she would share that love with other generations as a teacher. Now she taught at the same high school she had graduated from and she loved her job and her children. She had watched the city of Jackson progress and regress, decay and rebound, and she loved every inch of it.

Of course, her senior year, she thought she would be on the first plane soaring out of the state. A full scholarship to Jackson State and a summer teaching program between her junior and senior year ensured that she would not only remain for college, but that she would stay after graduation. God had jokes. Just when she thought she had everything figured out, He surprised her.

Like Derek. Jada had never intended to fall in love with him. It had been all about the sex. Like it had been with the others. Since her freshman-year relationship ended badly with a boy who couldn’t commit if he were sewn to his girlfriend, she only entered relationships that promised to be beneficial to her financially or sexually. That meant three things to her: one, she was not interested in becoming emotionally involved, opting to see the men on a rotating basis. It also meant that she was perfectly okay with sleeping with a married man if she were attracted. Finally, it meant that she would only date white men. She entertained thoughts of sleeping with black men, but often, if they had any money, it was tied up in some plan for entrepreneurship or worse, some baby mama. White men could satisfy both her craving for the physical and the financial. Hooking up with Derek happened in a perfect storm: he was white, from a well-off family, her first married man, and he caught her when no other men were on her dating horizon.