Secret Wives

CHAPTER 1:

“May I speak to Tameeka?” I gripped the cell phone tightly in my palm, willing this ordinary voice on the other end of the line to not be her.

“Speaking.”

Why did she have to sound so normal? Why couldn’t she sound like a leper. Whatever they sound like. Maybe some kind of gravelly voice. Something high pitched and grating. And that’s really discriminatory against lepers, so please forgive me in advance for any offence you may feel as a result of continued reading. As a matter of fact, I am totally going to offend a bunch of random categories of people, so sorry to everyone I ever hurt. Shall I continue?

This bitch had a normal voice and it made my eye twitch. I let out a breath before I let her know who I was.

“This is Sarah. Do you know who I am?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line before she spoke. Her voice was cool and professional as though she was in an interview with a white man. “Yes. I know who you are and I’ve been expecting your call for months now.”

“Oh?” She caught me off guard. I don’t know what I had expected exactly. I’d known about her for all of two whole hours and she’d been waiting on me for months? The nerve to continue almost left me. I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it for what felt like an eternity. Did I really want to confirm everything I’d just read in those emails? I could just hang up and act like this never happened. Like I never saw or read any of those love letters. But I knew that I could only pretend for a moment. And that when he came home from work today, I’d look into his eyes and the truth would be right there. Where it had always been. Just behind the lies.

“Hello?” Tameeka’s voice came out of the phone and I reluctantly put it next to my ear.

“I’m here.” I didn’t want to be here though. Anywhere but here. In fact, if this closet floor could open up and swallow me just so I didn’t have to talk to this woman anymore, that would be helpful. But I'd called her. I needed to be sure and I hoped she didn’t hear the uncertainty and shakiness in my voice. The last thing I wanted to do was come off as a weak and fragile woman.

“I’m calling you because I found your emails on my home computer.” I paused, wanting to call her a whore. Resisting.

“What exactly is your relationship to my husband?” I already knew what their relationship was. It was pretty clear in those scathing emails. They were intimate. They had been for months. Then, they’d stopped seeing each other only weeks before I returned from Africa with our teenage daughter. Yet, there was still communication between them. In fact, he’d sent her money just a few weeks ago.

I expected her to confirm the affair, to express how sorry she was for her role in this betrayal. But what she said next floored me.

“We were married for a year.”

A rumbling earthquake began in the pit of my stomach and rose up through my lungs into some kind of animalistic roar. A crag had split open in the depths of my soul and let loose all the sorrow I had ever felt in my entire life. I couldn’t hold it back. With just enough sense to mute the call before dropping the phone to the ground, I was thankful Tameeka hadn’t heard my outburst. I didn’t know her. I didn’t want to know her. All I knew is that she’d been waiting to cut me with this cold knife, this revelation. The pain that radiated from my body was worse than any physical pain I’d ever experienced.

I listened as this woman explained to me how they’d met on a dating app nearly two years ago. How he’d been selected as a potential match by the Tinder algorithms because he was black, over 30, and lived within a 200 mile radius. He called himself James.

Her story went something like this:

I had been on the hookup app for a few months and paying for a premium subscription so the app would find matches for me. You know, weed out all the scrubs. When the app made suggestions, I would check them out and see if I liked the way they looked. I thought he was cute so, I reached out to him. We texted back and forth for a couple of hours and then he asked if we could meet up. I told him to send me a picture of his ID so I could make sure he was a real person. That’s when I found out his real name wasn’t James. He convinced me that he was trying to protect himself by not having his real name on the app, and asked if he could call me to explain. I wanted him to be real, so I agreed to let him call me. After that first call, we talked for hours getting to know each other. He asked again if he could meet me in person and I invited him to my place at an extended stay hotel in the city. It was a three hour drive, but he agreed to it.

When I heard a car horn, I looked out of my window to see him standing besides this little hybrid car. He looked normal, not like a murder or anything, so I answered the phone when he called me. I led him up to my suite, calling a friend of mine to let her know that in case I didn't call her tomorrow, she was to alert the authorities. We sat on the couch talking. He seemed shy at first, but he kept touching my leg, the skin just above my knee. The touches lingered longer and longer. I don’t have sex on the first night, but he wanted to so badly. I helped him jack off and then we slept naked together in my bed. We showered together that morning and then went out for breakfast and to the zoo. When I ran out of carrots for the horses, he gave me his. We spent the entire day together. I promised to come see him the next weekend. He told me to get an STD test and gave me $200 to pay for it.

I drove down 3 hours to this blighted city in the middle of nowhere. You know the janky little studio apartment where you stayed when you came home from Africa to visit him for your birthday? That’s where we had sex the first time. I was so excited and thrilled. I had condoms and everything, but we didn’t use them. We were laying on the bed together and he said that he wanted me, but we would have to get married first. That’s when he told me he already had a wife, but that he could have another and that I would meet you soon enough. Then, he called some guy on the phone, Imam something, but it was like 2 or 3 AM for them due to the time difference. The guy’s wife answered and told him he was crazy for calling in the middle of the night. Wait until the morning. But we couldn’t wait, so James called a couple of other people.

A few moments later, I was saying “yes” as James, I knew his real name by now, translated into English from whatever language the man on the phone was speaking. It only took a few minutes and then it was done. We were already laying in bed together, and as he hung up, James said to me “You’re my wife now. Can I kiss you?” I had never been married before and I was elated to be someone’s wife.

His work contract was up in a couple of weeks, so I told him I could get him a job where I was working and he moved in with me at the extended stay hotel in the city. We were living as husband and wife.

Her story was full of little details. She went on and on, like she’d been waiting an entire year to tell me all of this and finally could unburden herself from this weight she’d been carrying. She could finally put the whole situation behind her. Now it was my turn to carry the weight of this terrible secret.

But her story was far from over. She was just beginning.

To be continued...

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This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.