Lady Elect 2

Book 2: Lady Elect

by Nikita Lynnette Nichols

Genres: African American Women's Fiction; African American

Synopsis

Five weeks after she's brutally attacked and beaten in her home, Arykah Miles-Howell returns to church determined to reclaim her title as the First Lady of Freedom Temple Church of God in Christ. Not fully recovered from the loss of her unborn child, Arykah deals with broken women who bombard her with problems of their own. With the help of her supporters, affectionately known as Team Arykah, and her loving husband, Bishop Lance Howell, Arykah manages to overcome her personal struggles. She proves to the congregation that she is a force to be reckoned with when Bishop Lance's ex-girlfriend tries to take Arykah's place on the front pew. Will Arykah keep her eye on the prize and stay covered and protected in the armor of God, or will she strip down to nothing but her flesh, boxing gloves, and stilettos and jump in the ring to battle?

Release date: January 1, 2015

Publisher: Urban Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

She relented and gave in just to shut everyone up. Lance, Monique, Adonis, and even Mother Myrtle Cortland had worked Arykah’s last nerve. Her supporters were overbearing, and Arykah was at her wit’s end. If any of them mentioned calling a therapist one more time, Arykah was willing to slit both her wrists, and even theirs. She couldn’t take their nagging a moment longer.

It’ll be good for you if you speak with a therapist . . . You’ve suffered a traumatic experience . . . Arykah, keeping your feelings and emotions bottled up inside will only cause ulcers . . . You have to talk about the rape . . . It’ll eat you up inside if you don’t. You’ll never get past it if you don’t open up to someone. Blah blah blah.

Yes, Arykah had been raped. Yes, she had been beaten. Yes, she had a miscarriage. And, yes, she was traumatized. But Arykah wanted to heal in her own way and absorb the trauma on her own terms. Not talking about it and dismissing it from her mind was the best medicine. But each and every day since she was released from the hospital, it was, “Did you make an appointment with a therapist yet ?” Why couldn’t everybody just shut up and leave her alone?

So, there Arykah sat, wasting her precious time on a Saturday afternoon, in a building, in a corner office in downtown Chicago, with a view overlooking Lake Michigan. The tides were high in early May. Arykah watched the waves crash against the shoreline.

“A penny for your thoughts,” Lance said. He sat in a chair next to Arykah and caressed her hand inside his own.

She glanced at him briefly before returning her gaze back to the water. “Hmm? Just wondering how many people have drowned in the lake.”

Lance frowned, then he chuckled. “What?” He wondered what on earth would make Arykah respond that way.

She kept her focus where it was. “Isn’t that why you and everyone else pressured me to come here? So that I could drown in my sorrows? Ironic, don’t you think? You brought me to a therapist to drown, when really all you had to do, Lance, was push me in Lake Michigan. You know my fat behind can’t swim.”

Lance shook his head from side to side. He didn’t understand. “No, Cheeks. I thought it would be good for you to talk about what happened. I can’t get you to open up to me. You refuse to discuss it with Mother Myrtle or Monique. It’s obvious the rape and miscarriage are eating you up inside.”

Arykah snapped her head in Lance’s direction. “What the heck you mean, ‘It’s obvious’? Because I cry from time to time? That makes me a nutcase?”

Aw, heck, here we go , Lance thought. He knew it would take some time for Arykah to bounce back to her old self, sassy talk and cuss words surfing on the tip of her tongue. When they married, Lance had vowed to love Arykah for better or for worse, until death parted them. And Lance had accepted the fact that Arykah’s healing wouldn’t be easy. It would be stressful, difficult, and trying. But with each passing day since Arykah was assaulted, Lance had to walk on eggshells.

Right then, all Arykah wanted to do was cuss out everybody who was either on her last nerve or the one before it. There was a time when Arykah was honestly trying to curb her vulgar vocabulary, but since the day she was attacked, she was starting not to care what she said or whom she said it to. If Lance said “Good morning” to Arykah, she wanted to respond, “What in the hell is so good about it?” For now, though, it was just a nod and a smile. But the clock was ticking before the sailor in her showed itself. God help her!

She had Lance so confused he didn’t know if he was coming or going. One moment Arykah was behaving as if the rape never happened, and the next moment she would be crying and hiding from the world on the floor of her closet.

Though Arykah had fought Lance tooth and nail about speaking with a therapist, he knew he had to get her some help, even if it meant dragging her to the therapist office himself.

He chose his words carefully before he spoke to his wife. “Of course you’re not a nutcase, Cheeks. I’m concerned about you. We all are. Mother Cortland, Monique, and Adonis are worried that you may not be dealing with this matter in a healthy way.”

She raised her voice. “In a healthy way ? Really? Well, why don’t you tell me, Lance, the healthiest way to handle this matter.” Arykah made quotation marks with her fingers. “You think it’s healthy for me to spill my guts to a total stranger about how my loving husband was not around when a man beat me, raped me, and ripped my baby from my womb?”

Lance’s jaw became tight. Arykah said it. She finally said what Lance had felt. He knew Arykah had blamed him, but she hadn’t actually said the words. Had Lance known, on that Monday morning, that Arykah was in danger, he never would’ve gone to church. In his mind, Lance was a husband first and pastor second. He should have been home to protect his wife. Had it been him, instead of Arykah, who answered the doorbell, she wouldn’t have been raped and beaten. Arykah would still be carrying their child.

Arykah seemed fine after she was released from the hospital. She had told Lance that she didn’t miss being pregnant because she hadn’t even known she was with child. And against her doctor’s orders to not indulge in any intimate relations for four weeks, Arykah tried to seduce Lance a week after the rape and miscarriage. Lance wanted to take Arykah but remained strong and reminded her of the doctor’s orders. But everything had changed three nights ago, almost four weeks after the assault.

An hour after Arykah had retired for the evening, Lance walked into the master suite and saw that she had fallen asleep with the bedroom light on. He sat on the bed and kicked his slippers off, then reached for the lamp on the nightstand. As soon as the room darkened, Arykah gave off a bloodcurdling scream.

“No! Please, God, no!”

Lance was startled. He switched the light back on and jumped out of bed and looked at Arykah. She was trembling, and her head was shaking vigorously. When Lance moved toward her, Arykah squeezed her eyes shut and turned away from him.

“Please don’t hurt me! No more. Please no more.”

Her words stopped Lance in his tracks. His heart beat so fast he thought his chest would burst. “Baby, it’s me. It’s Lance.”

Arykah clutched her pillow to her chest and sobbed loudly. Lance saw that she rocked back and forth in a fetal position. Slowly he moved toward her.

Arykah began flailing her hands and legs. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me.” Arykah looked toward the bedroom door. “Lance! Lance!” she called out.

Lance sat on the bed at her side and tried his best to console her. He placed his hand softly on her thigh. “Arykah, it’s me. I’m right here.”

Arykah fought off the man next to her. She swung at Lance, striking him repeatedly in his chest and neck area. “Get out!” she yelled. “Get out!”

Lance stood, but his feet were glued to the hardwood floor. He didn’t know what to do.

“Move away from me. Get away!”

Arykah’s screams sent him running from the bedroom to the kitchen. He yanked the telephone from the wall and dialed Monique. He was breathing heavy in her ear. “You better get here quick.”

“What happened?” Monique asked in a panic.

Lance ran his hand over his bald head. “I don’t know. She’s screaming and yelling. She won’t let me near her.”

Monique was already jumping out of bed and running to her closet to change her clothes. “I’m on my way.”

Lance didn’t return to the master suite. He sat in the living room, waiting a half hour for Monique to arrive. He slept in one of the four guest rooms that night while Monique and Arykah stayed behind the closed door of the master suite.

“You think that I don’t blame myself, for one second, that I wasn’t home when you were attacked? It kills me that I couldn’t protect you. I failed you, and I will never get past that.”

There was a soft knock on the door before it opened slowly. An African American female entered the room. The first thing Arykah noticed was her cute short crop haircut and beautifully made-up face. Arykah had expected to see someone wearing a white lab coat, but the lady was dressed in a form-fitted dark blue jean button-down dress. She guessed the lady to be about a size fourteen. The last time Arykah wore a size fourteen was when she was fourteen. At thirty years old, Arykah fit comfortably in a size twenty-two. She was a big girl who took pride in her appearance. Arykah paid good money for her expensive clothes and shoes. She never allowed her size to interfere with looking her absolute best.

Arykah glanced at the lady’s feet and saw a pair of black leather mules and frowned. Why couldn’t she have slipped into a pair of plain black stilettos to set that blue jean dress off?

Arykah, a self-proclaimed shoe whore, thought that a lot could be said about a woman by the shoes she wore. The lady’s crop haircut . . . check . Her face was made up nicely . . . check . The blue jean dress hugged her curves perfectly . . . check . The black leather mules . . . epic failure. Perhaps, when they were done, Arykah thought that she and the lady could switch seats. She needed a lesson and obviously some serious therapy on how to upgrade her shoe game.

“Mr. and Mrs. Howell?”

Lance stood from his chair and extended his hand. “Yes. I’m Lance.” He shook the lady’s hand and turned to face his wife. “This is Arykah.”

The lady looked at Arykah who was still seated. “Hello, Arykah. I’m Doctor Santana Lovejoy.” She sat down at her desk and noticed that Lance was still standing. “Lance, please sit.”

Lance sat, and Doctor Lovejoy retrieved a notebook and ink pen from the center drawer of her desk. She looked up at both Arykah and Lance, then smiled.

Arykah was drawn to her hazel eyes against her dark mocha-colored skin. Cute. She could not really deny that Dr. Santana Lovejoy was strikingly beautiful. Arykah rated her a nine. She could’ve been a ten for sure had she worn the correct shoes.

Doctor Lovejoy had read Arykah’s file before she and Lance had arrived. She looked at Arykah.“How can I help you today?”

Arykah didn’t want to be there. She concentrated on her hands and wondered when was the last time she had visited a nail shop. Since Lance thought the session was necessary, Arykah decided to let him and Doctor Lovejoy have at it. Arykah glanced at her cuticles. She was overdue for a fill-in. I could be somewhere getting my nails done right now .

Lance waited for Arykah to speak, but she didn’t say a word. “Honey, you wanna start?”

When Arykah didn’t respond Lance nudged her arm. While she kept her focus on her nails, Arykah nudged him back much harder.

Lance gave Doctor Lovejoy an embarrassed smile. He cleared his throat. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea after all, he thought to himself.

“Why don’t you start, Lance?” Doctor Lovejoy asked him.

That was the second time she had said his name. The way she said it caused Arykah to snap her head in Doctor Lovejoy’s direction. Lance? Lance? It’s like that? She said his name like they had been acquainted. Like they knew each other. Like they go way back. Like they may have been intimate before. Doctor Lovejoy sounded like that chick from The Cosby Show when she whined her boyfriend’s name. “Oh, Laaannnce.” Arykah cringed every time she watched those particular episodes.

“You two know each other?”

Both Doctor Lovejoy and Lance looked at Arykah curiously.

“You’re on a first-name basis. I thought that maybe you were old friends.”

“Actually, this is the first time that I’m meeting both of you,” Doctor Lovejoy said. “I find that using last names in sessions doesn’t break the ice with my patients. I prefer to be on a friendlier term.”

Arykah couldn’t say for sure that Doctor Lovejoy was flirting with Lance, but she decided to go ahead and participate so she could get the heck out of that office, and her man away from that woman. Arykah would really hate to have to flip the desk over on the broad in their first session.

“I was raped. I was beaten,” Arykah started. “It caused me to miscarry. Now I’m crazy, and that’s why we’re here.” Arykah looked at Lance. “Isn’t that right, Babe? Go ahead and tell Santana all about your crazy wife.”

By saying her first name and putting special emphasis on it told Doctor Lovejoy and Lance that Arykah didn’t appreciate being there or the way Doctor Lovejoy had said Lance’s name.

Doctor Lovejoy was taken aback by Arykah’s straightforwardness. She was caught off guard and didn’t know how to respond. She was confused. All she did was ask the couple how she could help them. “What just happened here?”

Lance pulled on his necktie to loosen the knot. All of a sudden the walls closed in on him. He felt claustrophobic. Lance knew Arykah was going to put on a show, and he had to be ready for when she popped off. Clearly, he’d made a mistake by convincing Arykah to speak with a therapist. She kept telling him that she wasn’t ready, that she needed more time, that she would open up on her own. Lance wanted to leave the session and apologize to Doctor Lovejoy for wasting her time, but that would only cause him further embarrassment.

“I’ll tell you what just happened here,” Arykah offered.

Lance twitched in his seat and silently prayed. Lord, please write on her tongue. Sweat beads had formed on his brow.

“The truth is,” Arykah started, “my husband is the head of our household. And because he’s the head, I’m obligated to do things he asks of me, even when I don’t want to. Like coming here today. I didn’t want to. But Lance insisted. So, let’s talk and get this session over and done with ’cause I gotta get to the nail shop.” And you need to get to DSW .

“Okay,” Doctor Lovejoy said as she wrote the words, pissed off, mad, gonna be a handful, on her notepad. She looked up at Arykah. “I hear you, Ary . . . um, Mrs. Howell.” Doctor Lovejoy chose to call Arykah by her last name. Obviously calling Lance by his first name had set Arykah off. She was about to detonate.

“Who are you angry at?” Doctor Lovejoy asked her.

“She blames me,” Lance said.

Arykah looked at Lance, then connected eyes with Doctor Lovejoy before staring out the window at the interesting waves again.

Doctor Lovejoy asked the same question in a different way. “Who pissed you off?”

Lance opened his mouth to speak but Doctor Lovejoy raised her palm to silence him.

“Mrs. Howell, are you angry at your husband? Are you angry at the man who attacked you? Are you angry at God?”

Arykah looked at Doctor Lovejoy. “All of the above.” She glanced out of the window at those waves. “All of the above,” she said in a very low voice almost speaking to herself. “All three of them pissed me off.” Arykah’s last words were just above a whisper, but Doctor Lovejoy and Lance had heard her clearly.

Doctor Lovejoy wrote more words in her note-pad. “Tell me why you’re angry with God.”

Tears dripped from Arykah’s eyelids. She didn’t look at Doctor Lovejoy. She kept her focus on the waves crashing against the shoreline. “Because God is omniscient. He knows everything. He saw it coming but didn’t stop it.” She began to rock back and forth in her chair. “God saw that man on my street. He saw him walk up my porch steps and watched him ring my doorbell.” Arykah stopped rocking. She turned her head to her right and looked her husband in his eyes. “You and God allowed that man to rape me.”

All of the blood in Lance’s body turned cold. Chills ran down his back. From the moment Lance answered Arykah’s call on that dreadful day, he had felt guilty that he wasn’t home to protect his wife.

Lance saw his home number flashing on the caller ID on his cellular telephone. “You miss me already, don’t you?” he joked upon answering the call.

She was crying. She was coughing and choking to get the words out. “He hurt me.”

Lance frowned. “Cheeks?”

Arykah’s sobbing became louder. “I was calling for you. Where were you?”

Still frowning, Lance didn’t have a clue what she was saying to him. “What?”

Arykah screamed into the telephone. “He raped me!”

Lance jumped up from his desk at church. “What?” He was already running from his office. “Baby, I’m on my way. I’m on my way, Cheeks!” When Lance ran past the church secretary’s desk, he yelled, “Sharonda, call the police and an ambulance to my house. Right now!”

Lance ran down the church steps, out the door, and got into his car at the speed of lightning. He had tears in his eyes. The thought of a man violating his wife infuriated him. “Baby, hold on. I’m coming home.”

Waiting for her husband to get to her, Arykah lay on the living-room floor moaning and crying into the phone. “Lance? Lance?” Her words were just above a whisper.

“Cheeks!” Lance yelled into the telephone. She didn’t answer him. Lance was worried that Arykah had lost consciousness. “Arykah! Arykah!”

Lance had blamed himself for not doing what he was called to do. Yes, he was the bishop of Freedom Temple Church of God in Christ, but he was also a husband. He didn’t protect his wife. He felt less of a man. “Cheeks, if I could go back and change everything that happened, on that day, I would. You know I would.”

Doctor Lovejoy’s eyes grew wide. She wished Lance hadn’t spoken those words. But he’d said them so fast, she didn’t have time to stop him. She knew the session was over when Arykah jumped up from her chair and glared at Lance.

“You can’t change it, Lance! You weren’t there to protect me!” she screamed. “You weren’t there! You weren’t there!” Arykah moved past Lance, opened the door, and ran out of the office crying hysterically.

Lance leaned forward in his seat and placed his face in his hands. He exhaled loudly. “My God.”

“Go after her,” Doctor Lovejoy said.

Lance stood and exited the office. “I’m sorry,” he said over his shoulder.

Arykah was already sitting in the passenger seat of their late-model Land Rover when Lance got to the parking garage. He opened the driver’s door, got inside, and looked at her. “Cheeks, I’m so sorry.”

Arykah stared straight-ahead at the wall in front of them. She didn’t respond.

He reached out to touch her left arm when he saw that she was shaking. “Cheeks?”

Arykah snatched her arm away from his touch.

“I’m really sorry, Babe.”

“Let’s just go.” She wiped tears from her eyes.

Lance started the engine and pulled out of the parking garage.

They had been riding in silence for ten minutes before he glanced over at Arykah. “I shouldn’t have pushed. You weren’t ready to talk about it, and I kept insisting. I just thought that if you got your emotions out, things would get back to normal faster.”

Arykah was looking out of the passenger-side window. She didn’t respond to him. As Lance drove, she watched people walk past all of the showcase windows on Michigan Avenue. Lance wanted to do something to cheer her up. He always kept a wild card in his back pocket for when Arykah was in a foul mood. “I feel like spoiling my wife today,” he said. He glanced over at her with a smile. “How about we stop at Macy’s? Let’s see how long it’ll take you to put a dent in their shoe department?”

When she didn’t react, Lance frowned. That was the first time Arykah hadn’t been fazed when he mentioned shoes. He knew then that something was really wrong. More wrong than he had thought.

“Are you hungry, Cheeks? We’re not too far from the Cheesecake Factory.”

Nothing from her.

Lance glanced at her again. “Don’t they have the banana cheesecake you’re always raving about? That’s your favorite, right?” Lance chuckled when he recalled that Arykah always ate her desserts before her meals whenever they dined at restaurants.

Still no response. No facial changes, no body movements. Nothing.

The only thing Arykah loved more than shoe shopping was eating. Especially a sweet treat. Lance thought for sure that he’d get her hyped up for stilettos or something delicious to eat. When she didn’t respond to either, he silently prayed, Lord, please bring my wife back.

“That’s him!” Arykah hollered out. She pointed to a man walking along Michigan Avenue. “That’s him, Lance! That’s the guy who raped me!”

Lance slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the curb. He saw the man Arykah was pointing at. He wore a gray sweatshirt with stonewashed blue jeans. Lance understood why Arykah would think the man was the guy who attacked her. He was dark and bald just like Clyde Trumbull. “No. That’s not him, Cheeks. We got the guy, remember? Clyde Trumbull. Mother Pansie’s nephew.”

“Oh,” was all Arykah said. She settled back in the passenger seat.

Arykah wasn’t present at church the Sunday morning when Detective Cortney Rogers arrested Mother Pansie for soliciting her nephew, Clyde Trumbull,. . .