My Secrets Your Lies

Genres: African American Urban

Synopsis

“I became the pariah. It was my punishment for walking in my truth and being unafraid to love my way. But I can’t help but wonder what would have happened…had I denied those feelings…had I kept pretending…had I…stopped being me.” ?Sand   Given all that Sand and Rene have been through, the couple lands an opportunity to share their life story in the upcoming documentary, Beneath My Skin. The question is?are they truly ready to take that trip down memory lane? As they subconsciously relive their past, Sand ventures to a dark place where agony and judgement has tormented her since the day her parents discovered her sexual orientation in a shoebox full of love letters. Their rejection left her homeless and dependent on the streets, but it was during those trying times that she learned how to not only walk in her truth, but how to survive.   Recycled through the foster system as early as four, Rene is one who has become accustomed to change. Sand introduces her to another side of love and gives her a reason to open her mind and heart to something new?that is, until Rene finds herself questioning not only their relationship, but her sexuality. A series of events leaves them entangled in a web of deceit, wicked passion, and murder. As their love story unfolds, they’ll find out soon enough if they are truly each other’s ride or die!

Release date: September 27, 2016

Publisher: Urban Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

“What’s up, baby?” I asked once I heard my girlfriend’s sexy voice on the other end of the line. I took a pull from the fruity-flavored Black & Mild.

“Hey, boo! Wait, why haven’t you left yet?”

“I’m about to walk out the door now.”

“All right. I’ll see you when you get here.”

“Cool. I love you,” I slid in.

“I love you too, babe!”

I hung up the phone and headed out of the two-bedroom apartment that I and my stud bro Spliff shared. Rene couldn’t stand Spliff. She felt he was a bad influence, but it was my idea to keep our business far away from Rene. Rene knew only as much as I wanted her to know, but on the cool, Spliff and I were both slanging out of that spot. It was known as the trap, but we referred to it as our local office suite. And while my stud bro had no problem with his chick bouncing back and forth between places, Rene was never allowed in there. I wasn’t trying to get her caught up like that.

The way our paths had crossed was pure destiny. We were both sixteen and homeless, doing whatever was necessary to survive. I had gotten kicked out, and she was a runaway. Just looking at her, I wouldn’t have thought she was even capable of a thing. She looked so innocent, but I knew better than anybody that looks were definitely deceiving.

I was stung by Rene’s beauty the moment I laid eyes on her. She was a shortie compared to my five-nine stature. She had smooth amber-colored skin, mesmerizing eyes, silky black hair that fell across her shoulders, and a banging Coke bottle figure. Baby girl had it going on. It didn’t take long for me to win her over. We became close friends, and despite all the disrespectful stares we would always get, Rene never felt ashamed or embarrassed to be around me. When I finally told her what the deal was with me, she admitted that she had always felt there was something different about me. Her instincts had been right.

About two weeks later, I was pleading with her to go back home.

“The streets ain’t for a girl like you,” I told her, trying to get her to understand. “Unlike me, you choose to be out here like this. Look around us . . . ,” I said, pointing to a homeless man pissing in a beer can only a few feet from us, while a nappy-headed base head approached every car that came in our direction, begging for money. That was my reality—not hers. I hated the thought of not being able to see her every day, but I didn’t want to see her in that fucked-up situation.

Yet, regardless of how I said it, Rene wasn’t trying to hear it. The pain in her eyes was all too familiar. She had begun to really open up to me. Her birth mother had abandoned her when she was only four years old, and her father was an even further distant memory. She had shared how she had been living with her fourth set of foster parents. She had been with them for only six months, but she hadn’t been happy there, and she’d become tired of being recycled in the foster system. She had told me that with her seventeenth birthday right around the corner, she would be out of the system and finally free. So it had become even more apparent that we were more alike than different—we were conquerors.

Rene and I were laying our head at different spots every night, but that was about to change. I was already pocket-change hustling, meaning I was barely making enough in a day to feed myself, but now I had to hustle twice as hard to take care of both of us. I started out selling nickel bags of weed, but that wasn’t raking in enough ends, not even enough to pay the weekly rate at one of the cheapest, most disgusting motel dumps in the roughest hood in Dallas. That was when I decided to upgrade the product. My supplier fronted me my first major piece of work. The rest, as they say, was history.

I used my key to unlock the door of her apartment. It was technically ours since I paid all the bills, but we had gotten the lease in her name. I lowered my shades to check out how she’d rearranged the furniture since the last time I was over. Rene had great taste and always kept the place nice and tidy. And with the pink fancy curtains peeled back, the sun lit up the living room. I slid my bag off my right shoulder and tossed it onto the couch. I followed that sweet smell of cucumber melon, her favorite lotion, into the kitchen. She was busting suds in her birthday suit. It was a beautiful sight. I crept up from behind, wrapped my hands around her waist, and pulled her closer to me. As I stroked the hardened chocolate of her perky D breasts, I planted tender kisses along the edge of her neck, licking the morning dew from her skin. She moaned seductively, quivering in response to the art of my stroke. She nestled in my embrace before turning around and greeting me with her smile. She knew exactly what I wanted.

“You’ll have your pussy,” she reassured me, “after we finish this homework.” She smiled lovingly. Rene kissed me on the lips and led me by the hand to the dining room table, where she had laid out an assortment of snacks. She picked up a long oversize shirt of mine that was hanging over one of the chairs and put it on. “This way you can concentrate.” She chuckled.

“Very funny,” I said, grabbing my bag off the couch. I pulled out my textbooks and binder and placed them on the table, beside hers. “I’ll be glad when we finish, man.”

“Damn, babe. Get a grip. We just started.” She laughed, eyeing me strangely.

“Naw, not like that. I’m sayin’ look at us. We doing this shit together.” I held her with my eyes as I took her hand in mine. “My folks thought I wasn’t going to amount to anything. But with this . . .” I pointed to the printouts she had superglued to the front of both of our binders. They were homemade GED certificates, and they served as our motivation and a reminder. She had even gone as far as writing our names on them. “With this,” I continued, “I get to prove everybody wrong.”

She came closer. So close I could feel my jimmy jumping in my pants.

“This ain’t about them, Sand. This”—she put her index finger where mine had just been—“is about proving yourself right.” We allowed her words to marinate for a moment.

I nodded my head and relinquished a smile. “I hear ya, li’l mama.”

“Good! Now, let’s get to work.”

There I stood, trying on my graduation cap and robe. I had accomplished something in my life that I had never thought I would in this life. I had gone from being a high school dropout to actually getting my GED, and now to graduating from community college with an associate of science degree. I was floating on cloud nine.

I removed the cap from my head, fiddling with the braids that dangled across my shoulders. Rene had braided my hair into sectioned cornrows. She normally would do something creative, like have them crisscross or have them in Iversons, and sometimes she’d throw in twists. She’d freak it out real tight, doing whatever came to mind. I couldn’t believe I’d let her talk me into letting my hair grow back out. She was determined to see me rock a different look. She parted and greased my scalp every week, conditioning my hair and giving me hot oil treatments to speed up the process.

Rene bought me ten-carat gold diamond studs for my graduation present. She decided to give them to me early so we could go and have pictures taken, something that I had vowed never to do again. She had to beg me and throw in a little something extra for me to finally give in.

Once we arrived at the picture place, I escorted my woman inside. I had avoided this moment so many times after Rene had mentioned it, afraid of how the pictures would come out. I was afraid of what hidden secrets they might reveal or what lies they might tell. I paid the lady for the portrait package that Rene selected. She insisted on having a big-ass picture to hang over the fireplace. I agreed but really didn’t care for the idea too much. The Asian gentleman posed us and snapped at the same time. I knew we were dealing with a professional, but I was still leery about how the pictures might turn out.

The last time I had had my picture taken was back in the first grade. The school sent the students home with picture information, including details about dates and purchase prices. My mom was so happy that her baby would finally have some professional pictures taken, that she’d have something more than the snapshots she and Dad had taken of me running around the house, hiding from them and their camera. She had me all dressed up and looking so cute for the big day. I remember her folding a crisp twenty-dollar bill and placing it inside of a yellow envelope.

When I came home from school that afternoon, she was angry and pissed off at what she saw. She had so much disgust in her eyes that she could hardly tolerate looking at me.

“What is this, Sand?” she kept asking me over and over again. “What the fuck is this? Who told you to do this to your goddamned hair?”

It was very clear what I had done. The two pigtails that hung on each side of my head had been purposely sliced off. I had taken the sharpest scissors off my teacher’s desk and had cut the dreadful twigs off my head without thinking twice about it. I had then taken a comb from my backpack, combed my hair all back, then slicked it down with lotion and water. The pretty little red ribbons that had been tied around my pigtails were gone, and the ugly barrettes that had hung from my plaits were in the trash. My mom eyed me up and down, looking at my hair and down at my red- and pink-flowered dress, which I had gotten all dirty from digging up earthworms with the boys.

“Do you know what you look like now?” she asked me. “Do you know what you fucking look like now?” She then hollered at the top of her lungs, making my ears ring. She pulled me by the little hair I had left and dragged my little ass into the bathroom. “Look at yourself, Cassandra Janene Ross. Look at what you did to your goddamned hair.” She cursed over and over. “You look like a damn boy now, you hear me? A damn boy!”

She didn’t even bother whupping my ass; she left that for my father to do. When he got home, he was so pissed off that he swore up and down he would have killed me if he touched me. I was told to stay in my room and never come back out. When those pictures finally arrived, I can recall my mom ripping the eight-by-ten straight down the middle and trashing the others along with it.

In the days that followed, I walked around the house like a stranger. I was so young and yet so confused about life and the thoughts that teased my young soul. I used to just brush them off and assume they were all natural, until I reached high school. The ninth grade would be when all those entrapped emotions exposed themselves. That was when my glances at women became stares and when being in the presence of one sent a tingling sensation between my legs.

Snap!

The bright flash from the camera temporarily blinded me. I stood up from the chair that I was posted up in.

“It’ll be thirty minutes,” the Asian man told us.

“You wanna grab something to eat, baby?” I asked Rene, who was touching up her foundation and lipstick.

“Yeah, baby. I’m starving.” She continued putting on her makeup as we walked back out front, toward the car.

I was rolling her Chrysler Sebring for the time being, until my ride was finished at the shop. The metallic silvery color shone bright against the rims that I had added on there. My baby’s ride was hooked up to the tee. I opened her passenger-side door, and she hopped in, putting on her brown-tinted shades, which matched the outfit she sported. I started the engine, and we drove a block down the street to Williams Chicken.

“What you want, baby?” she asked, trying to retrieve money from her wallet.

“Put that up. How many times am I gon’ have to tell you not to pay for anything yourself as long as I’m with you?”

She looked at me with a smile. “All right, hon. Whatever you say. You the boss, baby.”

I removed my wallet from my pocket and flipped through the large bills, trying to find something smaller than a hundred. I handed her the smallest thing I could find.

“Fifty dollars? Is this all you got, Sand? You know they may not have change.”

“I just want a medium corn fritter,” I told her.

She grabbed her purse and stepped out of the car. While Rene was inside, ordering our food, I waited in the car, listening to a mixed CD with nothing but Dirty South music. I had to turn the volume on level one because I had those speakers I had put in thumpin’ like a muthafucka.

As Rene was walking back outside with a bag in one hand and a drink in the other, I noticed some guys who were inside suddenly run out.

“Damn, baby got back,” I heard the young, immature boys say in unison.

She waved them off like she better had, and hurried to the car. I guessed they couldn’t hear the engine running or see me through the mirror tint, so I prepared to get out of the car. Just as I got ready to step out, they headed back inside. I reached over to open the door for Rene, then took the bag out of her hand so she could get in.

“Damn, those young-ass boys,” she said as she flopped down into the seat, sipping her soda through a straw. I handed the bag back to her and buckled up her seat belt, then drove off. By the time we got back to Sophisticated Images, the line had gotten longer and more people were waiting to have their picture taken. Rene stood next to me in line, holding me by the arm, anxious to see how they had turned out. I was anxious too but did not let it show.

“Rene and Sand, package C-thirty-four ready,” said the cashier, a young black lady, eyeing me in a peculiar way. I was used to stares, but this one was different, sort of an “I wanna get to know you” stare. She watched closely as Rene sorted through the package, looking for any imperfect prints, and I did as well.

“I love these,” Rene kept saying while examining each picture thoroughly. I was watching her and the chick from the corners of my eyes. “We’ll take them,” Rene said.

“All of them?” the cashier said.

“Yes.”

We paid ten dollars for the extra proofs that Rene decided to keep and then stepped out of line.

“You left something, sir,” I heard the cashier say behind me.

I turned around, knowing she was addressing me. She handed me my receipt and smiled a sly smile while doing it. I returned the gesture and headed for the door.

We headed home, and Rene was eager as ever to get those pictures into the frames she had bought days earlier. I decided to jump in the shower and allow the water to cool me off since it was such a hot and humid day.

It wasn’t until I was stripped naked and looking into the full-length mirror in the bathroom that I really saw myself. I wasn’t a boy. Never had been. Just had feelings and thoughts like those of a boy. My small breasts and the slit between my legs reminded me of that. That was why I hated being naked in front of other people. The way that I looked on the outside didn’t match how I felt on the inside.

I placed everything on the counter that I had in my pockets and almost flipped out when I saw the name Jasmine written in red ink, along with a phone number, on the back of my receipt. My heart was telling me to rip the damn thing up before Rene saw it; then I thought about how fine Jasmine was and talked myself out of that earlier thought. Besides, there wasn’t anything wrong with being friends.

Graduation was tight, but the after party my homeboy James threw for me was off the chain. There were so many women and men in one place that you were guaranteed to leave with somebody.

James was an older cat, probably in his late forties. He was the one who had introduced me to the fast money lifestyle. Once I was hired on his payroll, I had to prove that I could get out there and grind just like all the other niggas. Dude was cool, though. We would even hang out, and I definitely didn’t offend or intimidate him. There were times when we would kick it like guys and times when I had to show him that just because I had a split didn’t mean he was going to treat me like a chick. When we weren’t getting money, we would hit the basketball court, the club, and them bones. We were so cold as a team in dominoes that hardly any of the guys would play us for money. That was actually how some of my chump change would roll in. We played for real money. You had to shoot a hundred spot just to sit down at our table.

James wanted to make sure everybody got their drank on. He had trash cans full of beers, and the bar was full of liquor. He had strippers for me and the whole nine.

Rene had been pissed when I told her that James wanted to throw me a graduation party and get me some strippers. The conversation had gone way past heated when sh. . .