Forever Ain't Enough Read online

  Forever

  Ain’t Enough

  Shelia E. Bell

  Shelia E. Bell

  2018 © Shelia E. Bell Forever Ain’t Enough

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the Smashwords store and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced mechanically, electronically, or by any other means without prior consent of the publisher, except brief quotes used in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Any references or similarities to actual events, real people living or dead, or to real locales are intended are to give the novel a sense of reality. Any similarity in other names, characters, places, and incidents is purely coincidental

  “How do you plead?”

  “Guilty, your honor. Haven’t you heard? Karma has no menu. You get what you deserve and they deserved everything they got…and then some.”

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

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  18

  1

  “I will wait for you till the day I can forget you

  or till the day you realize you cannot forget me.” Herryicm

  Chynna hit the SEND text button for at least the two hundredth time. Okay, maybe it was a little excessive, but she was hot. Dray was supposed to be walking down the aisle with her but instead she’d learned some skank named Bethany was taking her place. The unmitigated gall of him.

  Dray had broken it off less than six months ago after the two of them being together for seven years. Two of those last seven years they lived together, and now this fool was getting married—to someone other than her!

  Chynna couldn’t describe what or exactly how she was feeling on the inside. Her heart felt like it was breaking in a million and one pieces ever since her best friend, KeeKee, told her about Dray and Bethany.

  KeeKee told Chynna she learned about Dray’s new status on social media, something Chynna couldn’t do because Dray had taken liberty to delete or block her from all of his social media accounts. What had she done so terrible that he would treat her like this? She loved him, had loved him since she laid eyes on his charming face at the local utility company all those years ago.

  Fresh out of college, both of them were waiting on a customer service representative to get utilities turned on respectively for their new apartments. Dray had recently secured a permanent position at the FedEx Forum. Chynna worked in midtown for a PR firm as a communications specialist. They began chatting while sitting next to each other. By the end of the thirty-minute conversation Dray had Chynna’s phone number. The rest, well let’s just say, the rest is more than history—it turned out to be life changing for both of them in more ways than one.

  As Dray fell head over heels in love with Chynna he often said, “If nothing lasts forever will you be my forever?” It would make Chynna bowl over in laughter. He could be so nerdy at times. Every gift he gave her over the years, every bouquet of flowers he sent, every card he inscribed, included the quote. So what happened to tear it all apart?

  The last few weeks before the break-up, Chynna thought things were perfect, at least perfect in their imperfect sort of way. That was how their relationship went—a rollercoaster in more ways than one, but it proved to work for them.

  Chynna asked herself had she missed some sign. What had changed between them to cause Dray to do this? Had she been that blindly in love, that stupid, that naïve, that she had missed the warning signals or red flags? She sat at her computer desk in her bedroom and glanced at her cell phone again as she sent Dray text message number 251.

  “Why are you doing me like this? Puhleeze, tell me, Dray.”

  A minute or two after sending the message, without forewarning, her bedroom door flung open, frightening the crap out of her. In walked Dray, slamming the door behind him so hard it sounded like it was about to pop off the hinges.

  “Are you crazy?! You’ve been blowing my phone up for the past week. What part of it’s over do you not understand?”

  “You have some nerve,” Chynna yelled back, pushing away from her desk and standing up. Arms folded, she huffed. “You tell me through a darn text message that things are over. Then I have to hear from my best friend that you’re getting married?”

  “At least I told you it was over. Plus, I don’t owe you an explanation about anything I do. You’re not my lady anymore. I’ve moved on and I wish you would too.”

  There it went again, her heart breaking in two. “So that’s what this is about? I thought we’d gotten past all our problems and worked through it. You said you forgave me. Obviously that was a lie.”

  “Ha? I forgave you all right, but it’s hard to forget you slept with another man, Chynna. I tried to put it out of my mind, but all I can hear and see is you calling another man’s name while we’re making love.

  “Don’t act like you didn’t hurt me, too. You cheated first, or did you forget that little detail?” She fought against her rising anger.

  “I didn’t cheat on you. Stop being so melodramatic. Okay, anyway so you caught me talking to some female online. It’s not like I went and slept with her. It was nothing. Nothing but a random chick. Plus she was the one hitting me up. I told you all this, but you still went and messed off with someone else.”

  “Don’t try to put this all on me. You seriously don’t see anything wrong with what you did? Ha! The problem with that is you shouldn’t have been prowling on some dating app anyway. I don’t care if you say you didn’t meet her in person or not. You were still trolling for one of them desperate internet tricks.”

  “It doesn’t give you the right to sleep with another man and then get in the bed with me and call his name!”

  Chynna laughed, picked up the hardback book she’d placed on the bed, and then threw it with all her strength at his head. He dodged it while Chynna broke out in raucous laughter. “I told you not to mess with me, Dray. You think you can do what you want when you want and I won’t find out? Well, you should know better than that by now.”

  “You’re as crazy as they come. And you have to wonder why I left your trifling behind.” With that being said, Dray turned and stormed out of the bedroom.

  Chynna jumped up, clad in a pink thigh length nightshirt. Running out of the room after him, she pounced on his back and began pounding him with both fists as hard as she could, digging her long nails into the side of his neck and face. Her legs clinched tightly around his waist as he fought her off. Finally, he was able to throw her off while pushing her to the floor.

  “Ahhh, you hurt me. I’m calling the police. They’re going to lock your butt up! You wait and see.” She got up and ran back toward her bedroom to retrieve her phone.

  “See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. I can’t deal with this anymore. Call the police. Call the FBI. Call the dang President; I don’t care what you do anymore, Chynna.” He stormed toward the front door.

  “Dray, wait. Please, Dray, please. I’m sorry,” Chynna cried, stopping in her tracks and turning around. “Please, Dray. Just stay, please let’s work this out. We always work
it out, baby.”

  Dray continued toward the door. He opened it and walked out, not saying a word and not bothering to close it behind him.

  Chynna rushed behind him. Unable to restrain herself, she began another round of verbal assaults, something she was quite good at. Her tongue could be as deadly as a bullet through the heart.

  Standing outside on the porch of the two-bedroom duplex they once shared, her pleas for him to forgive her turned to a plethora of cuss laced sentences and threats to destroy his life. “Give me my key. Don’t you ever come back here. You hear me, Dray!”

  Dray reached inside his pant pocket, removed the key chain that had two keys on it and threw it on the ground.

  Her next-door neighbors, an older married couple, looked at the scene from inside their front window like they were parked at a drive-in movie theatre. All they needed was a bucket of popcorn.

  Truth is, Dray felt his life had already been ruined. As he walked to his car, got inside, and sped off up the street, he thought about their tumultuously violent relationship. As much as he loved Chynna, he couldn’t continue to deal with her uncontrollable temper. If he had done half the things to her that she’d done to him he would be underneath a jail. The police had been to almost every apartment and rental house where they’d lived too many times to count. They had been threatened with eviction at the last apartment they had because of their screaming matches and Chynna’s physical and verbal assaults against Dray. After tonight’s fighting match, they were sure to be thrown out of this place next.

  Things between Chynna and Dray were good when they were good. They had fun together, enjoyed doing many of the same things. They liked many of the same foods, with both of them adopting clean eating a few years ago. But when things went bad they were all the way bad because Chynna could go from zero to a hundred real quick. She couldn’t control herself when she got angry. She always had to have the last word.

  When they first started dating, Dray initially thought it was kinda cute when she would get mad and throw a tantrum, but when even simple disagreements escalated into her throwing things at him, hitting him, and threatening him, he didn’t think it was so cute any longer. When she got this way, Dray clung to the teachings of his father, “Son, never hit a woman. Walk away, cool off, and then come back and talk about it later.” That rarely worked when it came to Chynna. The longer he stayed away, the angrier she was when he returned.

  It was during their last argument, after she called him by some other dude’s name, that Dray made up his mind he was done. He’d had enough. He was tired of the arguing, the verbal abuse, and the whole unhealthy aspects of his and Chynna’s relationship. He came to the unfortunate realization things were never going to change with them. He didn’t want to live a life with a woman who was jealous, insecure, abusive, and vengeful. He once thought he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, but her abusive tendencies combined with the knowledge she had slept with another man gave Dray a change of heart, and it cut him deeply. So deeply, he sought and found love and comfort in the arms of Bethany—the woman he told himself he loved and wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

  2

  “They say the best revenge is living well.

  I say it’s acid in the face—who will love them now?” Mindy Kaling

  “Girl, for real tho, you need to stop doing all of the stupid, crazy stuff you do,” KeeKee warned Chynna. KeeKee knew how Chynna could be. “You’re a grown woman, Chynna. All the fighting and cussing you do and then your mouth is deadly, too. Wasn’t losing Dray to another woman enough? I mean, you lost a good man, a man who loved and cared about you.”

  Chynna looked at KeeKee like she was the enemy. “Look, I’m sick of you acting like you’re so perfect. It’s not like you’ve never taken matters into your own hands. What about that time you put all four of Jason’s tires on flat after you caught him with that girl. I can’t think of her name. But you know who and what I’m talking about.”

  “Yeah, I do and her name was Shanika Holt, but that’s a whole other matter. Plus, you’re talking about something that happened when I was what, eighteen or nineteen, not a thirty-year old, Chynna. For goodness sakes, you kill me.”

  “You’ll get over it, and anyway, I can’t sit back and let the love of my life walk down the aisle with another woman, especially this Bethany chick, whoever she is. And you say you don’t know her?”

  “Nope, I don’t know who she is. Only what I see on her social media page.”

  “Well, I’m going to find out about her. I need to see what she has that I don’t.”

  “What she has is your man because of your foolishness. Sometimes I don’t blame Dray for calling it quits.”

  Chynna looked like she was about to go into a spasm when KeeKee said those words. “And you call yourself my best friend? How could you say something like that? You know how depressed I’ve been since Dray and I broke up. I’m done. I’m outta here.” Chynna grabbed her Kate Spade purse and cell phone from off KeeKee’s kitchen counter, turned around, and stormed toward the front door.

  “Wait, Chynna. I didn’t mean it like that and you know it. Stop getting your panties all in a wad. You can dish it out but you can’t take it!”

  “Girl, bye. I’ll talk to you later. I’ve got things to do.” Chynna opened the door, closing it behind her as she bolted down the stairs from KeeKee’s apartment. She sat in her car for a few minutes, dialed Dray’s number, but it went to his voicemail. I know he hasn’t blocked me. Been calling him and texting him and he hasn’t responded. We’ll see about that, Mr. Draymond Hawkins. When will you learn that I’m not one to be played with?

  Chynna was raised by the foster care system after the state removed her and her little brother from the home of their drug-addicted parents. No one on either side of her parents’ families wanted the responsibility of taking care of her and her brother.

  Being tossed from one family to the next, with some of them being abusive and mean to her, and separated from her brother, no wonder she grew up to be an angry woman.

  She didn’t know where her brother, Cortez, was. She hadn’t seen or heard from him since they were separated. She was eight and he was five the last time she laid eyes on him. For all she knew he could live, maybe even work, in her neighborhood and she doubted if she would recognize him. She hated that. Sometimes she hated the world and everybody in it. Sometimes she even hated herself.

  The last foster mother she had was the one who taught her to seek revenge at all costs whenever she was wronged. Turns out she had been wronged a lot in life and she never stopped until she paid back whoever it was that mistreated her.

  3

  “You always fall for the most unexpected person at the most unexpected time and sometimes for the most unexpected reason.” Unknown

  Dray, along with his brothers, Raul and Jerome, and two of Dray’s closest friends who were going to be groomsmen, met up at the tuxedo rental place to be fitted for their attire for Dray’s upcoming nuptials.

  “You sure about this?” Jerome, the younger of his brothers, asked as the sales clerk took their measurements.

  “Yep, I’m sure. I love Bethany. Why would you ask me if I’m sure?”

  “Yeah, you really ready to turn in your bachelor card, man?” another one of the guys asked, laughing.

  “Yeah, I am. Bethany is a good church girl. I believe she’s going to make a good wife. She has my back, you know?”

  “I hear you, and yeah, she seems cool, real cool. I’m just saying I don’t know if she’s the girl for you,” his friend Tarik said.

  “I agree with Tarik,” Dray’s oldest brother, Raul, added.

  “What? Y’all trippin’.”

  “Nah, I don’t think so. I say you still got feelings for Chynna,” another of the guys stated. “You and her was stuck together like glue. Don’t get me wrong, she had some wild ways.” His friend laughed hard as did the others. “How many times has ol’ girl gone off on you, bruh? I mean, t
ruth is, she used to do some wild and crazy stuff when she got mad at you.”

  Dray smirked and threw his hand to the side. “Man, y’all talk like fools. Chynna is history. We been there done that. I mean, I wish things could have been different, but hey at the end of the day, it is what it is. Things didn’t work out between us and so I moved on. I had to let her and all that craziness go. I couldn’t do it anymore. When I hooked up with Bethany I found out she’s a cool chick. She got it going on and on top of that I got her heart.”

  “But what about you?” Jerome asked.

  “What about me?” Dray responded.

  “We haven’t heard you say anything about being in love with her,” said Jerome.

  “Okay, so I love her. How’s that? And what’s not to love about her? Like I said, she’s cool, she’s smart, she got her own, and definitely the girl is fine.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Jerome. “Whateva. But the fact remains, ol’ girl proposed to you, not the other way around. I mean, I’m all for women’s rights and I support the Metoo movement and anything else that promotes empowering females, but I don’t know if I can wrap my head around a woman proposing to me. I mean, I can’t see a girl dropping on one knee, pulling out a ring, and asking me to marry her.”

  “Me neither,” Raul chimed in, “and especially a church girl like you say Bethany is.”

  “That’s ‘cause any female in her right mind would stay away from you, man,” Dray mocked and all the guys laughed, including the sales clerk. “Anyway, I wouldn’t be marrying her if I didn’t love her. Know what I mean?”

  “Yea, whateva,” said Raul. “People have married for many reasons other than love, you know.”

  “Well, that’s not me,” Dray remarked. “I’m marrying Bethany because I love her. Believe that.”