So Sweet... So Scandalous

One thing I don't worry about for my birthday:

Gifts.

Why? I don't know. I haven't worried about gifts since I was a child.

My birthday is my birthday.

It is my own personal day.

One of the best things I ever did on my birthday was on a birthday in my mid-twenties. I had the audacity to spend the entire birthday by myself... I even went to the movies. One of the movies I saw was Stargate. Can't remember the other movie I saw.

But that started... something. An enjoyment of myself.

And no one has ever heard me wail "No one got me anything."

Why?

Because it simply doesn't cross my mind.

And I'd probably lose my natural mind if it DID cross my mind.

My day. Belongs to me. It has been hijacked by others over the last 10 years. This is okay.

Still my day. I make sure to have a day around that time to myself as a gift to myself,

But when I get gifts, or even a card, it simply shocks me.

Someone thought of me?

TOTALLY unexpected.

So, with that said...

I was driving home in the pouring rain one night on the week leading up to my birthday and I got a text message. I was close to home so I didn't look at it.

Got in the house and looked at it...

It was from the LBigga, aka the LBoogie, aka the LBeezy.

"Are you at home, old girl?"

I texted back that I was.

She told me to go look on my front porch.

I reluctantly opened the front door. (I come in through the back of the house from the garage. I RARELY step outside the front door).

Wind whipped around my face. It was cold.

I looked to the left. To the right. Didn't see anything. Not even one of the locals walking the streets. (Yep. It was THAT cold.)

I came back in the house, and saw a box sitting on the black stool next to the kitchen island.

I opened the box... and it was packed with stuff...

An underwater camera...

Some candles...

The coolest card!

That is so sweet!

Leezie... that's her pet name for me... that and Leeazurus. I can see her painstakingly drawing that, biting her lip, penning that cursive "Leezie" on that envelope.

Man, it would've been a beast to get "Leeazurus" on a card. LOL!!

I really liked the birthday card.

It also contained a really nice traveling journal. A thought of the day was printed across the top of each left page. The top of each right hand page contained a space for a "Highlight of the day".

And at the bottom of that page was a scripture... always something about life's path... And you know how I feel about paths, man!

So Sweet.

And then things turned a bit scandalous.

A huge bright red feather boa was in the box.

Actually that was the first thing I saw when I opened the box (How could you miss such a thang?). I thought "Maybe she didn't have any tissue paper to cushion things with, so she snatched a boa from somewhere."

I hung it on the staircase so I could get a picture of it.


As you can see, Oscar-Tyrone was a bit interested in it. Dude got up and walked over to me REAL quick when I pulled it out the box. Looked at me half crazy when I put it on.

I caught him smacking his paw at it. He got yelled at real bad. We haven't had that problem since then.

That was scandalous. A feather boa. I've never had one of those.

If that was scandalous enough, the next item made me clutch the pearls.

There was a bottle of... gel in there.

I don't know much about this. Never used it in any of my escapades.

*LadyLee scanning the memories locked away in the back rooms of her mind*

No, I don't remember special lotions.

LadyLee has always been the spontaneous type.

More of a whip cream, Boone's farm, Sue Bee Honey type of girl...

(Wait... this is a PG-13 blog. We won't get over into that).

Nope, no emotion lotion. Something strange about flavored gels that get hot when you blow on them. I don't know who came up with that concept.

So SCANDALOUS.

I saw all this stuff... Thought there may be some type of riddle here.

I stared for awhile at the bottle of lotion... something looked very familiar....

Look at the name of it.

Sweet Heat.

I jumped up, almost knocking the table over. Oscar-Tyrone scurried out of the way.

Sweet Heat!!!!

That's the name of my first manuscript. The first one I ever completed.

Sweet Heat. 1080 pages long. The love story of Samuel "Sweet Heat" Heath and Vaughn James.

Sweet Heat.

I like all things Sweet Heat... even found a potato chip brand called "Sweet Heat" a few years ago:



Ya'll know how much I love some Sweet Heat. That there is my first baby there

LOL... Beezy, you thought of everything.

But looking at the plethora of items in the box, I thought, there had to be a riddle to be solved.

I know that emotion lotion was some ol' Stella craziness... i.e., I was supposed to go down to the DR and get with the sanky pankies (male sex workers) and handles some bizness.

(Uh, no. You needed to catch me in my dark days for that one.)

But the other stuff?

Beezy wrote in the card a reason for each item, in the fashion of "something old, something new, something borrowed, something new" style.

And yeah, the lotion was for some gettin' my groove back action.

This did not happen. Wasn't gonna happen.

First of all, LadyLee never lost her groove.

An Oldgirl stays groooovvvvyy. LOL

Although, when I sent a bellhop back to our old room to look for my camera (we'd just switched rooms, and I thought I left it there)... well, when I offered him a couple of bucks he said "Uh, there's other ways to pay for that."

Yeah right. My name is Oldgirl, NOT Stella!

Sweet scandalous gifts...

Enough to make an oldgirl smile and blush at the same time, lol...

My sista Kentucky peeked in my room one morning and said "Someone gave you a boa!?"

"Yep," I yelled. "The LBoogie hooked that up!"

LOL!

Thanks much for thinking of me LB... in your own very special, creative way:)

"I Love My Wife"

Story Week is dedicated to The Good Nurse because she scratches out my head when I was ailing. LOL, Naaaa, just playing. The Good Nurse called an Oldgirl to check to see how I was doing. It was good talking to you, gal! I was a bit blue and you put a smile on my face:) Thanks for the pick-me-up!

Welcome, Boys and Girls!

It's story week!

I will probably do a foreword and a story. An afterword of my personal thoughts may or may not be posted the following day.

Foreword.

The name of this story is "I Love My Wife". It is part of the the Biscuit Blues Anthology, LOL. (But I do like the sound of that, ya know?) But if you haven't read "Buttermilk Biscuit Blues", a story I posted a couple of months ago, then go back and read it.

Two of the stories this week are prequels to that.

The stories grew out of an excerpt from my Sweet Heat manuscript. All are set back in 1981, regarding some issues between Sylvia Ellison and her husband, Fred Ellison.

For some reason, my elite critique team, including the Good Nurse, who barreled through all 1003 pages of Sweet Heat (thanks, girl!), really liked one of the minor characters, Sylvia Ellison, She's a mother figure to the male protagonist Samuel and a voice of reason in the whole book as well. The critique squad got really excited about a very interesting storyline concerning some past issues with Sylvia and her husband Fred ("I want to know more about THAT Lee"!). This very minor storyline is very interesting, enough for a whole book in itself. But I am not experienced enough to write it just yet. Gotta dig into some backgrounds here and there.

So these stories are just a way of me to trying to wrap my mind around that storyline and the Sylvia and Fred Ellison characters. Be forewarned that they are very rough, and need work, but I got the information that I was looking for from them, which was my goal in the first place.

The following story is from Fred Ellison's point of view.

So without further adieu, I present "I Love My Wife"


I Love My Wife

I love my wife.

And if anyone even dreams of saying that I don’t…

Man, they better wake up real quick and apologize.

I do love her. I love everything about her. Her cocoa brown skin. Her sexy brown eyes. Her body, so fine and thick that when she walks across the room, my eyes zoom in on her like lasers.

I love the little things, too. I love the way the bathroom smells after she has finished taking a bath. I love that sound, that hiss, as she pulls that hot comb through her hair. I love the way her big toe curls slightly towards her middle toe. Her laughter when she talks on the phone to her family and friends is music to my ears. I love watching her as she reads a bedtime story to our son. I stare at her for hours as she sleeps, wondering if she dreams of me. Her light snore lulls me into a peaceful sleep at night.

Yes, I love my wife. She is a good wife, more than I could ever ask or hope for.

But I also love the chase. The chase is where it’s at, and the chase is all I think about. The high I get when I bed a new woman is a high better than free drugs. Going to a club, sitting at a bar, and catching the eye of some hot young thing at the far end is the sport of champions. One flash of my million dollar smile and a casual wink of my eye are my rod and reel. I reel them in like a fish. They're ready to be cleaned, battered down, and fried. Hell, It ain’t even necessary to hide my wedding ring. This is 1981. There are women out there, looking for a man, any man, married or not. And I’m a tall fine dark brother. I am what they all want. I am what they all need.

I please those women. I know I do by the way they moan my name late in the midnight hour. They worship the ground I walk on. They plead with me not to go, but I slip on my clothes and tell them that I have to go. It ain’t nothing for me to bed them and get up and get on to my house, to my wife, to my own bed.

Now, most of them have their own places. I would never take a woman back to my place. Not to the bed that I share with my wife.

That would be disrespectful.

I love my wife too much to do something as foul as that.

I’ve ran as many as eight women at a time, and that’s not easy. Some want more time than others, and some are just happy to get a moment of my time. Some are wild and kinky. A few are innocent and needy. Sometimes it’s hard to keep everybody straight.

No, maintaining eight different households wasn’t easy. It's easier to keep five or six different chicks on the team. My wife Sylvia always runs point.

And as long as they all play right, they all stay in the game.

And if anyone of them acts up? That broad rides the bench.

Hell, she might even get traded.

But I always come home to my wife. She never asks questions. Never fusses or nags. She always has a good hot breakfast ready, even taking the time to fresh squeeze my orange juice. She knows to have my newspaper on the table, open to the sports section, when I come in from a long night out.

But it has been a couple of years since I’ve touched her in a way a man touches his wife. The last time we had sex, I stared into her eyes, and her eyes said two words…

“I know.”

The look in her eyes was a storm cloud of shame over my head. It got to the point where I couldn’t even make eye contact.

No, she never whines or fusses. Afterall, she didn’t have to.

She knew she was the one that held all the power.