Lust and Lies (The Jamie Reynolds Chronicles #1) Read Free Page A

watched my parents argue and fight and slowly grow apart, yet try to stay together for the kids without just telling us they were unhappy and not staying married anymore.
    Finally when I was about fifteen years old, my father came down for Christmas. He left to go back to New York abruptly. I walked into my mother’s room after my father left and she was crying.
    I asked, “Ma, is everything okay?” For the first time, my mother opened up to me and told me everything. I soon became an adult at the age of fifteen as I listened to my mother expose years of my family’s secrets, and everything started to make sense, why we moved from school to school, why my dad was not around, and even why we moved into the East Eighteenth Street apartment.
    “Do you know why your father left all of a sudden?” she added with tears in her eyes.
    “No, Ma, why did he leave?” I asked this question not really ready to hear the answer, but I knew my mother needed to talk to someone.
    “Your so-called sister has died in a fire,” my mother said.
    “What? I don’t understand.”
    My mother poured her heart out to me. She told me about my father’s secret life. How he had been cheating on her since they got married. How she could never trust my father around any of her friends. I thought I’d heard it all until my mother told me about my father’s affair with Samantha. Samantha lived upstairs and was our family’s babysitter ever since I was, like, four years old when my mother decided to go back to work. It happened right under my own roof when my sister and I would go outside to play.
    After hearing my mother go on and on about the different affairs my father had throughout my childhood, with babysitters, neighbors, women we called auntie to be polite. I thought I would be sick to my stomach. I wanted to cry, because I loved and looked up to my father. In my eyes he was a perfect dad. But I had to hold it together; I was always known as the strong one in the family. I was the child with no emotion growing up and I allowed myself to believe that.
    Then my mother told me about Kisha. Kisha was one of my so-called sisters, as my mother put it. Kisha was five years old when she died during a house fire. I guess this was why we moved into East Eighteenth Street when I was ten. My mother must have just found out about my so-called sister and she moved us out of Bergen Street to East Eighteenth Street.
    This abuse towards my mother didn’t end with Kisha dying. My father continued to live a life of promiscuity for years. I guess when Kisha died, a piece of my dad and mom’s civil relationship went with it. I don’t really know the relationship my mother had with Kisha and her mother, but after that day I ended up seeing my dad less and less. My sister and I traveled to New York instead of my dad coming down to Florida to hang out with us. Knowing what I knew about my dad at first changed me, and my relationship with my dad was poor. It was hard to look at him and respect him. I never told him what my mother told me about his secret life.
     
    “How do you react to something like that? Over the years, I learned to accept my father’s lifestyle and learned to move on.”
    “Wow, that’s crazy JR,” was all Jonathan said and at this point I knew I said too much already.
    “I just need to be with my family, that’s all,” I said really quickly then changed the subject, as I started to feel uncomfortable about telling Jonathan so much. I wasn’t really an emotional person, and I was often seen as the strong one who had tough skin and gave advice to everyone else, not being the one who needed it. But I guess at that moment, I needed to tell someone something, or I might have erupted with my own hidden emotions.
    “Enough about me, what’s your story?”
    “My story?” Jonathan repeated. “There’s nothing to my story. You’ve known me for a minute now and pretty much seen and heard most of my story.”
    He was right, not only