Page 54 of The Impact (Parachutes #3)

“I’m fucking wit’ you. I ain’t do that nasty shit.” Her and Paige burst out laughing, with Paige smacking the table.

“Yo! That shit was about to get so spicy. My heart dropped to my ass. Tahli was about to murder you.”

Tahli still couldn’t find humor. There was an abundance of information she was soaking in.

“Stop continuously making me feel like shit for my decisions,” she garbled, something inside of her still souring.

“Stop weaponizing my love for you because I didn’t accept a fucking 12-year-long lie,” tears choked Tahli’s throat.

“Nobody on God’s green earth knows how much I loved Vin.

It ever occurred to you that I may have loved him more than I loved anybody?

That’s why I can’t forgive this? Because he hurt me more than anybody could have? ”

Abby’s face stoned over. Even Paige’s giggles subsided.

“Your dumb ass ever thought about that? You ever thought that maybe I loved Vin even more than I loved you?”

Abby’s blue-water gaze clouded. Her eyes widened with horror. Panic flashed across her whitewashed face.

Good. Feel it, Tahli supposed. Abby reached for her coffee, but knocked it over instead. Tahli’s breaths grew labored. With fraught eyes to Tahli, Abby’s silent plea signaled alarm. Something…was wrong.

“Abby?”

Abby flailed her hands, tipping over all of their cups, and coffee covered the table, spilling from the edges.

“Abs, what the fuck?” Paige jumped up, soaked in brown. Abby clutched her chest. And Tahli blinked in fright.

“Abby!” Paige roared.

“Abigail! What’s wrong with you?” Tahli shot up from her seat, sending the chair toppling behind her. “Paige, what’s wrong with her?” Tahli shouted.

Stretching out a pale arm, Abby clutched Tahli’s forearm, and Tahli saw an unknown fear metastasize. Abby’s other hand gripped her chest.

“Abby! I’m here. I’m here, Abs!” Tahli gripped her head, but it slipped from her grasp as Abby collapsed. A second later, Abby’s eyes closed, and her head rolled to the side.

“Somebody call a fucking ambulance!”

Vin

The night of Akemi’s barbecue, Vin took Bianca to a semi-secret intimate speakeasy in the city, with exclusive access, velvet couches, and immaculate drinks. She had a palpable need to relax that he fulfilled, never expecting her to be a lightweight.

“That was fun,” she slurred, as he hauled like a baby her into her ranch-style home. Evidence of a single mom with a college kid away at campus everywhere. Folded clean laundry packed into tote bags near the entrance. Photos. An otherwise immaculate, fresh-smelling home.

“Way funner than the barbecue,” she fucked up grammar, holding onto his head. Vin didn’t mind. She was 130 pounds at best. Had her one child as a teenager and likely snapped right back.

They made it to her bed, where Vin laid her down, slipping off her shoes.

“Tahli was really, really pretty,” she garbled. “Like…like an Egyptian queen. But…Black.”

“Uh huh,” Vin replied simply, instead of reminding her than Egyptians were black. Tahli was beautiful. An observation Vin couldn’t escape.

“What did you think about Drew?” Vin asked a version of Bianca who probably wouldn’t remember his pathetic question.

“He’s fine,” she pissed him off. “Really fine.” Vin seethed.

At the barbecue, Dali had told Vin an entire story that he didn’t hear a word of, because he’d watched Drew disappear into the house with his ex-wife.

With tears stinging the back of his eyes, and his trigger finger itching, Vin had gotten up in the middle of Dali’s sentence to stalk them. Tahli could have thumb-screwed him and it would have been more merciful torture.

“He’s nice to her,” Bianca carried on about dull Drew. “You can tell Tahli wears the pants, though,” she giggled clumsily.

Yeah. Tahli had likely missed wearing those pants.

“He’s pretty. And Tahli’s pretty. But you’re prettier.” Bianca rubbed her hands across his face. “I wanna make you feel good. You’re so sad. I’m so glad she divorced you.”

Vin closed his eyes, fighting back humor.

“I wanna suck your dick.” Vin kissed his teeth with the willpower of a thousand saints. Almost 18 months without any contact with a woman, any blue-blooded man would admit the struggle.

“And…I couldn’t suck your dick when you were married. I wouldn’t do that.” Vin wouldn’t have let her.

“But I can suck it now.”

“That’s a very generous offer,” he pulled her hand from his belt buckle. “Let’s table that for another time.”

“Table me. Please.” She put her hands together, prayer fashion. “It’s been years. Put me on that table!”

Tucking her in, Vin chuckled.

“How do you like it, daddy? Sloppy?”

Shit . Vin leaned down to her face.

“You need anything before I go?”

She nodded. “Yes, sir. Dick me, please.”

“I’m gonna lock your door with your key, then slide your key under the door.” Vin kissed her forehead. “Goodnight.”

He told Larry about it the next day, and his therapist joked that even he wasn’t that noble.

“Shit, man. Eighteen months dry and you’re reluctant to get intimate with Bianca? Why do you think that is?”

Vin thought it over before shrugging it off. “I just don’t want to bad enough.” He had almost taken it there with Bianca on their first date. But something happened. The impact from Tahli’s accident had knocked the desire right out of him.

“And…?” Larry urged, like he knew there was more.

And… “I still feel very married to Tahli. The divorce doesn’t feel real to me,” Vin admitted. “I’m like in fucking limbo. It’s getting better, but…I don’t know. If by the grace of God I ever get her back…it’d be good to be untainted,” he confessed.

“I still miss being married to her,” Vin opened up so much more than he would have a year before.

“I miss my kids so fucking much, L. I’m used to seeing them when I’m not working.

But now, it’s regulated because Tahli also needs to see them when she’s not working.

Used to be our time together. Even DJ is with his grandmother so much that I’m like splitting custody of him, too.

I just…all of this shit is still surreal, and I don’t like it. ”

Days later, Vin and Bianca were in his living room—him on the sofa, and her straddling a dining room chair backwards, scarfing buffalo wings from the table. A stack of bones and three wings remained.

“I can’t believe how drunk I was. Did I say anything embarrassing?”

Vin shook his head and lied. “Not at all.”

He spared her, even if there was nothing to be ashamed of. Vin knew another girl who would get drunkenly horny and call him up at some odd hours of the night to make a baby. Vin could never resist that girl.

“Good. I guess I was still nervous from the day. Tahli is a…force,” she snickered. Vin grunted.

“People love her. You’ll get to know her. She’s actually, how do y’all say it…? A real girl’s girl.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Bianca chuckled. “Except when the girl wants to get into her baby daddy’s pants.”

Vin’s blank stare was his only reaction. His latest advice from Munch played in his head:

“Nigga, you ain’t fucking nothing in over a year and ain’t fucked another bitch in like 13. You better wear her little lightbulb-head ass out.”

“Thought you was all about me and Tahli?” Vin asked, ignoring the slight on Bianca, and checkmating him in their chess game.

“Nigga, you divorced now. You lost. Go get some new pussy for the both of us.”

“You ever seen this trick?” Bianca smashed her wing down onto the plate then sucked the whole thing clean off the bone. Vin’s poker face sustained, but it was hard not to imagine his dick sliding between her full lips.

“Can I ask you a question?” she posed, sucking buffalo sauce off of her fingers.

“What’s up?”

“How was it in prison?” That did it. Deflated any prospect of an erection. He reached for his water.

“You like small talk, huh?”

“Sorry. I like getting into the layers of people. Some people. I want to know you, Dalvin…all of you.” A feat too large for a little lady. “But I wouldn’t want you to talk about anything that makes you uncomfortable,” she seemed to read his mind.

“It was a long time ago,” he deduced, swigging water.

“Doesn’t seem like something you really forget, though.”

He sighed. For a man that barely talked, except to one trusted individual, Vin felt he’d been inundated with questions lately. He couldn’t front, though. There was something therapeutic about getting the shit that had been rotting inside of him out little by little.

“It was…suffocating,” he decided on. “In all ways. Like dying a slow death. You’re forced to see how little you matter to people.

Stripped of everything, even your name. Just a number,” he muttered, transporting to the second darkest time of his life.

The third being losing his pops. Fourth, maybe losing the son he never met. Number one? Losing her for sure.

“It makes you that much easier to forget as a human being. And of course. No excuses…we all did our shit to be there. I’m not saying we didn’t.

But whoever designed the system was an evil genius, because what it does to the mental, darling…

is way beyond the years of your life you cough up.

You watch the world go on without you and know that it can.

You don’t matter. Everyone can keep living without you. ”

Kind of like Tahli now. Who knew she could survive without him?

“That’s sad.” Bianca rested her chin on her hands, her hands on the back of the chair she straddled.

Vin shrugged. “You’re a ghost. Here but not.” It wasn’t until he said it that he realized how eerily similar his current situation was. Tahli could get fulfillment out of life without him. He had to watch it happen, haunting her from the sidelines.

“I guess I never thought about how it programs you to realize how insignificant you are. I’m not sure if you ever shake that shit.”

“You’re not insignificant,” Bianca’s chocolate eyes went dewy. Vin studied them.

“Why did you stay with your husband if you were unhappy?”