“Look, Stenton, I have to get to church. We can talk another time. A time when you’re in a better state. I’ll call your assistant to make sure you get some hangover food.” She then comes over and kisses me on the forehead. “Take care of yourself. Okay?”
Zoey issues a long and somber regard. There’s a pregnant pause because I don’t know how many other ways to tell her we need to sort some shit out. Then she steps into her heels and walks out of the room, leaving me in a stupor, carrying the same fucking load of guilt that I have had for too many years.
Fuck me!
Chapter 6
Then
February 2007
~Stenton~
The morning after I dropped Zoey off at school after our Alpine excursion, just after practice, my phone did ping with a text. It was Erika Erceg. She still wanted to go out. And when she told me she was in Philly and wanted to see me before leaving, it added to my list of irritations. With what Zoey put on me in the past few days, I didn’t have room for more bullshit of the female persuasion. But I agreed to it.
We met at Estia’s on Locust. By the time I’d arrived with Paul, my assistant, in tow, she was there with her male friend, Mehan. Although Mehan likes to straighten up around me, I know he was just as excited and as atwitter as Paul seated next to me, but just not on the surface.
Paul had been my personal assistant for almost two years. He came highly recommended by a Gabonese model I used to fuck. When I decided to get my shit together and clean my image, I did a whole makeover, even in staff. Prior to him, I had three female personal assistants, all of which I’d fucked, making me a not-so-stellar employer. Paul was an aspiring clothing designer, who needed money while getting his business in order.
He had an impeccable eye for detail, could interface well with women, which helped with my sex life. When things went awry with a woman and I needed to separate, Paul would be there with his planner clutched to his chest in one hand, and STOP sign in the other, tapping his foot. He also wasn’t afraid to flex his authority over a man professionally on my behalf. The only irony was he seemed to have gotten along with everyone but me. I got ragged on a lot in the beginning by my teammates for having a five foot one inch, vanilla, effeminate man bossing me around off the court. Being criticized for odd tendencies was old hat for me. I never fit in in life. I took it all in stride and simply considered how much my life had improved and became much more systematized with his service.
The threesome chatted to their heart’s delight at the table throughout the meal. I couldn’t figure out why I was there; this seemed to have been a gathering for Paul and friends versus Erika and me. Paul led the conversation, asking about Erika’s reality show, the type of makeup her artists used and all other types of shit that had me in my phone rather than in their conversation. Erika would try to rope me in at different points of their talk, like mentioning me cameo-ing her show.
“You know you want to do it, Stent,” her tongue laid between her top and bottom teeth when she finished pronouncing my name. “It’ll be great! C’mon.” She batted her long dark eyelashes.
“Oh, and I know your mom would so love the cameo. Stent would make her year!” Mehan cheered very heartily.
Paul lifted his shoulders in a heavy shrug as he sipped his tea through a straw. He knew that reality show bullshit was not my style at all. He was bold, but not stupid enough to add to their futile goading. I had built a solid reputation on being a private man over the past few years. It had been easy for me to remain so “elusive,” as the media termed me, because I didn’t have a large circle. I didn’t have close relatives other than my uncle and mother. My cousins that I did keep in touch with weren’t all without long sentences, preventing us from bonding and the others I’d never had a close relationship with. So, it had been pretty easy for me to lay low.