“Five more minutes,” I complained, as I hit the snooze button on the alarm clock that was incessantly ringing.
It was going to start ringing like a drum again in another five minutes, but for now that is all that I needed. Five am came too quickly every day and I found myself struggling to get out of bed each morning.
I felt Fancy’s small palm gnawing at my shoulder and no matter how many times I hit the snooze button on the clock that stood on my night stand I couldn’t snooze her. She would continue to beat my shoulder off until I got up.
“Kiyan, get up! Nobody told you to stay up all night doing god knows what. Go make our baby and me some money.”
“You got jokes, huh?” I asked, as I shuffled out of bed, still half sleep. My shift at the hospital started at seven, so I had one hour and a half to get ready and then a twenty-minute drive to get to Chesapeake General. I was glad that I scaled back on my duties at the family barbershop because it was starting to wear me down. Our beard care line was doing well and that would be it for now.
“What were you doing last night anyway? You didn’t come to bed till eleven pm?” I looked back to see that Fancy was now sitting u in the bed. Though she was carrying my child and needed her rest, she could never stay asleep when I was getting ready. She complained that I was too loud, and I liked when she was up anyway. Since we had decided to give our marriage another try ,we had really been putting in work getting to know each other all over again so our morning consisted of just that.
I walked up to her and placed a kiss on her lips and then her forehead. One of our past times. There wouldn’t be a day that passed that I wouldn’t give her a forehead kiss every morning. I knew that I had to love her because, her morning breathe was off the chain and I was still risking my life kissing her.
“I was talking to Miss Candis.”
Fancy side eyed me, giving me a skeptical look. She was never the jealous type, but with all of the infidelity that I had caused in our marriage, she made sure she asked more questions these days and she paid attention to everything, hence how she knew that I got in the bed at eleven when she was knocked out snoring by nine.
“You and Miss Candis, sure are chummy. Don’t tell me you are into senior citizens now?” she joked.
“You think you are Dave Chapelle this morning, don’t you? But nah, you know she be lonely, and she’s just taken a liking to me since I met her at the open house,” I shrugged. It wasn’t that deep to me. The lady didn’t have very much family and she was not harming anyone. Over the week that I’d know her we had become close and there was something about her that just made me comfortable.
“Honey, you know I’m just looking but, seriously don’t get too attached to this woman. You barely even know her and she does have family and so do you.”
I knew exactly what Fancy was getting at. She knew that Family was something that I cherished the most and now she thought that I was getting overly attached. She didn’t have to worry about that though aside from her she was carrying the only person that I would ever need. I thought about telling Fancy that I would be meeting Candis for lunch today, but ultimately decided against it. She would just try and talk me out of it and I couldn’t bail on the old lady.
Though I dreaded going into work sometimes because the hospital was the nastiest place ever and people came there to die, I really loved my job. Just being able to save a life and even taking someone’s pain away really reminded me why I had chosen to become a surgeon in the first place I was I had two more years to go, an addition to a three year years of fellowship and then I would become a surgeon. It turns out that that one year I thought I had left was not accurate. It came down to something about residency hours and paperwork. Residency was proving to be a lot harder and strenuous than medical school which I graduated two years early from when most people took four years or longer finish.
The few six hours of my shift were filled with patching up Boo Boo’s and I even had a hernia repair. I checked the time on the clock right above my desk and saw that I was running a few minutes behind on my lunch with Candis. I made my way to the café and got there in about ten minutes, walking. I took in the sweet aroma in the air and I knew that I didn’t need a sticky bun, but the little devil on my shoulder was just telling me to go for it.
I grabbed an ice coffee strong and black and yes, I had to get the sticky bun too and looked around form Candis. I didn’t see her, so I took a seat and took the time to text my wife.
At the end of the message she agreed to throw dat’ ass if I bought her some Sushi home which she craved almost every day since she had been pregnant. I was just about to shoot Candis a text when I looked up at the door and she appeared. She walked up to the table with a smile like she was happy to see me. I got up to pulled her chair out and I noticed a woman walking behind her. I moved out of the walkway so that she could get by but surprisingly she pulled out her seat and sat at our table.
“Oh, baby, this is my niece Kenya, Kenya this is Kiyan the nice young man that I have been telling you about.”
I shook her hand unsure of why she was even here and then sat down.
“How has your day gone Candis?” I asked, still feeling kind of weird that we were on a first name basis. Every time I tried to address her as miss, because she was widowed, she corrected me and said that her first name was just fine.
The two of us talked for the next thirty minutes while her niece kind of just sat there. She would steal glances at me and offer a quick word every now and then but for the most part she was basically mute. I didn’t know what Candis was up to, but she knew that I was married and we I had met her through my wife. Maybe Faye was right, and I needed to try and distance myself from her a little. I was now understanding that out relationship was a little weird.
I took in one last glance at Kenya before I left to go back to work and I had to admit that she was beautiful, but I wasn’t attracted to her at all. She had a butterscotch skin tone and a model build with a natural thing going on with her hair. She gave me a half smile before I left, and I returned it really wondering why the hell she was here.