“I will wait for you till the day I can forget you
or till the day you realize you cannot forget me.” Herryicm
Chynna hit the SEND text button for at least the two hundredth time. Okay, maybe it was a little excessive, but she was hot. Dray was supposed to be walking down the aisle with her but instead she’d learned some skank named Bethany was taking her place. The unmitigated gall of him.
Dray had broken it off less than six months ago after the two of them being together for seven years. Two of those last seven years they lived together, and now this fool was getting married—to someone other than her!
Chynna couldn’t describe what or exactly how she was feeling on the inside. Her heart felt like it was breaking in a million and one pieces ever since her best friend, KeeKee, told her about Dray and Bethany.
KeeKee told Chynna she learned about Dray’s new status on social media, something Chynna couldn’t do because Dray had taken liberty to delete or block her from all of his social media accounts. What had she done so terrible that he would treat her like this? She loved him, had loved him since she laid eyes on his charming face at the local utility company all those years ago.
Fresh out of college, both of them were waiting on a customer service representative to get utilities turned on respectively for their new apartments. Dray had recently secured a permanent position at the FedEx Forum. Chynna worked in midtown for a PR firm as a communications specialist. They began chatting while sitting next to each other. By the end of the thirty-minute conversation Dray had Chynna’s phone number. The rest, well let’s just say, the rest is more than history—it turned out to be life changing for both of them in more ways than one.
As Dray fell head over heels in love with Chynna he often said, “If nothing lasts forever will you be my forever?” It would make Chynna bowl over in laughter. He could be so nerdy at times. Every gift he gave her over the years, every bouquet of flowers he sent, every card he inscribed, included the quote. So what happened to tear it all apart?
The last few weeks before the break-up, Chynna thought things were perfect, at least perfect in their imperfect sort of way. That was how their relationship went—a rollercoaster in more ways than one, but it proved to work for them.
Chynna asked herself had she missed some sign. What had changed between them to cause Dray to do this? Had she been that blindly in love, that stupid, that naïve, that she had missed the warning signals or red flags? She sat at her computer desk in her bedroom and glanced at her cell phone again as she sent Dray text message number 251.
“Why are you doing me like this? Puhleeze, tell me, Dray.”
A minute or two after sending the message, without forewarning, her bedroom door flung open, frightening the crap out of her. In walked Dray, slamming the door behind him so hard it sounded like it was about to pop off the hinges.
“Are you crazy?! You’ve been blowing my phone up for the past week. What part of it’s over do you not understand?”
“You have some nerve,” Chynna yelled back, pushing away from her desk and standing up. Arms folded, she huffed. “You tell me through a darn text message that things are over. Then I have to hear from my best friend that you’re getting married?”
“At least I told you it was over. Plus, I don’t owe you an explanation about anything I do. You’re not my lady anymore. I’ve moved on and I wish you would too.”
There it went again, her heart breaking in two. “So that’s what this is about? I thought we’d gotten past all our problems and worked through it. You said you forgave me. Obviously that was a lie.”
“Ha? I forgave you all right, but it’s hard to forget you slept with another man, Chynna. I tried to put it out of my mind, but all I can hear and see is you calling another man’s name while we’re making love.
“Don’t act like you didn’t hurt me, too. You cheated first, or did you forget that little detail?” She fought against her rising anger.
“I didn’t cheat on you. Stop being so melodramatic. Okay, anyway so you caught me talking to some female online. It’s not like I went and slept with her. It was nothing. Nothing but a random chick. Plus she was the one hitting me up. I told you all this, but you still went and messed off with someone else.”
“Don’t try to put this all on me. You seriously don’t see anything wrong with what you did? Ha! The problem with that is you shouldn’t have been prowling on some dating app anyway. I don’t care if you say you didn’t meet her in person or not. You were still trolling for one of them desperate internet tricks.”
“It doesn’t give you the right to sleep with another man and then get in the bed with me and call his name!”
Chynna laughed, picked up the hardback book she’d placed on the bed, and then threw it with all her strength at his head. He dodged it while Chynna broke out in raucous laughter. “I told you not to mess with me, Dray. You think you can do what you want when you want and I won’t find out? Well, you should know better than that by now.”
“You’re as crazy as they come. And you have to wonder why I left your trifling behind.” With that being said, Dray turned and stormed out of the bedroom.
Chynna jumped up, clad in a pink thigh length nightshirt. Running out of the room after him, she pounced on his back and began pounding him with both fists as hard as she could, digging her long nails into the side of his neck and face. Her legs clinched tightly around his waist as he fought her off. Finally, he was able to throw her off while pushing her to the floor.
“Ahhh, you hurt me. I’m calling the police. They’re going to lock your butt up! You wait and see.” She got up and ran back toward her bedroom to retrieve her phone.
“See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. I can’t deal with this anymore. Call the police. Call the FBI. Call the dang President; I don’t care what you do anymore, Chynna.” He stormed toward the front door.
“Dray, wait. Please, Dray, please. I’m sorry,” Chynna cried, stopping in her tracks and turning around. “Please, Dray. Just stay, please let’s work this out. We always work it out, baby.”
Dray continued toward the door. He opened it and walked out, not saying a word and not bothering to close it behind him.
Chynna rushed behind him. Unable to restrain herself, she began another round of verbal assaults, something she was quite good at. Her tongue could be as deadly as a bullet through the heart.
Standing outside on the porch of the two-bedroom duplex they once shared, her pleas for him to forgive her turned to a plethora of cuss laced sentences and threats to destroy his life. “Give me my key. Don’t you ever come back here. You hear me, Dray!”
Dray reached inside his pant pocket, removed the key chain that had two keys on it and threw it on the ground.
Her next-door neighbors, an older married couple, looked at the scene from inside their front window like they were parked at a drive-in movie theatre. All they needed was a bucket of popcorn.
Truth is, Dray felt his life had already been ruined. As he walked to his car, got inside, and sped off up the street, he thought about their tumultuously violent relationship. As much as he loved Chynna, he couldn’t continue to deal with her uncontrollable temper. If he had done half the things to her that she’d done to him he would be underneath a jail. The police had been to almost every apartment and rental house where they’d lived too many times to count. They had been threatened with eviction at the last apartment they had because of their screaming matches and Chynna’s physical and verbal assaults against Dray. After tonight’s fighting match, they were sure to be thrown out of this place next.
Things between Chynna and Dray were good when they were good. They had fun together, enjoyed doing many of the same things. They liked many of the same foods, with both of them adopting clean eating a few years ago. But when things went bad they were all the way bad because Chynna could go from zero to a hundred real quick. She couldn’t control herself when she got angry. She always had to have the last word.
When they first started dating, Dray initially thought it was kinda cute when she would get mad and throw a tantrum, but when even simple disagreements escalated into her throwing things at him, hitting him, and threatening him, he didn’t think it was so cute any longer. When she got this way, Dray clung to the teachings of his father, “Son, never hit a woman. Walk away, cool off, and then come back and talk about it later.” That rarely worked when it came to Chynna. The longer he stayed away, the angrier she was when he returned.
It was during their last argument, after she called him by some other dude’s name, that Dray made up his mind he was done. He’d had enough. He was tired of the arguing, the verbal abuse, and the whole unhealthy aspects of his and Chynna’s relationship. He came to the unfortunate realization things were never going to change with them. He didn’t want to live a life with a woman who was jealous, insecure, abusive, and vengeful. He once thought he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, but her abusive tendencies combined with the knowledge she had slept with another man gave Dray a change of heart, and it cut him deeply. So deeply, he sought and found love and comfort in the arms of Bethany—the woman he told himself he loved and wanted to spend the rest of his life with.