Page 95 of Seasoned
“Bon appétit,” he said.
Jackie ate several bites of food before she looked across the table at him. “Delicious. How did you learn to cook like this?”
“It was a matter of survival. After my wife and I split, I realized how spoiled I’d been. Growing up, I never learned to cook because that was the responsibility of the women in my family. Then I got married, and Yvonne took care of the house and the kids and made sure I had a hot meal waiting for me every day after I came home from work, even though she worked, too.”
“She was a saint,” Jackie said, taking a sip of wine.
“Yeah, she was. Married to a great guy now.”
“You’re still friends?”
“We are, but that’s because she and I admitted we’d made a mistake getting married because she’d been pregnant with our first daughter.”
“An amicable divorce. That’s rare, but not surprising with a man like you. I swear you could sell ice in a snowstorm.”
Tyson laughed out loud and dabbed his mouth with the napkin. “Thanks, I think.”
“So you divorced the woman you married and then decided to play the field and never get married again?” Jackie asked.
“Not as bad as all that. Before Yvonne and I divorced, we had an unspoken… understanding.”
Jackie lifted her eyebrows in a silent request for him to expound.
“We were married but seeing other people,” he explained.
“Oh.”
“Unconventional, but like I said, we recognized we didn’t belong together. When she and Patrick decided to get married, it forced me to move out and work in earnest on my business ideas. I never had much money, and man, did I want to succeed. But I wanted to have a good time, too, because she and I had married so young. We had both just graduated high school when she got pregnant and we got married, thinking it was the right thing to do. Eventually, I felt like I’d missed out and decided that I’d experience everything I hadn’t experienced.”
Jackie cut into the tender rib eye. “I’m going to assume that means women?”
Tyson laughed and shrugged. “Of course. But not only women. I partied hard, drank a lot, and, in general, acted like a fool.”
Because she was learning more about him in one night than she had during their week in Atlanta, Jackie couldn’t stop asking questions. “What finally got you straightened out?”
“A pregnancy scare.”
Her mouth fell open. “One of your girlfriends?”
“More like a hookup. We scratched each other’s itch from time to time. I wish I could tell you the scare happened when I was younger, but it happened when I was old enough to know better, a couple of years after you and I met. I was forty-nine years old. When she told me she was pregnant, I was devastated. My girls were grown and Kendrick was already in his late teens, I was making good money at the financial services firm where I worked—not great—but okay, so the last thing on my mind was having a child. That stage in my life was over.” He shook his head.
An uncomfortable heaviness weighed in Jackie’s chest. Staring down into her glass of wine, she thought about how she still wanted to be a parent. And here he was, talking about not wanting to go back down that path.
Across the table, he watched her with a frown creasing his brow. “I know what you’re thinking. He ain’t shit. Believe me, I know that. At least, I wasn’t. I’m a different man now.”
“I wasn’t thinking that,” Jackie said.
“Then I misunderstood the look on your face.”
“You did. What happened with the baby?” she asked, curious despite herself.
“After she had the baby, we did a DNA test and learned that it wasn’t mine. I had already known there was the possibility that the child could be another man’s, so it’s not like she tried to trap me or anything. But I’d never been so relieved to get a negative test in my life. That’s what turned me on the straight and narrow. No more running around for me. I continued consulting, and after hours and on weekends I worked hard on the software idea that had been at the back of my mind for a while. Five years ago I sold it and my life has been good ever since.”
“Congratulations,” Jackie said sincerely. When they met years ago, he’d expressed a desire to run his own business because he’d grown up poor and didn’t want that life for himself or his family. To see him finally achieve a lifelong goal gave her an immense sense of satisfaction.
At the end of the meal, they walked out to the balcony—Jackie with remnants of wine in a glass—and stood overlooking the water. In the distance, the lights of a few boats twinkled in the dark.
“We’ve been talking about me the entire time. What have you been up to? Still traveling?”
