Choose Me Read Online Free Page B

by my grungy appearance and saw me
     as a poor brother who wouldn’t be able to wine and dine them like a gentleman should; I let them think that way. There were
     some women who thought my clothes and hair were eccentric, but these women bothered me too. I concluded that if a woman judged
     me by my outward appearance, in the long run, I was better off without her.
    Then in a moment of weakness, I called Sondra and she came back. I professed my love for her; she confessed that she had been
     miserable without me. Our attempt to pick up where we left off ended in disaster. I never thought I would hear the words,
“It’s okay, it happens.”
It never happened, not to me. From that point on, the relationship went downhill. Instead of admitting that she was seeing
     someone else, she let me catch them together. Nothing dramatic like having sex in my bed, just walking in the rain and holding
     hands. Just like the old Oran “Juice” Jones song.
    Afterward many of my perspectives about women changed. I had always thought women cheated in retaliation for being cheated
     on, but I realized like a lot of misconceptions about women, that one isn’t true. It had happened to me twice—two times too
     many.
    As I turned my attention to the blurry words on my laptop where I was working on my latest screenplay-in-progress, I tried
     to delete Sondra from my mind. The library behind me was full of unfinished scripts, and for the last week I had been working
     on a script about two friends on a road trip in search of their fathers. But twenty pages into the manuscript, my characters
     still had yet to leave Chicago. I had serious writer’s block. Ever since I had sold my first screenplay, which had won a college
     screenwriting competition, to a producer who had in turn totally revised the script, I was determined to make my next one
     a success. By the time my screenplay, which had started out as a drama about four Brothers in college, made its appearance
     on screen, it had become a comedy about the antics of three friends, with one token Black friend.
    “Yo, Ad-
dam
!”
    I turned from my computer screen just as Luciano, my closest partner, poked his head over the Japanese room divider that separated
     the living room and my office. Last night, after a typical boys’ night out of shooting pool and the bull, I drove him to his
     house where he discovered his wife had finally changed the locks, something I had been warning him would happen soon enough
     if he kept acting like he was still a bachelor. He pounded on the door of his house yelling Lisa’s name the way Stanley Kowalski
     yelled “Stella” in
A Streetcar Named Desire,
until his next-door neighbor threatened to call the cops. The last thing I wanted was to spend the night in jail, a place
     I had never been and never wanted to be. I had no choice but to offer the man my sofa bed.
    “Don’t lean on that, man,” I told him absentmindedly
    “Man, how come you ain’t got no food up in this mug?” Luciano Reed was, for the most part, an articulate, somewhat educated
     man, a disciplinarian at an all-boys’ private school, but when we were together, he often lapsed into the old street lingua.
     And it was infectious.
    “I ain’t been grocery-shopping this month.”
    “So, when you going?”
    “Don’t worry about it. You won’t be here long enough to find out.” As I looked up at his dejected face, I knew I shouldn’t
     have been so hard on him, but it was fun.
    He leaned against the divider, then pulled away quickly when he saw my harsh look. “Lisa’s not answering the phone; she turned
     off her cell. She won’t even let me in my own house to get some clothes.” Technically, since Lisa got the house in the divorce
     settlement from her first husband, it was her house. But I didn’t bring up this fact.
    “She better ’cause you ‘cain’t’ stay here too long,” I half-teased.
    He ran a hand through his unkempt black hair and dragged himself to the