Preview_REAL SECRETS

http://www.stockfreeimages.com/The release of "Real Secrets" is pending a November release date, originally slated to be released in October, the date was pushed back as I struggled with the cover I knew I wanted. I did not want to settle on anything and decided to wait to get what I truly wanted (that will be released later). Although this is not the first book that I have released it is the first book that I completed. In my earlier years I wrote many stories and did not complete any. I would store them away to come back at some later, as yet undetermined time. One day my husband asked why didn't I ever complete anything I started. I asked what did he mean by that and he said he would start reading my stories, become engaged and all of a sudden I would just drop off and leave him hanging. A close friend of mine shared the same sentiment with me. So in an effort to prove them wrong, I completed Real Secrets at the time known only as "Secrets" in Cincinnati, OH in 2001. I have revamped it somewhat through the years. But here is an excerpt from my first completed project ever.

WARNING: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE



(MARCH)When Tamara snuck into the house at 3:07 A.M. she knew that Darren was still lying awake on his side of the bed. She could tell by the uneven rhythm of his breathing. She had left her shoes beside the front door in the living room of their ranch style three bedroom home to silence her footsteps. Slipping out of her jeans and t-shirt, she crawled into bed next to him in her panties and bra. As she slid the covers over her shoulders and turned her back to him, he grabbed her arm and pulled her back into a sitting position.
“Where have you been?” he uttered in a deep low voice so as not to awaken their son.
 “I was just out driving around and I stopped at mama’s house to talk with Konia,” she lied.
He pushed her away from him. She knew that he could smell the liquor on her breath.
          He turned his back to her and lay down.
“Look Tam, just so you know, I’m taking D.J. in the morning and we’re moving in with my brother.”
“What the hell are you talking about taking D.J. in the morning Darren? Hell no you ain’t taking my baby nowhere!” she shouted throwing the covers off her and jumping out of bed. As she made her way to the light switch on the wall across from their bed, she could hear him get up and slip his pants on.
“Tamara, I’m not fighting with you anymore. You promised that you would quit drinking and you didn’t. I’m not a fool! I know you still drink, you’re still getting high, and you’re still stripping. I asked you to give that up when we first met,” Darren scolded.
Tamara sat on the edge of the bed and held her head in her hands. She was so tired of this same old argument. She didn’t know what he was complaining about anyway. Between her pay and tips she brought home anywhere from $4,000 to $4500 a week dancing at Secrets. He never complained about that black and gold Lexus parked in the front that he loved to see her driving up in. Nor did he have any complaints about the dark blue Navigator that she had him rolling in. They lived in an upscale neighborhood in Roswell, Georgia. No more Boulevard for her or College Park for him, not that anything was wrong with College Park, but the neighborhood he was living in was just as bad as living on Boulevard for her.
 “You know I’m sick and tired of you complaining about what I do. You met me stripping in those damn clubs! If you had a problem with me shaking my ass then you never should have hooked up with me Darren, I haven’t tried to change you. And I’ll be damned if I let you use my baby against me! You ain’t taking D.J. nowhere,” she screamed getting into his face.
 “Tamara I’m not using or holding anything against you. I just can’t live like this anymore; you can have the cars, the clothes and all the rest of this material shit. But I can’t keep letting my son be exposed to this lifestyle anymore. When we had him shit was supposed to change; you were supposed to change it was about sacrifice. Yeah you were doing this when we met but you had higher goals and dreams for yourself and I haven’t seen you make good on any of that yet. I think you actually enjoy what you do. And you promised that you would stop stripping and now all you have is a bunch of excuses. Not only you haven’t but you’ve started drinking and you got a mouth worse than the fellas. How you think it makes me feel that the fellas at work and the ones that I hang with have all seen my woman’s ass, not just your ass but your whole damn body!”  
“That’s the problem you always worried about what someone else thinks. So what if they seen me D, it ain’t like they been up in me. You’re the only one I give my body to,” Tamara said. She walked to his side of the bed and wrapped her arms around him in an attempt to regain control of the situation and calm him down.
 “Pssh…yeah right,” Darren mumbled as he pushed her away. “I’m for real Tamara I can’t take it anymore. It’s disrespectful to me as a man. Yeah I work at UPS and I may not make the same money that you do but we can survive.”
“Darren I can’t go to school and we can’t keep up what we have on what you make alone. Even if I found a decent job we can’t do it,” she argued back.
“We ain’t gotta live like this,” he said, waving his arms around to indicate their surroundings. “It might be hard but we can work our way up to this point. I’ve been telling you that we could move into an apartment save up enough money for a few years on a decent down payment and then buy our own home. Hell we paying somebody else’s mortgage acting like this our shit and it ain’t.”
Darren looked into her eyes and saw the hard, cold truth…she couldn’t give it up, not for him and not for D.J. Stripping had become an addiction for her; he didn’t know if it was the money that she had to buy anything that she wanted, or if she felt some sort of power when she took her clothes off and had grown men acting like a bunch of little boys.                    Darren walked out of the room and went into the living room to sleep. Tamara knew that if he felt this strongly about her work that it would be worse if he found out that she had been doing private parties. That’s where she had been tonight. The whiskey had helped her to endure what she had to do. What he didn’t realize is that she wasn’t a natural drinker and didn’t enjoy it much. But when she performed at private parties she needed it, and she did one to two parties a week now. Private parties…the one thing he really hated more than stripping.
She had promised him that she would never do that and she had promised herself the same thing in the beginning when she first took the job 4 years ago. She knew that Darren would never understand. They were so close to paying off their car notes and credit cards and she had a nice lump sum to make a down payment on a home for them that would keep their mortgage payments low. She needed at this point to make as much money as she could. The sooner she got everything paid off and the sooner that she saved enough money to pay off her final 2 years of college, the sooner she could quit her job.
She wasn’t proud of what she did and she didn’t even know how she had allowed herself to sink to this depth, but in this “man’s world,” with no skill sets a woman had to do what she had to do. Hell she had made $2500 tonight alone and that was enough to pay the rent and all of the utilities. She knew from watching her parents that she couldn’t depend on a man to take care of her. Her mom never worked and always depended on her dad to take care of the family. He gave her mom an allowance that she was supposed to take care of everything with except for their bills. And when he finally died her mom had to sell the house, get a minimum wage job as a cook in a school cafeteria and get government assistance to get back on her feet. That wasn’t a life she envisioned for herself. 

JUST A PIECE OF THIS WRITER...
C. MICHELLE RAMSEY