It Couldn't Be Helped Ch. 06

We laughed, teased, and praised each other savoring the reality of what we were now and what we had just done. If there were any reservations before between us they were now officially extinct. I knew then I was knee deep in some serious shit with a beautiful twenty six year old ebony woman who was playing for keeps. And I loved it.

Despite all this, however, there was something gnawing at me the whole time as I heard my Dad's two basic tenets of how I should conduct my life swirling around in my head. The first was, and I quote:

"If you ever get put in jail, you better break out before I get there." That obviously didn't apply here.

But the second: "Sex is temporary but fatherhood is forever" did. Crystal and I didn't use any protection and post mortem that ate away at me because fatherhood scared the shit out of me.

I decided to come clean on the spot.

"Crystal" I said softly "You know I loved it but I feel kind of scared because we didn't use any protection."

"That was kind of reckless don't you think?" I asked.

Crystal lifted her head off my chest and smiled. Then the smile vanished replaced by one hundred percent seriousness.

"I want to have your baby, Sean" she said "I want to make lots of babies with you."

I could feel myself gearing up for a nervous breakdown/heart attack tag team combination. Life as I knew it had ended.

Then Crystal burst out laughing.

"Gotcha" She said shaking her head and laughing "I am just playing with you, boy."

I was saved and born again on the spot.

"You don't have to be scared, Sean" she said "because I am on the pill now."

"What?" I said incredulously.

A little history is due here. Crystal was the biggest anti-pill person I ever knew. If I had a dime for every time I heard her go off on the bad side effects of it and how the man needed to bear some responsibility for birth control too I would be a rich man. Thus, I broke into my Crystal imitation and started throwing her usual party line back in her face.

She laughed and then came clean too.

"I know" she said smiling and nodding her head accepting the guilt of her flip flop.

"But after that night in my apartment, by the door, and then coming home and realizing what I wanted and how badly I wanted you" she said grinning

"I told myself I was going to have you no matter what" she continued "so I took my ass down to the clinic the next day and got hooked up because I knew that if I didn't" she said pausing and blushing

"My black ass would have been pregnant with your baby within weeks."

"So you knew?" I asked with raised eyebrows "Even after I stood you up that night, you kept taking them because you knew this would happen?"

"Hell yes I knew, baby" Crystal said smiling confidently "I just didn't know when."

"But when I turned and saw you getting into the lift line with me today" she said blushing again.

"That was when I knew I had you. That was when I knew it would happen for sure because I knew we would make up."

"So, basically" She said looking down at my chest and running her fingers through my chest hairs before raising up and locking her perfect brown eyes on mine.

"Your fine white ass never stood a chance. You just didn't know it" She boasted smiling mischievously.

I just laughed and kept holding her. She was right though: I never did stand a chance.

It was almost 1am by now and we were spent both physically and emotionally. Crystal and I both started yawning and after a while I told her we should go to bed.

"Oh, so now you are ready to take me to bed?" She inquired sarcastically with a smile on her face as she rolled off me and stood up.

"To sleep" I said as a matter of fact "After you got a hold of me tonight my dick won't work for a week and I will need an IV just to get enough fluid in me to lick a stamp." I quipped standing up also.

Crystal laughed and put her arms around my neck while I slipped mine around her waist.

"I'm sorry for your condition, Sean, but the truth is" She said grinning as our noses touched and we started Eskimo kissing.

"It couldn't be helped." She whispered before our lips met as we started laughing at the irony.

I guess not.

Nor could it be helped that there I was, two hours and one short nap later, pounding Crystal's tight pussy from behind with a handful of black hair in one hand and a handful of ebony ass in the other. But don't get me started on that shit.

____________________________________

Two months later Crystal gave her notice at the restaurant. She was set to graduate with a Masters in Accounting and already had a job lined up at a local brokerage firm. We stuck to what she called "The Plan" and kept our relationship pretty much under wraps although we practically spent every waking hour and every night together. We knew people were talking but as far as we knew our cover wasn't blown.

Crystal's last night at the restaurant the whole crew threw her a surprise "moving on up" party after close. There were probably 25-30 people there. She was so touched that she broke down and cried. She went around hugging and kissing everybody – everybody except me that is.

We had live entertainment in the lounge nightly so they hooked up the microphone and Shelly, Crystal's closest friend and fellow server, acted as MC and went around the room with the mike and had people tell their favorite "Crystal" story. Then they would present Crystal with a funny or prank gift. Everybody was laughing and partying and from what I could hear it was a pretty loud and rowdy affair.

I say "from what I could hear" because I didn't see very much of it and only caught the beginning. When you are a bartender in a busy restaurant and lounge you are always the last one out the door because you have to clean up last, restock, and then count your register. Thus, I was still working during the bulk of the celebration but I could hear the goings on while I counted money in the back offices located in the kitchen.

I had just finished up and was putting the cash in the safe when I heard Shelly's voice booming into the mike.

"Where's Sean? We can't have a party for Crystal without Sean! Sean, Get your ass out here damnit!!"

Then the rest of those drunken fools started chanting "Sean! Sean! Sean! Sean!"

I started to make my way through the kitchen to the lounge but I was a confused and nervous wreck. I knew they would hand me the mike and expect me to roast Crystal unmercifully. Three months ago I could have and would have brought the house down talking about her and would have relished doing so but now everything had changed.

The things I could get away with saying while we were "friends" now came with a potential price tag and my instinct to protect her publicly now far outweighed my desire to tease her publicly. Plus there was our new status and I didn't want to reveal that.

If I slammed her the way they expected I would be in trouble with Crystal and if I didn't I risked exposing us. I didn't know what to do or what to say and felt like a man being led to his public execution or suicide. Take your pick.

I walked out of the kitchen and everybody cheered. Shelly was in my face instantly trying to hand me the mike but I bought myself some time by saying I wanted to get a beer first. That worked for about a minute because she was back in my shit as soon as I took my first drink and before I could object the mike was in my hand and everybody was looking at me. I looked over at Crystal's smiling face and she knew immediately by my demeanor that I didn't want to do this.

I started speaking into the mike saying some harmless introductory stuff but then I totally locked up. Nothing came out of my mouth at all.

Just silence.

Me, the guy who relished verbal combat and lived for stuff like this, was now a deer caught in the headlights. I was drowning and dying right there in front of all our friends.

But then the girl who always had my back, always looked out for me, and always cared about me, sprang to my defense. Crystal walked up to me and took the mike out of my hand and turned around to face everybody.

"He can't talk shit right now" Crystal said softly into the mike "Because he knows if he does I will kill him when we get home."

With that she tossed the mike to Veronica, turned back towards me, whipped her arms around my neck, and kissed me passionately.

Crystal "outed" us right there.

We never hid what we were ever again.

We underestimated almost everybody thinking they would freak out but for the most part everybody, including our families, were pretty cool. My mom and dad had more concerns about her age then her race but the second they found out that Crystal was on my ass about going to college she became their damn Joan of Arc. She couldn't do anything wrong. My extended family already had a Polynesian and Hispanic presence so Crystal being added to the mix really wasn't an earth shattering event.

Crystal's family, meanwhile, was a different beast and more complicated. Her family was huge. The women were pretty easy and they embraced me immediately. They always made me feel welcome. The men, however, were another story. After I met her parents for the first time her dad walked up to me later and asked

"What are you going to do if somebody calls my baby a "nigger" or "uncle tom?"

"Nothing" I said "I'll just laugh, walk away, and take her home."

"But they better pray I don't ever see them again when I'm alone" I said.

"That's right. Don't get lured into any bullshit and protect her" he said nodding his head and grinning while extending his hand "Welcome to the family."

It was sports however; the greatest racial unifier on the planet, that eventually broke the ice for me on the male side of Crystal's family.

Her family had annual football and basketball games during Thanksgiving and Christmas that pitted one side of the family against the other. The first time I played in the basketball game Crystal was terrified. She knew I could play but she kept telling me it wasn't like playing back home. She acted as if I had never been the minority before while being on the court. Who did she think I played against my whole life? Frat boys? Where did she think I learned how to talk shit?

I played and got off stealing the ball on game point and taking it the length of the floor and flushing it. I was in like Flynn after that.

During the game one of Crystal's cousins was guarding me and kept talking trash saying "white boy" this and "white boy" that. After about the third or fourth jumper I drilled in his eye I turned to him and declared to the whole gym:

"That's Mr. White Boy to you, son!"

Her whole family blew up laughing while Crystal damn near fainted from stress. She just didn't understand the difference between the street and the court. Still, however, the name stuck and I was affectionately known from then on as "Mr. White Boy."

Crystal and I got married in the spring of 1991 during my senior year of college. We had the first of our three kids the following year.

Just the other day our eldest daughter, Veronica, went to her first junior high dance. She was supposed to meet Crystal at a designated time and spot after the dance but she showed up some thirty minutes late. Crystal was livid and when she brought her home we sat her down for the interrogation. Apparently a group of them, broken down into couples, had left the dance right before it ended and went on a little lover's stroll.

"I didn't mean to be so late" Veronica said "but there was this boy who finally asked me to dance and I was so excited that I didn't want it to end."

"I'm sorry." She said "But 'it couldn't be helped' because I was so excited and I just lost track of time."

Crystal and I looked at each other knowingly and incredulously as our daughter unwittingly uttered out the phrase that held so much emotional and sexual power between us. To most people it was just a simple phrase but to Crystal and me it had history and represented the unstoppable force of a boy and girl overcoming everything to be together. It represented fate, lust, love, and passion.

"You're grounded!" We said in unison.

THE END