excerpt from Lady Prime

From my first novella, Lady Prime started the “series” of the Be A Man book series. This lost gem in my collection was my first foray into writing something “different”. Here is an excerpt from Chapter One. Enjoy

	She died on a Tuesday. The woman whom I had loved for the last twenty-five years. We gave each other the best and most valuable moments of our lives. On the day her father walked her down the aisle to me, her beauty overwhelmed me as I stood at the altar. Her white dress and infectious smile brought both joy and fear to my heart. She would be the woman with whom I would grow a family and spend over half of my life. 
	When she left, I didn’t cry immediately. It was sudden, but my love’s passing gave me some peace in my world. It wasn’t that we didn’t love each other or that our marriage was in trouble. Her absence brought my world and career to a screeching halt. I was okay with that. I focused my energies on consoling our children, as our son had just had our first grandchild and our daughter was in the middle of her first year of college.
	With my career on hold and my personal life nonexistent, I relaxed in my office in the house my wife and I had built nearly five years before her death. Most of my days while I was home from the road, I spent in this oversized shrine to me and my childhood. My lair was a space designed and customized for me. Despite that, my partner-in-crime and I wasted many hours cuddling and sharing in this space. I even sat in there every week and challenged my son to 2K basketball games like normal when he was present, in college, or in his newly built house ten miles away while I put my career on the back burner.
	On the day I got back to my roots in writing, something special happened. No matter how many TV shows or movies I wrote for, I always loved writing my novels and short stories. My wife always fussed at me for having my word processing program open on one screen with my social media pages open on the other screen. She used to say it was a distraction. Six months after her passing, I needed one.
	Facebook’s messaging app wasn’t the first one I’d ever used. Thirty years prior, AOL Instant Messenger was the big thing for chatting. It got me into more trouble than I could ever have imagined. It was text messaging before text messaging, and you could originally only use it on computers. While I spent hours writing stories, poems, and papers in college, my AIM was always on until I got my original Blackberry. Even back then, I always preferred to talk to my special someone on the phone. On this day, I got an instant message from someone who used to be a special someone to me ages ago.
	Her message to me touched my heart, but what was more important was the fact that she spoke to me at all. Popping up at a time I was deep into writing a death scene for one of my beloved characters, Arielle’s message not only surprised me, but the volume of my computer was at its loudest. The sound of the message nearly stopped my already broken heart.

Arielle:
Hello, I know it’s been a long time since we’ve talked. I know I’m late, but I’m so sorry for your loss. Your wife was a beautiful woman, and my heart goes out to you, your children and your entire family.

	Her words were similar to the text I had sent nearly ten years to the day. The last conversation we had via the messaging program was one I said something similar when she lost her nephew. This woman was the first person to share her mind, body, and soul with me when we were teenagers. This woman was the benchmark for everyone I ever dated after her, and it wasn’t until my wife came along that I aborted the whole concept that this woman was and would always be “Lady Prime” to me.

Me:
Arielle, thank you so much!  This means a lot to me.

Arielle:
You’re welcome.

	This was the best we could say to each other to start. It had been a lifetime since we had had a real, meaningful conversation. At this time in life, it seemed like catching up with people meant saying, “You and your family are in my prayers,” and it was getting old for me. However, Arielle was different. Even during twenty-five years of marriage, I always low-key stalked Arielle to see what she had going on in her life. For her to reach out to me after all those years gone by, I had to capitalize on the opportunity.