The Last Street Novel by Omar Tyree

their long nights of battle, they would both be exhausted, with him refusing to submit to her, and her refusing to submit to him.
    She thought about their struggles a lot. She didn’t speak about them often. It was not her way to complain about her many stresses, she just worked through them in silence. However, she couldn’t seem to work through her inability to trust her husband to refuse temptation like she could. And she wondered if that temptation was more attractive than she was; more uninhibited, more enticing. And those thoughts only made her more insecure and unwilling to compete. Why should she be in competition with other women anyway? She was married to the man, and he should respect her more, holding her high on her pedestal. But since he had obviously forced her to compete, with disrespectful bitches, then he would have to live with her wrath and her withholding her affection from him.
    Yet, she felt helpless and ultimately at his mercy. Shareef had become a national superstar, where she was only his wife, an aspiring event coordinator who had been only halfway successful in her attempts at big events in Florida, or in her hometown of Macon, Georgia, where her father, Daniel Mason, was a county judge. So maybe Shareef could walk away and do better, or most likely worse. For what woman would work as hard as she had to maintain the peace with her husband when more than half of her friends and family were separated or divorced for lesser transgressions?
    Jennifer loved Shareef, his boastful swagger and his achievements, as much as she loved her father’s. But submitting her will to her father was natural—he was Daddy. To submit to a husband she could no longer trust was degrading, and she found herself not able to do it. She had pride. She had value. She had self-respect. She loved her husband very much while despising her lack of control over their marriage, and she found herself paralyzed in her emotions. What was the right way to deal with him? Only if the man wasn’t so damned thick-headed and impatient, maybe he could find time to relax with her for a minute, listen to her words, and allow her to develop trust in him again.
    Jennifer would sink into deep spells of daydreams about her husband and their marriage at any place or time without warning. All it took was mention of his name or a passing of information to remind her of him. And before she knew it, it was close to ten o’clock at night and their library meeting was adjourning. It would take her another twenty minutes to drive home to relieve him of the children. How would Shareef react to that? He reacted to everything. But if she had reacted as much to him, she may have been forced to stab him.

    “I’ M ON MY WAY to the house now,” Jennifer called and told her husband from inside the Land Rover. By then it was well after ten o’clock, and she had spent an extra ten minutes talking to the youngest member of the fund-raising committee about the best location for a new apartment. That’s what Jennifer was like. Loyal. And her job was never done until everyone had received her full attention.
    “Aw’ight,” Shareef grumbled quickly over the phone.
    She heard his voice and knew what he was thinking. He had been waiting to leave for more than an hour, and he was now pissed for having to wait that long. But life wasn’t about a clock for Jennifer. Life was to be enjoyed and treasured, regardless of the seconds, minutes, and hours. Time should not control you, you should control it.
    So when she arrived home, she was still not pressed.
    Shareef, however, was waiting outside the house, on the steps, for her, like an overgrown child who could not wait to catch the minutes that could never be recaptured or replaced.
    “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he told her as he hurried over to his Mercedes.
    “How did practice go?” she asked him.
    “What?”
    “I said how did his practice go.”
    “Oh, it went normal. He had a good practice.”
    Shareef