“I’ve seen his ass before,” I sucked my teeth and broke eye contact. “Right before I broke up with Drew. I was with him at the racetrack, and that nigga was grilling us. It looks like he’s grilling me now, and he has some nerve. Picture him mean mugging me because he doesn’t like Drew.”
“Oh yeahhhh,” KoKo’s voice was full of recognition. “His people do be beefing with Drew’s people. You’re not with Drew anymore, so he better fix that shit. I don’t care who he is, he better keep it cute,” she fussed, making me laugh.
Me nor KoKo could beat Wilde, but my friend was ten toes down for me. She went from bigging Wilde up to spazzing,simply off the strength of me telling her I felt like he was mugging me. “Calm down, gangsta,” I bumped her arm with mine. “He can stare all he wants, but he better not say anything to me.” The lean had me mellow and not too worried about being grilled by a handsome stranger.
I swallowed the remaining liquid in the Styrofoam cup and tossed them in the trash. I had another hour in me at the most before I’d be ready to go to sleep. I couldn’t sip lean all throughout the day because I had to work and couldn’t be fighting sleep. I was smart enough to know that if I kept drinking it and became even more addicted to it than I already was, I wouldn’t be able to use common sense and refrain from drinking until I was done with work. A part of me wanted to believe that I’d never let anything come in between my money, but addiction didn’t work like that.
I was watching someone on a motorcycle do a wheelie as he rode down the strip and once he passed, my eyes landed on Ashley. The moment I realized who she was, my eyes traveled down to her belly and there it was. A small bump. She was on the strip partying and smiling. The woman that Drew cheated on me with and got pregnant. I resisted the urge to throw up. Lean mellowed me out and made me numb, but it didn’t completely take my feelings away, and the mood was somewhat ruined. I took in her pretty dark skin and her stark white teeth. Ashley was gorgeous, and Drew was handsome. My stomach knotted as I tried to imagine what their child might look like.
“Do you hear me?” KoKo nudged me, and my head whipped in her direction.
“Huh?”
“I said do you want to walk down closer to that end and see who’s down there?”
“Sure.” Little did she know, she’d saved the day because I couldn’t stomach too much more of Ashley. I didn’t give a damnabout her having Drew. She was going to get something better than that. A baby.
Despite me seeing Ashley, the strip was fun enough. We didn’t meet anyone that we felt was worth giving our numbers to, but I was fine with that. I just thanked God that I had my own and that I didn’t leave Drew with nothing to my name. My shop was successful, and I’d rather have that than a man taking care of me. A trick would have been nice, but it surely wasn’t needed. And love? I was good on that. I fell fast and hard for Drew, only to realize when it was too late that I’d fallen for the worst kind of person. A selfish, verbally abusive one, with a God complex. One that taunted me when I had a miscarriage rather than supporting and comforting me. Yeah, love could kiss my ass.
Eric’s funeral was just as sad as I imagined it would be. For some, there was no real closure since there couldn’t be an open casket. The picture of him that rested off to the side of the casket made it worse, because he looked so happy and full of life in it. But, I knew what was inside that coffin. I saw it every time I closed my eyes. I almost hated Pierre for even telling me to open the car door that day. I could have gone the rest of my life without seeing Eric like that. I knew Pierre was going through it as well. He was the one that had to find his brother like that. The pastor that preached during the funeral reminded me too much of my father. They all stood in front of the church, yelling and saying what sounded good, but I stood on the fact that most of them didn’t live by the scriptures they were preaching about. And I couldn’t respect it. I refused to respect it.
I had no desire to sit around talking and eating fried chicken, so it was my choice to skip the repass. Misha had been blowing me up, saying she wanted to see me without Lonna around. I was contemplating sliding through, so she could take my mind off what I had just sat through. Before I could make it to my car,my homeboy, Jermaine, called out to me. I had known Jermaine since we were in middle school.
“What up, G?”
Jermaine scratched the back of his neck, making me aware that he was feeling uncomfortable about something, and I doubted it was the funeral. “This might not be the best time to bring this up, but I’ve been holding it for over a week, and I need to know. You fucking with Dashay?”
I stared at him blankly for a few seconds. I stared at him until he uncomfortably let out a small chuckle. I wanted him to feel stupid for the dumb shit he’d just confronted me about. “The stripper, Dashay? The one with three kids?” He knew what I was alluding to with the questions.
“Yeah man. I know she dances, but she makes good money, so I don’t knock her hustle. And I know a few niggas have had her, and I might look like a sucka, but we like that. We were like that. And you knew I fucked with her. So, I just want to hear you say you pushed up on her.”
Disgust made my upper lip curl. He was confronting me about a female that flirted with me every time she saw me, despite knowing that me and Jermaine were friends. This was a female that got mad when I came in the club and other dancers flocked to me. He was coming at me after my cousin’s funeral over a female that had fucked almost every baller in the city, from athletes to drug dealers.
I ran a hand down my face. “I’m gon’ give you a pass for coming at me with this shit today because I’ve known you for a minute, and you’ve always been emotional. The crew passing around pussy has never been an issue before. I didn’t know you were lame enough to try and cuff the hoe. That’s my bad. I won’t let her suck me off again.” I walked away, not giving a damn about how my words made him feel.
Just to be spiteful, I thought about hitting Dashay up as soon as I got in my BMW, but if he was that pressed, he could have her. I had more women on the team than I knew what to do with, and I was never pressed about one. Hell, I wasn’t pressed about any of them. Women were one thing I never had an issue with getting. A chuckle pushed from my throat when I thought about the fact that this man was salty enough about a hoe to confront me at my people’s funeral. Glancing over at my passenger seat, I sucked my teeth when I realized that I had to take three cases of promethazine to the crib. I couldn’t keep riding around with the shit. In the hood, promethazine was like liquid gold. I could make more off one bottle than some people made in two weeks from working.
Mazi had been selling the cough syrup for me for almost two years, and we’d never had an issue. A few months back, the fat fuck claimed he had to pay $12,000 for his grandmother’s funeral, and it put him in a bind. I was kind enough to front him a case of syrup and told him he could just pay me later. Kind wasn’t a word that anyone ever used to describe me, and Mazi reminded me why. You give a person an inch, and they’d take a mile. He’d been owing me for six weeks, and he wasn’t getting any more syrup from me. On top of that, he was going to die because I was tired of him playing in my face. People didn’t suddenly stop drinking lean. That was one thing that wasn’t hard to get off. He made the mistake of getting comfortable enough to think he could finesse me, and I was about to send him with his granny.
At home, I stashed the cough syrup and changed my clothes. As I was rolling a blunt, my doorbell rang, and I frowned. Only a few people would stop by my home unannounced, and my mother was one of them. I wasn’t in the mood to see her. My mother still drank too much, and she still occasionally sold pussy to any man that was willing to pay for it. She obviouslysold it for scraps, because she was always broke. Since the age of seventeen, I’d given her more money than she’d ever spent on me. I tolerated her because she was my mother, but I didn’t deal with her like that. Same way I didn’t deal with my father.
After checking the peep hole, I was relieved to see that it was Pierre at my door. He obviously skipped the repass, too. “What up, G?” the blunt dangled from my lips as we slapped palms.
“I know who killed Eric.”
My brows hiked, and I turned around as he walked over to the couch.
“It wasn’t hoe ass Drew. It was his homeboy, Boone.”
I drew back. “Boone? Why would he do it?”
“Check it, he was saying that Eric robbed him. Eric supposedly broke into his house and tied his baby moms up. She claimed that she recognized Eric’s voice because they used to work together at Burger King in high school, and whenever she ran into him, they talked. The only thing this nigga had to go on was her saying she knew it was my brother’s voice. Eric told me everything. If he robbed that pussy, he would have told me. That bitch is lying. Or, she didn’t really say that, and Boone put it on her for the same reason Drew was calling him a snitch. They were just salty that he was getting money.”
I could practically see steam coming out of Pierre’s ears. He was pissed and Drew not being the one to kill Eric didn’t mean anything. I couldn’t speak for Pierre, but he still had to see me for lying and calling Eric a snitch.
“You sure it was just Boone? What if it was both of them?”
“Nah. Niggas claim the hoe Ashley was posting pictures the night before and the day we found Eric. The two of them were in Chicago. She’s pregnant by that nigga. Unless they killed him and set him on fire days before they brought him to the spot, but I doubt it. I got word that Boone been acting all jumpy and weird and shit.”
