Chapter 1
Ciara
Slamming the mailbox shut, I crumpled up the piece of paper I’d just read.
“I am going to kill his ass!”
The letter in my hand was a statement from a credit card company addressed to me. Worst of all, the charges were for places I had never visited and things I had never seen in our twelve years of being together. I got with Kairo when I was sixteen years old and we have pretty much been broke since then. Extra money came around like holidays for us, so splurging was unheard of in our household.
I won’t say that our marriage has been all bad because of our finances. Kairo and I had plenty of good days where we would make do with what we had. There were nights where we would build large pillow forts in our small one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx for movie night. Or times like when we did homemade hibachi and almost burnt down our building trying to do an onion volcano. Everything we did to have fun was either free or had a coupon attached to it, so that’s why this credit card bill had me mad fuckin’’ irritated. What was all this romantic shit listed about?
There is a $200 charge at a flower shop and a $300 tab at The Loft Steakhouse in Brooklyn. Kairo had never done anything like this with me, so who were these charges for? Especially on a card with my name on it that I did not approve of. I been working hard to maintain a decent credit score to get a nicer apartment for us one day that is not in the Castle Hill Projects. Getting a nice spot was a dream of mine. But apparently, Kairo had smaller ambitions that involved impressing females who wouldn’t loan him a grape for a fruit fight.
I can’t believe almost twelve years later, and his ass is still placing this burning feeling in my chest that I have right now. There was sweat dripping down my temples, and my hands were squeezed tightly into a fist. If only I didn’t love his ass so much, I would have been left him high and dry. I don’t know what I did to deserve such mistreatment from a man I always held down since the beginning, through all his extra bitches and his trips to jail.
Kairo and I first got together when we were upperclassmen at Truman High. Kairo was a player, a ladies’ man, the boy that got all the cute girls in my class in trouble for skipping school and sneaking out with. Kairo never looked my way until I had a fight with Cheyanne Lopez for picking on my overdue box braids. I whooped her ass all the way under the lunchroom table and that ended me up in after-school detention for two weeks.
Of course Kairo’s ass was in there for reasons I didn’t know, but he was in detention so much it was a part of his schedule.
The entire first day of detention, I felt like Kairo was looking at me out of the corner of his eyes, but he didn’t say anything to me until we hit the sidewalk on Baychester to wait at the bus stop once we were dismissed.
He ran up behind me, tugging his backpack filled with God knows what inside. Back then, boys we're selling weed, pills, whatever it took just to keep up with others. There were more locker raids at Truman High than in the Projects.
I still remember how his voice had highs and lows because it hadn’t deepened all the way.
“Hey. I’m Kairo.”
“Hi, I’m Ciara.”
“Yea, nice to meet you. I just wanted to tell you that you may want to walk with me down to the bus stop. There are some creepy ass niggas hanging around that stop at this time of day. I wouldn't want anyone to try and take you.”
“O- o- k. Thanks.”
I remember stuttering in shock that Kairo Chalvez was even talking to me. To the outside world Kairo was just another bad ass teenage boy, but to the girls at Truman High, he was the dream man to have as your man. There wasn’t one girl at my school who would have turned down his offer to walk them to the stop that day or any other day; I mean, he was Kairo Chalvez.
For the next two weeks of my detention sentence, Kairo and I found ourselves getting closer and closer each afternoon. We walked to the bus stop side by side, sharing laughs and making inside jokes about dumb shit like teenagers do.
We would also stop by Harold’s Deli close to my apartment every single day, because we both had a soft spot for their Ham and Cheese on a roll, a classic combo that never failed to hit the spot. We’d sit at our usual corner table inside the small deli, where I think his cute face, nice clothes, and funny jokes really hooked me. After that, there was no seeing Ciara without Kairo. I fell deeply and fast for the bad boy at school.
I lost a lot of friends because of Kairo, some of my family, and even a few children because of the bullshit he put me through. There were things I would never tell a soul that I did with and for Kairo. Not even my best friend, Pernelle, who I told everything to. She was the first person to tell me Kairo was no good for me. Sometimes I wish I hadn't been so headstrong back in the day, trying to prove that I deserved to have the popular guy in school. Look what it got me. Years of heartbreak and looking like a dummy to everyone who knew our story.
I pressed my back against the hot metallic surface of the mailboxes, fighting to keep tears from running down my face.
When I finally lifted my chin from the pavement, just my luck that my fine ass neighbor, Ant, was walking toward his mailbox looking like a cool lime-flavored popsicle on a summer day. I quickly straightened my posture, trying not to slouch in front of him. He always looked good, and though he was dressed in sweatpants and gym clothes most of the time, he had a way of making it look like high-end fashion. It was his athletic build for me. He had that tall, dark, Xavier Legette body type.
Sometimes when Kairo is gone, I stand in the window of my apartment to watch his chocolate skin glistened like melted chocolate when he jogs up and down pathway in front of our building. Despite the trash cans, cluttered grounds, and worn down building, he was quite a view from my third floor window.
“Ayo Cici, you good?”
His deep voice rattled the drums in my ears.
“Hey, Ant.”
I spoke almost below my breath.
“You good?”
“Yeah, I’m good. See you later.”
