by Toy
Pain arrived at the gym already dressed in ball shorts and a wife beater. The only thing left for him to do was slide the Everlast gloves on his hands. The more he thought about Nikki and how he had messed his life up because of her, the angrier he became. He started hitting the punching bag, seeing mostly Nikki’s face smirking back at him. He hit her with all the hits he couldn’t give her in reality. He would have choked the damn bag if he could.
“Well, damn, what the hell did she do to you?” a female voice asked him.
Pain looked to the right and saw a cocoa colored woman with the old ass hair cut that Anita Baker had all the women wearing back in the day. He looked her up and down, making a note to call Nike and thank them for making the outfit that she was wearing. Feeling thirsty all of a sudden, he licked his lips. The sound of her laughing made him stop thinking of all the things he wanted to do to her sexually.
“Oh, damn. My bad, beautiful. What did you say?” he asked.
“I was wondering what woman you were picturing on the bag. Or maybe it’s a man,” she said with a smile.
“What? Hell nah. I’m all man, baby, and I love all women,” he said with a smile of his own.
“That might be why you’re up here hitting on this damn bag like this. All those women you’re loving got you up here all tense and stressed and shit. You need one woman who can bring you peace. Stop looking for a piece of ass and find peace. It will make your life less stressful,” she told him.
“Maybe I should start finding women in the gym from now on,” he said, looking down at her.
He noted that she was damn near a midget compared to his 5’10” of height. She was more like maybe 5’2” if that.
“Smooth way to come back. I’m Connie, nice to meet you,” she said.
“Hello, Connie, I’m Pain,” he told her.
“You’re Pain?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Yeah, have you heard of me or some shit?” Pain asked.
“Who hasn’t heard of you and your homeboy Murder? You two run the streets. You’re sexy and all, but I don’t need those problems in my life,” Connie told him.
“What problems?” he asked.
“So, you changed the damn locks then come here to smile in the face of this broke ass Nia Long. How can you leave me outside like that, and I’m carrying your first born?” Nikki said, coming out of nowhere.
“Those problems,” Connie said before walking away.
Pain watched her ass jiggle in those black and red work out pants. He bit his lip thinking of what he could do to her.
“Really, motherfucker? You’re gonna stand there looking at her ass while I’m standing here?” Nikki asked. “Why did you change the locks, Pain?”
“Shit, I thought you had somewhere else to live. I’m saying you didn’t come to the house last night. I’ve been hitting you up, but you never hit me back. I thought you had moved on or some shit like that,” he told her.
He was so focused on beating the shit out of the bag that he forgot he had called up his homeboy to change the locks early this morning. He laughed at the thought of what her face looked like when her key didn’t work.
“Pain!” she yelled.
“What the hell do you want, man? Why are you even standing here?” he asked.
“I need the key to get in the house,” she said with her hand on her hip.
“If I had the locks changed, why would I give you a key? You need to start realizing your actions have consequences, shorty. Get the fuck on,” he told her as he turned and started hitting the bag again.
“All of my shit is in there. I need to take a shower and put some clothes on,” she said.
“All of that is of no concern to me. I know you ain’t been out all night and not washed your ass. My kid is still in your stomach, so I don’t give a fuck if you ain’t got shit to wear,” Pain said.
“Is this because of the argument we had yesterday? I don’t know what you’re thinking I’m up to, but I’m not up to nothing,” she said, trying to sound innocent.
“Why are you even up here? You should just go to the condo you got,” Pain told her after he grew tired of hearing her go on and on about a bunch of bullshit. He stopped hitting the bag and turned to look at her. “Why you looking like that? I always knew about the condo. That’s why when you came at me talking about you needed somewhere to stay, I never said much. You must think you’re the smartest bitch on the planet. You’re not, though. You’re just another scheming ass bitch. Now get the fuck away from me. Only hit me up when it’s about my kid. Get the fuck out of here,” Pain told her.
Nikki turned and stomped away. Pain went back to hitting the bag until his arms didn’t work anymore. He left the gym thinking that maybe Connie was right. He needed to find peace. The problem is he had no way of finding it.
Pain sat on the couch thinking that he may have went a little too hard in the gym. There was no way he was going to the gym tomorrow. He thought about that Connie chick; he needed to find her or at least somebody like her. Although he had only talked to her for a few minutes, she had made a lasting impression. Then, he thought about Nikki and the shit that she tried to pull. It was funny to him that she was really trying to play homeless. The thing about Nikki that he learned was that she loved to tell her talking ass girlfriends about the shit her men would do for her. She thought her girls were loyal and lived by some kind of hoe code, but they were telling all her damn business.
Pain found out about the condo when one of her so-called friends told him that Nikki was just staying with him to make sure he wasn’t fucking with some other bitch while she was pregnant. He laughed at the fact that a life-long side chick would be trying to block him from getting other pussy. His phone went off again with a call from Nikki. He couldn’t understand what her beef was. She tried to play him, and she got caught, plain and simple.
When the baby was born, he was going to get a blood test. If the kid was his, then she would have to sign away her rights plain and simple. However, all that depended on the Murder not killing her before she gave birth.
Chapter 18
Nikki sat in her condo wondering how the hell Pain found out about it. Yeah, she lied when she told him she had nowhere to go, but she needed to be there with Pain. She thought she could use Pain to keep making him hurt Lawrynn. Seeing the hurt in Lawrynn’s eyes that day at the doctor’s office made Nikki want to see how long it would be before Lawrynn either went crazy or turned to dyking. She thought that knowing her ex had a baby on the way with her cousin would make Lawrynn do one of the two. The fact that she hadn’t done either yet pissed Nikki off. Lawrynn was stronger than she thought she was.
More and more every day, she hated both of her cousins. Nell had stopped dating altogether, so she would have to find another way to hurt Nell. Nikki sat down and thought about all the things she had gone through during the summer that changed her. She had gone to her grandfather’s house on her father’s side for the summer. It was funny to her that even though she had totally changed after that first visit, her mother kept sending her down there until he died four summers later. She still felt that if Lawrynn or Nell would’ve come with her that first summer, then all their lives would be different. Why couldn’t they just come with her?
Nikki had never seen her father face to face. He had been in prison all her life. He was serving a life sentence for killing a cop. She would talk to him twice a week when he was allowed to call her. Not once in their conversations did he warn her about her cousins. He had to know something was wrong with them, and he never even told her mother not to send her there for the summer. That was why she blamed him the most in all this. Family knew the flaws of family. It was just that she was born into a family that chose to overlook some flaws and not others. She always felt like someone knew what was happening to her, but they did nothing to stop it. Nikki’s mind traveled back to the first night it all happened.
“Look how she’s eating that hot dog, Mike,” Nikki’s cousin and
Mike’s twin brother, Malcolm, said.
The twins were older than Nikki by six years. They were the only cousins she knew at the time. She never understood why her mother would send her down to hot ass Alabama every summer. It was too hot, and there was nothing to do. She only had the twins and her grandfather around.
Her mother would only tell her that she needed to get to know her family when she asked why she had to go. In her mother’s mind, the twins treated Nikki like she was their little sister. In the real world, she was treated as their number one money maker, and it all started because of her eating a damn hot dog.
“Man, you’re crazy as shit for even thinking like that,” Mike told his brother.
“What? As long as we’re not the ones fucking her, there shouldn’t be a problem. I bet she’s a damn virgin too. You know that’ll bring in double the price at least,” Malcolm said, looking at his little cousin like the nasty nigga he was. “Aye, lil cuz, you fucking yet?” he asked.
“No, I’m not having sex. I’m only thirteen,” she said.
“Shit, gals down here fucking at ten,” Malcolm said and laughed. Nikki rolled her eyes and continued to eat her hot dog. “I think you should hang out with me tonight. I’m gonna go to my boy’s house. He’s having a party.”
“Are there gonna be kids there my age?”
“Nah, but you’ll be fine if you do what I say,” he told her.
When he said that, Nikki felt scared all of a sudden. She was hundreds of miles away from home with people who were supposed to be family. Nikki didn’t feel safe, but what was she supposed to do.
Nikki cried her eyes out as she thought about the horrible things her cousin made her do. She lost her virginity that night along with a piece of her that she would never get back. When she came back after the summer, Nell and Lawrynn were taking about all the fun they had. Hearing them talk about all the fun only made her jealous of their joy. She had begged her mother and their parents to let Lawrynn and Nell come with her, but they never did, and she finally stopped asking. Now, here she was, a used up little girl with hurt, anger, and animosity growing toward the cousins that she once considered sisters.
She couldn’t tell them that all summer she was a teenage prostitute for her two cousins. As the summers came and went, she grew to hate, envy, and wish pain on her cousins and their perfect little lives. She had been on a quest to fuck up their lives ever since. Sex was the only thing she knew how to use, so that’s what she did.
In middle school is when she started offering their boyfriends head in the bathroom. They never told, and she had the satisfaction of knowing that Lawrynn and Nell weren’t having sex, so their boyfriends called her when they wanted her to do something good to them. She enjoyed the feeling of having one up on her cousins.
Over the years, the head in the bathroom had turned into fucking their boyfriends in cars, hotels, and even in their beds. When she saw how much pain creeping with their men caused them, she set out to do it to all of their men. The only two who didn’t take her up on her offers were Allen and Murder. She tried and tried to break Allen, but he only had eyes for Nell. She was happy that they finally broke up but sad that it wasn’t her fault.
There wasn’t a time that she felt regret or any emotion behind the stuff she did to her cousins. In her mind, they needed a reality check. Men wanted nothing but sex from women. They weren’t into relationships and marriage. They only did that to keep up appearances. Every day she laughed at the numerous Facebook statuses and the Instagram posts of men loving their wives and girlfriends. Nine times out of ten, it was a man that she had fucked in the past or was fucking with now. It was comical to her that these women were all smiles with men who were passing dick to her like clockwork.
Nikki rubbed her stomach and thought about Pain. He was one she doubted she would be able to get. Never giving up eventually paid off. Now, this baby would be at all the family cookouts to remind Lawrynn of the nigga she couldn’t keep. She might even name the baby after her just for shits and giggles. Her daughter’s nick name would be Ren instead of Law Baby. She prayed that the baby would be a girl instead of a boy. She couldn’t wait to see Lawrynn’s face when she found out the baby’s name.
Picking up the phone, she called Pain again. She had been calling him since she left the gym and hoping he wasn’t in that bitch’s face from the gym. After dialing the number, the operator told her that the number she dialed was out of service. She slammed the phone down and grabbed her keys. If Pain thought he was going to ignore her as long as he felt like it, he was all fucked up in the head. This was her world, and things were supposed to go the way she wanted them to. He better get with the program.
~~
Nikki walked into the bar that she found Pain in with Murder and some more of their friends. She sashayed her ass through the bar as if she was walking a runway during fashion week. The sad part was that no one paid her any mind.
“There go your baby mama,” one of the guys said.
“This bitch gonna make me fuck her up. What the fuck do you want, Nikki?” Pain asked.
“I wanna know why my baby daddy changed his phone number. I wasn’t feeling good,” she said.
“You weren’t feeling good, so you came to a bar? Make that make sense right now.”
“Can we talk about this somewhere else?”
“You came up here to find me, not the other way around. State your reason for hunting a nigga down.”
“I wasn’t hunting you down. I just happened to come past here,” Nikki said.
“Oh yeah, that’s right, on your way to the hospital since you’re sick and all,” he said.
All the fellas around them started laughing.
“Murder, this is the type of friends you have? He’s turning his back on me and our baby,” she said, looking at Murder.
“I don’t know you, shorty. Don’t talk to me,” Murder said, and they all started laughing again.
“Fuck all of y’all,” Nikki said.
“We already have, ma,” a few of them said, followed by more laughter.
“You’re gonna let them make a fool of me. They’re all laughing like I’m some kind of joke. You’re just gonna stand there like you don’t even care,” she asked, looking at Pain with hurt in her eyes.
“You’re still standing here after you’ve said you don’t feel good at least twice. You claim you’re not looking for me when I know for a fact that you went to three other places at least asking if anybody has seen my black ass. Yet, you’re not admitting any of it like you haven’t been caught in your lies already,” Pain told her while shaking his head.
“Can you take me to the hospital?” she asked him.
“Nah, it looks like you’re well enough to walk ya ass in there alone. Just call one of these niggas if some shit happens. I know you have their number. I’m not giving you my number,” Pain said.
“That’s just dumb. You really want me to call somebody else to talk to you?” she said.
“Well, you’re talking to the same nigga who cheated on a good girl for her stank ass cousin. Not only did I cheat, but I got the damn cousin pregnant. All of that shit was dumb, but I did it anyway. Just call me dumb ass Pain,” he said with a shrug.
Nikki rolled her eyes and left the bar.
None of this was going the way she needed it to go. She couldn’t believe Pain had played her like that in front of everybody. So what if she had fucked most of the guys that he was with at the bar? He knew all of this when they first started messing around. Why was it just now a problem? It didn’t make sense to her. If he wanted to cut her off, he should’ve done that shit before, and maybe she wouldn’t be pregnant.
Chapter 19
Nell had been working overtime a lot more lately. It wasn’t that she needed the money, but she needed to stay busy. Since Lawrynn had been with Murder she had been unavailable. She didn’t want the hassle of getting with a new guy just for her to have to beat Nikki’s ass again, so she worked.
When they pulled up to the carwash, it was packed with men of various shades and sizes. Nell could only shake her head and think about how long it had been since she had some dick that didn’t need batteries.
“Are you coming in with me?” Lawrynn asked Nell.
“Hell yeah, I know you don’t think you’re gonna go in there and leave me out here with all these hood wolves. I need to come in anyway because you’re gonna mess around and forget that I’m out here,” Nell said as she got out of the car.
All eyes were on them as they walked into the building. They were all too scared to say anything because Murder would definitely kill their asses for harassing his woman and her friend/cousin. He couldn’t stop them from looking, so looking is what they did.
“Did anybody fuck with y’all?” Murder asked as they walked into the office.
“No,” they said in unison.
“Oh, you gonna just come get my money and not give me a kiss? That’s the type of shit we’re on now?” Murder asked with a smile.
Lawrynn laughed and went to give her man a kiss.
“Get a fucking room,” Nell said while rolling her eyes.
The door flew open, and in came Allen. He stopped in his tracks when he came face to face with Nell. They both were stuck looking at each other. Nell hadn’t seen Allen in years. She had heard that he never got married or had any kids a few years back, but nobody said that the nigga was working out and cut the fuck up.