by Roy Glenn
I stood there for a second and looked at him. I could tell by looking at him that he was a baller now. Standing there looking like money. I guess it was inevitable that he would grow up to be a baller; it ran in the family. Back then, two of his uncles went to jail for selling drugs, and the only reason his father stopped dealing was ’cause Lorenzo’s mother had died when Lorenzo was young. Lorenzo was definitely bling-bling now, and his gear was all designer shit.
“Okay. Where can we go?” I asked.
“Come ride with me.”
“I can’t. Me and Teena are rollin’ together. I can’t leave her.”
“Teena? From high school Teena?”
“Yup.”
“Where she at?”
“Right there,” I said and pointed to my girl.
“Wait a minute.” He walked over to Chris, one of the guys he was with, whispered something to him then pointed at Teena.
Chris was fine too. He walked over and started talking to Teena. She was smiling and laughing, and the next thing I knew, him and Teena were coming toward us.
“What’s up, Teena?”
Teena gave Lorenzo a big hug. “What’s up, Lorenzo?”
“Y’all need to start callin’ me Lo. Nobody calls me Lorenzo anymore.”
“Whatever, Lo-ren-zo,” Teena said, emphasizing each syllable. I had to agree with her. I had met him as Lorenzo, and to me, that would always be his name.
Teena turned to me. “So, where we goin’, Nina?”
“I don’t know. This is a Lorenzo production.” I turned to him. “Where you talkin’ about takin’ us?” I asked, knowing that it didn’t really matter where he wanted to go, and it really didn’t matter what excuse he offered up for why he never wrote, I was going with him.
“Don’t worry about that. We goin’ to a little place I know. Come on.”
Teena and I followed them to Lorenzo’s rimmed-out Suburban. He threw the keys to Chris and we got in the backseat. Chris drove to a place called Jimmy’s, a little hole-in-the-wall bar where everybody seemed to know them. While Teena and Chris drank shots of tequila and played pool, me and Lorenzo sat in a booth in the back of the bar and talked. While I sipped rum and Coke, he told me that after I went away to Hampton, his father went to jail for murder. Since he was only seventeen at the time, Lorenzo had to go into a foster home until he turned eighteen.
“I’m sorry to hear that about your father. For real, I really am, but what does that have to do with you writing me?”
“’Cause he killed the man in our house, so they never let me back in there. They just packed up some of my stuff and shipped me off to this group home. I tried to tell them that I had to get back in the house to get some more of my stuff, but by the time I got in there, the landlord had thrown out all of our stuff and moved someone else in there.”
I looked at Lorenzo, still playing the mad role. “You probably wouldn’t have written me even if you had the address.”
“That’s not true, Nina. I loved you—still do. I’m so glad to see you, you just don’t know.”
“Sure you do,” I said, getting wrapped up in the part. “All that is easy to say now, but all I know is that you forgot about me.”
A very sad look came over his face, but then all of a sudden he stood up and started smiling. “You gotta come with me, Nina,” he said and started walking away. When I didn’t jump up and fall in behind him, he stopped and came back to the table. “Come on, Nina. You gotta come with me.”
“Why?”
“’Cause there’s something I gotta show you.”
“Show me what?”
“Come with me and see.”
“Come with you where?”
“To da crib.”
“Hell no! I see you after five years and you think I’m gonna go to your crib with you? I don’t think so. What you wanna show me, your dick?” I asked. I wondered if he said yes, would I say okay. Truth be told, I love me some dick, and that had been my dick all through high school. On the morning that my parents drove me to Virginia to start college, I even snuck down to his house so I could fuck him one more time before I left.
Lorenzo smiled at me. “I could show you that right now if you wanted to see it, but what I got to show you, you gotta come with me to see.”
“Why can’t you just tell me what it is?”
“’Cause I want you to hold it in your hands and know that it’s for real.”
“Sounds like we still talkin’ about your dick.”
“Yeah, you wanna see it, the way you keep on talkin’ about it.”
“You must be smokin’ that rock you sellin’. I don’t wanna see that dried-up little thing you got.”
“Cool. Since we both know it ain’t about no dick, you can come with me so I can show you what I gotta show you.”
I went along with him. We told Teena and Chris that we would be back, and it wasn’t long before we were in his apartment. I don’t have to tell you that da crib was laid. The whole place had a black and white theme. The furniture was white leather and just about everything else was black. He had every kind of electronic device you could possibly imagine, plus a few things that I had no idea what they were.
“I hope I can find it. I ain’t looked at them in years,” he said as he went into the bedroom.
I followed him and sat on the bed while he searched in the closet. I picked up the remote and turned on the flat-screen TV. While he searched the closet I flipped channels, wondering what I would say when he came out of the closet and sat down next to me, talking ’bout he can’t find whatever it is that he’s looking for. As far as I was concerned, this was nothing more than a clever way to get me here. I started to call him out on it, but I decided to just let it ride and see where Lorenzo was going with this.
“I know they’re in here somewhere. I never throw anything out.” The search continued for a minute or two more before he finally said, “Here they are.” He came out of the closest and sat next to me on the bed. “This should prove to you that I didn’t just forget about you.”
“What are those?” I asked.
“Here,” he said, and handed me two envelopes. They were addressed to Nina Thomas at Hamilton University in Hamilton, Virginia. They were marked RETURN TO SENDER, NO SUCH ADDRESS. “I wrote those letters to you and mailed them, but they came back.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “That’s ’cause I went to Hampton University, in Hampton, Virginia, not Hamilton, silly.” I suddenly felt myself getting all warm and sentimental. Not only did he try to write, but he saved the letters for five years.
“Oh shit, really? Damn, I feel stupid.”
“You should feel stupid. How many times did I tell you it was Hampton, not Hamilton?”
“A bunch of times, Nina,” Lorenzo said, and that’s when I saw it. I got up and walked over to his dresser to look at the picture stuck on the mirror. It was faded and the edges were all curled up, but there it was—my high school graduation picture.
“I can’t believe you still have this.”
“Never forgot you, Nina. I thought about you every day.”
I felt a rush of warmth when he kissed me. It was like it was all happening in slow motion. Maybe it was him, maybe it was the rum and weed, I don’t know, but it seemed as though his touch made my head spin. I felt myself losing control of the situation, so I pulled away.
“Slow down, handsome. We got plenty of time for all that.”
“All right, all right, but I don’t think you know how I’m feeling right now,” Lorenzo said.
“Yeah, I do, but we left Teena and Chris at the bar.”
“So? They’ll be all right. They looked like they was gettin’ along just fine.”
“Maybe, but I would be mad as hell at her if she ran off with somebody and left me with a stranger.”
“All right, all right,” he said, then kissed me. “We can go back for them, but you gotta promise me something right now.”
“What’s that?” I asked and he
held me tighter.
“Promise you’ll never leave me again,” Lorenzo said, and he kissed me again.
“Never.”
Lorenzo was right: Teena and Chris were getting along just fine without us. We got back to the bar in time to take Teena to the Escalade so she could follow Chris wherever he was going. After we dropped them off, I went back to Lorenzo’s apartment with him. As soon as we got through the door, he was all over me. We were both naked before I knew it.
There we were, both of us standing in his living room, breathing hard, and surrounded by a pile of clothes. “What?” I said as we stood there staring at each other.
“You are so beautiful, Nina,” Lorenzo said.
Two
While I was at Hampton I never really had what you would call a boyfriend. There were guys I saw ’cause they were paid and liked to give me money; guys I saw just to go out and be seen with—but they had money too—and then there was Raymond. Me and him never went anywhere. We never did anything together and he never had any money to spend on me, but damn, that nigga could fuck.
Just like I’d had other men, I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that over past five years, Lorenzo had been saving all that dick for me. I knew that there had to be somebody he was fucking. More likely a whole bunch of women looking to fuck a baller—a baller with skills. Shit, I knew he probably had a gang of women, but it was cool. I wasn’t worried. None of them had shit on me. And besides, I had history with him, and if that first night back together was any indicator, I could just relax and let it come to me.
And it did.
But you know there had to be some drama first. Like this one time we were at Sam Goody looking at CDs when one of his women walked up on him. I was on one aisle and he was listening to a CD on the headphones on the next aisle, so he didn’t see her coming. I’d been watching her since she’d come in the store, wondering what possessed her to put that bad weave in her hair, and we are not even gonna talk about her outfit and that ridiculous shade of pink. She was looking around, but as soon as she saw Lorenzo she started straight for him.
Well, Pinky walked her narrow ass up to him and threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips. Lorenzo started looking around to see where I was. When he finally saw me, I was looking dead at him. I just stood there and waited to see how he handled it. Lorenzo eased her arms from around his neck, took off the headphones and put a polite distance between them. It wasn’t long before he turned around and pointed me out to her. She looked over at me and waved. She said a few more words, then she walked out of the store.
When I asked him who she was, he told me that she was one of his sister’s friends, and that he barely knew her. “Come on, now. I saw the way that woman kissed you. You gave her some of that dick. Only question is, is whether she’s still gettin’ it?”
Lorenzo put his arms around me and said, “The only woman I want is you. Believe that.”
I always felt warm and safe in his arms, like, I don’t know, like I could feel how much he loved me. Still, I couldn’t let him off the hook that easily. “I hear you sayin’ that, but what I see is something different.”
That first chick went away quietly. The next one wasn’t pretty.
We had gone to the club and had just hit the VIP room when Lorenzo stopped dead in his tracks. He whispered something to Chris and they tried to walk me and Teena up outta there quick, but they weren’t quick enough.
“Lo! Lo! You hear me callin’ you, muthafucka. Don’t try to walk away from me!” I heard a woman yelling over the music. Lorenzo stopped and faced her, but Chris was still trying to drag me and Teena out the club.
“Let me go, Chris,” I said, struggling to get back to them.
“No, Nina. That ain’t nothing for you to be concerned about,” Chris said.
I kicked him in the ankle. Not hard, but enough that he let go of my hand. As I got closer to them, I began to wonder when Lorenzo developed this thing for rail-thin women with bad weaves.
By the time I got back to them, she was all up in his face with, “Why you don’t return my calls?”
“I been busy,” Lorenzo said, as I stood next to him.
I could see the fire in her eyes when she saw me standing there. “Who the fuck is she? This who you been busy with, huh?”
Lorenzo looked over at me and smiled. “Yeah. This my baby, Nina. Nina, that’s Karhonda.”
“Well, bitch, you know I’m fuckin’ him too,” Karhonda said and took a step toward me.
“You mean you used to be the bitch he was fuckin’, ’cause I’m gonna make sure that your triflin’ ass never sees that again.”
By that time, Slim was surrounded by two other women. Karhonda caught me off guard and slapped the shit out of me, before Lorenzo stepped in between us. One of her girls stepped up and swung on me, but outta nowhere Teena clocked her with a shot to the jaw. “No you bitches didn’t think y’all was just gonna group up on my girl and me just stand here!” She looked at the other women. “What, bitch? You want some too?”
Teena was my girl, and if it came to it, she was always ready throw down.
“Everything all right here, Lo?” a security guard asked. He was a big, huge muthafucka backed up by two more just like him.
“Nah, them three there gotta go,” Lorenzo said as he pointed them out. “And they don’t need to come back up in here.”
“I’ll take care of it,” the guard said, and turned to the three women. “All right ladies, let’s start making our way to the door,” I heard him say as Lorenzo ushered me back into the VIP room.
There were a few others, but after awhile, I was the only woman Lorenzo was seeing. Or that was the way he made me feel. I was his woman, and it felt great. At the clubs, I was the one on his arm, chilling in the VIP room, hanging out with the stars. It didn’t matter where he was at night, Lorenzo would always come get me so I was the one he woke up next to every morning.
He bought me a white 2006 BMW. At first I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t a new BMW, until he explained to me that he couldn’t pay cash for a new car at any dealership without them reporting the transaction to the IRS. Even though he couldn’t do it, I still felt good knowing he had cash like that. It wasn’t shit for Lorenzo to hand me a thousand, sometimes two thousand dollars and say, “Why don’t you go buy yourself something nice?” or “You haven’t been to the spa lately. Why don’t you spend the day pampering yourself?” At first I thought it was just his way of getting rid of me for the day, and that used to bother me, but I came to grips with it. One, that was a lot of money to throw away just to get some stray pussy, and two, even if he was trying to get rid of me, did it matter?
Lorenzo took me to Mexico for my birthday. When I got back I called Teena so I could tell her all about it. She said she was tired of smoking the weed that Chris had and was on her way to find some. I told her that I would ride with her. I sat patiently waiting for Teena to arrive, and two hours later when she finally did, she came with some fantastic story about what she and Chris were doing.
“So, how you doin’, girl?” Teena asked as I got in the car. “I like that suit. Where’d you get it?”
“I’m doing fine, and I got the suit off the rack at Neiman Marcus.”
“So, tell me. How was Cancun?” Teena asked.
“Girl, we had the best time, but I never wanna see another bottle of Jose Cuervo as long as I live. We stayed drunk the whole time we were there. We must have been on the alcoholics’ tour, ’cause it seemed like we woke up drinking. Everyplace we went they had shots of tequila. And then we had the nerve to go on a tequila cruise. So picture this: we’re already drunk, right, staggering onto the boat. I almost fell in the water twice.”
“No you didn’t!” Teena laughed.
“Yes, I did. We were dancing on deck when Lorenzo decides he wants to spin me around. I lost hold of his hand and went straight for the rail. Luckily, he caught me before I went over. So we’re standing there laughing about it, and m
e, like the drunken fool I am, spins around again. Bam! Right back to the rail. I sat my drunk ass down after that.”
“I just bet you did,” Teena commented.
The conversation, like any other conversation between me and Teena, was intense and all over the place. We jumped around from topic to topic while we rode around trying to find some weed. Finally the subject turned to men in general, and Chris in particular. “And when we got back, there was Chris waiting at the airport to take us home. Which reminds me …” I turned to her with a questioning gaze.
“What?” she asked.
“Teena.”
“What?”
“Teena,” I repeated with more intensity.
“What!”
“What did you do to Chris?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I’m talking about, Teena. Don’t sit there looking innocent like you don’t know who Chris is.”
“I ain’t doin’ nothing to that nigga. You know me, girl. Chris is just another nigga with money to me.”
“You must have done something to him, ’cause you were all he wanted to talk about on the way from the airport. I know at first he really wasn’t feelin’ you, but now all he talks about is Teena. ‘Teena says this’ and ‘Teena likes that.’ I got so tired of hearing about you last night I had to throw Chris out.’’
“Tired of hearing about me, huh? I’ll try not to take that personal.”
I threw up my middle finger. “Anyway.”
“What did he want to know about me?”
“Whether you were crazy.”
“I know you told him I was.”
“Well, you are out there, Teena.”
“Out there? Bitch, please,” Teena said as her cell rang. It was another friend of ours named Shay. The three of us had known each other since junior high school. She got married and they had two kids, which was the only reason she didn’t hang with us all the time. “What’s up, Shay?”
While Teena talked to Shay, I stared out the window and thought about how I was letting all the things I had planned after college get further and further away from me. I had planned to work for a year and then go back for my masters. “Yeah, right,” I said out loud, and Teena looked at me like I was stupid. I had been out of school for almost a year by that time, and I hadn’t looked for a job or filled out an application to grad school. I was getting so caught up in Lorenzo and what he was doing that I was losing myself to it, but I loved Lorenzo, and was happy to be anywhere he was, doing anything he was doing.