by Noire
Carmiesha shook her head and snuggled up against him again. Ya-Yo wasn’t one of them hustlers who was scared to be real with his woman. He was always showing his concern for her. He bent over backwards to make sure she was straight and comfortable at all times. She kissed his chest. Ya-Yo had a nice body. He wasn’t all that tall, and he wasn’t buff like Dre or nothing, but he had hard muscles from lifting boxes in and outta his truck, and his hands were rough the way a working man’s hands should be. Carmiesha really liked that about him.
“So, you been thinking on what we talked about? You know, about leaving Harlem?”
Carmiesha breathed deeply. Ya-Yo wanted to take her and their relationship somewhere scary. Lately he’d been pressing her to move outta Harlem with him. To just leave the city and build a new life somewhere else.
“I thought about it a little bit.”
“So are you down, or what?”
“I still don’t know, boo. It’s easy for you to just sky up and bounce, Ya. The only one you have to think about is you. I got Mere’maw and Jahlil. And a business I’m trying to run too. It’s just not that simple for me.”
“It ain’t gonna be simple for me either, baby. You think I wanna live with my moms for the rest of my life? I love her, but I’m willing to do whatever I gotta do to give me and you something better. You know? We gotta be down to do something different if we gonna have something better, baby. That’s what’s real.”
Carmiesha pushed her naked breasts against his chest.
“But what about your job? And what about the shop? What I’m supposed to do? Just walk away from everything I’ve been building there?”
“I told you. I can put in for a transfer, Meesha. I can get a route in Jersey or Connecticut. My supervisor said he’ll give me the hook-up. All I gotta do is ask.”
“And what about the shop?”
Ya-Yo hugged her close to him, his hand grazing over the soft hump of her ass.
“We can get you another shop, baby. You can leave Toya in charge here, and we can open you up a second location. Before you know it your ass gone have a franchise going. You’ll have Locks of Love shops popping up all over the place. Ain’t nothing holding you down and keeping you limited to just one spot. Go for shop number two. Then number three. It’s all possible, girl.”
Carmiesha closed her eyes and pressed up against Ya-Yo, and she could almost believe him. She could almost see herself with a chain of beauty shops all over New York, New Jersey, Philly, and maybe even Baltimore and D.C.
But when she thought about Mere’maw and Jahlil, she just couldn’t see where they fit in the picture, and she said that out loud.
“What about Mere’maw?”
“We’ll take her with us. Whatever it takes to make you comfortable and happy, then that’s what we’ll do.”
“Yeah, but I gotta think about my so—I mean, I gotta think about some other stuff too,” Carmiesha tried to play it off, mad at herself for almost messing around and admitting that she had a son when she’d already told Ya-Yo that Jahlil was her dead brother’s child.
“What else is there, Carmiesha? Shit is getting hotter in Harlem every day. How you think I felt seeing you all fucked up like that? Your face banged up. Bruises every fuckin’ where I touched you. Even your feet cut the fuck up? This ain’t no way to live, baby girl. Me and you together, we can do better than this.”
Carmiesha knew he was right. All of what he was saying was true. Just remembering the fear she’d experienced as she watched him basing on one of Pimp’s boys made her start trembling.
“How long you think it’ll take before we can leave?”
“Depends on how hard we work to make it happen. They got some lots going on sale in North Jersey. I was down there a few weeks ago, and they already started building some nice three-bedroom houses for working people like us. I already know I can get a decent loan, but we can get more money up front if we do this together.”
Carmiesha nodded. She was feeling him. She was getting excited about what could one day be her life. A house? Outside of Harlem? The thought of getting far away from Pimp and his posse brought her immediate relief.
“Okay, Ya. I’m down to do this, but I wanna make sure we discuss everything together. I mean, we gotta agree on every step we take and make all our decisions together.”
Ya-Yo smoothed her hair and kissed her again.
“We gone do this shit together, Carmiesha. It ain’t me, and it ain’t you. It’s us, baby. All about us.”
Carmiesha closed her eyes, and when she felt his fingers probing between her legs she slid them open for him. Ya-Yo’s dick wasn’t tiny, but it wasn’t big either. It throbbed against her belly, and she knew he was ready again. She couldn’t lie as she laid there and faked a few moans. Ya-Yo had a decent tongue and didn’t mind eating pussy, but as hard as he tried to please her and as much as he cared about her, he just didn’t fuck her as wildly or as passionately as she was used to being fucked. Sex-wise, Carmiesha was strung out on one particular dick, and no other man could measure up to that.
But that didn’t stop her from riding into Jersey the next weekend with Ya-Yo and visiting the subdivision where they were gonna live. She squealed with excitement as they went into the model homes. They were small, but decorated like palaces compared to the way she’d been living all her life.
Carmiesha held Ya-Yo’s hand as they signed the contract and put their first cash payment down on the lot they had chosen. Ya-Yo was already talking about hooking up the future garage for himself, and giving her a free pass to do whatever she wanted with the rest of the house.
They drove back to Harlem riding high on that excitement, with their paperwork in Ya-Yo’s briefcase and the date of their next payment circled on their calendars. And not once while they were laughing and dreaming about the life they were gonna have together did Carmiesha allow herself to think about Andre. She made it her business to keep that niggah outta her head. But that didn’t mean he was outta her heart. It just didn’t mean that at all.
Two weeks later the shop was packed. It was Friday, and Carmiesha was looking forward to the next morning, when she and Ya-Yo would be going back to Jersey to take some pictures of their lot. It was just a bunch of graded dirt right now with the property lines marked off, but they wanted to have a record of the whole process, from beginning to end, and planned several picture-taking trips down there over the next few months.
She had transferred her Saturday appointments over to four other stylists, and was just getting ready to sew in some weave tracks for one of her loudmouthed drama-queen clients who didn’t trust nobody else’s hands in her hair.
“This gone hurt like hell, girl,” she told her. “But I gotta catch it tight if you want it to last awhile. Don’t worry, though. Your butter’s gone be whipped! You ready?”
The moment the girl nodded, the sound of shattering glass exploded outside. Once again, Carmiesha’s staff and their clients jumped up and ran over, peeping out the door and peering out the windows.
“Oh, shit,” Toya said, covering her mouth. “I think it’s Ya-Yo, Muddah. In his UPS truck.”
Carmiesha dropped the large spool of weave thread she was holding and rushed out the door. The streets were packed and traffic had stopped in both directions.
Ya-Yo musta had an accident, Carmiesha thought with fear rising in her gut. His truck must’ve careened out of control, because it had jumped the curb, run over a street vendor who’d been selling T-shirts, urban books, and mixtapes, and crashed into the Wong Chi’s Chinese restaurant directly across the street.
“No,” Carmiesha whispered, and before anyone could stop her she was dashing across the street. She ran so hard and fast her heels kicked up and slapped her ass. Surprise hit her when she saw two guys jump off the back of the big brown truck and run down the street and into an alley, but Carmiesha didn’t even slow down. When she reached the truck she jumped in the open door on the passenger side, almost tripping and falling back down t
he steps as she tried to get to her man Ya-Yo.
“Oh, baby!” Carmiesha wailed, her face crumpling as she sank to her knees beside him. Ya-Yo was laying on the floor by his seat wearing his dark brown UPS uniform. The truck had crashed and he’d had an accident all right. But Ya-Yo damn sure hadn’t been the one driving. All Carmiesha could do was scream. Scream at the top of her voice as she shook in rage at what they’d done to her man as he lay there with his feet bound with rope and his hands tied behind his back with duct tape.
Ya-Yo had been stabbed.
One time through each of his open eyes. But not before coming under fire from some gangsta niggah’s gat, and catching a bad one right in the middle of his forehead.
Chapter 22
Carmiesha moved through the next few months in a haze of grief.
She had a business to run and bills to pay, so she couldn’t afford to just lay in bed and cry all day. Ya-Yo had great benefits and insurance through UPS, but she wasn’t entitled to a penny of it because they hadn’t been married. Instead, his mother got everything, and she made it clear that Carmiesha didn’t have no real ties to her son. She blamed Carmiesha for his death, and said that bullet that killed him had been fired in retaliation for Ya-Yo standing up and making noise over that ass-whipping them cops had put on her.
“My baby got blasted behind you and your bullshit!” she had screamed on Carmiesha during Ya-Yo’s funeral. Carmiesha had just stood there crying in embarrassment as everybody stared at her like it was her fault. She had loved Ya-Yo, and had even made plans for a future with him, but Carmiesha wasn’t even listed on Ya-Yo’s obituary. Not even as a friend. His mother had pushed her to the end of the funeral line, and wouldn’t even let her sit up front in the funeral parlor, or ride to the cemetery in the limo with Ya-Yo’s family.
“I don’t know nothing about no plans y’all had to buy no house,” Ya-Yo’s mother snapped a few weeks later when Carmiesha called and told her the next payment was due on their lot. “Ya-Yo never said nothing to me about moving way out to no Jersey with you or nobody else. My son wasn’t hardly leaving Harlem. He had a good job here and was living rent-free with me. Why would he want to leave and go somewhere with you? You must be stupid if you think I’m falling for some gold-digging scam to get my dead child’s money.”
Carmiesha knew she was out of luck. The money she and Ya-Yo had put down on their dream house was gone. If she wanted to get Mere’maw out of that rat-trap building she’d have to find another way to do it on her own, but paying off that niggah Pimp was making all her dreams look like pipe dreams. She just couldn’t afford to do every damn thing by herself.
At first she had a lot of nightmares after Ya-Yo’s murder. In her dreams at night Ya-Yo would still be alive when she ran up in the truck. He’d be trying to talk and rolling his stabbed eyeballs around in his head, crying that he couldn’t see her. Carmiesha would be panicking in her sleep. Begging people as they stared from the crowd to please call 911. Her own cell phone would be right in the pocket of her work smock, but either she wouldn’t have any bars for service, or her nail tips would keep slipping off the buttons and she’d hit 811. Or 922. Or 992. Everything except 911, while Ya-Yo lay there moaning and dying right in front of her.
Carmiesha would wake up crying big, loud tears. Missing the way Ya-Yo smelled and the way he felt against her. She missed the way he made her feel when she was in his arms. Like there was no other girl in the world except her. Mere’maw would shuffle into the room and try to comfort her, but there was guilt mixed in with Carmiesha’s grief as well.
She had loved her some Ya-Yo. She really did. But the truth was, Ya-Yo was just a second-best love. A good second best, but a second best nonetheless. A small shitty voice inside of her mocked her. The voice told her that if she’d loved Ya-Yo enough, they would have already been long gone from Harlem and he wouldn’ta been beaten and killed like no soft-ass sherm. That voice also blamed her for not taking Pimp out of the picture a long time ago. Carmiesha had never even tried to get him locked up for raping her. She’d taken one good ass-kicking from those cops, then got scared and buckled under the shakedown hustle he had going. Pimp had turned her brothers into lowlifes and gotten both of them killed. He was even fucking around with her son’s head, but Carmiesha just didn’t have enough gangsta in her to put a stop to it before the boy became twisted just like him.
Carmiesha had almost wanted to kill herself. Somehow, every damn thing she cared about, that crazy niggah found a way to fuck it up. He had a hold on every part of her life and there didn’t seem to be a way to escape him unless she killed his ass dead.
After a while Carmiesha started plotting on that shit. She plotted to take his fuckin’ ass out and leave the world a better place. She was living between rage and grief every day, and her thoughts were always filled with anger. She stayed focused on getting retaliation on Pimp for the way her life had turned out, and the way Ya-Yo’s life had come to an end.
She thought about stealing Mere’maw’s gat and shooting him right where he had Ya-Yo shot. In the middle of his ugly-ass forehead. Or maybe, inviting him up on the roof for a quick shot of hot pussy, then stabbing him over and over until there was no more blood left in his body. But she just couldn’t. Not she couldn’t kill him. She couldn’t risk going to jail for it. Ms. Washington depended on her to help out with Jahlil, and Mere’maw depended on her for everything in her life. Killing Pimp might satisfy the anger in her soul, but going to jail would just damn the people in her life to even more misery.
To top things off, over the past several months the situation with Jahlil had gotten even worse. The boy was almost thirteen now, and he looked a lot older. He walked around wearing do-rags and hoodies and had real diamond earrings in both ears. When she asked him where he’d gotten them from all he would tell her was that his man had put him down.
Mrs. Washington had just about given up on him, and Carmiesha didn’t blame her. Mr. Bert had died a few months after Ya-Yo’s murder, and she was there with the boy all alone. Jahlil was tall and getting real muscular. He was smelling his ass and thought he could get loud when somebody told him to do something he didn’t want to do. Twice Carmiesha had gone over to the house and fucked him up with a broomstick for basing on his mother.
“I can take him,” she told Mrs. Washington over and over. “I’ll take him home with me and put him in that school off of St. Nick. I’ll find a way to explain it to Mere’maw, but I just can’t leave him here on you like this no more.”
As usual, Mrs. Washington refused to let him go. “I know you gave birth to him, Carmiesha, but he’s my boy. Me and Bert raised him up from day one, and whatever he is we had some hand in it. Maybe we spoiled him too much. Or maybe he shoulda been around more kids his age when he was little. I don’t know what we did to make Jahlil act the way he do, but I love him and I’m just gone stick it out with him and pray he learns better.”
Carmiesha had felt so damn guilty. The Washingtons hadn’t done a damn thing wrong. That only thing wrong with Jahlil was them bad-ass genes he was born with. There was no longer any doubt that the child was just as crazy as his father, and even though she still loved him with a full heart, sometimes Carmiesha looked at Jahlil and just didn’t like him.
And she sure didn’t like the fact that he was still spending a lot of time with Pimp, neither. Carmiesha knew damn well Pimp knew whose son Jahlil really was. When he stood next to Carmiesha you could see a lot of Carmiesha in him. But when he stood next to Pimp you knew for damn sure this child had come outta his balls. She wasn’t really worried about Pimp dropping no dimes about it to Thug, cause that would mean he’d have to admit he had fucked her when she was only thirteen, which was way before Dre had even gotten him any.
But Pimp was a crafty niggah. She wasn’t sure what kinda poison he was pumping into Jahlil’s head, but she knew everything about the boy had gotten much worse since he’d started hanging around him.
One time she’d ran up on them comin
g out of a McDonald’s by 125th Street in the middle of a school day, and screamed on Jahlil so bad a Jamaican lady threatened to call the cops on her.
“Bitch,” Carmiesha said, pointing at the woman as Pimp stood there drinking a strawberry shake and laughing. “You better mind your fuckin’ business or the cops gonna need to get over here for real.”
She’d pulled Jahlil by his jacket and reached up to smack him upside the back of his head. “Bring your ass on! I’m taking you right up to that school!”
Carmiesha was pulling the boy down the street when Pimp hollered out.
“Hey, Jahlil! I forgot to tell you, man! I found out about that guy for you, and you was right. That niggah is foul, leaving you out like that and taking all them wit’ him…I think a niggah oughtta get served….”
“Keep moving!” Carmiesha snapped at Jahlil. “And don’t even look at that fool!” She didn’t know what the hell Pimp was talking about, but there was no doubt in her mind that if anybody needed to get served it was him, because as far as she was concerned he was the foulest piece of shit in Harlem.
Carmiesha couldn’t keep living with the thoughts she had. She needed something else to focus her attention and energy on, so when Andre started calling sounding serious about his life and wanting to see her when he rolled down to Harlem, she agreed.
“Thug’s outside!” one of the street runners would holler in the shop door when he rolled up in whatever whip he had rented for the weekend.
Carmiesha would keep right on doing whatever she was doing. Even when all the other stylists and female customers were going dope-crazy over the notorious Thug-A-Licious, she played it chill and treated him like the Andre Williams who had been eating her pussy out since she was thirteen.
But secretly, Carmiesha looked forward to the weekends Dre came down from Syracuse. It was the only time she had something to smile about, something other than killing Pimp to completely occupy her mind. Dre had a way of making her forget all her problems and laugh like she didn’t have a problem in the world. He was a joker, a silly-ass nut, and he kept her mood up, up, up, whenever they were together.