Turned Out by His Hood Mentality 1

by Diamond D Johnson

  I mean, I loved the nigga to death, but I would be a liar if I said that he didn’t work my nerves. Granted, he’s always had the ability to press that specific button, which would tick me off, but these days, it’s like the shit had gotten worse. He started annoying me more and more as the days got closer to Billion getting out of prison. Now that Billion was home, his ways had pretty much magnified times ten. There was no doubt in my mind that Reggie was jealous of Billion, although he would never come out and say it.

  A lot of his jealousy had to do with the fact that I had a baby on him with Billion. However, deep in my heart, I knew that Khari belonged to Reggie. I wasn’t proud of it, but yes, I had been fuckin’ Billion and Reggie at the same time. Don’t even judge me because niggas jump in and out of bitches’ beds all the time, but the second a woman does it, we’re considered a hoe, a slut, and everything else that society likes to use to degrade us.

  Reggie and I shared a daughter, which was my oldest child, who was eleven, and her name was Rylo. Rylo was made out of love; I’ll definitely tell you that. When Reggie and I conceived our first daughter, we were in a full-fledged relationship. He was doing his little thing in the streets, selling dime bags, pills, and whatever else he was into, and it was good. Hell, I thought he gave a bitch good money. It wasn’t until I started fuckin’ with Billion that I realized the things that Reggie was giving me were pennies compared to Billion’s money.

  Here’s the thing, by the time Rylo was born, Reggie and I had hit rock bottom in our relationship. I say that because he started making a little bit more money. Every bitch knows that when a nigga starts bringing more coins in, that’s when they start feeling themselves and forget where the fuck they come from. In other words, the cheating began. I put up with that shit for years, and by the time my daughter turned two, I’d had enough of his shit, so I moved out of the house and back home with my mother. From there, Reggie and I co-parented, but just like any other baby mama/baby daddy duo, I gave him the pussy each time he popped over and asked for it.

  By the time Rylo had turned six, Reggie and I were still doing the co-parenting thing and fuckin’ on the side. That’s when I met Billion. I mean, I’ve always known who Billion was because you can’t possibly be from Miami and not have any idea who Billion is, but I never knew him on a personal level. We met in a club. He was so fuckin’ fly. I remember him standing at the bar, and he started buying drinks for all the ladies in line… me included. Every nigga is a sucker for a phat ass, a small waist, and some perky breasts. Because I was so confident in myself, I can’t even say I was shocked that the nigga was all over me when he saw me for the first time.

  I remember having all the bitches mad that night because it was me who he had brought with him up to his section. We drank, smoked, and just chilled the whole night. It wasn’t that I had to give the nigga the pussy on the first night, or I had to do it as a way of thanking him, but the nigga was just so fuckin’ fine that I would have been a fool to not have fucked him. He fucked me in his Charger for about fifteen minutes straight, and I swear, those were the best fifteen minutes of my life. After that, he made it a habit to come and scoop me from my mama’s house. All we really did was fuck and smoke.

  I’ll be the first to admit that Billion and I were never a couple. Shit, the nigga was fresh out of a relationship with his first baby mama, Sidnesha, and he’d expressed to me on many occasions that he wasn’t looking for love. Billion was heavy in the streets, so it wasn’t like we could fuck all the time. When he wasn’t there to rock my world, I leaned on my baby daddy.

  I wound up pregnant, and when I went to the doctor and found out how many weeks I was, judging by my last period, all fingers pointed back to Reggie. It was so easy for me to pin the baby on Billion because it wasn’t like either of them were clocking my period or the last time we fucked, and Billion didn’t know that I was fuckin’ my baby daddy. I had lied and told him that all Reggie and I did was co-parent. Add on the fact that I wasn’t the only bitch that Billion was fuckin’ at the time, so again, he wasn’t clocking when the last time we fucked.

  From the second I told Billion that I was pregnant with his baby, he never once asked to have a DNA test done after our baby arrived. He fucked with me to the point that he didn’t even think I would ever pull some foul shit like that on him. On top of that, I was in love and smitten with that nigga, and he knew that. He knew how much I cared for his ass, so he just couldn’t ever see me doubling back and fuckin’ with my baby daddy on that level.

  Every chance I got, I dogged Reggie out to Billion, telling him how much I couldn’t stand his ass. It was true, though. Around that time, when Rylo was six, I felt like Reggie was so fuckin’ inconsistent in her life. The nigga popped up when he felt like it, and he was missing out on so many important moments in her life. The shit was just driving me crazy.

  When I announced to Reggie that I was pregnant with Billion’s daughter, I swear the nigga tried to kill me. I told him about the pregnancy about a month after I found out. When I say that nigga beat the fuck out of me and damn near tried to kill my baby… I can’t make this shit up. The only reason I was able to have a healthy pregnancy is that when he put his hands on me like that in my mama’s living room, her neighbors heard the commotion and called the police on him.

  My mother was at work, and Rylo was in school at the time. Reggie was arrested, but because I loved my baby daddy and I was also stupid, I didn’t press charges. The courts did put him and I on a non-contact order for the duration of my pregnancy. I went through all this shit just to lie and pin a baby on another man. I knew not to press charges on Reggie because he was the type of crazy, where I really thought this man had a mental illness. I feared he would retaliate by having my ass killed. I knew the nigga wasn’t blessed with all his marbles, which is why I didn’t try him as often.

  Billion was there for me during my pregnancy. I mean, he wasn’t walking around Buy Buy Baby with me while I looked at strollers, car seats, and shit, but he made sure to give me the money to purchase everything that our daughter would need. He attended a handful of my doctors’ appointments, and we didn’t even have a gender reveal or a baby shower. I wanted those things, but Billion didn’t, because, in his words, he didn’t want to give people the wrong image since we weren’t together.

  He was in the hospital room when I gave birth to Khari, which was all that really even mattered. Billion signed the birth certificate, and in the eyes of the law, he was Khari’s father, but biologically, that baby belonged to Reggie.

  It was by the grace of God that my daughter came out looking exactly like me. I was able to get away with the shit because she had the same curly hair texture that Billion had when he was a little boy. What people didn’t understand is that before I put dreads in my hair, I had curly hair too, so she very much got that from me. My baby was only a few months old when Billion got hit with that charge and had to do five years.

  Although I hated the situation, I’ll admit that when Billion went in, we ended up being the closest we’d ever been. Maybe it was the jail talk, or perhaps he was just being nice to me, so I would take my ass down to the prison every other weekend and hook him up with some pussy, but in prison is when my love for Billion really picked up.

  While I was holding Billion down as he served his sentence, Reggie had come back into the picture. After being away from his daughter and me for almost a year, the non-contact order was lifted, and he was able to come back over. The judge had put us on a peaceful contact order, so if the nigga even so much as raised his voice at me, I could call them boys on him, and his ass would be back in jail. I wasn’t petty like that, though, so I wouldn’t snitch on him. Now, if he jumped stupid at me again and put his hands on me, I was going to do my best to get his ass buried under the prison.

  For the first few months that Reggie started coming back around, the nigga wouldn’t say shit to me. That had a lot to do with the fact that I was walking around my new apartment, toting a new baby on my
hip that he thought belonged to the next nigga but was actually his. When he came over, it was to pick up Rylo, and then he would bring her back. That year that he and I spent apart, I felt like it changed him because this was the most involved that he’d ever been in our daughter’s life. Although Billion had left me with a large sum of money when he went in, Reggie was leaving money as well for Rylo.

  After months of Reggie playing the silent game with me, he and I finally started back talking to each other. Eventually, I was back fuckin’ him. All fingers should point to me just for getting back with Reggie, especially since Billion was home now, and the nigga had all of a sudden got amnesia and forgot all the shit he promised me while he was locked up. But Reggie was so fuckin’ toxic, man. Even right now, this silly nigga was mad that Billion was knocking on the door to pick up Khari. It’s like, what the fuck did he want him to do? Blow the horn when he pulled up? Nah, that shit was lame.

  “Reggie, please don’t start your shit this morning. This man is here to pick up his daughter, and then you and I can go to breakfast like we planned. Damn, calm down,” I fussed at him, as I finished the last baby hair on Khari.

  I had been putting her hair in two ponytails for the last twenty minutes because, just like me, the little girl hated getting her hair done. I was the same way when I was a little girl, which is why, at the age of four, my mama had my hair locked. I loved my dreads, but I ended up cutting them about two years ago because they had gotten too long, like down my ass kind of long. Now, I had them where they stopped a few inches below the middle of my back, and they were still trying to grow some more.

  “You a female, so you don’t understand. That nigga banging on the door with all that authority, like he runs some shit over here. I pay these fuckin’ bills here. Nigga should have stayed his ass behind those four walls,” Reggie snapped.

  I kissed my daughter on her head and told her to go ahead and open the door for her father because she didn’t need to witness this conversation. One, Reggie was talking fuckin’ crazy this morning, using all of those curse words. Two, I didn’t need Khari to go back and repeat this conversation to Billion because she was known for telling people’s business.

  Today was supposed to be a good day with just Reggie and me, yet he was finding a way to fuck everything up. It wasn’t every day that we got to chill without the kids around. My mama had picked up Rylo early this morning, and Khari was getting ready to leave. But if this nigga kept on, I didn’t even know if I wanted to be around him at all today.

  Reggie didn’t live there, but he was right about paying the bills. He felt that he had to pay the bills since this was where his daughter laid her head, but him paying the bills, I swear that came with a cost because the nigga always felt the need to remind me. Crazy thing is, I didn’t need this nigga or his money. If he only knew the amount of money that Billion wired me the other day, he would shit bricks. On top of that, I still had a lot of money left from when Billion went in. He blessed my account, telling me to use the money for Khari and me and to open a business or something.

  During our prison talks, Billion was always pushing me to start my own hair business, where I either did dreads or retwisted them. There wasn’t a soul alive who could fix up some dreads the way I could. I was stopped in public all the time by people wanting to know who maintained and styled my dreads. I would always tell them that I did my own hair, and they would as if I did hair professionally, but the answer to that question was no. I couldn’t stand to be around a whole bunch of people. Call me crazy, but I loved the fact that I didn’t have to work because both of my baby daddies took great care of me. I loved it here.

  Looking over at Reggie, anyone with two eyes could see that this nigga was too damn fine. Just like Billion, he had that chocolate skin tone that I absolutely adored. When it came down to it, I preferred a darker nigga because something about those dark-skinned niggas with that dominant shit just turned a bitch on. I felt that light skinned niggas were too weak, and them niggas be in more competition to look better than you than these bitches, and I didn’t like that.

  Reggie rocked a low cut. He tried to jump on the wave train a few months ago by putting waves in his hair, but his shit just wasn’t swimming. A bitch could stand up in his waves; I swear you didn’t drown in them like Billion’s waves. It didn’t take away from how handsome he was, though.

  Reggie wasn’t that tall, about 5’8, and he had a medium build. He didn’t have crazy muscles like Billion, but the nigga was strong. Nice set of teeth that I loved, and when he smiled, his dimples showed. He was a nice dresser, these days, he was a good dad, and his fuckin’ skills were a solid seven. Someone else may rate him a strong ten, but because I knew what Billion’s dick game was hitting on, and I knew that nigga could fuck the toenail polish off a bitch, there was no way I could rate Reggie a ten. He could eat some good pussy, though, but that was about it.

  “As a black man, that’s kind of fucked up to even wish that another black man would stay in a fucked-up place like prison. Let me go and see where he’s taking Khari, and then we can go,” I said, ready to switch my ass out of the room, but Reggie pulled my arm to stop me.

  “Yo, change your fuckin’ shirt, man. You showing way too much to that nigga. You trippin’, man,” he said.

  There was absolutely nothing wrong with what I was wearing. I was in a distressed graphic t-shirt, and yes, certain parts were cut up, showing a little something, but it wasn’t as bad as Reggie was making it out to be.

  Standing on my tippy toes, I kissed his lips and left the room. The nigga was smitten with me, so one kiss to his lips, and he stopped bitching. I made it to the living room area of my home, and Billion was sitting on the couch with Khari in his lap. He had his arm wrapped around her, and from where I was standing, I could hear him complimenting her, telling her how pretty she looked today. I won’t even lie; that shit rocked my heart because Billion loved this little girl to death. In a way, it was like he was making up for so much lost time because he went in when Khari was just a baby.

  Khari adored Billion. It showed in the way she was smiling and looking up at him with nothing but love in her eyes. When Billion came home, the nigga could have chosen to go anywhere in the world, but the week leading up to his release, he had been calling every day, making sure that I had Khari dropped off to his mama’s house. He wanted his kids to be the first people he saw once he was back in Miami. It was cute because most niggas got released these days, and they wanted to swing by the barber, go fuck on some hoes, or whatever crazy shit they loved to do.

  Throughout Billion’s sentence, I always showed my daughter pictures of Billion because I wanted her to know who he was. When she got a little older, like three, I started bringing her to the prison to see him, but it wasn’t often because Billion didn’t like for his kids to see him like that. Looking at him, I just couldn’t grasp how a man could be this fine, and single at that. Prison had done his body so good because although he had always been solid, these days, he was huge.

  Today, he was in a plain black V-neck, and he wore black jeans with a clean pair of low top black and brown Louis Vuitton sneakers on his feet. From where he was sitting, I could see the brown Louis Vuitton belt that he was wearing. He only wore one chain around his neck, and an AP watch was on his wrist. Like always, he smelled good, and those waves were sick.

  “Where are the two of you going this morning?” I wanted to know.

  “Lil Bill has a football game, so we’re going out there and support. When they get another break from school? I want to take my kids out of town,” Billion said.

  Again, a wave of sadness came over me. I had so many chances to just come clean, but I couldn’t now because a bitch was in too deep. I didn’t even want to know what this nigga would do to me if he ever found out that Khari didn’t belong to him. Because I was scared shitless about this, no one knew the truth but me. I didn’t even tell my best friends and my mama this shit, which was weird because I told them everything. If
I could, this was just going to be one of those things that I took with me to the grave.

  “They just coming off Christmas break. They won’t have another break until March, which will be for spring break,” I told him at the same time that Billion reached on the coffee table and grabbed a piece of candy from the candy jar.

  He unwrapped a mini Snicker and gave it to Khari because, in the middle of me talking, she was trying to reach for one, but Billion had got it for her instead. All I could think about was the fact that Reggie had told her this morning that she better not eat another piece of candy. My daughter thought that she was supposed to survive off sweets. You could honestly just forget about trying to get her to eat real food because she didn’t care for it, and when she did eat, it was chicken nuggets from McDonald’s.

  Although we were all living in my lie about Billion being Khari’s father, I’ll admit that Reggie has stepped up, and he’ll discipline both Rylo and Khari. He didn’t beat them or anything like that, but he had popped both of them from time to time. Rylo was eleven, which was way too damn old to be getting popped, but if she ever got in trouble, he usually just took things from her, like her phone and her tablet.

  My kids were good kids, so they never really did anything to get in trouble. Rylo got the curse of having my slick ass mouth, and that’s what got her cell phone privileges revoked at times. He still popped Khari, but it was for things that she deserved. I let Reggie give out the discipline because I was too soft. Not that I couldn’t, but as a little girl, I used to get my ass beat by my mama, so I just wouldn’t want to carry out a whipping or anything like that. Let me clear up what I said because I don’t want anyone to take it the wrong way and feel like my mama was abusing me, because she wasn’t. She was just a single mother raising me on her own, and that caused her to be so hard. If I was showing my ass in school, talking back to the teachers and shit, I would have a good ass whipping waiting at home for me. If I ever got beat as a child, it was for things that I deserved.