by Shan
“It’s cool. It is what it is,” KaeDee said and sighed. I had never seen my bruh look so sad and that bothered me for real. I ain’t know what that shit felt like, and I didn’t wanna know. It was one of the reasons why I tried so hard to keep Briana out these streets. I knew I wouldn’t be able to take losing her to that dope shit, and I ain’t know why everybody didn’t understand that. A nigga was just trying to stay sane. I seen the goonie Tramell lose his shawty, and now the bruh KaeDee was going through the same thing. Them niggas didn’t even look the same. Those deaths had changed them, and shit, only time would tell if they would ever be the same again.
“Shit my bad,” Tamar said, as he stepped into his office breaking me from my thoughts. We all stood up and slapped hands with the nigga and then sat back in our seats and gave him our full attention.
“Oh, this my bruh bruh, Cass. I told you about him the last time we had met up over this dope shit,” I told Tamar, and he nodded his head. He sat back in his chair and grabbed a blunt from the desk. He fired up the weed, and then, looked over at me.
“A few of the lieutenants out here been getting hit real heavy kinda like the same way you was telling me some months back. They said these niggas come through with them army guns and hitting everything in sight. Niggas ain’t doing no talking and straight shooting. They take all the money and the dope and leave somebody behind, barely alive, to be able to tell what happened,” Tamar said, and I shook my head. “They left behind a pack at this last spot with the word Allah marked across it. I had been hearing about that shit floating around in the streets, but no one could ever put a face and a name on who it belonged to.”
“I think it’s them muthafuckin’ Arabs. That’s their product and me and the youngin’ Dae had tried a few times to get that shit off the streets, but it kept finding its way back out there. They denied being part of the coalition, and from my understanding, they trying to move everybody out the way that’s a part of it.”
“Well, I don’t like that shit. They fucking with the streets, and that’s fucking with my money. I done took a huge loss this week alone, because these nigga taking my shit and putting their muthafuckin’ name on it. Is this something you can handle, or do I need to put my people on it?”
“Why the fuck would I handle it? They can’t take shit else from me, because we ain’t even got shit,” I chuckled and shook my head. Fuck was wrong with this nigga. Yea, we had beef with these Arabs that was pass that bitch ass robbery, but Tamar didn’t need to know that. If he wanted a favor from me, then of course, I had my hand out for something in return. Wasn’t shit free, and this nigga wanted to kill my brother, so fuck him.
“I got thirty-two keys that this cat lost after running his mouth a little too much. You bring me them niggas that’s shutting these traps down, then it’s yours, and I’ll have the goon squad fuck with you from here on out. That little beef with your bitch ass brother is still my problem, and it’s gonna get handled. I heard he doing that county time.”
I sucked my teeth and sighed. I noticed that KaeDee fixed his tie and straightened out his suit. Cassidy’s eyes were damn near the same color, and he was biting hard as hell on the side of his jaw.
“I told you last time, do what the fuck you gotta do. Either way it go, that baby gonna be a Prince, nigga. You might as well say we about to be family,” I laughed and stood up from my seat. “You’ll be hearing from me soon.”
Me, Cassidy, and KaeDee left out of Tamar’s office with two of his guards following behind us. Once we were outside, Cassidy flipped out.
“I don’t like that bitch ass nigga. He can’t be the only nigga that got that work. Ol’ disrespectful ass bitch. Fuck he just gonna threaten the kid like we wasn’t just sitting right there,” Cassidy said, and I pushed him towards the car. “I don’t give a damn what Dae did; that’s still fam.”
“Chill, Cass. That nigga got this whole place lit. Don’t get us shot the fuck up out here. Get in the car, and let’s go. I gotta go back and talk to Selena and see what else she can tell me about this dude Fariq.”
“That was him the other day that lit the parking lot up at IHOP,” Cassidy said, and me and KaeDee looked at him and frowned.
“What you mean?” I asked him.
“Just saying that was him. Nigga with that curly ass hair and the tattoos everywhere.”
“Why the fuck you didn’t say nothing? All this time…”
I pulled my phone out my pocket cause it had been going off like crazy and realized that I had a bunch of missed calls and text from Selena. I hurried up and called her back hoping some shit hadn’t popped off and that they were all good.
“What’s up?” I said, the moment Selena answered the phone.
“I have been calling you! Why didn’t you answer?” Selena yelled through the phone.
“Man what the fuck is wrong with you? I told your ass I had a meeting. Is everything good?”
“No, everything isn’t good. Cuba was rushed to the hospital. She fainted and fell down the stairs.”
“What?” I asked, feeling my muthafuckin’ heart drop.
“Khi, get there now! We’re in a cab on our away to Baylor Hospital in Plano. Hurry up.”
“A’ight. I’m on my way.”
***
I walked into the emergency room and looked around until I spotted Selena and Briana. Selena hopped up from her seat and gripped her stomach as she made her way over to me. She was looking like she was ready to drop any day now. She flipped her hair to the back as she wrapped her arms around me and hugged me. I looked over at Briana and noticed that she hadn’t brought her attention up from her phone since I walked in. She usually would have some slick shit to say, but I guess she knew this was a sensitive time and chose to keep to herself.
“What happened? Where she at? What they saying?” I asked Selena all in one breath.
“I don’t know. They haven’t come back and said anything to us. I tried to go back there with her, but she told me and Briana to stay away from her,” Selena told me, and I nodded. I turned around and made my way over to the nurses’ station. An older white lady pushed her glasses up on her face and looked at me.
“Yes, sir. What can I do for you?” she asked me with a smile.
“My girlfriend, Cuba Lance, was brought in by ambulance. Can you let me back to see her?”
“Ahh, just a second.”
“A’ight.”
The lady began to type on the computer before she reached for a visitor’s tag and handed it to me. I peeled the back away from the sticker and stuck it on my shirt when the lady hit the button to open the door for me.
“She’s in room 7. Just walk through, to your left, and straight down,” she told me, and I did exactly what she said. The closer I got to the room, I could hear someone screaming and crying, and I hoped that it wasn’t Cuba. I was already thinking the worst, and I swea’ I couldn’t take no more bad news man. Soon as I got to room seven and looked inside, Cuba was hunched over and throwing up inside of a pink basin. She tossed her head back and squeezed her eyes shut and began screaming at the top of her lungs. I took in a deep breath and let it out, as I walked over to the side of the bed and grabbed her hand.
“Make it stop, Khi! Oh, my God, it hurts so bad!” Cuba cried, as she squeezed my hand.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked the nurse, as she walked back over to the bed with the basin now empty.
“She’s losing the baby sir. We don’t know why yet, but the doctor will be in here soon.”
“You can’t get her shit for the pain! What the fuck man? Why is she breathing like this?”
“Everything that we give her, she’s throws it back up. We’ve started a line, and we’re just waiting for the meds to kick in sir,” The nurse told me just as Cuba started vomiting into the bucket again. I was about to lose my muthafuckin’ mind. It seemed like everything was just coming at a nigga left and right. I had just found out about Cuba being pregnant with my kid a few days ago, and now, s
he was losing it. I knew she was pregnant with my son; I had felt that shit in my heart that I was finally going to get my little boy and with the woman that I had planned to spend forever with. I shook my head as Cuba began to scream and grip down on her stomach again.
I sat down on the bed and wrapped my arms around Cuba. She laid her head on my shoulders while screaming and crying. It was eating me up that there wasn’t shit that I could do to make my baby feel better. I hated to see her going through this and wished that I could swap places with her. I ain’t like seeing her like this. It made me feel defenseless and fucked up that I was in yet another situation that I couldn’t control.
“Breathe baby. Just hold onto me until the pain passes,” I told Cuba, and she wrapped her arms around my baby. I rubbed her on her back and nibbled on her ear. After a few minutes, her breathing had finally slowed, and I could feel her body relaxing.
“I lost the baby, Khi,” Cuba cried, and I continued to nibble on her ear and rub her back. “I don’t know what happened. I was sleep…and then I woke up in pain.”
“It’s a’ight baby. As long as you good, that’s all that matters,” I whispered into her ear. “We can have more kids as soon as you ready.”
“I wanted my baby.”
“Hello,” I glanced over my shoulder to see a tall white male standing at the end of the bed. He was rocking a white coat and a name tag that said Arnold Stacco, MD. I pulled my hands from around Cuba and stood up to shake his hand.
“I’m Doctor Stacco, you are?” he asked me.
“Khian, Cuba’s boyfriend.”
“Okay, well we collected some blood, urine samples, and also took a vaginal swab just to see if we can get an idea of what’s going on. Sometimes we run all of these test and still come up empty handed. We may never know what caused this. I will say that I am surprised to see that she is in so much pain for what seemed to be a healthy pregnancy. Usually, at this stage of pregnancy, when a woman miscarries, it’s almost like experiencing a cycle. The woman will bleed a few days and is only able to determine loss of pregnancy through a sonogram or a quick doctor’s exam. Being that she is in so much pain and the excessive vomiting, I will like to admit her and monitor her until we get these results back,” Dr. Stacco told us, and I nodded before I looked over at Cuba. She had finally seemed to be comfortable and was struggling to keep her eyes open.
“A’ight,” I said and shrugged my shoulders. “I guess we wait then.”
“Sure thing. I will come back in a few hours once those results come back. You guys hang tight, and they will get you situated and take you to another room on another floor.”
The doctor wrote a few things out on the clipboard he was holding onto before he placed it at the end of the bed and walked out of the room. I grabbed the chair that sat nearby and pulled it to the side of Cuba’s bed. Once I removed my jacket, I tossed it over the back of the chair and sat down. I grabbed Cuba’s hand and laid my head into her lap. She gripped the back of my head and sighed as she lightly rubbed her fingers over the waves in my head until the both of us had drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 16
Cassidy
I stood outside of Tangie’s place and waited for her to come to door. The moment she pulled the door open, I rushed inside and threw my hands up to my head. Tangie had finally braided a nigga up, so my shit wasn’t all over my head even though, at times, I liked the wild look. It was my signature look along with my two different colored eyes. When everybody mentioned Cass, the first thing they would say was the crazy nigga with the wild hair and funny looking eyes. My pops would always tell my mama to cut my shit off cause he felt like I was too easily identifiable by the police. I wouldn’t let my mama touch my damn hair though and always made sure I kept it out the way if I was ever doing shit that was against the law.
“Can I smoke this in here?” I asked Tangie, referring to the blunt that I pulled from behind my ear. My got damn nerves was all bad, and I was practically losing it. I had all this shit that I was holding onto that I needed to tell KaeDee and Khi, but it seemed like every time I got a chance to say something, the timing just wasn’t right. What I had to explain needed to be done in a cool and collected environment, but wasn’t like that shit was going to happen no time soon. When Tangie gave me the okay to fire up the weed, I pulled a lighter and quickly lit the tip with it. She was the only person that I could talk to about this shit, because I had to explain to her back then what was going down. I never knew that things were going to go this far though. I figured that me going to prison and doing that bid was their payback and that would be the end of it, but hell nah. Like Tangie said, that nigga Fariq wasn’t going to stop until either he or I was dead.
“I’m guessing you still haven’t said anything, Cass,” Tangie said, and I nodded and took a pull from the blunt.
“Seems like it’s never the right time. Today we met up with the plug, and he having problems with these same niggas. I tried to slide the shit up in there that I knew Fariq when me, KaeDee, and Cass were standing outside and Khi was already ready to bite my head off. Shit just so fuckin’ hostile right now that if I say something, it’s just gonna split us up even more.”
“The longer you wait, the worse it’s going to get. You waited four years and Fariq and his brothers been out here causing hell the whole time. Khi them will be mad, but they won’t be mad forever. Shit, it’s not like you intentionally did that to that girl. She was stupid for putting her nose in her brother’s business, and you took advantage of it. Whether Khi them would like to admit it or not, that move you made put y’all on the map, and it kept them all fed and living good the whole time you were gone. Khi had to know that all that work came from somewhere and didn’t just fall out the sky.”
I chuckled and shook my head. “I can’t wait to murder that nigga Fariq tho Ma’, I ain’t even gonna lie. That nigga been fucking with me for too muthafuckin’ long. Sending his people after me while I was locked up, then…man, shit just crazy. Fuck it, let me text Khi real quick,” I told Tangie, as I pulled out my cell phone.
“I see you getting better at working your damn phone,” Tangie said with a laugh.
“I still don’t like using it. This little thing knows too much. It’s like a little handheld computer or something. This lil Siri bitch be talking about what can she help me with. Bitch not about to get me caught up. She can’t help me with shit.”
“You so damn paranoid boy. Technology is really something these days. I can only imagine what these phones will be able to do in the next five years or so.”
“It won’t even matter cause I still ain’t gonna wanna use these bitches,” I chuckled, as I went to send the bruh a text.
Me: I need to talk to you. It’s important.
Send.
I slid the phone back into my pocket and took a pull off my blunt. Looking at Tangie had me feeling a little more at ease. She was only wearing a tank and some boy shorts, so I knew she was ready for a nigga. I had been putting it down on her every minute I got since I took her down through there in her office the other day. She couldn’t get enough of the kid, and I couldn’t get enough of her little ass either. We had been fuckin’ like rabbits, and I was trying to mark my territory and plant a few seeds, but her ass took them damn birth control pills faithfully. I thought about hiding them shits and trapping her ass. I ain’t even want her to think about stop fucking with me. I know I wasn’t the only nigga that did shit like this or even thought about it. Chicks wasn’t the only ones trapping folks with babies and shit. Like them hoes be saying, desperate times called for desperate measures.
“What you up in here cooking? Damn,” I said, as I blew out a cloud of smoke and made my way to the kitchen. “See you low-key feeling the kid, huh? Standing in this bitch with your ass out, got dinner ready. Can I get some head tonight, too?”
Tangie slapped me on the arm and pushed me out the way as she went to fix me something to eat. She placed a big helping of the lasagna she had made on the plat
e along with some corn on the cob and cornbread. I rubbed my hands together and sat down at the table with Tangie sitting the plate right in front of me. She fixed herself a plate as well and sat across from me.
“Aye, I was for real about that head, though. I mean, it’s just like old times. You might as well stop playing with me, Tangie.”
“Ain’t nobody playing with you. You know how I am. Some things I don’t mind doing, but not if you out here sleeping around shit. I’m not trying to be sucking another bitch’s cum off of you.” Tangie said, just as I stuffed my mouth with food and shook my head.
“You sound real crazy.”
“How so?”
“I ain’t out here fuckin’ nobody. When would I even have the time if I’m ducking and dodging bullets and shit? Come on, Ma. I’ve been with you every chance I get when you’ve allowed me to be with you. Give me some credit.”
“I guess I’ll give you a little credit, but you still gotta prove yourself before I give you any head,” Tangie said and laughed. She took a few bites of her food and looked at me with a smile.
“What about some babies? Can I get that yet?” I asked and wished I could take the question back. I sighed, as I watched Tangie blink her eyes rapidly and pull away from the table. She got up and went towards her room, and I rushed behind her. I wasn’t fucking thinking, and the fucked up part about it is, I hadn’t even asked her about the kid or how she was feeling about it. I had only heard about her losing our baby through Khi, and when I tried to communicate with Tangie through letters, she never responded.
“My bad. I wasn’t thinking,” I told her, as I pulled her into my arms.
“It’s okay. I just…just you here being here and mentioning a baby, makes me think about it. I really haven’t thought about it too much over the years. Only on the days that he was supposed to be here or the day that I actually birthed him. I have a picture of him, if you want to see it,” Tangie said, and I nodded my head. She walked over to her dresser and pulled her jewelry box off of it. She opened it, pulled out a picture, and handed it to me. Damn, I thought to myself as I looked at my son. He was so tiny that he fit in the palm of Tangie’s hand perfectly. A small tear slid from my eye, and I quickly wiped it away and handed the picture back to her.