“What time you get off?”
I was leaning in the doorway with my UPS gear on. At that point, I was only still working there as a means to have secured drops for Ching. I had been stacking so much paper. Soon, I was going to be able to pay off mom’s crib and even have a down payment for my own.
I told Aeysha that I got off at ten, and after hooking up with Ching, I would be home. Really, I had to hook up with Simone. I couldn’t believe that I was actually juggling these two women, but I just couldn’t help myself. I loved and respected Aeysha for the old, but I was loving Simone for the new shit she was dropping on me so heavy. I hadn’t even been fucking with any of my other hoes.
Speaking of other hoes, Eboni was in the hallway leaving out at the same time I was. As a matter of fact, she purposely slowed down when she saw me coming down the stairs behind her.
“Hey you.” She tried to be all sexy and flirtatious when we both reached the security door. I reached around her to open the door for her. She instantly put that phat ass on me.
Even she had been texting me, along with my other hoes, wondering where I been and why I hadn’t fucked with her. Me and Eboni had been fucking off and on since I moved in. I only fucked her every now and then– maybe every two months on a drunk night coming into the house when she caught me slippin’.
But right after meeting Simone, she was put on the back burner along with the rest of ’em.
I asked her nonchalantly, “What’s going on?”
“You. You can’t call nobody?”
I had to admit that when she licked her lips, it took me back to the last time I smashed. If I wasn’t really interested in that pussy, my dick damn sure was. I couldn’t help it though. Though she wasn’t the prettiest chick, Eboni was thick as fuck. That day she was wearing some dukes that made her ass cheeks play peek-a-boo and a flimsy tee that showed off her nipples when the wind blew. Her ass and hips were so fat that it made her lil’ pudgy stomach look small. Underneath a fly kango was her usual long, straight weave. Her lip gloss was shining. Even her toes looked nice in her sandals that showed off a fresh French tip pedicure.
“My bad. I been busy.”
“Yea, I heard.”
Despite the fact that I knew Aeysha would be coming out the house soon, I didn’t mind Eboni following me to my car. She was a good hoe. She never snitched, and she never gave no signs that anything was going on when Aeysha was around.
“Aeysha told me that you been in them streets fucking with Ching. I see you.” Then she gestured toward my car and looked over me, noticing my ice.
“I been doin’ a little something.”
“That’s what’s up.” On cue, when she heard the front door opening, she got into character after quietly telling me, “Well, stop being such a stranger. She misses you.”
I couldn’t even respond because Aeysha was coming out of the house just as I walked towards my car.
“Hey, Aeysha, beau! You on your way to work?!”
I could hear Aeysha giggling in response to Eboni as I got in the car. They met at the sidewalk and were so busy talking that they didn’t even notice me as I drove off.
“We have the uncle of Ron Johnson on the line, Governor Derrick Johnson. If you all haven’t heard by now, news broke this morning of the disappearance of Ron Johnson, who has been missing for a few weeks. Governor Johnson, are you there?”
When I heard radio personality, Asha Devine, mention the name Ron Johnson, I turned the radio up and froze.
“Yes, I’m here, Asha.”
“Now, you wanted to call in to tell Chicago about your nephew, Ron. Go ahead and tell Chicago how they can help.”
“My nephew Ron has been missing since July 31st. I just wanted to take this time to ask your listeners to please contact the police if they know anything about my nephew’s disappearance. After some police investigation over the last week, we believe that my nephew’s disappearance is the result of foul play. If anybody knows anything, please contact the authorities. Again, my nephew’s name is Ron Johnson. He is 6”, slim, dark skinned, with dread locs. He was last seen in Humboldt Park on July 31st. Again, if anybody knows anything regarding this disappearance, please contact the authorities.”
“Okay, Governor. It’s unfortunate to have you on the show like this…”
The rest of the interview went blank. Immediately, I was on the throw away calling Ching.
“What up, Pretty Boy?”
“Please tell me Ron last name isn’t Johnson.”
“What the fuck is you talking about?”
“Indiana.” That’s all I needed to say for Ching to know what and who I was referring to.
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Governor on the radio looking for his nephew that went missing July 31st. His nephew’s name is Ron Johnson.”
“Let me call you back.”
Simone
♫ Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday!
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday! ♫
Many of Chance’s friends and some of the faculty that had grown close to him were in the cafeteria of Lexington House singing Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” in front of a German chocolate cake lit with eighteen candles.
Though we were singing with smiling faces, Chance looked unhappy to be there. He stood next to me with his arm around my waist and head on my shoulders. For the past few weeks, he had become more and more comfortable being affectionate with me. I wondered was it lust or just coincidental because he was emotional about leaving a place and people that had raised him.
As we clapped and cheered for his eighteenth birthday and independence, it looked like Chance was fighting tears.
He barely let out, “Thanks, y’all,” with his head held low.
“This nigga trippin’! I would be happy to get out this…”
Quickly, I cut off Germaine, one of the other teens that was almost eighteen and on his way out of here. “Aye, watch your mouth!”
“I’m just sayin!”
I could only laugh at Germaine because he felt how I thought Chance should feel.
“You all packed up?”
Chance was leaving Lexington in a few days. He looked at me reluctantly as he sat at the cafeteria table. He took a plastic fork and began to jab at a piece of cake that someone put in front of him.
“I guess so,” he finally answered me.
Sitting beside him with my own cake, I asked him, “Why are you so scared of leaving?”
“I already told you. It’s crazy out there. Even crazier for a nigga with no money.”
“Chance, you’ve been out there. You live here, but you went to school out there. You hung out out there.”
“But I always had a place to come home to.”
“We aren’t just throwing you out there. We’re giving you somewhere to live.”
“For three more years, and then what? Then what am I going to do?”
“Chance, by then, you will be in school and working. You will have life figured out. You’re over reacting.”
“How do you know? What if I don’t? I barely graduated. What college gone let me in? I’m gone end up like these other niggas– on the corner trying to sell whateva I can to get by. I spent my entire life in here, having nothing and wondering where I belong, just to end up still tryin’ to figure out where I belong.”
I honestly felt sorry for him. I didn’t have an answer. The eerie part was that he looked at me so longingly and impatiently, actually waiting for me to give him one.
But all that I could assure him was that we would help him, that Lexington would always be there for him– especially me.
Tammy
Sleeping with Donte wasn’t right. There were other things that I needed to be focused on; like Jimmy. But there was little that I could do until he was caught. After that scare at the sports bar, I decided it would be best to stay in t
he house until the police arrested him.
Being caught between an ex-boyfriend trying to kill me and a best friend that didn’t know that I loved him was only putting me in more of a shithole. I knew in my heart that this wasn’t an ideal situation, but, as me and Donte lay in my bed, once again riding one another until sweat dripped from our brows and I could feel the creamy reactions of our love running down my leg, it felt so right to me. I was remembering the man that I had begun to fall for before I idiotically allowed Jimmy to sweep me away.
I cursed loving inspirations into his ear between short, heavy breaths. I praised how good he fucked me. I adored how his length reached my stomach and how his width was such a tight fit inside of my walls. I sucked his earlobe as he lay on top of me, consistently probing my pussy with long, deep strokes that made me delusional.
“Urrrrgh. Shit!”
He was cumming, and I was sad. I didn’t want it to end. His body weight on top of mine felt right. Being in his home felt right. Us being together just felt right.
However, after sitting on the side of the bed and taking off the condom, he told me, “Good night”, and actually stood to leave.
“You’re not sleeping with me tonight?”
Donte had slept with me every night since I got there. He hadn’t missed one night.
“Naw, not tonight,” he said so nonchalantly that it hurt.
In offense, I sat up, holding the blanket to my chest to shield my breasts from the cold air. “Why not?”
“We can’t be fucking like this and laying up. Sex plus time equals feelings.”
“So you’re scared of catching feelings?”
“Hell naw,” he said so fast that it cut like a knife.
“So the issue is me catching feelings?”
Just like men do, he just stood there looking stupid. Our sex had turned into a serious conversation that he wasn’t prepared for. His dick was still hard as he stood in the middle of the floor in the guest bedroom in boxers. Even in my anger, it was hard for me not to admire his body.
When he avoided the question with silence, he’d given me my answer. Though he had definitely been keeping me in the friend zone, I thought it was because he was scared of his own feelings, since I had toyed with them previously.
But I had spent the last few weeks convincingly fucking and sucking that scariness away, so I thought.
“What if I already have feelings?”
I decided to just put it out there. Fuck it. I was ready to put it all out there.
But, unfortunately, Donte wasn’t ready to accept it. “Tammy, you got a lot going on.”
“Don’t give me excuses, Donte.”
“We’ve been down this road before.”
“And you’re not willing to go down that road again?”
The way he condescendingly looked at me made me feel like shit. I was a grown ass woman, so I knew better than to childishly think that just because I was fucking this man it meant that we were on the road to a relationship. However, the fact that he wouldn’t even consider being with his best friend, a woman that he loved enough to hold every night for weeks, to protect every night for weeks, and tell his every secret for years, offended the fuck out of me.
Again, he’d used silence to give me an answer. The fact that he couldn’t even open his fucking mouth and talk to me hurt even more.
In response to the anguish in my eyes, he simply asked, “Do you want me to leave?”
“Hell, you were leaving anyway, Donte.”
Many pieces of my newly broken heart wanted to ask him to stay, to beg him not to walk out, as I watched him leave the room.
But he was closing the door behind himself before I could muster up the courage to do so.
Simone
Something was wrong with Omari that night. He’d come into my house silent and agitated. It was obvious that a lot was on his mind.
For hours we sat damn near in silence watching a movie. Though he still held me as we sat closely on the couch, it was obviously something wrong with him.
There was damn sure something wrong with me.
At this point, Omari and I had been together for almost four months. I had never been invited to his home. Though he stayed with me until very early hours of the morning, he never stayed overnight or for days. I fucked with enough married men to know that those were moves of a man that had a woman at home.
The more I realized it, the more it broke my heart. It put me back into a place that I thought I had successfully escaped from. I thought that I had finally won. I thought that I finally had a good man that was mine and that I didn’t have to share. But, as he continuously excused himself to talk on the phone, an eerie and familiar feeling of heartbreak came over me.
“I gotta go,” he said as he came back into the living room.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“It’s late. I have to go to work in the morning.”
“You know you can stay here.”
With a fake smile that was suppose to convince me, he said, “I’ll never get any sleep if I stay, and I’m tired tonight.”
I saw right through that though, so I tried a different approach. “Well, I wanted to spend some time with you tonight. I miss you. Let me go home with you then. I promise not to bother you.”
“My house isn’t clean.”
I was devastated. As he slipped on his shoes, I realized that I was right back in the same shit. I was so sick of sharing a man. I was so sick of a man thinking me good enough to fuck, but not good enough to come home too.
I was so fucking tired of losing. I was so wrapped up in the feeling of finally having a regular relationship with Omari that I wasn’t willing to let that feeling go.
But I did let him go. I lovingly kissed him goodbye and looked into those beautiful gray eyes praying that my women’s intuition was just being a dramatic lying bitch.
“Oh, here you go,” Omari said reaching into the pocket of his shorts. “I told you that I was going to get you those shoes and handbag you wanted from Neiman Marcus.” As Omari spoke, he reached into his pockets, counted out what looked to be over fifteen hundred dollars and slipped it into my hand, kissing me on the forehead as he did.
I was short of breath as I told him, “Thank you.” I was fighting back tears as I let him out of the house. Regardless of my heart wanting to ignore the signs, my gut was kicking my ass.
So, as soon as I locked the door, I ran to my bedroom, slipped on a pair of flip flops and grabbed my car keys. Once I could hear Omari driving out of the driveway, I ran outside, hopped in my car, and followed him.
TEN
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2013
Omari
Ching never called me back Thursday. I didn’t like that. He had involved me with that murk without me even knowing and now he was being all nonchalant about killing the Governor’s nephew!
I was on my way to his crib when Capone called the throw away.
“What up?”
“Man, a lot.”
My heart started beating so fast and hard that I had to slow down as I rode down Seventy-First Street.
“Them boys just left the block.”
“Dics?”
“Yep. Homicide.”
“What they talkin’ ‘bout?”
“Asking about Ching. Asking about a robbery.”
I tightly gripped the steering wheel and gritted my teeth.
“They didn’t get shit out of me, of course. But they around here sniffin’, dawg.”
“Ah ight. I’m on my way to Ching crib. I’ll holla at him.”
“Peace.”
I couldn’t believe this shit. I was in the middle of a real life murder investigation. I went from being broke to damn near on my way to prison for murder.
I pulled up in front of Ching’s crib and hopped out so fast that I almost left my ride running.
The door was open since Ching was expecting me. On top of the fact that I needed to holla at him, he needed to holla at me about someth
ing.
Ching was in the living room on the floor sitting between the legs of Nina, one of his dips, as she twisted his roots while he smoked a blunt.
“What up, Pretty Boy?”
“Man, I gotta holla at you,” I told him as I sat on the couch across from him.
He saw the look on my face and told Nina to give us some privacy. Once she bounced and I heard the bedroom door close, Ching let me know that he was already up on game.
“I already know, dawg. Black called and told me that them boys was on the block.”
“What the fuck we gone do?”
“Nothing. Not a gawd damn thing! Why we would we?”
“They know about the robbery.”
“And?!”
“We was in your ride, man!”
“I got rid of that motherfucka! C’mon, man. I ain’t new to this!”
“I am though, dawg! I am!”
I didn’t mind letting my guard down in front of Ching. He was family.
Ching sat upright on the floor. We were eye to eye as he blew loud from his nose.
“Don’t tell me you scared, man.”
“Look, Ching. I don’t know if you forgot, but this shit ain’t my life. I ain’t no pussy ass nigga, but
do I want to do a bid for killing somebody? Hell naw! And who would?!”
“You didn’t kill nobody.”
“But you put me in the middle of the shit!”
“Them lil’ niggas took over a hundred thousand dollars worth of work from you! You didn’t want to show them niggas what was up?! Or you wanted to put in them niggas heads that they can just take from you anytime they feel like it?! Next time it woulda been you in that lake fuckin’ with them trigga happy ass niggas!”
Aggressively, he dumped ashes on the floor.
I didn’t know what to say because he was right. They hadn’t killed me by the grace of God and only that. They killed niggas everyday for much less than a couple kilos.
“Nephew, man, listen…” I knew that Ching was being sincere when he called me “nephew”, something he hadn’t called me since we were teenagers. “…You my family, dawg. I would never do anything to put you in harm’s way. I would never do shit to take you away from your moms and your girl,” Ching promised me. “But I need to know that you gone be cool, man. If them boys show up, you gots to be cool. All that scared shit ain’t gone do shit but get us caught up. You hear me?”
Secrets of a Side Bitch Page 8