by Untamed
“Friends?” he blurted, as if he were tired of hearing the word. “Yeah, so you keep saying, but what the fuck was he doing calling Princess ‘his’ baby? And what the fuck was he doing signing off with ‘Stay sexy, lovely lady’? And since when are you all messaging each other? I thought it was only emails and the occasional phone call. What’s the real reason you even left Pooch?”
“Wait, what?” I asked as I grabbed my robe from the chair beside our bed and wrapped it around my naked body. “I mean, we have each other’s phone number. Every now and then, he’ll message me, and we’ll talk. I never put stock into it, but where are you going with this whole Princess and Pooch deal?”
“I’ll be frank.” He placed his hands in his pockets and closed the space between us. His jaw tightened as he stared at me with such intensity. His next words nearly pummeled me. “Is Princess really Aaron’s child or Pooch’s?”
Shockwaves ripped through my core, causing a heavy flow of tears to stream down my face before I could blink them away. “Oh, my gawd. I can’t believe you asked me that. Princess is Pooch’s child. You know that. I’ve never slept with Aaron.”
He shook his head, as if he didn’t believe me. “So you keep saying, but all your actions and his say different. Then you made the comment that you left the hood for a reason. Was I your meal ticket out of the hood, so you can be away from Pooch? Is that all I was to you?”
“What?” I asked in disbelief. “Hell no. Come on, baby. You know I left Pooch because I was . . . I am . . . in love with you, and I was pregnant with your baby.”
“Was or am in love, Trinity? Which one?” he yelled angrily.
“I am. I am in love with you.”
That declaration seemed to take some of the steam out of Terrence, because he turned away from me and paced for a few moments. His shoulders slumped before he plopped down on the bed. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe,” he said, more to himself than to me.
Thick emotions gathered in my throat, and I swallowed hard to hold myself together. Then I sat beside him. “Believe in me, baby. Believe in us.” Gently placing my hand on his chin, I turned his face so that he could see the sincerity in my eyes and hear it in my words. “I would never do you dirty, and I’m not lying to you. I wanted to use today to make it up to you. Honestly, Big Cal helped me realize that I was being too hard on you about assuming that he and I had ever been together. I know it’s because of what happened and how close Big Cal and I are. I’m so sorry for making you feel like there was more between us, and I’m sorry for confiding in him about our marriage. I was wrong for that.” I took a deep breath. “I’m so, so sorry. Please forgive me,” I begged as I leaned on his shoulder.
After a few minutes, Terrence stood up and slipped his feet in his tennis shoes. “I don’t know, Trin. I need some time to think. I’ll be back.” He headed to the door.
I jumped up. “Dreads, wait,” I called out, and he stopped in his tracks. “Baby, please. Let’s not do this. This is us. We’ve been together so long. You’ve been my heart since I was fifteen. It’s always been you for me, even when I was with Pooch. You know this. You were my first kiss, my first love, my first lover, my first baby daddy, and you’re my first and only husband. Please,” I pleaded.
Exhaling, he slowly turned to face me. “Yeah, I have been all of that to you, but we ain’t kids no more, Trinity. Maybe a part of you wants something or someone new. I don’t know. What I do know is that I have to leave this house before my head explodes.” With that, he walked out of the bedroom and slammed the door behind him.
I couldn’t believe what had just happened. I stood frozen in place for a few minutes, as I heard Dreads’s Range Rover pull out of the garage. I felt like I was moving in slow motion as I went to our closet and threw on some old clothes. I pulled my hair up into a ponytail and lay across our bed and clutched my pillow. A few minutes later, the tears I could not hold back began to slide down my face again and onto the bed as I wailed from all the pent-up emotions inside me. My cell phone rang, and I answered it quickly, hoping it was Terrence.
“Baby?” I asked in a tear-strained voice.
“Trinity?” Big Cal’s voice came crashing through the receiver. “What the fuck is wrong? Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. Um. Everything is cool.” I managed to get out. “Listen, Big Cal, I gotta go. We don’t need to talk.”
“What? Why the fuck can’t we talk?” he asked angrily. “Wait a minute. Where is T?”
“Gone.”
“Gone? Gone where?” he asked, upset.
I shrugged, as if the gesture were visible to him. “I don’t know.”
“Did y’all fight? Did he hit you? Did he say something to you?” He fired off this succession of questions faster than I could answer.
After taking a deep breath, I said, “Big Cal, please just leave it alone, and leave me alone. I gotta go. Bye.”
For the next few minutes, my phone buzzed off the chain, but I refused to answer. Once my tears stopped, I rolled over, with heavy eyelids, and picked up my phone. I’d missed seven calls from Big Cal and none from Terrence. I put my phone down and closed my eyes. As I drifted off to sleep, I couldn’t help but wonder if Big Cal cared more about me than Terrence did.
Chapter 2
Terrence
Love made you do crazy things. I didn’t want to believe that Trinity would do me dirty, but right there on her cell phone were the messages between her and Aaron. Talking about us—about me. What the fuck was I supposed to think? Every time I looked around, those two were acting closer than close. Always talking. And me? Hell, I was on the outside, looking in. He was my cousin, and she was my wife, but neither one of them talked to me about the shit that was bugging them. Now, Aaron was real quick to get me involved when he thought Pooch was going to get out and fuck up his and Thomas’s life, but did my cousin let me know that my wife was confiding in him about our marriage? Hell no. It wasn’t even that the conversation was all that bad—well, not until that eloquent ending that my cousin wrote. The point was that after all we’d been through, my wife couldn’t come to me, and my cousin couldn’t tell me that she was going to him.
I was hurt beyond belief. I felt betrayed by them. True, it ain’t like I caught them sleeping together, and Trinity continued to deny that they had done that, but I could go only by their actions. Whether they had had sex or not, their actions told me that something was brewing between them. I could just feel it. I didn’t get married to be at war with my wife, and I sure as hell didn’t get married to compete with another nigga for her attention and affection.
I rode around the Chi for about an hour, just thinking and bopping my head to any type of gangsta rap that hit the airwaves. Still, the more I tried to clear my head, the more hurt I felt and the angrier I got. Before I knew it, tears were rolling down my face.
“Shit,” I said aloud, wiping my face.
I’d never cried a day in my life until Trinity. There was always something that would break a man down. For me, it was my wife and kids.
“Come on, T. Man the fuck up,” I coached myself out loud as my bottom lip began to tremble. I just didn’t want to face the possibility that my wife had feelings for my cousin. “Fuck.”
My cell had been buzzing like crazy, so I pulled it out to check who was calling. I figured it was Trinity, wanting me to come home so she could cuss me out for leaving, but I was wrong. I had ten missed calls, and every last one of them had been from Aaron. Humph. Coincidence? Not a chance in hell. I dialed his cell phone number.
Aaron’s voice came through after the second ring. “T?”
“Yeah, man. What’s good?” I said, trying to straighten out my voice.
“What the fuck is wrong with Trinity?” he asked without hesitation.
Scoffing, I pulled the phone back and side-eyed it before placing it back to my ear.
“Ain’t shit wrong with her. Why?”
He paused. “Don’t lie to me, man. I called her,
and she sounded so distraught—”
My temper flared and went from simmer to sizzle in one second flat. “Why the fuck are you calling my wife? Huh? What the fuck goes on in my household and in my marriage is none of your muthafuckin’ concern, Aaron. She may be your fucking friend, but she’s my wife. I advise you to remember that, nigga.”
“You muthafucka. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to like that? I helped you get your fucking girl back so she could become your wife. Or have you forgotten that?” he yelled.
“No, nigga. Have you forgotten it?”
“You muthafuckin’ trippin’,” Aaron said, then sucked his teeth.
“No, muthafucka, you trippin’. If you need to contact anybody in my household from this point forward, it better only be me.”
Aaron laughed. “You are really fucking jealous of my friendship with Trinity, aren’t you? What? You’re so fucking insecure that you can’t stand for another man to be involved in her life? Remember, nigga, when you was locked up, it was me who looked out for her and had her back. Me. Not you. Me. I was the one who had to watch that nigga Pooch degrade her and treat her like shit, while trying to encourage her by letting her know it was gonna get better. And if it weren’t for me, you’d still be in that damn gray box, looking at yo’ wifey from a wallet-size picture frame. So don’t fuckin’ come at me wit’ no bullshit about my friendship with Trinity. I’ve been there for her, and I always will be there for her.”
That nigga had really just tried me on my manhood and my gangsta. Both of which was legit as a muthafucka. I flipped open my glove box and saw my .45-caliber pistol resting in there. Cousin or no cousin, I was about to handle this shit, on the real. Trinity was my wife, and wasn’t no nigga gonna tell me how he was gonna interact with my wife regardless of my feelings. I had that ass. Oh yes, I had that ass.
A sinister chuckle escaped me. “Is that so?”
Aaron sucked his teeth. “Yeah, muthafucka, it is so.”
“A’ight. Bet. I see you, nigga.”
“I see you too, nigga. Anytime. You know where I’m at. All day, baby. All day,” Aaron said and then hung up the phone in my face.
I pulled over at the nearest gas station. That nigga didn’t know I was right around the corner from his house. I pulled out my bullets and loaded my gun. He officially wanted it with me, so he was gonna get it.
Not even two minutes later, I pulled up at his house. I stepped out, with my gun in hand, headed to the door, and tapped on it. Thomas answered the door.
“’Sup, cuz—”
“Where’s Aaron?” I asked, pushing my way inside.
“What’s with the gun?” he asked, clearly getting nervous about the situation.
“Where’s Aaron?” I asked again.
“Yo, T, what’s wrong?”
“Tot, I don’t have time for this. Where is your brother?”
“He’s taking a dump.”
“Good.” I walked to the bathroom with him on my heels.
“Bring me some damn tissue, Thomas. Fuckin’ wit’ Terrence done made me forget it,” Aaron shouted at the door.
I opened the door and pointed the gun at him. “Oh, bitch, you gon’ see angels, but it damn sure ain’t Angel Soft.”
Aaron jumped, grabbed the towel rack with one hand, and the sink with the other. “Oh, shit. Fuck!” he shouted as I fired off a shot into the wall above his head. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Coming to see you, nigga,” I yelled, then aimed and squeezed the trigger, pumping hot lead through his shoulder.
He clutched his bleeding shoulder, in pain. “You muthafucka.”
Just then, Thomas grabbed my arm and tried to wrestle the gun backward out of my hand, which sent a bullet flying into the hallway wall.
“Let me go, bruh!” I screamed at Thomas.
“Come on, man,” Thomas demanded as I struggled to get free. “What the fuck is wrong with you? We family,” he added, trying to reason with me.
The mention of the word family clicked inside of me. An image of my grandma flashed across my mind, and it was just enough of a reminder to stop me from fighting against Thomas and to lower my gun. Once he realized that I wasn’t a threat anymore, he let my arm go, and I shrugged away from him.
“We stopped being family when your bitch-ass brother decided he was gonna push up on my wife. Claiming to be her friend and shit. The way he talked to me on the phone and shit . . . Hell naw, I’ve been there. He’s in love with Trinity.”
My words came out scorching hot. Hotter than the lead in Aaron’s bleeding shoulder. Thomas stood there wide eyed and obviously oblivious to what had transpired between Aaron and me.
“I’m gonna kill your ass,” Aaron growled as sweat poured down his face and blood seeped through his fingers “Shit, it hurts.”
His words made me remember exactly why I was on some “Fuck this family” bullshit. I raised my arm and aimed right at his head. “You first, nigga. Send my regards to Grandma.”
Thomas ran in front of his brother. “I ain’t gon’ let you kill Aaron. He was wrong for what he did, but I ain’t gon’ let you take out my brother. I love you both, but this is my brother.”
“Move, Thomas.”
“No,” he said sternly. “If you gon’ kill him, kill us both.”
“My beef ain’t wit’ you.”
“And I ain’t beefin’ wit’ you. But this is my brother, and y’all are my fam. I will ride or die for both of you.”
With Thomas standing in the way, I couldn’t pull the trigger. Had Aaron’s face been in my line of sight, I would’ve, but I could not shoot Thomas. He was the baby of the family, and he’d always admired and looked out for me, more so than Aaron had. He had treated me as if I were his big brother too. I couldn’t do that to him. I loved my family—all of them, even Aaron. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t make an example out of his ass over my wife, though. It just meant that Thomas saved his life. My point was made. Leave Trinity alone.
After lowering my gun, I put the safety back on. Thomas and Aaron sighed with relief, and I backed up and leaned against the doorjamb as Thomas grabbed a towel so that Aaron could put pressure on his wound.
“Ugh,” Aaron shrieked from the pain. “Terrence, I swear it’s gon’ be me and you. Ugh.”
“Shut up,” Thomas yelled at Aaron. “That’s family, and Trinity is his wife, bro. You was outta line. Trinity ain’t your fuckin’ assignment no more, and she ain’t your woman. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Ugh.” Aaron grimaced. “Just get me to the fucking hospital. I’ll deal with this nigga later.”
“I love you, cuz, but you better stay away from my wife and kids. Final warning,” I said just before I turned and left.
I was halfway home when my cell phone rang. I expected it to be Thomas, but it was Trinity. “Yeah? What’s up?” I answered.
All I heard were sniffles. “So, this is it, huh? You’re really done with us? You haven’t called, and I guess you ain’t coming home.”
Her sadness shredded me. Pinching the bridge of my nose, I gave a deep sigh before I spoke. “Baby, I’m coming home. I just needed some space, and I needed to handle something.”
“Handle what?”
“Nothing.”
“What have you done, Terrence?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar,” she said softly.
She knew me, so there was no need to pretend like she wasn’t right. “We’ll talk about it at home. Just know that I love you.”
A grateful sigh sounded through the phone. “I love you too, baby. I love you so much.”
The sweet and sincere tone of her voice made me smile. “You do?”
“Of course I do. Only you. I’ve had poor judgment with some of the things I’ve done, but, Dreads, baby, you’re my husband. No one comes before you, and no one ever will.”
A single tear fell from my eye, and I felt like such a bitch. My grandma used to say women brought the female out in a man. I had
never understood that until now. I cleared my throat of the emotion. “No one will ever come before you, either, li’l mama, and no one will ever come between us. That I mean. I’ll see you at the house, baby,” I said, and then we said our goodbyes.
Now that my clearer head had prevailed, I decided to make another phone call. I dialed Thomas.
“How is Aaron?” I asked when he picked up.
“Other than mad as hell, he’ll survive. It was a flesh wound. They’re stitching him up now.” He paused. “You know he gets top-notch service, since he is the man,” Thomas joked.
“Yeah,” I agreed somberly. I paused for a moment before offering an apology. “Listen, I lost my cool, and I’m sorry. Still, your brother is trippin’ over my wife, man.”
“Yeah, I know. He keeps telling me that Trinity is just his friend, but I’m starting to think otherwise myself. He’s just too protective of her. Something’s up. I just don’t know what.”
“Well, find out,” I ordered. “I don’t know what it is, either, but I have to know. In the meantime, just know that I’m cool, and I’m sorry.”
“You may wanna tell Aaron that. That nigga is the one in the ER with anger management issues, not me.”
“True. Call me when you two are outta there. I’ll talk to him.”
“A’ight. Bet. Go home and sex your wife, cuz. You need it.”
I laughed. “You ain’t lying. Later.”
It felt good to feel like I was back on track with my wife. After today’s crazy turn of events, I could honestly say that I believed Trinity when she said she had never slept with Aaron and was only his friend. Something was up with Aaron. I didn’t know what the deal was, though. It was weird, because he claimed only to be her friend, and he had never truly pushed up on her, but he reacted to her as if he were her man. Maybe he was going senile. Whatever it was, I was a little concerned about having him around Trinity, because that shit just wasn’t right. But since I had no control over whatever was wrong with Aaron, there was one thing I was going to make right. I placed a call.