10. Kareem
Kareem
I didn’t see the inside of a courtroom until a few days after New Year’s.
It was cold in a way that ain’t have shit to do with the weather outside or the winter season.
I was seated at the defendant’s table with my wrists cuffed and heart jackhammering in my chest. It was hard as hell for me to relax.
My mind was constantly running at a crazy speed, analyzing and thinking of my next ten moves.
The prosecutors and my court-appointed lawyer were dressed in muted suits and bland dress shirts, as if they were attending somebody’s funeral.
Maybe in their heads they were. Mine. The judge, an old white man with salt-white hair who looked like he chewed niggas up and spit them out for breakfast, was thumbing through the paperwork in front of him.
I felt him sizing me up, and knew he didn’t see me as a real man—just another nigga in a lineup.
A menace to society. One half of a career criminal duo with a track record of drug dealing since we were teens.
He said something to me, but I wasn’t listening.
I couldn’t. I was too focused on the fact that Sawyer was there.
“Why the fuck is she here? She should be at home. At work. Anywhere but here. They already warned me what they’d do if they saw her . . .”
She sat in the back row with her hair pulled into a low ponytail and her sister right beside her.
She wasn’t crying, but she wasn’t smiling either.
That shit was almost enough to break a nigga down.
It took everything in me not to flip the fuckin’ table over and run to her.
To tell her that I loved her. But I couldn’t even bring myself to turn around to look at her again.
I couldn’t fuckin’ face her before I had a plan.
My cousin, King, was also in court. He already knew to watch out for Sawyer in my absence if shit didn’t go my way. He was my eyes and ears on the outside.
The judge cleared his throat, reeling me back into reality.
My new charges were handed down. My bail was denied.
Of course. I fully intended for them to throw the book at my black ass.
After all, I was an escaped felon.All the other words after that sounded like the teacher from Charlie Brown. All I heard was womp, womp, womp.
Every time I zoned out, all I saw was the way she looked at me when they dragged my ass out of her apartment on Christmas.
It was a mix of her heart shattering and her worst nightmare coming true in real time, and I was powerless to stop it.
It was my fault in the first place. I could’ve broken into any fuckin’ apartment during the hurricane.
I could’ve fucked any random woman. I could’ve been having a baby with anybody else.
But it had to be her. And now, I had eighty-two days until her due date to fix things.
Eighty-two days to get back to her side.
Eighty-two days to right my wrongs and prove to her that I was the man she should’ve chosen all along.
I found myself repeating Sawyer’s due date in my head, permanently tattooing it in my mind.
March twenty-seventh. That was the finish line.
It was the only thing that kept me tethered to this planet.
The only thing that kept me from crashing the fuck out.
This is why you don’t do strings, mothafucka.
I hated being tied down to someone. Not because I didn’t enjoy companionship, but because it was hard enough carrying my own burdens.
Now I cared too much to let her hold her own too.
I needed a plan. Nah. I needed more than a plan.
I needed a fuckin’ miracle. It would take something supernatural to get me out of my situation.
Shit, I’d take probation, house arrest, weekly piss tests, or whatever else they tossed at me.
I just wanted to be there when my daughter took her first breath and every day after that.
I’d drink poison, drive off a cliff, get hit by a train, take bullets, or get trampled by a herd of horny Chris Brown fans—anything to make it back to them.
I refused to miss the birth of my first child, period.
I wanted to be standing right beside Sawyer, gripping her hand, hearing her cuss me out through every contraction, and assuring her everything was going to be okay the minute our daughter took her first breath.
The judge slammed his gavel down, indicating that the hearing had ended.
I pushed out a long sigh before chancing another glance at her.
It may have been my last opportunity, and I wasn’t about to waste it.
I stood to my feet and slowly twisted my neck in her direction before they led me away in cuffs.
I prayed that her eyes would lock with mine, if even for a second.
Thankfully, they did, and I mouthed the words wait for me to her . Sawyer’s lips didn’t move, but she didn’t look away either. And that was enough for a nigga like me to hold on to.
The metal cuffs bit into my wrists as two officers marched me down the concrete corridor.
The judge was behind me, and so was Sawyer.
I wished I could turn off the thoughts and the feelings.
Usually, I could’ve, but not with her. Everything was different with her.
What if she decided I wasn’t what she wanted?
How would I handle that when Sawyer had become my anchor in the storm?
I had to push my doubts and even all the comforting thoughts of her out of my mind and lock them away—from how she’d look as her belly continued to grow to whose features the baby would have when she arrived.
I had to force myself to put my feelings on mute and my heart on ice, and focus on doing my time.
Luckily, I was a Gemini. The way I was able to disconnect myself from people was one of the scariest things about my sign.
They started reprocessing me through the system—fingerprinting, taking mugshots, logging my inventory, and conducting a medical screening. I lied about how many hours of sleep I got at night, and my level of stress from one to ten—anything to make the shit go by faster.
I was given an orange jumpsuit and was finally moved from the holding cell to gen pop. I had a new cell assignment, which came with a new cellmate, a blanket that was thinner than a piece of loose-leaf paper, and an inmate number. Not my name. Just a fuckin’ number.
But the only number I had in my mind was eighty-two.
I had eighty-two days to get back to her. To show up. To change the narrative of our love story. I lay against the thin mattress, staring up at the nasty ass ceiling, counting the days backward from Sawyer’s due date as I began to plan silently.
Eighty-two. Eighty-one. Eighty.