3. Blake
No This Man Didn’t . . .
“I, on the other hand, see you, and I won’t tolerate that bullshit. You’re going to respect me, and I’m going to respect you. We’ll work just fine.” He said that shit like it was a smooth line of a spoken word poem.
I wasn’t sure how to feel. I didn’t know what to expect when it came to Scotty. I went home to change after I dealt with Toyala. I also wanted to do some research. I texted Mel at the body shop and told him to send me a picture of Scotty. He took a great candid photo of him and sent it to me.
He was fine as hell, with his red ass. I took that shit and put it in Google and came up with not a damn thing.
What the hell was that? Now, he stood in front of me and told me that I had unnecessary masculine energy.
My mind was in shambles as I tried to remember the last man that spoke to me crazy.
I couldn’t remember, because I probably killed their ass.
I tried to pinpoint his energy, but it was foreign to me. New energy had entered the chat. “You’re not from around here, huh?”
His smirk was subtle. “Is it that obvious? Nah, I’m from Chicago.”
That made sense. I couldn’t say that I’d ever met a man from Chicago, but I heard about them. They were a tough group from what I heard. “That makes some sense, I guess. We won’t get into your comment about my unnecessary masculine energy.”
He pulled his phone out of his overall pants pocket and pressed his fingers on the screen. He extended the phone to me then said, “Put your number in so I can get in touch with you, and vice versa.”
See, that was that shit. With a titter, I asked, “You’re not going to ask? You’re just going to tell me what to do?”
He said nothing. He just kept his focus on me. My brows furrowed before I grabbed his phone, then put my number in it. When I handed the phone back to him, he pressed the screen. Seconds later, my phone vibrated in my back pocket.
I took it out to see an unsaved number. My finger pressed the reject button on the screen because I knew it was him. When I glanced at him, he wore an expression that was hard to read.
“I think that we need to sit down to get to know each other better if we are going to be interacting in a manner where we need to watch each other’s backs in various situations.
Is that cool?” After I nodded to his statement and question, he told me that he would reach out to me to set it up.
He pivoted his body, prepared to walk away.
Before he did, he looked at me. “Oh, and in the words of my Jilly from Philly, if I can tell you what to do, then I can tell you what to do.”
What the fuck! Bitch, say something back! I was caught so off guard by his words that I didn’t get a chance to say anything back. I was so disappointed in myself. There was no way that I would let this nigga handle me.
A Few Days Later
Let’s Rap . . .
Today was a productive day of shopping for my newest client, Leslie.
We got a late start because she was already thirty weeks pregnant.
Social media was a strong avenue of promotion that some people overlooked.
I certainly did at one point. A business mentor of mine told me to invest in a social media marketing director.
I took the advice, and it was the best decision I ever made.
In the beginning of my business, I was active on social media as far as showing my face.
After I got my face tat, I did pull back because of the fear that I would lose business.
Nadia thought otherwise and turned my entire appearance into a social media campaign.
When I thought I would lose potential business, my appearance opened me up to different levels of clientele.
Eventually, brands began to reach out to me because my appearance opened their brand to a different kind of customers.
I was told that my appearance made their product seem attainable for those who may not have thought it was.
I took offense to that. I felt like they insinuated my tattoos spoke to a lower class of people.
I told that particular brand to kiss my ass, and I stopped using and referring them to my clients.
“Nadia, when does our next campaign go live again?” I really could have gotten my ass up from my desk to walk across the hall to her office, but I wanted to be lazy today. Plus, my feet were on fire from wearing heels most of the day because we taped content while I shopped.
Certain stores allowed and often asked me to tape my shopping trips in their stores.
It was great promotion for them because of my followers numbers.
Across all of my social media platforms—Threads, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram—I had over three million followers.
About 15 percent of my business’s income came from my monetization from those platforms.
When I taped shopping content, I wore heels most of the time. There were times when I wore sneakers, but it depended on what I shopped for. Today was clothing shopping, so it was heels all the way.
Nadia walked into my office. My eyes closed as a giggle escaped my lips. This girl had an addiction to Fruit Roll-Ups. She had a huge drawer of them in her office. “I’m going to edit the videos, have them proofed, then I think we’ll set it for two weeks out.”
That sounded good to me. “That works. Oh, I got the invitation to Kaycee’s baby shower. I told Mrs. Joanne to decline the invitation.” Mrs. Joanne was my assistant.
Nadia chortled. “Damn, you’re not going to go to her baby shower so she can brag about you? That’s cold-blooded.”
My brows lowered and kissed toward the middle. “Nadia, don’t damn play with me. That lady can kiss my ass. Our contract has been satisfied, and I don’t like her. There is no reason for me to go to her baby shower.”
Nadia continued to laugh. She was silly as hell and so lighthearted.
At twenty-four, she had a bright future.
I tried as much as I could to put her up on game about different parts of life.
Like myself, she came from a two-parent household, and her parents were still together.
Her parents weren’t cut from the same cloth that mine were, though, but they were the sweetest people.
I plucked Nadia when she was a junior in college, and she’d been with me ever since.
The knock on my office door caught our attention. Mrs. Joanne came in with a smile. “Blakeney, you have a very handsome visitor. Would you like me to have him come back?”
My laughter wanted to stay inside, but the way Mrs. Joanne’s nosy brow was arched demanded a laugh.
I loved her old ass. She was a friend of my mother’s that I’d hired three years ago.
After her husband passed, my mother was worried about her and all the idle time that she had.
I offered her the assistant position to give her something to do, and she was amazing at it.
Four years later, and she was a part of the glue that held my company together.
“Yes, Mrs. Joanne. You can send him back,” I told her. She was a mess.
When she grabbed Nadia’s hand then told her that I would need privacy because whoever it was, was a whole lot of man, I chortled. Her words made me look back at my camera monitor to see who it was. My smile fell immediately. What the hell?
What was Scotty doing here? How did he even know about here? Mrs. Joanne was right. He was a whole lot of man. Moments later, he walked into my office.
“Miss Blakeney, how are you today? This is an extremely nice building you have here,” he complimented. Without instructions, he took a seat on the couch that was in my office.
I took him in. He leaned back and stretched his arms out. One of his long legs extended. It was a cool day, which explained his sweatsuit attire with the matching sneakers.
“How tall are you?” I absentmindedly asked. I knew that he was taller than my five-feet-six-inch height, based on the other day. The way he sat on my couch told me that if he had both feet on the ground, his knees would probably be in his chest.
His eyes roamed down his body before they met my eyes. “I’m six-three, with your short ass.” He tittered with his words. “I came to take you to dinner.”
The bridge of my nose scrunched. “You have a problem with asking, don’t you? This is the second time that you told me what to do.”
He smirked with a chuckle. “And it’s going to be the second time that you do what I tell you to do. Where you wanna go to eat? I’m new, so I don’t know the good food spots.”
Don’t you let that man handle you like this! You are Blake, bitch! My back straightened. “I can’t go to dinner tonight. I have other plans.”
He didn’t need to know that my other plan was to go to bed after I dropped some clothes off to Q’amie’s house for Cora. I had to reclaim my womanhood from this man because I could already see that he was a problem.
Scotty’s head tilted. His freckles, greenish-gray eyes, and lightly ginger hair color made him stand out.
I normally was attracted to dark-skinned men, but there was something about him that rattled me.
He was probably the only man, outside of Seneca and Stitch, who wasn’t intimidated by me. Nothing I said fazed him.
“Okay, bet.” He stood to his feet then walked toward the door. “I’m going to catch you later.”
That was it. He left my office without a second thought. That was surprising, but it gave me such pride. Yeah, that nigga wasn’t going to handle me. Second time me doing what he said, my ass.