Chapter 1 #4
He shook his head. “This is your home. Maybe the problem is that ten years you spent on the run has you behind on where you belong.”
“Maybe, but I’m here, right?” I tilted my head to the side.
“But you can’t tell me for how long or if it’s for good.”
“Because I don’t even know that, Pops. Can’t we just exist in the fact that I’m here now?”
He shook his head. “Until you have kids, you’ll never know how nervous that makes me.
How nervous I am when I don’t hear from you for over a month or how fucked up it was when you showed up here beat up, bruised, and shot after six months.
You’ll never know until you have kids of your own, and even then, I pray you never experience this. ”
I felt bad because he was right.
“I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m working through my own stuff right now, but I have no intention of disappearing on you all in the near future.”
He searched my eyes for a moment then nodded. “I’ll take that answer.”
ISO
EASTER
Technically, I rose a couple weeks before he did, but I damn sure wasn’t asking for a fucking holiday and an egg hunt.
Nah, instead here I sat, on the pier with a four-pack of coconut water, wondering what my son was doing.
Knowing my mama, she had him all greased up in one-color, sitting in IBS Baptist while the pastor preached about Jesus rising.
Glad I was missing that, but damn I missed my family.
I was missing crucial moments in my son’s life for what?
To protect him from a life nobody prepared me for.
Nah, I couldn’t go out like that. Maybe this was protection, but it was more than that.
Before everything happened, I was getting out of the streets, moving towards legitimacy and not looking over my shoulder with every turn.
I wanted more out of life than to be like every hood rich nigga who perished.
I wanted to live and give my son what I never had.
Too bad I was doing just that, parentlessness and enough trauma to bill a therapist in his adult years.
“My father said you could have come over instead of having him meet you here to give you this.”
I jumped hard as fuck, grabbing my piece in the process before I looked at her.
She wasn’t looking at me, but out at the water.
Even from the side she was so fucking beautiful.
She stood about five-seven with somewhat of an athletic physique and the thickest frame.
She wasn’t compact, but everything was proportioned in the right spaces.
“Damn, you don’t know how to make noise when you walk up? Could’ve just shot your pretty ass.”
She laughed. “Yeah, alright.” Then she extended the file I had requested from Lee.
I accepted it. “And my bad for interrupting your Easter. Thought his old ass was coming to meet me.”
She shook her head. “Trust me, you didn’t interrupt. This run just saved me from watching egg hunts and cheesy ass costumes. Thank you.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “You don’t fuck with any of that?”
“Nope. I don’t like the holidays.”
“Why?”
“I don’t have any reason. I just don’t. They’re a constant reminder of those who aren’t here anymore.”
I nodded, understanding her reasoning.
A brief silence filled the space before she spoke again.
“I’m nosy. Why are you sitting out here and not somewhere with your family?”
“Because I’m dead, shorty. I’m pretty sure you already knew that, right?” I glanced back at the water, feeling her eyes on me.
“Nope. I didn’t. I exist in a sorta ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ type of space myself; so I don’t often poke my nose where it doesn’t belong.”
“Yet you just asked why I’m here?”
She chuckled. “Yeah, because you’re sitting on the pier by yourself with a four-pack of coconut water like you don’t belong anywhere.”
That earned a laugh outta me. “At this point, I don’t. You're gonna join me?” I then lifted an unopened coconut water for her.
She shook her head. “I’ll join you, but no, I don’t want that nasty shit. It doesn’t even have proper temperature control. You drink it and it’s warm and cold at the same damn time.”
I laughed at her expression. “It’s good hydration.”
“I’m sure, but I’ll pass.”
“Suit yourself.”
She took a seat on the side of me. “So, you just sit out here and watch the water?”
I nodded. “And think. Sometimes I just need to just think. Ever since I was a youngin’, I used to like nature. Something about it always puts everything into perspective for me.”
She nodded like she understood. “I get it. I’m that way about guns.”
I looked in her direction quick as fuck, completely taken aback. “Yo, what?”
She laughed at my reaction. “I can’t really explain it, something about putting them together and taking them apart has always calmed me. Maybe not only guns, but any type of ammunition.”
“Yo, you can’t be saying things like that. Put some cushion on it, sweetheart.”
Confusion swept her features. “Why?”
“’Cause it sounds borderline homicidal.”
She shrugged like it was no big deal. Maybe it wasn’t.
Another brief silence ensued as we stared at the water.
“So, what’s in the file?”
I glanced at her. She had yet to look at me but kept her focus on the water. If she wanted to know what was in the file, why didn’t she look at it while in transport?
“Where are you from?”
“Here,” she responded honestly.
“Nah, I mean, how come I’ve seen your sisters and not you? It’s like you just popped up.”
More silence. Just when I thought she wasn’t gonna answer, she began to speak.
“I enlisted when I was eighteen, been on the move ever since.”
“Army?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Marine intelligence.”
I nodded. “Then why did you come back?”
“You sure you wanna know or do you just not wanna tell me about who’s in the file?”
I took a sip from my carton of coconut water then looked at her. “A little of both, but you know enough about me and I don’t know a damn thing about you. Not even your name, shorty.”
She laughed. “Liora. My father told you that back at the shop days ago, and no, I don’t know much about you, which is why I’m intrigued. I didn’t know you were dead until you told me.”
I chuckled at how nonchalant she was. It was like she didn’t even try, like she was that way naturally. In the same breath she mentioned me telling her I was dead, she also laughed.
“You gonna answer my question or what, man?”
She was confused again before she finally nodded. “You mean why’d I come back? Easy, I was shot in my shoulder blade. The bullet fragmented and I had to get a bunch of bone repair. Couldn’t think of anywhere I’d rather recuperate than home.” She spoke like it was nothing.
“And how is it now?”
“Straight, I guess.” She shrugged then I felt her eyes. She was ready for me to answer her question.
“He’s the nigga who tried to kill me. Did a piss poor job. If he was half good, he would’ve made sure I was dead.” I took another gulp of coconut water.
“Shouldn’t you be glad he wasn’t good at his job?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you rather be dead?” she asked a pregnant pause later.
“Would you?” I countered, eyes going from her shoulder to her face.
“Nah, I have a lot more hell to raise and life to live. Current circumstances are not forever. Now are you gonna answer my question?”
“Sometimes I wish I had, maybe this wouldn’t be so heavy. Then others I wonder if this is what they mean by a second chance. If so, am I squandering it?” I didn’t like the way my honesty with her made me feel, so I opened the file to focus my attention on anything but the current moment.
Most of what was inside of it I already knew because it was public knowledge, but things like where his baby mother and grandmother stayed were new.
She was silent for a minute before she spoke again. “The person who shot me will never walk this earth again because I gave myself peace of mind instead of trusting the system.”
“And you sleep peacefully?”
“Like a baby.”
I just looked at her, wondering how someone so beautiful could be so deadly. Did it bother me? Not at all. If anything, it made me want to know her more, even though I should have been focused on other things.
Shorty and I talked for a while longer, watching the sun set in the distance. Because there weren’t many lights on the pier, it was dark as fuck by the time we walked toward the parking lot.
“Honestly, it was nice talking to you, even though I still don’t know your name,” she admitted when we reached the blacked-out BMW M5 she hit the locks on.
“You didn’t ask for my name.”
She nodded, then stood straight in front of me, looking into my face. “What is your name?”
“Iso,” I responded coolly, feeling all the blood in my body rush to my dick.
This woman was beautiful, from her slightly slanted, piercing eyes to the way she rocked six braids mirroring the late Pop Smoke’s style.
Hers were much longer though and did something to me with the way they traveled down her back and contrasted that rich almond skin of hers.
“Iso. I like that. Well, I guess I’ll see you around.”
“We’ll see,” I responded and watched her sexy ass slide into that sexy ass car before she pulled off. I didn’t need any distractions, but something about lil G.I. Jane had me way past intrigued.
I pulled up to one of the addresses in the file, his grandmother’s.
She lived in Marshall Row, a lowkey extension of Watertown but it was considered the suburbs, or the outer lands to Briar natives.
When I pulled up a few houses from the address, I quickly spotted him.
He was the goofy ass nigga with the shaped up ’fro amongst several others shooting dice in the driveway.
My soul wanted to spray the whole fucking collective, but what would it do for me?
Was retribution worth continuing the cycle?
He was the only one who had wronged me, so why would I shoot up the crowd?
Because unlike them I couldn’t be with my people, couldn’t hug my son on this holiday. I was watching a nigga enjoy his kin while mine mourned me.
I didn’t get out of the truck blasting or do any young nigga shit without thought or acknowledgment of consequences. Instead I pulled off, headed home to rest and ponder things that should have been easy. Nothing was ever easy, especially not for a dead man.
For the next couple of days, I watched Bo come and go as he pleased, creating what looked like triangulation between his baby moms’, his girl’s and his grandmother’s houses.
He was on edge about something, maybe all the drugs I’d burned up at Adrian’s spot.
She wasn’t selling anything and he damn sure wasn’t that high on the fucking food chain to take a loss that big and survive.
He wasn’t eating like that and I knew it.
I was pulling up to my lil hideaway out in Westvale when Lee hit me up, telling me to come by the shop. He probably had the trucking business paperwork I needed.
Before I died on paper, I had been working to legitimize everything I’d attained in the streets during my brief time there.
I never had any intention of staying in them long or ever becoming some hood rich nigga, because that did nothing for me.
It wasn’t my fault that when I stepped in, I dominated things in a way that Rich Jordan Sr. had groomed RJ to do, but he never had it in him.
Niggas didn’t follow phonies and nepo babies.
They followed and listened to the nigga who stood on the streets with them at a point, the one they knew not to test because that dog was very much alive in him.
When I ran the streets, I always had one goal, to make it out and never get too high off the profits I saw from risking my life and soul.
It took me about forty-five minutes to get to the pawn shop. I backed into the park, then sat there for a moment studying my surroundings. I had to be aware of everything. It was nothing for a nigga to recognize me, and right now, that was something I didn’t need.
The coast was clear, so I pulled my hoodie over my face and got out of the car. I then walked over and knocked on the back door of the shop.
The door opened about a second later. It wasn’t Lee, but instead Liora, and my shit bricked instantly. She was fucking beautiful.
“Hey.” She greeted me quickly, allowing me in and leading the way through the small hallway into his office.
“What’s up?” I greeted. When we entered his office, I quickly noted he wasn’t there, but before I could say anything, she extended a thumb drive toward me.
“He had to make a run, but said to give you this,” she said before I could say anything.
I nodded and took it from her hands. Then my eyes glossed the massive, rundown office before landing back on her. Something on the computer monitor had her attention.
“What time do you get off?” I shocked the fuck out of myself when I asked that.
She looked from the monitor to me, then at the phone in her lap. “’Bout fifteen minutes. Why, you about to offer me some more coconut water?”
I chortled. “Nah, I was gonna ask if you wanted to get a meal with me.”
She looked away from the computer, those beautiful eyes again landing directly on me. This time they didn’t jump around like a pinball. They stayed on me like she was thinking hard.
After a silent forever, she nodded. “Sure, but given your current situation, I’m sure we aren’t going to an actual restaurant.”
I shook my head. I had damn sure not thought that part out. I hadn’t even thought about asking her to eat with me.
“Nah, you right, it won’t. Put your number in here. I’ll send you the address.” I pulled my phone from my pocket and handed it to her. Of course it wasn’t locked because I had no reason to lock it. I was dead. Nobody was going through my phone.
After she put her number in my phone, we agreed on seven-thirty and I left the shop.
I had to figure out what meal we’d have.
It couldn’t be anything in this area, so I was probably gonna get something closer to my spot.
The entire time I drove, I couldn’t help but question what the hell I was doing.