Chapter 2 #2
At that moment I wanted to hit this bitch in her shit, but he’d brought me along to be the levelheaded one.
“So you left your fucking daughter on my brother’s stoop like trash?”
She waved him off. “It is what it is, Reminisce. I gotta do what’s best for me at the end of the day. She’ll be good, she’s young.”
I shook my head, trying my hardest not to bop this bitch, because the last time I had been in proximity with a chick this dumb, it was my own sister.
“Don’t be shaking your head at me, bitch. You don’t know me, but you in here judg—”
I held my index finger up before I spoke. “Look, Rouge. I’m about five seconds up off your ass. Don’t volunteer to see what my hands do too fast, because I promise you I’ma hand wash yo’ ass in here.”
She sucked her teeth and focused her anger on Reminisce. “Who is this bitch you brought to my hotel room?”
I laughed, about to deck her, but Rem grabbed my arm. “Nah, we ain’t here for that.”
“Then what the fuck are you here for? I’m seconds from beating your lil pretty bitch up and having my—” She was too hot for me, so to help ease the process along, I pulled my gun from my back and aimed it at her head.
“This was supposed to be the other way around, but you bitches make me sick with all that rah-rah shit. Too much talking while he’s talking, so let him speak and answer only the questions asked to your simple ass and maybe when we leave here your fucking cranium will still be intact.”
She had her hands up in surrender immediately. “Okay, okay. Please don’t kill me.” That tough shit was gone and now she was blinking nervously and looking from me to Reminisce.
“Yooo.” He chortled, then he stepped forward and snatched the folded papers from my back pocket.
“Sign these. You abandoned your daughter, therefore I’on wanna see you ever again, not when whatever nigga you’re messing with realizes who you really are or when you realize that abandoning her was the biggest mistake of your being.
She’ll never have ties to you again, and if you even think about coming for her, I’ll kill you. ”
Tears streamed down her face, her eyes jumping from me to him before she took the papers from him. When she unfolded them, I physically saw her heart drop in that moment because whatever she’d planned by dropping the kid off had backfired.
“What? You want me to sign away my parental rights?”
“Yeah. When you dropped her off on my brother’s porch and went ’bout your business, you made that decision.”
“Sign the papers, sweetheart. I got better things to do than stand here.” I cut my eyes between her and him, irritated.
My temper was extremely short, making me liable to shoot this bitch and leave him to clean up the mess.
Situations like these grinded my gears because my sister had done this same bullshit to my niece.
Ariya had abandoned her baby because Brysheer didn’t want her.
“Fine.” She grabbed the pen conveniently sitting on the table. Seconds later she had her head down, signing and initialing every space with a pink highlight. A few scribbles later she was holding out the papers.
“She was supposed to bring you back to me.”
More laughter escaped Rem’s lips. “Now that’s funny. Where is her birth certificate and social security card?”
She looked at him long and hard before she went into her bag. She then pulled out a Ziploc bag of what looked like paperwork. She extended it to him and he snatched it from her.
Seconds later he was going through it. “How the fuck did you get my name on this?”
“You act like you don’t know me. I get shit done.” She looked from him to me.
I put my gun back into the small of my back and focused on him. I hated that I felt like I wanted to ask what he needed from me. Like if he wanted me to beat this bitch into next week, one word from him and I would. I hated the hold he had on me, even though I did a pretty good job of ignoring it.
“We got everything we need,” he said to me and I turned to leave, hearing him move behind me.
“If it’s any consolation, I really did love you, Reminisce.”
That statement didn’t stop his stride. “Yeah, I’m sure you thought you did,” he tossed over his shoulder as we exited her room.
When we made it back to the car, he was quiet for a while.
It was the heaviest silence I had ever experienced, because not even the radio was on.
I refused to make him talk though. If he needed silence, I’d give him that.
We were about five minutes into the ride when he finally spoke and that alone shocked me.
“I thought I’d loved her, but every time I tried to love her past that dark ass hole in her chest, she’d burn me deeper.
I know who I am and what I give, but something about the way I came up from a youngin’ made me look for love in the wrong places for a while.
Renny was the smarter one. Instead of looking for that shit, he shut it off. Then he came up on Cay.”
His words weighed down on my heart because they were coated in the type of pain that had me ready to spin and rid this earth of ol’ girl. “You know experiencing heartbreak doesn’t make you weak, right?”
He let out a dry chuckle. “Not now it doesn’t, but it did back then.
I was walking around thrown off, a shell of myself, damn near a ghost in the wind.
I was weak, seeing all of what my mama put herself and us through and mirroring that.
My childhood had me believing love was sacrifice and a constant battle.
She had me thinking love was earned off action and penance.
Even though I ain’t did shit wrong but be born and watch a woman who couldn’t love herself enough to do better for her kids.
When I met Pynk, I thought I had met my one.
Then I encountered the source of what would make my trust even more scarce. ”
I swallowed hard.
“My bad for getting so deep on you, Rim.”
“Can I ask what she did that finally made you let her go?”
“To be honest, it wasn’t one thing. Shit, I woke up one day and I was over all of it.
I was getting flashes of my childhood while looking at the woman I thought I wanted to spend my life with.
Not the physical abuse, but the manipulation and use of love as a weapon.
I realized it wasn’t love at all, but instead some form of survival, and I was only comfortable with it because it’s all I had ever known. ”
“That’s around the time you came here, right?”
“A lil while before.”
I nodded, then looked out of the window. I knew Reminisce, but this moment right here helped me understand more about him than the tit for tat we did ever would. He wasn’t damaged, he was carrying around heavy trauma that made emotionally unavailable.
“Yo, you late as fuck. Where you been?” Aroyal asked as soon as I entered my mama’s living room.
“Minding my grown ass business, Aro. You should try it.” I waved him off and moved in the direction of my mama. She was in the kitchen with Kay and Krisis.
Bry’s chuckle filled the space as he exited the kitchen with a plate and bowl in his hand. “Stop doing my boy like that, you know it’s better to tell him what you up to now rather than him finding out later on.”
I mugged Brysheer and Aroyal. “I’m fine, and if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t tell either one of y’all.”
Aro grunted. “I’ll find out sooner or later, but if you’re saying you good, then I’ma let you be.”
I didn’t even respond; I just moved into the kitchen. To my shock, it was just Krisis and Kay.
“Ariya called,” Kay said, letting me know in the door that my mother had stepped away to basically baby my older sister who refused to get her life together and be an adult.
I nodded.
“What are y’all cooking?” I looked from sister-in-law to sister-in-law before I took a seat at the table. They were used to me not helping but showing up. It was sorta my thing because I absolutely hated cooking even though I could.
“So you gonna tell us or leave us in suspense?” Kay asked, making me glance in her direction.
I chuckled dryly. “What is there to tell? I can’t seem to stay away from the most emotionally unavailable man on earth. Like, I know I should stay away from him, but I can’t. He needs me and I’ma come running.”
“Maybe that’s the problem.” Krisis looked up from the meat she was cutting at me.
“It is. Then I can’t only blame him. Turo did a number on me. I feel like I don’t know how to be with anyone after that mess with him.”
“So both of you are playing games?”
I shook my head. “That’s just it. No games, it’s like he says the right things but there is never action. The last time he told me he wanted me, he disappeared for months after. He isn’t the type to stay still long.”
“Hold up, you met the male version of you?” Krisis asked, making us all laugh.
“I absolutely hate y’all.”
“Don’t hate us, just stop carrying what one man did with you to the next. Trust me when I say it’s hard to give chances. But you’ll find yourself carrying less of that trauma,” Krisis said.
“So maybe your friend is following your lead. He said he wanted you, but you know how you are. You’re Aroyal’s sister, so I know how strong those genes are. You’re probably giving different signals, sis.”
“So I should ki—”
“Oh, there is my baby.” My mama’s voice made me look up from the table. I was on my feet quickly, moving toward her. “You’re late.” She pulled me into a hug.
“I’m sorry, I was helping a friend.”
“?Este amigo es una mujer o un hombre?” Is this friend a woman or a man?
“Why does it matter? Still a friend.” I sighed, knowing my mother only asked because she cared and hated that I was alone.
The fact that I was so comfortable being alone bothered her because she hated being alone.
That was why she always had my nieces and nephews and threw this dinner twice a week at the least. She acted unbothered about my father being AWOL, but we knew she was.
I loved my mother dearly, but unlike Aroyal, I felt she knew more about our father’s extracurricular activities.
She just didn’t say anything because she was comfortable and didn’t want to be alone.
My problem was I’d rather be alone than ever settling for what didn’t fill me.
If Reminisce was that, then let him be, but if not, I prayed to the lord that he just left me alone so I could finally get over what never was.