Chapter 6 #3
“Ain’t shit but a scratch,” Rose spoke, bullheaded as usual.
Sucking her teeth, she stood. The bathroom that adjoined her and her sister’s bedroom was a few feet away. Minx rushed to gather the first aid supplies and came back.
“Take your shirt off,” she instructed, her mouth tightly pursed together as she placed herself at his side.
Rose did as she said, groaning until he was naked above the waist. His pistol was in his waistband, but it didn’t alarm Minx. She’d been around guns all her life. His body was completely banged up, and she went to work cleaning his injury.
“So, tell me again, what happened?” She prodded.
“Nothing for you to worry about, Minx. I told you, you too pretty for this shit, shorty. You should get out of this town. You ain’t like everybody else here.” Rose panted.
Minx applied pressure to his gash, and he grit his teeth and growled.
The last thing he wanted to do was wake Max or Mila.
He already knew how they gave it up. He and Minx would get cussed out for weeks.
Rose didn’t have anywhere else to go. By this time, Max told him he was treading a steep hill into the street life.
The more he steered him toward some legit shit, the more the game sent him in the other direction.
He wasn’t doing it on purpose. Rose just always seemed to be in the midst of trouble.
“Why you trying to kill a nigga?” Rose cut angry eyes at her.
She ignored him, applying antibacterial ointment and bandaging him.
“Why you out here trying to get killed, nigga!” she shot back, using more strength than needed when she pressed the bandage against his skin.
“Ah, fuck!” Rose hollered, glaring at her as she shot to her feet. “Yo, you foul as fuck for that, Minx.” Shaking his head, he looked down at the work she’d done.
“Take these and go to bed.” She handed him a few pills she took when her cramps got really bad.
Minx stomped to the bathroom and Rose struggled to get on his feet. He perched himself on the edge of her bed, hunched over with his hands on his knees. Watching her wash her hands at the sink in her bathroom, she finally dried them before stepping back into the room.
“The fuck is your problem?” Rose asked, peeping her pull the covers back on the bed so that she could climb inside.
“Nothing. Good night.” She turned her back on him and curled up to her pillow, officially ready for bed.
She faced her bedroom door, and Rose released a frustrated sigh.
Minx was thirteen, but she was nothing like the other thirteen-year-old girls around the way.
She was mature, she read everything, and she didn’t play that peer pressure shit.
She was a leader, and Rose dug that about her more than anything.
The only female friend she did have was Luna.
She didn’t get caught up in gossip or none of that other shit.
She was just different. Rose scooted to the head of the bed, propping his back against the headboard.
One leg stretched in front of him, he kept the other draped over the side with his foot on the floor.
Going into his waistband, he retrieved his gun and set it on the table beside the bed.
“I got home from the block after being up for three days. I was tired as shit. I put some food in the oven to heat up so that I could eat, rest, and get back on the grit in the morning.” He began, and Minx found herself hanging on his every word.
She didn’t budge though. Keeping her back to him, she listened instead. Rose pinched the bridge of his nose and tossed his head back.
“I guess I passed out in the chair or some shit. When I woke up, this punk mothafucka Sherman was going through my fucking pockets. Nigga was trying to rob me, and I fucking snapped.” Rose’s glossed-over eyes stared ahead, zoning out as his jaws tightened.
He loathed his mother’s husband more than anything in the world.
“We started banging out right there in the house. He got a few good hits off, and then I pulled my strap on him. My mama came in, and instead of asking what was going on or why I was beating the nigga’s ass, she turned on me.
She put this gash in my fucking stomach, over a nothing ass nigga who was stealing from her son. ”
Minx didn’t know what to say. She knew it was bad at home because Rose was always at her house or on the block.
He hadn’t told her how bad it was though.
She was his sanctuary from the world, which he needed when it was done kicking his ass.
Even his closest homies didn’t know everything that went on in his life.
He and Finn were cool, but Finn also had his own share of demons to battle, internal and otherwise.
Rolling over in bed, Minx faced him. Staring down into her somber eyes, his heart picked up in his chest. She was a breath of fresh fucking air.
She had no idea the kind of comfort she brought him.
Young and innocent, it was something Rose wanted to protect if he could.
He’d burn the city down to the ground if someone brought harm to her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, holding his deep, electrifying stare.
“What you sorry for? You ain’t do shit.” Rose laughed, sucked in a deep breath and brought his eyes to the ceiling.
“Because you don’t deserve that,” Minx insisted, her face crinkling in a frown.
“How you know what I deserve, Minx? I ain’t shit.” Rose swiped the leg of his pants and stared down at his bandage. “Thanks for patching me up though.”
“Rose, why do you think you don’t deserve anything good? Who would make you think something like that?” Minx found herself questioning him.
For a minute, he didn’t answer. Images of his mother and his father danced around his head.
She told him all the time he wasn’t shit, just like his pops, and he would never be anything but what he was.
She said he was a worthless lowlife and that she wished she never had him.
He was a kid hearing that kind of shit, and now he was approaching manhood.
Those type of burdens weighed on him more now than they ever had before.
A parent was supposed to speak life into their child, but his mother spoke evil, nothing else.
Drugs had gotten the best of her a long time ago, and he wasn’t sure she would ever come back.
His father couldn’t deal with life or having a family, so he took off when Rose was a kid.
She met Sherman, and they both took turns taking their shit out on Rose throughout his childhood.
“I got you, but…” Rose’s voice carried off, and both of Minx’s brows went up with interest.
“But what?” she asked, eager to hear what he was going to spill next as butterflies fluttered in her chest and belly.
“But we only get to experience people for so long,” Rose recited.
Minx wasn’t sure what was going on or why her body switched up on her with Rose of all people. Her stomach tightened, and that space between her legs would get warm and moist. She might have been a young girl, but what he evoked in her scared her.
She couldn’t talk to her parents about it, neither of them would understand.
Both tolerated Ambrose but for different reasons.
She wasn’t convinced he was the kind of man they pictured for her though.
If they even thought something was going on with them, they might try and make them stay away from one another.
That was something Minx was sure neither of them could go for.
“I don’t like thinking about that,” she whispered, and his eyes found hers in the darkened room.
“Get some rest, Minx.” Voice gentle, he flashed a cute half smile in her direction.
She loved the way his lips curved up on his face.
“And the next morning, I remember waking up, and he was gone. You ever have that happen? When something feels like a dream?” Minx asked Brenyn after taking a few more hits from the blunt.
“Not until today,” she responded in a raspy tone.
Minx spun so fast to look at the girl.
“Tell me more about you and Rose,” she urged Minx.
Oddly, the story piqued her interest and comforted her.
The ill thoughts that took over were going to shut her down.
She needed to hear about something else, have her mind be taken to somewhere else.
After a while, Brenyn slept, and Minx stood over her.
She watched her, pulling the cover over her before she moved to the door to let herself out.
It would take some time, that was for sure, but she believed that Brenyn would be okay eventually.
Trenton Avenue had to be one of the grimiest blocks in town.
Everything was boarded up or ran down. Old people still owned their houses, but the youngsters had taken over most of them.
Trap spots and traffic filled the streets now.
Finn and Rose cruised over together. Rose clipped up in the passenger’s seat, and Finn focused his eyes ahead.
A large blunt dangled off Rose’s lips as he checked his clip before loading it back into his weapon.
He inhaled and kept the smoke in his mouth before turning it over to Finn.
“What’s going on with you and Minx, Rose?” Finn queried, eyes ahead puffing on a blunt.
“Minx is spoiled and territorial. She be acting like she own a nigga and shit,” Rose disclosed, fixated on the scenery passing by outside his window.
Finn chuckled and took another drag of the blunt. All he could do was shake his head. Those two were too fucking much. He loved Minx and Rose, like blood, but they were both crazy as hell.
“What?” Rose’s head spun toward his friend.
“Nigga, you acting like you don’t act the same fucking way.” Finn cackled. “Both of y’all mothafuckas got problems. Tell me something, what the hell are you? Ya damn sure ain’t brother and sister—”