Chapter 7
The way the sunlight poured into the meeting room gave me a migraine.
I sat, slumped, with my back to the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the L.A.
city skyline from the thirtieth floor, my Cartier frames blocking the light.
My fingers were interlocked in my lap, with the chair twisting slightly from side to side.
I didn’t feel like being there.
The projector illuminated the screen in front of the conference table with numbers, charts, and streaming projections—shit that I never cared about.
Simone and Kam both knew I stopped caring about numbers and streams a long time ago.
When I was a new artist, it used to excite me.
As an established artist, I felt I had nothing left to prove.
I put out music that made me feel good, let me express myself and what I felt at the time it was crafted.
I was in a position now that if it sold, it sold.
If it didn’t, to hell with it. My enjoyment came from creation.
I no longer had to prove anything to anyone.
Names of artists that I didn’t recognize agreeing to meet, let alone develop, flashed across the screen then.
Their faces were printed in glossy headshots, all lined up as if potential were something you could measure and pin to a board.
I knew the label’s formulas all too well.
If they sounded anything like Westside Zay, they could sign right then and there.
If they looked like they could be the next me, the label jumped right on them.
I hated to pretend that I hadn’t noticed the shit they pulled.
Luckily for them, I was already planning my next move.
They had no idea how none of this felt urgent anymore.
Kam sat next to me with Simone to his right. She clicked through slides and answered questions about rollout strategies, branding angles, and cross-platform visibility. She was in her element, always focused and energized. I was glad I had those two on my team.
When a shot of another artist, Kamil “K Millz” Moring, flashed across the screen, my phone buzzed in my back pocket. I leaned forward, slid it out of my pocket, and tapped the screen to unlock it.
There was a text from Yana, with a picture of her hands stretched out against a marble tabletop. Her nails were freshly done, short and neat with purple tips. I read the message underneath.
Yana: Do you like them?
A smile spread across my face before I could stop myself. I shook my head slightly like she was seated directly across from me.
Me: They cute. Don’t think you grown tho.
Three dots followed my message immediately.
Yana: Mom picked the color.
As much as her mother loved purple and stars, I’d already figured. She used to draw stars all over her notebooks when we were kids. Her whole bedroom was purple.
Me: I figured.
Yana: She said that you would say that (laughing emoji)
I leaned back in the chair and exhaled through my nose. For a moment, the chatter of the people in the room faded into the background. I was just about to respond when another message popped across the top of my phone.
Amora (Hot Girl Hitz TV): I need to talk to you.
I hadn’t heard from Amora since I broke it off with her last year.
She came to the movie set I had worked on for Princess’s movie with a camera crew, showing off for her live stream as if she and I were this ‘thing.’ We were never together.
When I was fucking with her, I was fucking around with a lot of different women too.
She was the one I called, who I knew would pull up, no questions asked, at any time of the day.
I was a full-on playboy then. When I ended it with her, I apologized for it.
She didn’t want to hear it, and I didn’t press it any further.
I hadn’t heard from her after that, and I figured she made peace with it.
I wasn’t sure what she needed to talk to me about.
With my brows together, I shot Kam a look. He understood it right away and shot me one right back. I nodded my head toward the door to let him know I was going to step outside. He nodded and turned his attention back to the front.
I stood from my seat and treaded lightly out the door. Label execs turned their heads toward me before shifting their eyes back to the presenter at the front of the room. When I reached the door, I opened it and slowly crept outside into the hallway.
The area was quiet out there. The soft, cream carpet accented the cream walls with framed plaques lined neatly next to each other.
They were gold and platinum reminders of whom I’d been for a long time.
I leaned against the wall and stared at the message again.
I felt irritation mixed with curiosity fill my chest as I pressed ‘send’ and held the phone to my ear. Amora answered on the second ring.
“Zay?”
“Yeah, what’s up?” I responded. I tried to hide the irritation in my voice, but I was certain she caught it because there was a pause on her end.
“Hello?” I asked.
“Yeah, um, can you hear me?”
I exhaled. I had a short fuse when it came to games. “Amora, I hear you. What’s up?”
There was another pause, but it lasted as long as my patience.
I clicked the end button. I had a short fuse for people who wasted my time.
I always had. I’d dealt with bad producers, people who offered fake deals or deals that didn’t live up to their word.
I dealt with lawyers and bullshit cases filed against me.
I no longer had time to play around with anything that didn’t serve me.
I turned around to walk back into the meeting. When my hand was on the handle, the phone rang again. I answered immediately, my tone dry.
“Amora, I don’t have time for this. I’m in a meeting.”
“I have a son,” she shot back.
I was the one to pause then. Confusion slapped me in the face so hard that my neck jerked back. I had heard what she said. I was just confused as to why she was telling me this information.
“Um . . .” I hesitated, not knowing what would come out next. Suddenly, it hit me. She texted me and said she needed to talk, delayed when I called, and then told me she had a son. Was she implying that . . . ? No. I couldn’t believe that shit in that moment. There was no way.
“Wait, what you just say?” I asked her.
“I have a son. He turned one today.”
I let out a chuckle that hardly escaped my throat before I could catch it. “Man, stop fucking playing with me, Amora.”
I could not believe that this heifer called my phone after one year to tell me that she had a baby. I could hardly comprehend what she tried to insinuate, although, in the back of my mind, I knew full on.
“I’m not playing, Zay. I have a son. I named him Xavier.”
My head began to spin at that name. I dropped my head in my free hand and pinched the top of my nose with my fingers. I took a deep breath in, then out. I knew what she was trying to imply, and since my patience was short, I cut to it immediately.
I breathed in through my nose and exhaled through my mouth, like I had been taught in therapy. “You sayin’ he my son?”
I hadn’t seen Amora since last year, but in that moment, I couldn’t calculate the math. All that surged through my mind was the fact that she named the baby after me. That threw me off and wouldn’t allow me to think straight. It fucked me up in that moment.
“You don’t remember the last time we slept together?” she darted back.
How the fuck was I supposed to remember something that happened a year ago?
She might have felt that our moments were special, but I’d made it clear a million times before that I was not interested in dating anyone on that level.
I was always sure to use condoms, so I had no fucking clue what she was talking about.
“Ain’t no way, Amora,” I said, my hand still pinching my nose.
“Oh, you don’t remember the last time we were together? The hot tub?”
I had no idea what she meant. I closed my eyes.
A scene in a hot tub emerged across my head, .
. . big brown titties in a yellow bikini bounced up and down in slow motion like a sports relay.
A glass of champagne mixed with Hennessey was in my hand while water splashed all around.
I couldn’t recall everything that happened that night besides those elements, but .
. . I knew what she said was not impossible.
“Why you just tellin’ me this now?” I asked. The timing of it all did align. However, I couldn’t . . . It still could not . . . I could not put what I felt into words. She recognized that immediately.
“Because it’s hard for me doing it alone,” she admitted. “I need help.”
I pushed off the wall. My legs felt like noodles. Before I could even speak again, she cut in.
“I just wanted to tell you before I had to take this to court.”
That right there sent a signal to my brain. I kept asking myself, what did she mean by that? Had she really tried to guilt me into taking care of a baby that I wasn’t even sure was mine? I didn’t know what to think. My mind bounced from one thought to another like Serena Williams in a tennis match.
“Amora,” I managed to get out. “What the fuck . . . Who the fuck . . . Bruh!”
“Look,” she cut in. “I see you being a family man all on the blogs. I just thought maybe you’d like to meet your son too. If not, that’s cool. I’ll just be sure to send them papers to your mailbox. You still got that condo in the Valley, right?”
I exhaled so hard that it sounded like a grunt. “Get the fuck off my phone, Amora.” I ended the call quickly.
I stared at the phone in my hand as if it had just insulted me.
A whole year of not even seeing this bitch, and now she had sprung a baby on me?
It didn’t sit right. Then I recalled her words: “I see you being a family man” with emphasis on the words like she was jealous.
As reckless as she looked and acted on those reality TV shows, she had always had some sense when it was just us together.
She was only loud, messy, and bold for the cameras, but she had never lied to me.
At least, from what I knew about her, she wouldn’t lie about something like that.
If the baby were mine, I needed to know.
The phone buzzed in my hand as her name flashed across the screen.
I hit the ignore button. My jaw was tight.
I was never in love with Amora. She was just always there when I called.
When I needed a body, when I needed a distraction, she would pull up with no questions asked.
I never made any promises. We never had any talks about the future.
Princess filled my mind then. The thought of her hit me in the chest like a warning shot.
This was how it started last time. When I was overseas with my group, I thought I got a girl pregnant.
When I told Princess on the phone, my heart broke when I heard her voice on the other end shake as if her whole world had fallen apart.
Then she disappeared without a word. I never thought I’d hear from her again.
Fifteen years later, the truth fell into my lap and exploded like a bomb.
She had been pregnant with Yana and kept that secret from me.
We slowly developed our relationship since then.
I accepted the mistake, although I had been upset for a while.
But the past had been the past, and when I met that little girl, none of that shit mattered.
However, in that moment, the way Princess and I had connected just recently, . . . how would she take this news now?
Fear, guilt, and déjà vu all wrapped around me as my phone buzzed with another missed call, and an unopened text from Amora popped up again. I couldn’t talk to her in that state of mind. I needed time to think about my next move.
I walked back to the meeting door and placed my hand over the handle. When I took a deep breath, I opened it, walked over to my chair, and plopped back into it.
The same man stood in the same spot and was still talking about some numbers that I still didn’t give a fuck about. His words faded into static. I finished the meeting, although I hadn’t paid attention to any of it besides the occasional nod of my head when I was cued.
Everything felt like it was about to change. I hadn’t even said a word.