Chapter 11
“Talk to me.”
“I’m going to Amora’s,” I said.
Kam didn’t skip a beat. “You . . . what!”
“I don’t need—”
“Yes, you do,” he cut in, voice sharp. “Send me the address. I’m meeting you there.”
I stared at the road ahead of me for a moment, jaw clenched so tightly that it made my teeth hurt. Outside my windshield, the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles traffic was regular and normal, the kind of normal that made you notice when something was off or didn’t feel right within you.
I didn’t respond to Kam verbally. I just copied the address she sent and forwarded it to him.
“I’m on my way,” he said before he hung up.
I punched the gas in my Benz as if I were trying to outpace my own thoughts. The city lights blurred past me. I kept thinking about Princess’s face when she asked me to always be honest with her.
Amora lived in a gated community, not the kind with paparazzi and glossy magazine houses.
There were quiet streets and clean sidewalks with trimmed trees watered every morning.
Whenever I visited before, I never saw the neighbors standing outside to watch who pulled up.
They didn’t have to. They already assumed you belonged there if you got through the gate.
She had done well for herself, I could admit.
Her hustle and drive to become a television personality paid off tremendously.
I always liked having her around because it never felt like she was there only for the money.
When I reached the gate, I rolled down my window at the keypad and typed in the code she sent. The gate opened smoothly without a creak.
My stomach twisted anyway.
Kam pulled up behind me two minutes later. His truck sat low like it had weight to it. He hopped out before I even killed my engine, his sunglasses on that still couldn’t hide his expression, then walked up to me as I opened my door. “You good?” he asked.
I cut the engine and stepped out. “No.”
He nodded. “Then don’t try to be Superman in there,” he said. “We going in, we handling business, and we leaving.”
I swallowed and shut the door behind me. The air smelled like sprinklers and fresh-cut grass. As we walked up the driveway together, we noticed the curtains move in the window.
“Here we go,” I mumbled.
She opened the door before we could knock, as if she stood on the other side and timed our steps.
She looked great. Even with no makeup and hair pulled back, she was effortlessly beautiful. Even through her beauty, I noticed her puffy eyes. They looked like she’d cried already today and didn’t think it necessary to pretend she hadn’t.
“Hey, Zay . . . and Kam?” she asked.
The three of us stood at the door for a moment. Kam was behind me, quiet and solid.
With a huff, she moved to the side and held the door open to welcome us in. I stepped inside.
Kam, sunglasses still on his face with a blank expression, trailed behind me like he was security.
Amora’s eyes flicked to him. “What he doin’ here?”
“He stayin’,” I said and walked to the living room I had been in many times before.
Her mouth tightened, and she shook her head. “Whatever.”
The house was clean, but it always used to be. It had that real clean feeling, not the one where it felt she had tried to impress me. It felt as if she’d been cleaning to keep from falling apart. The only difference between those times and this one was the baby things everywhere in small ways.
A folded blanket lay on the couch.
A pack of wipes sat on the coffee table.
A swing was in the corner of the living room . . . where the baby was asleep.
I stopped immediately, as if a force held me back as I stared at him. Amora walked past me without saying anything and went straight to the swing. She leaned down and gently lifted the baby. He cooed as he woke from his slumber. She turned around and walked slowly to where I stood in place.
When I saw him fully, my stomach dropped.
He was truly adorable. And he was so small that it made my body freeze with nervousness.
His hair was curly, soft, and thick. He had little, chunky cheeks like he’d been kissed every day, and big, brown eyes that didn’t know a damn thing about stress, blogs, captions, or grown folks’ shit.
Amora held him as if they’d gone through hell and survived on pure will.
She walked closer to me, and I didn’t move. I couldn’t tell if my legs forgot how or if my mind was too busy trying to calculate what this moment meant.
“We can sit here in the living room,” she said softly.
My eyes never left the baby as she cut past me and sat on the couch. Kam slowly followed her and sat in a recliner on her right. I walked to the couch and sat next to her.
For a moment, we were silent. I heard the baby, Zayn, take short breaths in a steady rhythm, as if he’d never experienced a hard day in his life. Because he hadn’t. That stayed in the back of my mind when his mother rocked him back and forth and didn’t speak a word.
Kam sat back in the recliner, and the noise from the leather stretched through the tension. With his arms folded, his eyes moved between us like a referee.
“So you brought your babysitter?” Amora asked as she stared at him.
“I’m the manager, remember?” he shot back.
“Same shit.” She scoffed. She looked at me. “You still ain’t changed, huh? Still having Kam sweep up the shit you too scared to take care of yourself, huh?”
I looked at her with squinted eyes. “Stop. Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?” she shot back. “Tell the truth?”
“The truth is, you invited me here, begged for me to be here, really. Posting subliminals and shi”—I caught myself before I cussed in front of the baby. I breathed out and put my head down before I continued with a quiet tone—“and stuff. So don’t act like you shocked that I came prepared.”
Her narrowed eyes met mine quickly. “Prepared for what, Zay? For me to trap you? For me to beg you?”
“Prepared to make this a scene. We all know you love attention.”
Kam leaned forward then, with a heavy sigh, as if this conversation bored him.
“You always got some shit to say!” Amora swung her gaze to him.
“Because,” he started, “you acting like you don’t know what you doing. You posted that baby with his lyrics like it was a press release. Don’t try to act brand new.”
Her posture straightened as if she’d just heard a noise for the first time. “I did not—”
“Yes, you did.” I cut her off with a voice sharper than I intended. “You did it. Don’t try to pretend now. What kind of shit is you on, yo?”
“All I did was post my son!” she exclaimed. “I’m allowed to post my son.”
“You posted him with my words,” I corrected. “My song. And named him like you was writing a headline!”
She exhaled and leaned back into the couch, still rocking the baby.
For a moment, it was quiet. Right when I was about to say something else, she muttered.
“Don’t act like you the only one with feelings, Zay.
” She hung her head low, kissed Zayn’s forehead, and spoke so low that it was almost a whisper.
“You just cut me off one day. You acted like I was nothing. Like the times we had meant nothing to you.”
It was hard for me to take in what she said.
When Princess walked back into my life, I didn’t know or expect everything to transpire as it had.
My first love, with whom things ended abruptly, resurfaced and stirred feelings I thought I had buried long ago.
Then, to discover I fathered a child with the one that got away caused my life to be disrupted in ways I hadn’t expected so suddenly.
I didn’t know what to do, let alone the right or wrong way of handling things, cutting off Amora included.
I leaned forward and placed my elbows on my knees. “Still . . .” I paused before I began again. “Feelings don’t mean tag my life for the internet to see.”
“Right!” she snapped. “You tagged that author, Love Tate, into your life. You tagged her right into your family. All you tagged me in was being hashtag—single mother.”
Kam grunted. “Alright.”
I shot him a glance. “Kam, man, come on.”
Amora kept going. “You want me to keep quiet so you can look so innocent. You never on social media because you don’t want people to know the truth about you, but you just as fucked up as the rest of these niggas!”
“That’s not what I’m trying to say—”
“Yes, it is!” She cut me off, her voice high.
Just then, Zayn stirred in his little blanket. A small coo slipped out, soft first, then it grew louder. She rocked him back and forth, but it was too late. He was wide awake, and before we knew it, his little voice boomed through the room with no apology.
Kam’s voice cut low. “Lower your voices.”
She swallowed and stood then. She rocked him, and with a low tone, she spoke to him as if she remembered he was the only innocent one in the room.
I watched her stand and do her best to quiet him, to no avail.
Her words weighed heavily on me. All you tagged me in was being a single mother.
She hadn’t even told me she was pregnant, let alone that she’d even given birth!
I wanted to snap on her, cuss her ass out, and then leave and tell Kam not to delay in filing a restraining order on that crazy bitch, but .
. . seeing her in that moment, rocking her son and speaking gently to him, I saw a different side of her.
I saw past the Instagram model, the TV personality with a pretty face, fat ass with the perfect titties.
I saw a mother. I saw a woman who held her son with care, genuine concern, and fear for his future.
With all the previous conversations we had about our fathers’ abandonment and the abuse I endured growing up, I understood something in that moment—something that was bigger than ego, bigger than image, bigger than whatever anger I held toward her.
Zayn deserved more than that, regardless of whether he was mine or not.
In that moment, I knew I needed to handle that right away.