Chapter 17 Chaos
All I can think about is last night. That woman spoke words to me in a way that no one has in a long time.
I’ve spent the last several years in Bangladesh, but all the beautiful women I’ve come across paled in comparison to her.
She always saw the real me, and as much as I poured into her, she poured into me too.
The way that she made me feel last night, it was like the years melted away, and for a while, we were back to the old us—Chaos and Charisma, the way we used to be, or rather Chrishon and Charisma.
She used to be my best friend. The one who I went to when I needed to spazz out or talk about my dreams. The one who listened to everything that was in my heart or encouraged me whenever I was uncertain about something.
I hated that I hadn’t approached her that night and asked about it.
I had spent the last five years blaming her for something that wasn’t her fault.
Any other time, I would have approached that nerdy ass nigga who was her ex.
I would have checked them both, especially considering that I had already beat his ass before and told him to stay the fuck away from her.
The only reason I hadn’t put a bullet in him, the way I had other dudes who stepped to her again after I’d told their asses to stay away, was because everyone knew I had beef with him.
Taking him out would have put an easy target on my back.
She deserves to be free, but setting her free before we get to the bottom of things would be putting a target on her back.
I need to hurry up and figure this shit out, because I will kill the senator before it’s all said and done.
It doesn’t matter how I do it or what comes of it; for the simple fact that he fucked with my woman, he’ll be breathing his last breath very soon.
“What are you singing?” Charisma asks as she walks into the closet where I’m changing clothes.
“Huh?”
“I just heard you singing. Were you singing that old gospel song?”
I try to play it off. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, you do. You were just singing that song. Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king. Hallelujah, hallelujah, we’re going to see the king,” she sings. “Your grandmother used to sing that song all the time.’
“Oh, yeah.”
“Why were you singing that?”
“Just thinking about her,” I lie.
“Oh.”
She walks out of the closet and turns back briefly. “Chaos?”
“Yeah?”
“The lyrics are ‘we’re going to see the king,’ not ‘you’re going to see the king.’”
I smirk as she walks out of the closet. The way that I was singing it, I was very clear and correct about my interpretation of my grandma’s old song. It won’t be me going to see Him but the senator’s ass. Hell, I don’t think either of us wants to see Jesus any time soon.
I had done a whole lotta fucking up that I wasn’t ready to answer for. Can He forgive assassins, especially if they hold no remorse in their hearts? I wonder.
Ever since last night, she has been more relaxed than I’ve seen her in some time. I want to keep her that way. Charisma deserves to be happy with all that she’s sacrificed for our son, taking care of him alone while I was away because I was too damn prideful and stubborn to speak up that night.
I spend several minutes thinking about what she likes.
We both used to love hiking, although her li’l ass had no idea that those hiking trips were my way of scouting the best locations to annihilate my targets from.
There’s no way that I’m about to risk taking her ass out in public to hike right now. We must be careful about our movements.
She also used to love doing pottery, and that’s out. I think a little harder, and I recall how much we used to love cooking together. An idea forms in my mind, and I jog down the steps and catch up with her in the living room.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
“I was thinking about cooking these steaks. I took them out this morning, and they’re thawed now.”
I move around the kitchen, grabbing a large basket from underneath the sink, and place the steaks, two corn cobs, two large baking potatoes, seasonings, and several other ingredients inside of the basket.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“Follow me.”
“Where are we going?”
“Come on.”
She jogs behind me to the door that I have kept locked since she’s been here.
“Why did I think that was a utility closet all this time?” she asks as we reach the top of the stairs.
“Because that’s what was convenient for me to allow you to believe.”
When I push the door open, I hear the little intake of breath she takes. “Wow. This is beautiful, Chaos.”
“It’ s my little haven away from the world. It’s where I come to chill.”
“You’ve not been up here since I’ve been here.”
“Yes, I have,” I counter, placing the basket on the table beside the grill.
“I’ve never seen you.”
“I come up late at night when you’re sleeping.”
“What do you do here?”
I point in the corner to the plants.
“Are those marijuana plants?”
“Yeah. This is my chill spot.”
My rooftop deck has patio furniture, an outdoor kitchen area, complete with a grill and refrigerator, and an outdoor herb and vegetable garden.
I reach inside the cabinet of the grill and remove the pans that I need along with some foil, a cutting board, and some cutlery. I take it to the table on the other side of the roof and set everything out.
“You’ve got everything up here,” she proclaims as she fingers a pepper that’s still on the vine.
I grab a pepper and an onion before I also pluck some basil and thyme from their pots.
“You wanna chop the veggies while I season the meat, corn, and potatoes?”
“Yeah,” she replies, smiling and taking the knife that I hand her.
I watch as she sets the herbs and vegetables on the chopping board and sets to work.
“There was a time when I imagined you and me just like this,” she happily confesses.
“Yeah?”
“Mm-hmm. I used to think about us cooking dinner together in the evenings after work.”
“Humph.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I guess I used to think about a lot of things we would do together too. Still having a hard time accepting that we lost all these years because of a misunderstanding.”
She smiles shyly back at me. “Yeah, but we’re here now.”
I bob my head, but I go silent.
“Do you think we would still be together if things hadn’t gone the way they had?” I ask.
“I would like to think so. Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know, Charisma. My daddy used to say that shit happened the way it was supposed to. That’s how I was able to accept his murder.”
“I know he was killed when you were sixteen. That’s the year that I was battling my mama’s boyfriends, but you never told me what went down. I only knew that he was shot, and you were there. Is that still hard for you to talk about after all this time?”
I sigh. “I don’t know, really. I haven’t talked about it in so long.”
“You can always talk to me. I mean, if you feel like it. One day, CJ will want to know the story.”
She’s got a point, and if I could ever talk to anyone, it was always Charisma. I only told my mother and sister the story because they deserved to know, but I hadn’t shared it with anyone else.
“You remember how I used to be in the streets with my old man all the time?”
She bobs her head.
“Those were drug runs I was making with him.”
“I kind of suspected that.”
“My ma hated that shit, but he told her that he was teaching me the ways of the street so I would never get caught slipping. As much as he wanted me with him, he never wanted me to sell drugs. He always said I was gonna get an education and be better than him. He wanted me to see the ugliness to divert me away from the streets, but he also wanted me to know how to protect myself and my family if the time came.”
“He knew what we all knew. You were too smart for the streets.”
“Wasn’t my plan to get caught up. They say the thing that you do to try to prevent something is usually the same shit that causes it to happen. That was my case. I rolled with my pops that day, just spending some time together, but he had a stop to make to collect some money.
“I was sitting in the car, chilling and listening to this new song I’d been wanting to hear when I heard loud arguing. My pops always carried two guns, one on him and the other in his glove compartment. I grabbed it, jumped out to see what was going on, and rushed into the house.
“By the time I cleared the door, I saw the guy who owed my pops that money shoot my dad. He heard me make a noise, and he turned toward me with his gun raised. I shot him in the face, jumped in the car, and drove straight to Soul.”
“I remember him. He was a friend of your father’s.”
“And what most folks didn’t know back then was he was the leader of the Immortal Descendents.
Soul came and got that shit cleaned up. Made it look like that dude and my dad had a shootout, got my prints cleared from the scene, made sure there were no witnesses to report my presence, and from there, he took me in. ”
“I never knew that, Chaos. I just knew that you were hanging with him a lot back then, and afterward, you started hanging with the MC all the time. I missed you because you weren’t around as much.”
“No. I wasn’t. Not until that summer you came to stay with us. I hung around the house more that summer than I had in the last year because I wanted to protect you.”
She crinkles her nose and tilts her head. “Can I ask you a question, and you keep it a buck with me?”
“Anything.”
“My mom’s boyfriend who tried to assault me . . . did you have anything to do with what happened to him?”
I stare at her for a long time, and she presses her lips together. I look away, and when I feel her tug on the hem of my shirt, I turn back to her. “Yeah.”
“What did you do?”
“Made sure he would never do to another person what he tried to do to you.”
“You killed him?”
I nod.
She sighs. “They never found his body.”
“And they never will,” I reply, thinking about Keeper. Thank God for him. He had cleaned up so much of the MC’s mess through the years.
“My mama mourned that man so badly. She never believed me when I told her what happened. She said that I must have misunderstood his intentions and that he never would have forced himself on me. Then she berated me for not giving him what he wanted and pointed out how much we both could have gotten out of him. I was sickened by her after that. She spent the next year chasing other men, but she mostly kept them away from home. Then I left for college.”
“I missed you. That’s when shit really changed.
I had already been trying to find my way.
Soul recalled how good of a shot I was, and he said I was a natural.
He asked if I wanted to do a job for him, but if not, he understood.
I asked what kind, and he said a hit. Told me that I was a natural at it, and if I did it, we could consider my debt cleared. ”
“Your debt?”
“Yeah. Up until then, I didn’t realize I had one. I guess I kinda did, seeing as how he looked out for me when I killed that man and in the years to come.”
“It was easy for you?” she asks in disbelief.
I nod. “He told me to pretend it was the man that killed my pops when I went to do it.” I look up into Charisma’s sweet brown eyes, and I worry. I know that she probably sees a soulless man when she looks into my eyes. “But you know what? I didn’t have to imagine the nigga that killed my pops.
“I had already expunged his soul from the earth. That shit didn’t bother me at all to kill the next nigga. It was easy.”
She’s shocked, but she finally gathers her composure and asks several more questions. I answer them all as we finish cooking and then eat.
“This is nice,” she states a couple of hours later.
“What’s that?”
“Being up here eating dinner on the rooftop, watching the sun set, talking with you like this again.”
“You’re not scared of me?”
“No. I know who you are, Chrishon. I have always known you. You’ve done some things, but that doesn’t make you a bad person. At least now I know the things I never knew, the things I always wondered about. You’ve put the missing puzzle pieces in place.”
I groan internally because I haven’t shared it all. “You’re welcome.”
She smiles sweetly, sips her wine, and then asks, “Can we call CJ? I’d like to see him tonight.”
I think we both need to see our little guy. His presence is a palate cleanser after so much darkness.