Jaheim #2
I’d slipped out of bed after staring at the ceiling, praying to a God I hadn’t spoken to in a while.
I couldn’t sleep because vengeance wouldn’t get off my chest. This was a code I lived by, but it had never come back on me like this.
I guess it hit different because nobody was ever supposed to know I existed in these situations.
I’d always stayed anonymous before. Detached. Untouchable.
I realized right then that I had probably already loved Liana when I did that careless shit. And I say careless because that’s what it was. Rex had told me to be careful using my skills for those you love. It could make you sloppy. I had been sloppy.
Esme stretched and followed me downstairs. Nobody was allowed in the lair, as Liana called it, so she posted up outside the door while I stood staring at my screens, lighting an emergency blunt deep in thought.
I was itching to make Odeal understand something once and for all.
Every time he reached toward Liana, he was going to lose something.
I cracked my neck. Then my knuckles.
“Fuck it.”
Odeal had violated my code repeatedly. He hurt Liana. He hid money from her. He sent someone to threaten her with a knife in her own alley behind her own bar. I couldn’t look past that. I had tried until I climbed out of bed and realized trying was finished.
Death by a thousand digital cuts. Until Odeal Jordan was sitting in a therapist’s office describing things nobody believed, and then in a padded room. Only then would I be satisfied.
He only had himself to blame for waking this part of me up.
First, I extracted the alley footage. I didn’t need anything coming back to me.
But before I buried it, I took over Odeal’s smart TVs and pushed clips directly to every screen in his house.
I watched him through his own bedroom camera rise up confused, rubbing his eyes, staring at his television at three in the morning.
The footage cut between Liana’s face in that alley, eyes steady, refusing to break, and the man he sent dead on the concrete.
I let it play for thirty seconds. Then I cut it.
Then I sent the Pixar lamp to his bedroom TV.
It looked perfectly normal until it wobbled and fell over.
The light show kicked in across every screen in the house, and every light flickered with it.
Then the alley footage flashed across every screen simultaneously, the clip running on a loop, while Drowning Pool's Bodies came through every speaker at full volume.
Let the bodies hit the floor.
I watched him scramble out of bed through his own bedroom camera and laughed until my side hurt.
He grabbed his phone to silence it. Didn’t work.
He grabbed the remote. That didn’t work either.
The lights kept cycling, the sound layered over itself until his brain didn’t know what to focus on first. I stopped everything long enough to watch the relief leave his shoulders before throwing him right back into it.
I controlled every sound, every flicker, every second of relief.
Like a fuckin maestro.
Odeal ran to the closet, like they always did.
I took a long pull of the blunt, exhaled slowly, allowing myself to choke, and laughed until my side hurt. The scary part was how natural this still felt to me.
“Dumb ass motherfucka. Just unplug the shit.”
He was going to have a very interesting few months. I was just getting started on the crash course. Don’t Fuck With Mine: 101.
I inhaled the blunt one more time, fighting the urge to open the folder I tried to stay out of.
Tonight’s events made me realize how much I missed my mother. How much I wished I could see her again or hell, even save her. I would’ve loved to give Jackson exactly what he dished out.
Having her for only twelve years was like being handed something extraordinary only to have it taken away before you understood its value. I had made it through anyway. Made something from nothing in every city I passed through.
Now loving Liana shifted how I saw all that survival. It wasn’t just pain anymore.
It was proof.
I was the man my father should have been.
I clicked open the private folder and typed in her birthday. Eunice loved making home videos. After she was gone, I had them digitized and moved into a folder I told myself I’d open when I was ready. Tonight felt like that night.
The first video was us dancing in the front yard. She was laughing at me, head thrown back, completely unbothered by whatever the day had cost her. I watched it twice before moving on. A few more after that. Birthday parties, Sunday mornings, her singing in the kitchen.
All you need is music, dancing, and ginger ale, Jah. People forget those first two.
I avoided watching the last one. The video of my twelfth birthday sat right there in the folder. I left my cursor hovering over it for a long moment. Liana’s voice came back to me in the silence.
You are not Jackson. You are Eunice’s son. And I think your mother would be proud of the man you became.
I hit play.
The camera cut to me in a Scooby Doo birthday hat, grinning so wide it looked like it hurt.
Eunice’s smile was so bright it filled the whole frame.
She sang Happy Birthday to me with everyone at the table joining in, her voice carrying over all of theirs.
When she leaned over and pulled me against her side and kissed my forehead, I paused the video for a second.
I remembered how she smelled that day. Charlie Red . I knew that because I’d gotten it for her for Christmas. I remembered how safe that felt.
I hit play again.
The singing drifted off one voice at a time when everyone at the table realized Jackson had arrived.
He came through the door with that forty ounce in a paper bag, grin already sideways, jealousy already sitting on his face before he even stepped through the door.
Even at twelve, I recognized it. A man so small he resented watching someone love his son out loud.
One by one people found reasons to leave after Jackson walked in. They knew what he was capable of. Fear had a way of emptying rooms fast.
My mom bent down in front of me anyway, fixing my crooked Scooby-Doo hat like none of it was happening.
“Happy birthday, Sonshine,” she whispered, kissing my forehead one more time.
I held onto her arm when she whispered for me to go to my room.
“Mama, I can stay.”
“Go on upstairs for me, Jah.” Her smile looked tired around the edges now. “I’ll bring your cake up in a minute. It’s chocolate.”
“Eunice, I told you about spoiling this fuc ? —”
The video cut.
My heart broke for a second. She had promised me that no matter what, I was having that party. She kept that promise until she couldn’t.
Sometimes I wished I hadn’t asked for one. I never got that cake.
I had spent most of my life trying to become the exact opposite of him. I never wanted love to feel like fear. Not for me. Not for the person standing beside me.
I didn’t understand then. I understood now.
I sat there in the dark for another moment, sitting with the weight of that birthday. The weight of tonight. The weight of almost losing Liana in that alley and what it would have done to me if things had gone differently.
I wasn’t my father.
I had said it to myself a thousand times over the years. For a long time, it sounded more like a prayer than something I truly believed.
Tonight, it landed differently.
Jackson wanted control. What I wanted was protection.
What existed between me and Liana wasn’t what Jackson had with Eunice. There was a difference.
I shut everything down one screen at a time until the room was dark.
Esme lifted her head when I opened the door. She stood and stretched before falling in line with me as I headed upstairs.
Liana was still asleep when I crawled back in beside her. One arm tucked under the pillow, messy bun halfway falling apart, mouth slightly open like she didn’t have a care in the world.
I’d come way too close to losing her. Sleep wasn’t coming easily after that.
I pulled her carefully against my chest so I wouldn’t wake her.
She sighed in her sleep and melted closer.
“I love you,” she murmured.
“I love you too.”
Yeah. Odeal was gonna pay for every fucking thing.