Chapter 19
nineteen
“Mm mm, don’t walk away from me,” Dania quietly buzzed. “I can tell y’all did it.”
Kamilla rolled her eyes and pulled the bag of trash from the trash can.
Fredo called her earlier this morning asking if she and Dania wanted to make some extra money.
The answer was immediately yes, especially after seeing the breakdown in tuition for the following semester sent by OSU’s financial aid.
She hadn’t even stepped foot on campus and they were sending her futuristic bills.
In a world that encouraged people to get a higher education, it was, without question, turning out to be a luxury.
Almost like clean air, cleaner water, housing and untainted food was.
The basic necessities of life were ridiculously costly.
“First of all,” Kamilla spoke, just above a whisper. “There’s someone here.”
Fredo owned a few spots throughout Los Oceania, besides the studio, that were essentially used for money laundering.
The breakdown from the street hustle, stickups, and heists were taken to Volts, then handed to Fredo to distribute and funnel back into the gang.
Kamilla knew how it worked off the game her father was adamant about telling her.
He protected her and taught her how to protect herself.
He loved her and showed her how to love herself.
He provided until he couldn’t but made sure his baby girl knew how to drive, knew how to manage her money, knew how to get through life in the event life flipped upside down.
The only things he left out were how to handle grief in the tsunami that Kamilla was trying to survive, and how to love a man like him.
Loving him was automatic but what was she to do when she’d been raptured up by someone just like him.
Kamilla could only mimic what she was blindly taught through his actions.
When encountering a man that would disturb the earth and petition the heavens for you, yield and let it take its course.
Love. It was too early to even add that word to the conversation but dare she say out loud that it had interrupted the flow of conversation.
It came in like a balm to soothe all the stinging, itching, painful wounds of loss.
Kamilla was on a journey of her own now – outside of what she saw from her parents.
Love, when done with pure intention and space to flourish, could be healing.
But then again, first experiences always felt like love to the freshly-kissed.
“Girl, they aren’t listening to us. Plus, look how big this lounge is,” Dania pointed out. “Now tell me.”
Kamilla looked around the small lounge and laughed. “You’re so nosey it has to be studied.”
“You call it nosy, I call it investment and if it’s gossip in the hood, it’s current events. Now spill it. How was it?” Dania pushed.
Drawing in a deep breath, Kamilla tied the bag of trash and placed it by the others before moving over the set of tables that needed to be wiped down. “Whatever you say, girl. Put that cleaning mask on and I’ll tell you.”
“Oh, you and C4 are made for each other. So damn demanding,” Dania huffed, pulling the mask back over her face and sassed. “Happy?”
“Immensely,” Kamilla graciously responded. “I’m not cleaning this nasty place up by myself.”
“I took something, I’ll be fine. Now tell me,” Dania practically begged for the details of Kamilla’s first time with her friend.
“It wasn’t bad. Not like all the horror stories I’ve heard. He was gentle and considerate and-” Kamilla stopped to slightly nip her lip.
“You want to do it again?” Dania cooed. “Did you finish?”
Kamilla held up two fingers.
“You know I figured it would be him riding around Husten if you ran away from him because he’s crazy like that. But now I see that it’s both of y’all locked in like this so quick.”
Kamilla slightly frowned at Dania’s statement. “Do think this is too much too soon?”
Dania shook her head. “No. I think in this life they live, and we live by proxy, everything has to be this way because we never know when the death knock is coming. For instance, my parents thought they had time to get it right. And now he’s locked away for the rest of his life and my mother, as bitter as she is, has to start over on her own. ”
A sigh pushed from Kamilla’s lips. “I’m all too familiar with that death knock.”
“So you know that love is here one second and gone the next,” Dania commented.
“I do. I just – I just don’t want to end up like my mother,” Kamilla finally admitted.
“After my dad was murdered, she just stopped. Between the times they were off and on, there was glimpses that her world revolved around him in ways I couldn’t understand but when he was gone, she left too.
Not physically but mentally. I don’t want to be that person. ”
“K, if you make the choice not to be, you won’t. Don’t let whatever it was that your parents experienced be yours. This is your journey.”
Kamilla huffed. “I know… I know but Cairo and my dad. They so similar. Azul, music, insane as hell.”
Dania stopped wiping down a set of chairs to look over at Kamilla. “Who’s your dad?”
“Don’t blurt it… please,” Kamilla warned, pausing to get Dania’s nod of agreeance. “AyeZee.”
She squinted and then let her mouth drop. With snap of her fingers, she bobbed her head. “You look just like him. Your daddy is a hood legend, why are you not cashing out on that?”
“Because I don’t want my journey through life webbed into being the hood legend’s daughter. Plus, his life here and his life with us were two different things. Whatever they experienced here, they kept it from me,” Kamilla shared. “Please don’t tell anyone.”
“Does Cairo know?” Dania asked.
“Yeah, I told him,” Kamilla answered.
Dania buzzed, knowing that no immediate follow-up meant that Cairo didn’t tell her why the two were so eerily similar.
That wasn’t Dania’s business to tell. Out of respect for Cairo and the hell he’d suffered since AyeZee’s untimely death, she wouldn’t utter a word.
She also trusted that Cairo would tell Kamilla they were grieving AyeZee in different ways.
She huffed. “Well, now I know why you like him so much. Those two men got the same type of crazy.”
“It’s not so much the crazy as it’s the care.
I loved my mother – I love my mother. Don’t get me wrong, but my heart longed for the love my dad gave.
That just hit different. And when you condition yourself to know that the only one who is sound enough to care for you is you, you hold on to those pieces. ”
“Your mom…how bad was her depression?” Dania asked, genuinely wanting to know.
Kamilla pulled in a sharp breath. “Bad enough that the only one who could find her in it was my dad. And maybe that’s why her world revolved around him the way it had. Maybe why he moved us out of here. I don’t know. What I know is I always want to be able to find myself in loving someone else.”
“I hear you. I one hundred percent agree. Don’t psych yourself out of what you feel. I can attest for him, he doesn’t let anyone in as close as he’s let you. You cracked something in him that no one else could. Just be as good to him as he is to you,” Dania requested.
“I promise I will.”
“And don’t worry, I’ll bust his head open behind you,” Dania added. “Let’s finish up so I can get a nap before the club tonight.”
The newly-founded friends fell into a comfortable silence as they cleaned the lounge. Toward the final mop of the floor, Fredo appeared with an envelope and smirk on his face.
“Tell me how I told that man of yours to have you clean the studio and instead, you watched him do all the work?” Fredo questioned.
“He told me not to work for free,” Kamilla sassed, with a smirk of her own.
Fredo observed her, finding the lightheartedness her father held. “Sounds like he got a good head on his shoulders.”
“You would know that more than me right?” Kamilla mused.
Fredo let out a rumble of laughter. “I would and I do. Crazy kid but solid. Had a million dollars’ worth of game imparted on him and he kept every drop. Anyway, let me make you whole. Don’t spend all in one place.”
Kamilla took the envelope. “Yeah, like on tuition?”
“Where you planning on going?” Fredo asked.
“I got accepted into OSU.”
“Smart girl like you with no scholarship?” Fredo huffed. “I wish I had a connect there. I got one down in the valley at RVCC.”
“RVCC?”
“Rancher’s Valley Community College. The dean owns some property we do business with,” Fredo shared. “Could’ve made you a Bison.”
Kamilla huffed, thinking about the email. “If this doesn’t work, I’ll take you up on that offer.”
“I got you,” he shared, before quieting his voice. “Anything for KP’s daughter.”
Her cheeks flushed.
“You got too much of him in you to hide that. Don’t hide it, just don’t let anyone exploit it. Aight?”
“Hear you.”
Back in normal tone, he looked around the space. “What you say about doing a deep clean here once a month to help with tuition and your friend’s baby? And before you give me that look, I’m Fredo, I know everything.”
“For as long as she’s able, that’ll work.”
“Aight, y’all get out of here,” he spoke, peeling a few hundred dollar bills off of a knot of cash. “Lunch on me.”
“I can’t take that,” Kamilla refused, but Fredo stuffed it in her hand and gave her a pointed look.
“We Azuls take care of our own. Go eat and be safe.”
Kamilla yielded and gave him a soft smile. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
With supplies packed into the trunk, the pair pulled away from the lounge while Kamilla split the money up evenly and put Dania’s into the glove box. “Thanks for helping me.”
“Thanks for calling me.”
“Mhmm this doesn’t get you off the hook from doing hair either, so make it happen,” Kamilla shared.
“Mhmm,” Dania mocked. “Next time you let him all up in your guts, put a bonnet on.”
“Girl, please!”