3. Trigga #2
And just like that, the conversation was over.
He stepped back from the doorway and walked off without another word, leaving me standing there with more questions than answers.
The shit absolutely did concern me. Telling me that I couldn’t see the man I was in love with was insane, especially without an explanation.
I walked over to my door and then slammed it so hard that one of the picture frames on the wall had fallen.
My heart was beating so hard in my chest that I felt the beat in my ears.
I looked back at my phone, and it was still sitting there with no new notifications, no missed calls, nothing from Tahari to explain any of this.
Tears fell at a rapid speed now as reality started to settle in.
Something had happened between him and my father.
And whatever it was… It was big enough for my father to step in like that.
I slowly sat down on the edge of my bed.
My mind was running through every possibility, trying to figure out where things could’ve gone wrong.
But nothing made sense. All I knew was that everything had just changed, and nobody was telling me why.
BLEEK
I sat on the ottoman that stood at the end of the bed with my phone in my hand. I was staring at the screen for a second before finally hitting Ty’s name to FaceTime him. The call rang twice before he picked up.
“Yeah,” he answered. His voice came through clear, but the background was anything but quiet.
One of his kids was yelling about something I couldn’t make out, another voice cutting in behind it, and I already knew he was somewhere in that house trying to pretend he had control over it. I shook my head slightly.
“You sound like you’re in the middle of a daycare,” I said.
“I am,” he replied without missing a beat. “What’s up?”
I leaned back against the foot of the bed and ran a hand over my face for a second before getting straight to it.
“Maliah little boyfriend? The one I told you about.”
“Yeah,” he answered. “What about him?”
I exhaled slowly.
“He’s the one that robbed my auto shops.”
That quieted him down just enough.
“For real? You sure?”
“Yeah, you know damn well I don’t move on anything unless I’m one hundred percent sure. I can’t wrap my mind around him doing some shit like that and then sitting up in my face like shit is sweet.”
There was a brief pause on his end, like he was putting the timeline together.
“So how are you handling it?” he asked.
I leaned my head back slightly as my eyes drifted up toward the ceiling.
“I shot him,” I said.
Ty went quiet for half a second, then let out a breath.
“And?” he asked.
I already knew that he was asking if I killed his ass, and honestly, I should have.
“I let him live, but he was screaming.” A slight edge of amusement slipped into my tone. “He was carrying on like I did something crazy. He was being dramatic as hell.”
Ty let out a short laugh.
“He was screaming because getting shot fucking hurts,” he said plainly.
I smirked a little at that as my mind drifted for a second.
Years ago, Ty had caught some bullets himself. So, I knew that his ass could relate to that pain. I looked back at the screen.
“What’s it like, though?” I asked him while a grin pulled at my mouth. “Catching lead. I never had the pleasure.”
Ty stared at me through the phone like I had lost my mind.
“Man, you better go knock on some of that French imported wood you got up in that mansion,” he said. “You out here jinxing yourself talking like that.”
I let out a quiet laugh while shaking my head.
“I’m just asking a question,” I added with a chuckle.
“Yeah, well, ask somebody else that dumb shit,” he shot back. “Ain’t nothing enjoyable about that experience.”
I leaned forward slightly and rested my elbows on my knees as I let the humor settle.
For a moment, neither of us said anything.
Then my mind shifted right back to where it had been before the call.
Maliah was all that I could think about right now in the moment.
I exhaled slowly as my expression tightened just a little.
“I told Mali that she can’t see him no more,” I said.
Ty’s face changed slightly, like he already knew that wasn’t going to be simple.
“And how did that go?” he asked.
I let out a breath through my nose. Seeing my baby girl standing in front of me in tears over my request wasn’t easy to witness, but it had to be done.
“She ain’t got a choice.”
I said it like that was the end of it. But something about it didn’t sit as clean as I wanted it to. And I knew Ty could hear that part, even if I didn’t say it out loud.
He was a father of teenagers just like me. One thing about those teenagers was they were wired to do exactly the opposite of what their parents had said.
“Now you know damn well she is not going to listen to what you said.”
If anybody was going to tell me some shit that I did not want to hear, it was his ass.
“Well, let me hire some security to tail her ass, how you do with my Paige.”
He took extreme measures when it came to his kids.
“Shit, her ass gave them the slip a time or two.”
I laughed because our kids were the exact mirror images of us.
“Yeah, who the fuck could tell young Ty anything?” I said with a small laugh.
“Ask yourself that same question, brother.”
His words sat with me because if Maliah was any more rebellious than I was back in my day, then I knew I had a problem. I looked into the phone and saw that something to his left had caught his attention.
“Aye… put that shit back before you get an ass whooping for dinner and sleep for dessert.”
I laughed hard as hell. He had to be talking to one of the younger kids over there. Just hearing him in dad mode made me momentarily think about how Eternity and I were trying. In no time, I was sure that I would be sounding just like his ass.
“Bro, let me call you back. This boy be doing too much.”
“Yeah, go handle that,” I laughed before ending the call.
I knew that I would have to explain everything to Maliah for her to fully understand the reasoning behind my request, but right now I had to decompress.
Earlier, Sha had dropped off Tahari’s car for me and left the keys inside just how I had instructed him to.
After shooting his ass, I stood in the window of my establishment, the same one he had stolen from, and watched his car hightail it off the lot.
When I didn’t see his car anymore, I flipped out my disposable phone and placed a call to one of the cleaners I used to employ back in the day.
He came with his small team and made the shop look good as new.
I stood from the ottoman and did a light stretch.
I needed a shower to wrap my mind around everything that had happened.
I needed to unpack my day and come up with a game plan to have this conversation with Maliah.
I knew that she was upset with me right now, but after our talk, I’m sure that she would see that more than anything, all of this was about protecting her.
I dragged my feet across the carpet and headed toward the bathroom.
I turned on the shower water, and quickly the hot water created steam that circled around me.
I looked at myself in the mirror and sighed.
The old me was looking back at me. I was glad that Eternity was out with Tori having their monthly girls’ day because if she were home and saw this version of me walking through the door, she would have known that something was up.
I inhaled away the pressure of the day and then sighed out all the bullshit.
The situation was handled; now the next task that I had to tackle was figuring out how to talk to my daughter about this shit.