Chapter 9 #3
I called Gutta, ran down what I’d just done and his ass pulled up within minutes. I never had to beg him to do shit, he was just always gonna come through for me. We got out of there before the police came.
Three hours later Brielle called me from her mother’s car that she had taken without permission.
She apologized repeatedly telling me she was sorry and that she needed to see me.
We got a room at the Hilton and what happened that night was something I had carried with me every day since.
She gave me something she had never given anybody else and I understood the weight of that even at eighteen years old and it had meant everything.
Bri wasn’t my first, but I was hers. She was the first and only girl I allowed myself to love though.
The next morning we couldn’t figure out how to leave each other.
Then life made the decision for us.
—
I shook that memory off, and came back to the parking lot and Brielle was still looking at me.
“You need to grow up,” I said. Not mean. Just honest. “Either I’m somebody you choose out loud or I’m somebody you need to stay away from. Because the in between is killing both of us and I’m done living in it.”
The door behind me opened and Gutta stuck his head out.
“Aye. I just got a call. Another fight in two days. Twenty five thousand. You want it?”
I felt Brielle go still beside me.
I looked at Gutta and then I looked at Brielle. She was watching me with something in her eyes that was close to pleading without being willing to actually beg and I stood there for a second in that space between what she wanted and what my life actually required.
“I’ll take it,” I told Gutta.
Brielle’s face changed. That softness that had been there a minute ago closed up fast and she stepped back, grabbed her purse strap and looked at me one more time.
“You know what Street,” she said. Quiet. “Never mind.”
She walked back inside and I watched her through the window go straight to Simone and say something and Simone looked out at me through the glass and then they were both getting up and heading for the door on the other side.
Gutta came out and stood beside me watching them pull out of the lot.
“What did you do? You know, you really making this shit hard for me and my bitch.” he said.
“What I had to. And Simone ain’t yo bitch, delusional ass nigga.”
“You making sure of that, ain’t you? And damn Street! Simone was out here apologizing to you.”
“I know.” I told him, unfazed. I was tired of dancing with Bri ass. I had bigger shit on my plate that her sometiming ass.
“Gutta I got twenty five thousand dollars on the line in two days. I can’t be sitting around waiting on a woman to decide if I’m worth the argument with her family. I got things to do.”
He looked at me for a long moment and I could see him deciding whether to push it or let it go. He let it go. But his jaw was tight about it and I knew this wasn’t the end of that conversation.
We went back inside and finished eating in silence and then he dropped me back at my apartment and went his own way.
I walked inside and locked the door and stood in the quiet of my place and let everything settle.
The morning had been a lot. The men in the abandoned apartment, the money from Gutta, Brielle in the parking lot saying things that she meant but could only tell me, me saying things back that I also meant and none of it adding up to what I wanted.
My phone rang.
Brielle.
I answered.
“You know what.” Her voice was different from the parking lot.
Still frustrated but something else underneath it now.
“I’m not about to keep letting you piss me off and act like I’m some terrible person.
My family is my family and yes it’s complicated but you stand there and act like I haven’t been fighting for you in ways you don’t even know about.
” I could hear her moving around, keys jingling.
“And you still out here fighting in cages and acting like your life don’t matter and I’m just supposed to be fine with watching that. ”
“Bri—”
“Send me your address.”
I stopped. “What?”
“Send me your address Street. I’m coming over.”
“If you’re coming over to argue—”
“I’m not coming over to argue. I’m coming over because I’m tired of doing this from a distance and I’m tired of the unfinished conversations, I’m tired of all of it.” A pause. “Just send the address.”
I stood in my apartment and looked at the ceiling for a second.
Then I texted her the address.
She showed up forty five minutes later and when I opened the door she walked in and stood in the middle of my living room, looked around at my space and then looked at me and we started talking.
Really talking. The way we hadn’t talked in years.
About prom, about the year and a half of silence after, about all the times since then that we had avoided each other and never fully landed.
About what we actually were to each other underneath all the history and the complication and the back and forth.
She talked. I talked. We went back and forth in the way that only people who actually knew each other could and somewhere in the middle of all of that the talking stopped being the point.
“What all that said, what we gone do Bri?” I asked as she sat on my bed and looked me in my eyes.
“Right now, I want to feel you. Then we can finalize everything else later. I’ve missed you so much.
I think about, and dream about how you made my body feel.
I wanna feel it again.” She said, not holding back at all.
I had to look in her eyes and see if she was serious.
She stood up, and started taking off all of her clothes.
I was froze and couldn’t do anything other than stand there.
This girl was so damn fine, a nigga was in a daze.
She was all the way in.
And so was I.
I lifted her off her feet, kissed her like I’d never get another chance, then I gave her exactly what she’d asked me for.
It had been years since I’d felt Bri, and it was better than I could have imagined.
I didn’t know if it was all of the love that I had for her, or if the shit was just this damn good, but here I was again.
I gave her everything I had because I wanted her ass to keep coming back.
The moans, the faces she made, that was some shit I wanted to have everyday.
Afterward we laid in the quiet of my room and she had her head on my chest. I had my hand on her back and neither one of us said anything for a long time. The city was doing its thing outside my window and in here everything was still.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. Quiet. Like she was saying it to herself as much as to me.
I didn’t respond right away.
But I held on tighter.
And for right now, that was enough.