The Love He Tried to Buy Back

Prologue

“Girl, if you don’t stop moving, this crystal gonna be on your finger instead of your nail.”

My client sucked her teeth but finally held still. “I’m excited. Damn.”

“You can be excited when I’m finished.”

She laughed, and I went back to placing the little Swarovski crystal where I wanted it.

Today made five years since I opened Love-Lee Nails, and the shop was packed.

Every chair was full, people were waiting up front, and my receptionist had said, “About an hour and a half wait, baby,” so many times she was damn near answering before anybody finished asking.

Drake was playing over everybody talking, the shop smelled like monomer and acrylic, and pink-and-gold anniversary balloons were tied up all over the place.

Five years ago, I was practicing nails on anybody who would let me.

Now people were willing to sit in my waiting area almost two hours just to get in one of my chairs.

That shit still felt crazy sometimes. We stayed busy because we were good at what we did, but I also made sure nobody came in Love-Lee and got treated funny.

I had been in enough nail shops where folks rolled their eyes because you asked a question or started talking about you in some foreign language like you couldn’t tell. I wasn’t having none of that in mine.

My girls kept their stations clean, used good products, and knew if they fucked up somebody’s nails, they were fixing them before I had to step in.

I wasn’t letting a client spend her money in my shop and leave unhappy.

Mistakes happened, but if I kept having to clean up behind you, you wasn’t gonna have a station in Love-Lee for long.

I didn’t care if somebody came in for a basic short set or wanted every finger covered in crystals.

If they sat in one of our chairs, they deserved to leave with what they asked for.

Most days, I didn’t take as many clients as I used to. I had six nail techs and a receptionist now, but today was different. I wanted to be out front with everybody instead of hiding in my office on the shop’s anniversary. Plus, I still liked doing nails.

I finished placing the last crystal and turned my client’s hand toward the light. “Okay, now you can move.”

She snatched her hand back and stared at her nails. “Bitch.”

I laughed. “Good bitch or bad bitch?”

“Girl, you know you a bad bitch.”

We both busted out laughing.

“Hold on, let me get my pictures before you start touching everything.”

I grabbed my phone and moved her hand underneath the light, taking a few pictures and a quick video for the shop page. Once I was done, she pulled out her own phone and started turning her hand every which way trying to catch the crystals.

“You still better tag me when you post them,” I told her.

“You already know.”

I laughed and set my phone back on my station. She was still admiring her nails when my receptionist called my next client over.

“Hold on, let me clean this table first.”

That was how Love-Lee stayed most days, one client getting up while another one was already waiting to sit down. You would think seeing my shop packed like this would’ve been enough for folks to give me my credit, but somehow my success always came back to my boyfriend, JB.

Everybody knew he bought the building for me, and apparently that was enough for some people to decide he had handed me a whole successful business along with the keys, like the clients just showed up because Jabari Haynes paid for a storefront.

What people didn’t know was everything that happened before he ever bought this place.

Me and JB had been together since I was fourteen. Looking back, I don’t know what the hell two fourteen-year-olds knew about being in love, but you couldn’t have told us we weren’t. By the time we got to high school, everybody knew if you saw one of us, the other one wasn’t too far behind.

My mama couldn’t stand it. It wasn’t really JB she hated as much as what came with him.

He had too much money for a boy his age, stayed around people older than us, and there was always some car pulling up with somebody in it my mama didn’t like the looks of.

She knew what he was doing, and so did I.

I just didn’t care enough to leave him alone. My mama used to stay on me about it.

“Boys like him end up in one of two places, Leona. Prison or dead.”

Every time she said it, I rolled my eyes like she was just talking. As far as my teenage ass was concerned, JB was gonna be fine because he was JB, and nothing bad was ever really gonna happen to him.

Then I got pregnant my senior year. I was scared to death telling my mama.

I already knew she was gonna be mad, but I didn’t expect her to tell me I couldn’t stay in her house.

I cried, begged, told her I was sorry, everything, but as far as she was concerned, I had made a grown decision, so I could go be grown with the boy I wouldn’t leave alone.

JB stepped up without me having to worry about much of anything.

He got us a little apartment and moved me in, and from that point on, we started trying to figure out how the hell to be adults when we were barely out of high school.

The apartment wasn’t much. The kitchen was small, the carpet was ugly, and the air conditioner sounded like it was fighting for its life every time it came on, but I loved that little place because it was ours.

We bought baby stuff a little at a time.

Clothes, bottles, blankets, diapers. JB put the crib together himself and cussed the instructions out the whole time because he refused to admit he didn’t know what he was doing.

We were having a boy, and I used to lie in bed with JB’s hand on my stomach while we talked about what our baby was gonna look like and which one of us he was gonna act like.

We had a whole life planned for that little boy, right down to shit that didn’t even matter yet.

Then we went to an appointment and the nurse couldn’t find his heartbeat.

I still remembered sitting there while she checked again and then brought somebody else into the room.

JB squeezed my hand so hard it hurt, but I didn’t tell him to let go.

I just kept staring at the screen, waiting for something to happen.

Maybe they would check one more time and realize they had made a mistake.

Maybe our baby would move. Maybe somebody would tell us everything was fine after all, but nobody did.

Our son was stillborn, and I went into the hospital pregnant and came home without my baby.

All his little clothes were still there.

The crib JB had fought with was still put together, blankets were folded and waiting for somebody who was never coming home, and bottles were sitting in the cabinet even though there wasn’t gonna be anybody to use them.

There really wasn’t a way to make sense of something like that.

Everybody kept telling me they were sorry, and I got so tired of hearing it that eventually I stopped answering the phone.

I didn’t want to go anywhere or see anybody.

Some days I barely wanted to get out of bed.

JB handled his grief differently. He stayed gone more, hustled harder, and came home later.

I knew he was hurting because I was hurting too, but neither one of us knew what the hell to do with the other person’s grief.

We were young as hell trying to deal with something grown people probably didn’t know how to deal with either.

One day, I was lying around watching videos on YouTube and ended up on some girl doing an acrylic set. I watched the whole thing, then another one, then another one after that. A few days later, I ordered one of them cheap little nail kits online, and my first set looked like shit.

My little sister, Anika, still let me practice on her.

Nina, my best friend since high school, did too, even though she talked shit the whole time.

Anybody else I could convince to sit down and give me both their hands became practice.

At first, it just gave me something to do, something that got me out of bed and made a couple hours pass without me thinking about the baby stuff sitting in the other room.

Eventually, I started getting good at it.

Not overnight either. I fucked up plenty of nails before I figured out what I was doing.

Acrylic too thick, shapes crooked, designs looking nothing like the picture somebody showed me.

After a while, though, people stopped letting me practice for free and started asking how much I charged.

That’s when I decided to go to school and do it right.

By the time I got my license, I already had people hitting me up for appointments.

I did nails anywhere I could set my stuff up, took pictures of every set that came out good, posted them online, passed my name around, and saved what money I could.

I wanted my own shop, and JB knew because I talked about it all the damn time.

I knew what kind of chairs I wanted, how I wanted the lighting, how many stations I needed so I could bring other techs in.

Hell, I even had the name picked out before I had enough money to rent a building.

I always knew I was gonna call it Love-Lee.

One day, JB pulled up and told me to get in the car. I climbed in and looked over at him while I buckled my seat belt.

“Where we going?”

“Just come on.” He pulled off before I could ask anything else.

I frowned and settled back in my seat. “I hate when you do that.”

JB glanced over at me. “Lee, just ride.”

I fussed anyway, and he ignored me the whole drive. A few blocks from the neighborhood, he pulled up in front of an empty storefront and parked.

I looked through the windshield at the building, then over at him. “What we doing here?”

Instead of answering me, JB got out and started walking toward the door. I called his name, but he kept going, so I climbed out after him.