“So you left your fucking daughter on my brother’s stoop like trash?”
She waved him off. “It is what it is, Reminisce. I gotta do what’s best for me at the end of the day. She’ll be good, she’s young.”
I shook my head, trying my hardest not to bop this bitch, because the last time I had been in proximity with a chick this dumb, it was my own sister.
“Don’t be shaking your head at me, bitch. You don’t know me, but you in here judg?—”
I held my index finger up before I spoke. “Look, Rouge. I’m about five seconds up off your ass. Don’t volunteer to see what my hands do too fast, because I promise you I’ma hand wash yo’ ass in here.”
She sucked her teeth and focused her anger on Reminisce. “Who is this bitch you brought to my hotel room?”
I laughed, about to deck her, but Rem grabbed my arm. “Nah, we ain’t here for that.”
“Then what the fuck are you here for? I’m seconds from beating your lil pretty bitch up and having my—” She was too hot for me, so to help ease the process along, I pulled my gun from my back and aimed it at her head.
“This was supposed to be the other way around, but you bitches make me sick with all that rah-rah shit. Too much talking while he’s talking, so let him speak and answer only the questions asked to your simple ass and maybe when we leave here your fucking cranium will still be intact.”
She had her hands up in surrender immediately. “Okay, okay. Please don’t kill me.” That tough shit was gone and now she was blinking nervously and looking from me to Reminisce.
“Yooo.” He chortled, then he stepped forward and snatched the folded papers from my back pocket. “Sign these. You abandoned your daughter, therefore I’on wanna see you ever again, not when whatever nigga you’re messing with realizes who you really are or when you realize that abandoning her was the biggest mistake of your being. She’ll never have ties to you again, and if you even think about coming for her, I’ll kill you.”
Tears streamed down her face, her eyes jumping from me to him before she took the papers from him. When she unfolded them, I physically saw her heart drop in that moment because whatever she’d planned by dropping the kid off had backfired.
“What? You want me to sign away my parental rights?”
“Yeah. When you dropped her off on my brother’s porch and went ’bout your business, you made that decision.”
“Sign the papers, sweetheart. I got better things to do than stand here.” I cut my eyes between her and him, irritated. My temper was extremely short, making me liable to shoot this bitch and leave him to clean up the mess. Situations like these grinded my gears because my sister had done this same bullshit to my niece. Ariya had abandoned her baby because Brysheer didn’t want her.
“Fine.” She grabbed the pen conveniently sitting on the table. Seconds later she had her head down, signing and initialing every space with a pink highlight. A few scribbles later she was holding out the papers.
“She was supposed to bring you back to me.”
More laughter escaped Rem’s lips. “Now that’s funny. Where is her birth certificate and social security card?”
She looked at him long and hard before she went into her bag. She then pulled out a Ziploc bag of what looked like paperwork. She extended it to him and he snatched it from her.
Seconds later he was going through it. “How the fuck did you get my name on this?”
“You act like you don’t know me. I get shit done.” She looked from him to me.
I put my gun back into the small of my back and focused on him. I hated that I felt like I wanted to ask what he needed from me. Like if he wanted me to beat this bitch into next week, one word from him and I would. I hated the hold he had on me, even though I did a pretty good job of ignoring it.
“We got everything we need,” he said to me and I turned to leave, hearing him move behind me.
“If it’s any consolation, I really did love you, Reminisce.”
That statement didn’t stop his stride. “Yeah, I’m sure you thought you did,” he tossed over his shoulder as we exited her room.
When we made it back to the car, he was quiet for a while. It was the heaviest silence I had ever experienced, because not even the radio was on. I refused to make him talk though. If he needed silence, I’d give him that. We were about five minutes into the ride when he finally spoke and that alone shocked me.
“I thought I’d loved her, but every time I tried to love her past that dark ass hole in her chest, she’d burn me deeper. I know who I am and what I give, but something about the way I cameup from a youngin’ made me look for love in the wrong places for a while. Renny was the smarter one. Instead of looking for that shit, he shut it off. Then he came up on Cay.”
His words weighed down on my heart because they were coated in the type of pain that had me ready to spin and rid this earth of ol’ girl. “You know experiencing heartbreak doesn’t make you weak, right?”
He let out a dry chuckle. “Not now it doesn’t, but it did back then. I was walking around thrown off, a shell of myself, damn near a ghost in the wind. I was weak, seeing all of what my mama put herself and us through and mirroring that. My childhood had me believing love was sacrifice and a constant battle. She had me thinking love was earned off action and penance. Even though I ain’t did shit wrong but be born and watch a woman who couldn’t love herself enough to do better for her kids. When I met Pynk, I thought I had met my one. Then I encountered the source of what would make my trust even more scarce.”
I swallowed hard.
