I was familiar with the area. I wasn’t about to let her take me out of my comfort zone, if we were going to do this, I was going to be in full control of this situation.
When we pulled into the hotel lot, I parked and walked over to meet her at her car before she could pull the door open herself.I opened the door for her, then reached out my hand.
“Give me your phone,” I said sternly.
She looked at me.
“I’m not playing with you, Ivy. That’s the only way. I’m not tryna be rude, but I’m a nigga who can’t risk a set up. Phone.”
She didn’t get offended. She didn’t make a production out of it. She just reached into her bag, powered it down herself without me asking, and put it in my hand. I tucked it in my jacket pocket and nodded once.
We walked in together.
At the desk I handled everything myself, slid a hundred across the counter without making it obvious and looked the clerk dead in the face. “Don’t give out none of my information to nobody. Somebody asks, you never saw me and I’m not here.” I said, paranoid.
The clerk pocketed the bill and nodded. No questions.
By the time we made it to the room, I’d already run the hallway, checked the exits, noted where the stairwell was. Old habit. I didn’t sleep easy in unfamiliar places and I damn sure wasn’t about to start tonight.
Inside, Ivy dropped her bag on the bed and immediately started digging through it. I stood near the window with my arms crossed, still running a quiet check on the room in my head. She pulled out a small case, a lighter, and in a few minutes she had a blunt rolled and was sitting cross-legged on the bed looking at me like she lived there.
She lit it, pulled slow, then held it out toward me.
“What’s got you so tight?” she asked, smoke easing out with the words. “What are you afraid of?”
I walked over and took it from her fingers. Pulled deep and held it, felt the tension in my shoulders drop by one degree.
“With the life I live,” I said, letting the smoke out slow, “I can’t ever be too cautious. That’s not fear. That’s just how you stay alive. But I’m not scared of shit baby girl, you worded that wrong.”
She watched me. Her brows lifted just slightly and I could see it — the curiosity. The question forming behind her eyes about exactly what kind of life I meant. She didn’t ask it yet. But she was going to.
I took another pull and passed it back.
She took a pull from the blunt and looked at me sideways while she held the smoke in. Then she let it out slow and said, “So you followed in your father’s footsteps? You into the same shit that he was?”
I didn’t answer right away. Hell, I didn’t know how to answer that because the truth was although I didn’t follow him exactly, I was still in this world.
“I thought you wanted better than that,” she continued. “You used to tell me all the time that you’d be nothing like that nigga. Ever.” She passed the blunt back and shifted on the bed, getting comfortable like this was a conversation she’d been waiting to have for a while.
“You know after y’all moved, your father was the talk of the town for a long time. And not in a good way. He got your uncle Gary’s house shot up. Right next door to my family, Griz. A bulletwent through my grandmother’s living room window. We had to move behind that man’s bullshit. Robbing the same people he was supposed to be giving product to.” She shook her head. “I didn’t understand all of it when it was happening. I was young. But when I got older and pieced it together, it made sense. All I ever hoped was that you got out and did something different with yourself. I always hated how your bitch ass daddy treated y’all.”
I sat with that for a second. Let it move through me without reacting to it.
She wasn’t wrong about my father. The man was reckless in ways that cost people around him everything, and he never lost a night of sleep behind it. I’d watched him operate my whole childhood and made a decision early that I was never going to be that. What I had become was a different conversation entirely, but I wasn’t my father. That much I knew.
“I took a different path,” I said finally, passing the blunt back. “Got into other things. Business ventures. I been out the family business for a long time now.”
She nodded like she was deciding whether to believe me or just accept it.
I looked at her. “You came here to talk or do you on something else?” I asked, in all seriousness.I needed my stress relieved, I didn’t need her adding to it.
She looked back at me and the shift was immediate. Whatever reflection was sitting in her eyes a second ago dissolved into something slower, something that moved through the room differently. She didn’t say a word. Just looked at me and said, “Sit down.”
I sat on the edge of the bed, blunt still between my fingers, and watched her.
She slid off the bed onto her knees in front of me like it was the most natural thing in the world. No performance, no production. Just moved like she already knew what she was doing and had thought about doing it for a long time now.
She looked up at me once, then her hands went to my pants and she had them open before I even fully registered it happening.
