“Yeah, um, can you hear me?”
I exhaled. I had a short fuse when it came to games. “Amora, I hear you. What’s up?”
There was another pause, but it lasted as long as my patience. I clicked the end button. I had a short fuse for people who wasted my time. I always had. I’d dealt with bad producers, people who offered fake deals or deals that didn’t live up to their word. I dealt with lawyers and bullshit cases filed against me. I no longer had time to play around with anything that didn’t serve me.
I turned around to walk back into the meeting. When my hand was on the handle, the phone rang again. I answered immediately, my tone dry.
“Amora, I don’t have time for this. I’m in a meeting.”
“I have a son,” she shot back.
I was the one to pause then. Confusion slapped me in the face so hard that my neck jerked back. I had heard what she said. I was just confused as to why she was telling me this information.
“Um . . .” I hesitated, not knowing what would come out next. Suddenly, it hit me. She texted me and said she needed to talk, delayed when I called, and then told me she had a son. Was she implying that . . . ? No. I couldn’t believe that shit in that moment. There was no way.
“Wait, what you just say?” I asked her.
“I have a son. He turned one today.”
I let out a chuckle that hardly escaped my throat before I could catch it. “Man, stop fucking playing with me, Amora.”
I could not believe that this heifer called my phone after one year to tell me that she had a baby. I could hardly comprehendwhat she tried to insinuate, although, in the back of my mind, I knew full on.
“I’m not playing, Zay. I have a son. I named him Xavier.”
My head began to spin at that name. I dropped my head in my free hand and pinched the top of my nose with my fingers. I took a deep breath in, then out. I knew what she was trying to imply, and since my patience was short, I cut to it immediately.
I breathed in through my nose and exhaled through my mouth, like I had been taught in therapy. “You sayin’ hemyson?”
I hadn’t seen Amora since last year, but in that moment, I couldn’t calculate the math. All that surged through my mind was the fact that she named the baby after me. That threw me off and wouldn’t allow me to think straight. It fucked me up in that moment.
“You don’t remember the last time we slept together?” she darted back.
How the fuck was I supposed to remember something that happened a year ago? She might have felt that our moments were special, but I’d made it clear a million times before that I was not interested in dating anyone on that level. I was always sure to use condoms, so I had no fucking clue what she was talking about.
“Ain’t no way, Amora,” I said, my hand still pinching my nose.
“Oh, you don’t remember the last time we were together? The hot tub?”
I had no idea what she meant. I closed my eyes. A scene in a hot tub emerged across my head, . . . big brown titties in a yellow bikini bounced up and down in slow motion like a sports relay. A glass of champagne mixed with Hennessey was in my hand while water splashed all around. I couldn’t recall everything thathappened that night besides those elements, but . . . I knew what she said was not impossible.
“Why you just tellin’ me this now?” I asked. The timing of it all did align. However, I couldn’t . . . It still could not . . . I could not put what I felt into words. She recognized that immediately.
“Because it’s hard for me doing it alone,” she admitted. “I need help.”
I pushed off the wall. My legs felt like noodles. Before I could even speak again, she cut in.
“I just wanted to tell you before I had to take this to court.”
That right there sent a signal to my brain. I kept asking myself, what did she mean by that? Had she really tried to guilt me into taking care of a baby that I wasn’t even sure was mine? I didn’t know what to think. My mind bounced from one thought to another like Serena Williams in a tennis match.
“Amora,” I managed to get out. “What the fuck . . . Who the fuck . . . Bruh!”
“Look,” she cut in. “I see you being afamily manall on the blogs. I just thought maybe you’d like to meet your son too. If not, that’s cool. I’ll just be sure to send them papers to your mailbox. You still got that condo in the Valley, right?”
I exhaled so hard that it sounded like a grunt. “Get the fuck off my phone, Amora.” I ended the call quickly.
I stared at the phone in my hand as if it had just insulted me. A whole year of not even seeing this bitch, and now she had sprung a baby on me? It didn’t sit right. Then I recalled her words: “I see you being afamily man” with emphasis on the words like she was jealous. As reckless as she looked and acted on those reality TV shows, she had always had some sense when it was just us together. She was only loud, messy, and bold for the cameras, but she had never lied to me. At least, from what I knew about her, she wouldn’t lie about something like that.
