“He’s good. It was a graze.”
She let out a breath, nodded and then she remembered she was with her man, so she stepped slightly to the side.
“This is Marcus,” she said. “My boyfriend.”
Marcus extended his hand and I looked at it for a second and then shook it because I was a grown man in a hospital waiting room and this wasn’t the place.
“Good fight tonight,” Marcus said. “I caught the last round on my phone on the way here. You’re going to be something serious when you get that title shot.”
I looked at him. “Appreciate it.”
We sat. All of us, quietly in a hospital waiting room at eleven at night with too much happening and not enough space to put anyof it. This girl knew she was dead as wrong for being dude here, but now wasn’t the time. Bri had always loved my brothers, and they loved her more. I like to hope was that her intentions were pure.
Brielle sat two seats down from me with Marcus beside her and I kept my eyes forward and my jaw tight. I did the thing I had been doing my whole life which was hold what needed to be held. I’d probably hit the gym tonight, and let off all my steam. The fight I had tonight wasn’t damn near enough.
Melo fell asleep in his chair after midnight. The way that Melo could fall asleep anywhere under any circumstance needed to be studied.
Marcus stood up after a while, said he was going to step outside and make a call. Brielle nodded and he walked out through the doors into the corridor.
Me and Brielle sat in the quiet waiting room and didn’t say anything for a moment.
Then she looked over at me. “You okay?” her ass asked knowing that she wasn’t really concerned.
“I’m good.”
“Street, be for real.”
“Bri I said I’m good.”
She looked at me the same way she looked when she knew I was lying. She wasn’t going to push it because she also knew me well enough to know that pushing it wasn’t going to get her anywhere. Especially while she had just come up to this hospital with a random ass nigga to check on my brother. Man, thank God for growth.
I stood up and told her I was going to get water from the machine down the corridor and walked out. I couldn’t stand being alone with her because I knew that I’d probably say something that I regret. Even just seeing her tonight was pulling at my heart and bringing old memories back.
The corridor was long, quiet and the vending machines were about halfway down on the left side. I got there, put my money in and was staring at the options. Although I was looking at the machine, I still wasn’t seeing any of them. My mind was on Bri and this ugly ass nigga she had introduced as her dude. She didn’t even like yellow niggas. I knew in my heart that this was some shit her father had set up.
Just as I thought that, I heard his voice coming from around the corner. Marcus. On his phone. Not loud but the corridor carried sound and made it echo. I wasn’t trying to hear him and heard him anyway.
“—yeah it’s fine. His brother got hit but he’s good. Not a problem.”
I stood still.
“I’ll be back in the city Tuesday. Tell BJ I said everything is moving the way it’s supposed to.”
I stopped breathing.
The machine dropped my water bottle and the sound of it hitting the bottom of the dispenser felt like it came from somewhere far away.
BJ.
Two letters.
The same two letters that had been living in the back of my head since I was five years old standing in a cold parking lot watching my father get shot while a voice on a phone said it was done but there was one problem.
I stood in that hospital corridor with my water bottle in my hand, my fight wraps still on and the cut above my eye throbbing. Everything in my body went the kind of still that only happened before something violent.
But I didn’t move.
I stood there and breathed. I let my brain do what it needed to do with what I had just heard. Maybe I was wrong. I had to be. This nigga wasn’t old enough to have had anything to do with my father’s death all those years ago. Maybe he was talking to another BJ. I pushed those thoughts to a place that needed to be handled carefully and with patience. Not right now in a hospital corridor at midnight while my brother was stitched up in a room down the hall.
