I called again.
Voicemail.
I texted. Once, then again and then I stopped counting because I knew what I was doing. I knew how it looked and I couldn’t stop myself anyway. I stood in that hallway and felt every single thing I had put that man through reflected back at me while he was with another woman. It was the most specific pain I had ever felt.
He was right there.
And he wasn’t answering me.
I walked back into that room and found Marcus. I smiled and took his arm and spent the rest of the night performing like I was really enjoying myself while Street stood twenty feet away from me with someone else. He didn’t look at me once.
On the drive home Marcus talked about the people he had connected with and the opportunities that were developing. I nodded and looked out the window at the city moving past.
I thought about what I had heard through that office door that morning.
I thought about Street’s face in that hospital corridor.
I thought about Simone’s voice at four in the morning telling me I couldn’t keep leaving a man and expecting him to keep being there.
And I thought about the fact that somewhere in my gut something was telling me that the two things I was carrying tonight — the man I loved and the man I was with — were connected in a way that I didn’t understand yet but that scared me more than anything else in my life.
I just didn’t know how.
Not yet.
And what was even scarier was that I may have actually run Street off for the last time. He looked genuinely happy tonight and he didn’t pay me any attention when usually he would at least acknowledge me.
What had I done?
I’d be lying if I said that my cousin hadn’t changed my life. Being Street’s corner man paid me better than the streets ever did, and that was saying a lot.
I wasn’t gone lie and act like I didn’t still move on the side, because I did. Old habits and old money didn’t just disappear because your life got better. But it wasn’t my main thing no more.Soon I planned to go all the way legit. My girl was gone make sure of that, with her upstanding citizen ass.
Street had put me in a position where I didn’t have to risk my freedom every day just to eat, I took that seriously even when I didn’t say it out loud. Watching him go from fighting in basements to being a top ten ranked heavyweight in the world was something I still had to remind myself was real sometimes. My cousin was genuinely about to be the heavyweight champion of the world if he kept moving the way he was moving and I had a front row seat to all of it.
That meant something to me that I didn’t have the right words for. Hood niggas were raised not to show emotions, but I was proud as fuck. Everything that I did in the past for him, it was all worth it.
What I did have now was Simone. We even had a joint checking account we had just opened for the house we were about to put an offer on. That was the most unbelievable part of everything if I was being real. Me and Simone looking at houses. I never thought that I would be the man to own anything beside a car and a damn social media account.Shit, I never thought she’d be my girl for real. She gave me the chase of my damn life, but I didn’t care. I wanted her ass and did what it took to get her too.
She had turned me into somebody who thought about a real future and I wasn’t even mad about it.
She wasn’t easy to deal with at all. Nothing about her was easy. She fussed about everything, the dishes, the way I drove, the way I talked sometimes. But I had figured out a long time ago that her fussing was just her love language. She cared about the details because she cared about me. Once I understood that I stopped fighting her on it.
Still, that shit didn’t mean I wanted to go to the grocery store either. She was staying at my crib because her roof was getting fixed before she put her house on the market. She was going to be here for a week and was already stressing me the fuck out. Living together was about to be hell.
“Come with me,” she said Saturday morning without looking up from her phone.
“I’ll be here when you get back.”
She looked up.
I looked back at her.
We did that for about four seconds.
“Come on! Damn!” I said. Having to give in to her spoiled ass.
She smiled, grabbed her purse and I grabbed my keys.
