I shrug, looking up at the dark sky. “I guess be that nosy motherfucka that annoys you from time to time.”
She sputters out a laugh that eases the nausea in my stomach, and my phone slips against my sweaty hand. I turn it over where Cash App is still open and waiting for me to tap in the money I owe her for coming to me, but first I need to answer that question she couldn’t get out.
“So you wanna know if the money I keep throwing at you have conditions attached to it? Is that what you tryna ask me?”
She opens her mouth, then reaches up to rub the back of her neck before nodding. “Yeah.”
“Well, it depends…”
She shakes her head, taking a step back, and I reach out to tug her purse strap even though I wanna touchher. I wanna scrape my fingers down her smooth face, wrap my hands around her cheeks, and tell her that if she’d tell me that ballplayer’s name I’d take care of him just because she comes to me when I ask for her.
“Let me finish,” I rasp.
Her eyebrows wrinkle and she tries to pull the strap out of my hand because I gave her too much space this time. She can drop this purse and take off right down the street at any second and I wouldn’t be able to do shit about it. She could slip right through my fingers, then I’d have to figure out another way to reel her back.
“Are you still that baby bird?” I rush out, twisting the leather strap around my hand so tight the blood stops flowing to it.
“Huh?”
“Terrica said he’d never give you a car or your own money because it’d be like pushing his baby bird out of the nest. Are you still that baby bird?”
She looks down at the leather twisted around my hand. “Yeah…but I’m not his.”
I nod, muttering out an “a’ight.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanna know.”
“Okay, and if I was still his pathetic baby bird, what would your conditions be before I took your money then?”
I shrug. “That you let me teach you how to take it and hide it because I don’t mind teaching baby birds how to fly.”
A ghost of a smile dances across her face, and my dick twitches at how easily I nudged my way inside her brain when I told myself I wouldn’t do it. I’d gone from a man she liked to turn her nose up at to the one she came to anytime I wanted her just likethat,and I’m not even fucking her.
Fuck.
“I didn’t spend all the money you gave me,” she says. “But I also don’t have any income right now. Faye stopped paying me for my help back when he started taking care of me because I didn’t need it. If I start asking her for money every week, she’ll start asking even more questions that I…I can’t answer right now. So I’m just trying to hold on to what I can, you know?”
I tilt my head as she folds her lips under her teeth.
“A’ight…then hold your hand out.”
She pushes her small, shaky hand out in front of me while I slowly unravel her purse strap from my fingers and open the front pocket of my duffel bag.
“Now what?” she asks, rolling her eyes away from me.
I push my phone back into my bag and pull out my wallet while staring at her standing in front of me with her hand out…and it all falls out of my mouth before I can stop it.
“When you need some money, you walk your ass right up to me and stick your hand out just like that and say, ‘I need some money, Pup.’”
I pull a few crisp hundred dollar bills from the folds of my wallet, dropping them in her hand. “And I’ll give it. I don’t have a problem giving you what you want, as long as you open your mouth and say what it is. You don’t need to do all the mental gymnastics with me. I’m grown.”
“You don’t have to do this. I can pay you back when I get on my fee?—”
“Get a Cash App and if you can’t do that, go down to Heritage Bank and talk to Ms. Beaufort. Tell her you want a checking account and put Faye’s name on the account with yours. Tell her Pup sent you and she won’t charge you nothing to open it.”
“Right…lead with Pup, huh?” she mutters to herself, looking down.
