I respected him for that because, although I knew what the outcome would be, the less I knew, the better. This would fuck my baby up. The way she looked at that boy when he admitted that he set her up told me everything that I needed to know. He broke her heart.
Back To the Present
Let Me In . . .
“You did the fuck out of that shit! I’m proud of you, man. You’re a fast learner.” I applauded Ace.
He completed his first client’s wrap on a brand-new Durango Hellcat and did the fucking thing. The wrap cost a pretty penny because the wrap had to be customized. The dude came in here and got it wrapped as a gift for his girl.
Ace’s smile was wide. “Thank you! I had an awesome teacher. Man, when people see my car, they always ask who did it. When I tell them that I did, they can’t believe the shit. I tell them to come through.”
That made me smile because, in the last week, we’d had calls about our new service. “That’s what I like to hear. As a matter of fact, a client is coming tomorrow for a consultation. I booked you as the technician. You ready to do your second wrap?”
“Hell yeah, I’m ready! Thank you, man. If I keep getting these bookings, I’ll be able to build my own place sooner than I planned instead of renting.” His enthusiasm was loud. He had goals that were honorable. What I liked most about them was they didn’t have shit to do with the streets.
We talked for a few more minutes before I headed to my office. Yesterday, Seneca dragged me out of town for some business that he said he had to handle. We ended up in Atlanta. I wasn’t sure what the business was and still didn’t know. It seemed like we went down there to fucking chill. I could have stayed under my baby for all that shit.
She had been acting a little out of it for the past couple of days. When I asked her what was wrong, she claimed she was stressed about work shit. I had never been the type of nigga to force someone that I loved to tell me anything they didn’t want to unless I felt it was something shady or detrimental to themselves or me.
I didn’t believe work had anything to do with it, but what I did know was whatever it was, it had something to do with that room she kept under lock and key. The day before yesterday, I walked down the hall, and she just stood there in front of the door. She just stared at the door. For almost five minutes, I watched her stand there. Later that night, I asked her what was in the room. She claimed it was storage. I loved Blake’s secretive ass.
Seneca and Q’amie alluded to her past and that she went through something that was devastating. I asked a few people in the crew about it in random conversation, but it was that thing no one talked about. That made me respect them a little more because they didn’t tell me her business.
My phone rang and pulled me from my thoughts. I missed my baby. The last time I saw her was early yesterday morning. When I called her last night, she kept the conversation short. There was no worry that she was on some fuck shit. Based on the cameras and her location, she was at home most of the day. That was also weird.
The caller ID on the screen of my phone told me that it was Blake calling from her office. After the third ring, I picked up.“What’s up, baby?”
“Sco-Scotty, this is Nadia. I need you to come to the office right now please. Oh, God, Blakeney.”Her voice was panicked.
I didn’t need to know what or why. I just needed to get the fuck there.“I’m on the way.”
My speed limit to my baby’s office was a steady one hundred miles-per-hour. If a cop tried to pull me over, they would just have to chase my ass to her office. When I pulled up, another car pulled up just as fast as I did. That put me on alert.
When the man jumped out of the driver’s side, and seconds later, a woman from the passenger side, it took less than a minute to know they were Blake’s parents. She was her mother’s fucking twin.Damn.This must have been serious if they were here too.
Mrs. Collins’s head turned in my direction when she noticed me as I got out of my car. She stared for a moment, then her head slanted. “Scotty, right?”
“Yes, ma’am. How are you?” My attention turned to her husband. “Mr. Collins, sir. It’s nice to meet you two, and I would love to extend this conversation, but I need to see what’s going on with my woman.”
Mr. Collins quickly bowed his head in understanding. We all moved to the front door of the building. Blakeney owned the entire two-story building. Her business occupied the entire bottom floor while she leased offices on the top floor.
The second we got into the suite, we heard loud voices.What the fuck?Urgency led the way as her parents and I moved toward the voices.
Nadia came out of Blakeney’s office. “Oh, thank God. She won’t listen. I think she’s really going to kill her.” The fear in her voice was real.
I walked past her to enter the office. What I saw was crazy as fuck. Blake sat in the armchair that was across from her couch with her gun comfortably resting on her lap. My eyes blinked a few times to kick my thought out of how sexy she looked in the moment.I love that gangsta shit in her.
Across from her were these two white people, a man and woman, whom I’d never seen before. What threw me off was the fact that both were crying and hugging each other. My head tilted to look at the dude sideways. If that was his wife, baby mama, or whoever she was, she should be ashamed to be in the presence of a man that cried harder than her in the face of danger.
The white lady looked toward me. “Please help us. She’s crazy.”
Blake finally realized other people were in the office. When she gazed at me, her expression softened. “Hey, baby. What are you doing here?” Her body leaned a little as she looked around me. “Mama, Daddy, what are y’all doing here? Dang, Mrs. Joanne, you called everybody,” she said with a titter like the shit she had going on was cool.
“You damn right I called everybody. Girl, we just got these white carpets cleaned. You know how hard it is to keep them clean. If you get blood in them, we might as well rip ’em up.” The conviction in Mrs. Joanne’s voice was strong.
“Joanne, girl, what?” Mrs. Collins asked with a chuckle. “What is going on in here?”
I was still stuck that this lady cared more about the cleanliness of the carpet than the folks on the couch in fear. I was in a room of crazy fuckas. The sad part was that I felt unusually comfortable in it. My nose turned up. “Who the hell pissed?”
