by C. L. Donley
Oddly, he was right. Kim had spent her life being a burden to some well-meaning family or another, and she desperately hated it. The only thing worse than the idea of admitting to her best friends that she was a walking waste of sexiness was admitting it to the men themselves.
Kim scoffed and shook her head, returning to her sleeping position.
“Did I see pictures of her? At your place?”
“No.”
“Do you miss her?”
Bel sighed and tilted his head toward Kim’s ethereal form under the sheets, the heaviness of the past having once again fled in the presence of her.
“When I got back home I went to her grave, for the first time in a long time. And I cried like a baby.”
“You cried?”
“Yes, I fuckin’ cry, why do people think I don’t cry?”
“'Cause you be stuntin,’” Kim answered succinctly.
He had to laugh. She was right.
“Anyway, I cried a lot, actually. Because I realized that I could barely remember why I was so… I remember the woman I just don’t remember… ‘us.’ I felt really turned around.”
He told Kim all about an entire other trajectory he’d had before he stowed away to the States, trying to escape all the death and all the responsibilities that seemed to stalk him. A solitary tear flowed down her cheek as she shed the last of her apprehensions. She was glad to be rid of that dour portrait of him that his actions and her ignorance had forced her to paint. And what was hidden behind it was that moment their eyes met in Spain, and every moment that followed that’d felt 100% like the truth without any evidence.
She’d been right at the beginning: he was the alpha to end all alphas, but he was also beaten up by life as she had been, vulnerable and entirely loveable. And he’d decided to let her all the way in.
* * *
Back at the hotel, Fahid was getting a bad feeling.
He never watched tv, but even in the dark solitude of the hotel, it was simply too quiet. Sometime during the night he got a phone call, from his mother, and ignored it. He walked the short distance to a drug store across the street and purchased a pay-as-you-go-phone and called her from there.
“The king has died,” Fahid’s mother Eshe informed him tearfully.
Dread and anger choked him mercilessly. Forty prosperous, peacekeeping years he’d ruled. A brilliant military leader and strategist. Once king, Hafiz made it mandatory for every male child to attend two years of military school at the age of 16, his own sons included, and anyone who continued their military career was paid handsomely, which caused a great wave of prosperity to elevate the citizens of every kind of station in Ghassan. The country had one of the strongest, most effective militaries in the world. All that, and he met his end by a conniving concubine.
They’d barely been gone two days before his father was drowned conspicuously in the shallow waters of conspiracy. Who could he trust? Over the phone, his mother’s tears seemed genuine, but he knew that was no indication of innocence.
“Did he name his successor before he passed?” Fahid asked.
“No, but Adela has sworn that the king had promised the throne to her son in private. The king’s chief guard, the high priest, Najila and her sons are holding a banquet in Semih’s honor. They have invited the French ambassador. They have not invited me or the queen. You must come home!”
Najilah and her sons? The French ambassador?
Just as his father predicted, his enemies slithered out of the grass and into the light before his body was cold.
Adela had double-crossed Fahid as well.
If Belkacem hadn’t shown up when he had, she would likely still be whispering assurances to him, telling him not to worry, that she would take care of everything, as long as he promised to give Semih the role of advisor to the king. He wasn’t sure now if she ever had the intention of settling for mother to the advisor, of if she planned on killing more kings to get her son to the throne.
He hadn’t known what he was dealing with in Adela, to him nothing more than a silly vindictive woman. He’d taken the bait to indulge his curiosity. Fahid inherited his father’s ability to be underestimated, it seemed.
He couldn’t imagine what power plays Adela would need to make so urgently that she couldn’t just wait the handful of years for the king to simply keel over.
But the EU might have a few.
Of course. This was about the pipeline.
Outsiders. This was bigger than the family then. In a small way, he was relieved. For the first time perhaps ever, envy for the throne loosened its grip on his heart.
Fahid still wasn’t sure how Adela managed to kill King Hafiz al Malwali of Ghassan, but apparently, she had. And the king saw it coming, perhaps not from miles away but well enough to protect Ghassan.
Surely the king knew he would make enemies attempting to compete with Europe for power over the world’s wealth and resources, to break free from the petrodollar. Perhaps the strength of their military had made their father too confident. Indeed, if any power had plans to attack Ghassan, they certainly couldn’t go through the front door because they didn’t want any of that business. Using a woman, however… it was clever, he had to admit.
Though he wasn’t quite sure if the EU would be so foolish as to try and destabilize a regime so established as Gassan. Or were they?
Forty Six
Chapter 46
Syreeta Miller was a track and field star, straight-A student and captain of the volleyball team. She’d earned scholarships at her first, second and third choice of school and had her pick of the litter at the time that she’d taken her parents’ advice and agreed that she too deserved to live a little, to be the teenager she’d never allowed herself to be before.
So she went to a party. She laughed, she drank, and she took her first hit of cocaine.
In an instant, her life was over.
Trophies didn’t matter; scholarships were nonsensical, the future itself paled in comparison to the pursuit of the next hit. The high was the goal after all. And it only cost about 30 bucks and required no experience, accolades or qualifications. She’d made the discovery of her life, that the middleman could be entirely cut out, which was herself.
Her parents, her whole family became to her like scowling, angry imposters. She wasn’t achieving anything, so they didn’t love her anymore. She still managed to graduate since all the hard work had already been done by that point. But she never showed up to graduation and never did decide on which college to say yes to. After a year her parents kicked her out of the house.
Syreeta lived on the street. It took a few winters for it to wear on her.
Then she had a baby. She named the baby Kimberly.
Kim’s father? Let’s just say his name was John.
Honestly, Syreeta had no idea how she became pregnant, but she had. When she traced back the conception date, she’d narrowed it down to three men. And when Kim entered the world as beige as a linen curtain and never darkened, she assumed which one it’d been. The one whose name she hadn’t caught because it didn’t matter, the man who’d told her anyway out of some semblance of guilt and she still didn’t remember. Just as she didn’t remember ever sleeping with him. Perhaps he’d slipped her something, adding insult to injury.
The instant Syreeta realized she was having a baby, all instincts to use drugs instantly left her, and she was hit with a burst of optimism. She was starting to see that drugs were not her ally, that somehow this inanimate object had managed to use her much more than she was using it.
This is your ticket out, this is your way back, her inner-self told her.
She showed back up on her parents’ doorstep, swollen with child and her eyes clear as a bell. The dopesickness had been a bitch, particularly with morning sickness on top of it. But she’d gotten through it because she was strong, stronger than any member of her hatin’-ass family. She was even strong enough to show up at their doorstep after all she’d said to them and sto
len from them, presuming they would want to have their prodigal daughter return, complete with the hard work of sobriety having already been done for them.
But as it turned out, being pregnant was even more of an insult than being a drug addict. College was completely out of the question now. That, and the news of having another mouth to feed was more than they could take.
Her parents having turned down the position, Syreeta took to raising herself, finding a place for her and her baby to go, learning about government programs, filling out forms, finding work, finding alternative means of emotional support, crafting a makeshift family from scratch. She met her husband Gerald Pritchard in rehab, after Kim was born and she’d had a few years sober. She hadn’t used, but she’d checked herself in anyway. The working, the single parenting, the dope-less existence was taking its toll, and she felt herself slipping. She was scared for her baby, who only had her to rely on. Gerald had lived on the streets since he was eleven and had also voluntarily checked himself into rehab for the same reason.
They did what everyone told them not to do and married almost immediately after getting out of treatment. Gerald hadn’t the first clue about how to raise a child, but he adopted Kim as his own, even though Gerald was black and knew obviously that Kim’s father had been white. He treated her no differently, and Syreeta couldn’t thank him enough for doing that. Gerald had two more children with Syreeta, and Syreeta loved being a mom. Though Gerald hated the idea, they moved into subsidized housing, just so that they could afford for Syreeta to stay home with the kids full time.
When Syreeta had ten years of sobriety and Gerald twelve, a familiar itch began crawling back into their consciousness. Life had only gotten more challenging, marriage demanding, and they hadn’t been to a meeting in years now, though they were still in touch with their sponsors. And with all the kids now in school, being a housewife had become rife with temptation and boredom. Syreeta was the first to break down, admitting to her husband that she was desperate to use, the weight of so many lives on her conscience.
“You’re doing the right thing,” Gerald consoled her when he’d heard her confession. He’d thought a bit about using every once in awhile, but finding out that his wife had been thinking about it much more intrigued him. They’d never been high together before. A decade of sobriety under their belt ensured that their first hit would be a holy motherfucker.
After a few weeks, it was obvious the idea wasn’t going anywhere. Convinced they had enough tools to find their way back, they endeavored to try their little experiment. They knew a few things: Gerald knew he was a functioning addict, and Syreeta knew that she was not. They also knew that there was a chance that with all the fail-safes in place, they might still not make it back to reality.
“If we can’t get this shit together in a year, we go straight to rehab. Even if the other one of us won’t,” Gerald decreed. Syreeta nodded.
After two years Gerald finally lost his job, and Syreeta was frantic. She had come to rely on Gerald for everything completely, and without his money coming in, they would surely be kicked out since they were already three months behind on the rent. Gerald’s solution was radical, and he proposed it with virtually no hesitation: he would simply have to pimp Syreeta out.
He assured her that he’d done it before and it worked like gangbusters. He would be strategic in the chosen clientele, and they would likely make enough money not only to get caught up but maybe even move from where they were. Syreeta liked that idea. They were gonna be okay. It’d been years since she’d been with anyone else besides Gerald, but she’d tricked on her own in the past before and it was much more dangerous. She trusted Gerald implicitly.
Their fail-safes had almost worked a year before. Syreeta had been the most focused of the two, the one who could most likely reel them both in. But cocaine was Syreeta’s drug of choice, while Gerald’s had been heroin. Syreeta had been deathly afraid of needles, but Gerald had insisted, and she trusted Gerald. He hadn’t meant any harm by it, not really. He’d simply wanted her to experience the love that he’d experienced, the love that he could never give her. He wanted to watch her face as she did.
The next few years were a blur. A blur of almost dying, almost going to jail, lying to kids, to the police, to Johns, to everyone. The fear of seeing the looks of horror on her own children’s faces, that fear inevitably falling away and giving way to the fear of dopesickness, the fear of the police taking you to jail before you could get a fix. The blurs themselves became blurs. Blood, vomit, the unbearable constipation, dumpsters, hotels that should probably be torn down, red and blue lights, Gerald dissolving into unrecognizable madness, then predictable madness, then finally Gerald gone altogether. Showing up at her family’s doorstep yet again. Stealing from them yet again. Stealing from her own kids, from the police, from Johns, from everyone. Then milestones that she knew should’ve passed by now. Kim, tall and with a gorgeous rack. Grown men coming around and calling her “mom” and sometimes giving her food.
She didn’t bother with the kids much anymore because they were Andrea’s now. Andrea used to be a good friend of hers. Used to be her best volunteer when she was in charge of hospitality at church back in the day. She’d offered to help with the kids just for a little while, “until Gerald got his shit together” is what she’d said. But she’d up and stolen them. Soon Syreeta had to ask permission to see her own damn kids. Sometimes she needed to talk to Kim alone. But soon Andrea had even trained Kim to act saditty.
It was just as well since Syreeta had failed them completely and utterly. They deserved to have a real family, a stable life and a place to live where they didn’t have to cry and get yelled at when they opened a closed door. It just hurt that she’d created some people that had loved her for who she was, the only ones in the world apart from Gerald, and that was taken away from her, outside of her control. How was she ever supposed to find the strength to get clean once her kids were taken away?
On this particular day, Syreeta had found some shade from the summer sun behind the playground of an abandoned fast food restaurant. She’d eaten a burrito that a John was nice enough to toss her. There was a young skinny white girl across the way, and Syreeta was annoyed. The bitch was trying to take her business, and she was about to get them both arrested. Plus, she had about two hours left before her body was going to start screaming again. It was in the middle of this scenario that something very unexpected and bizarre happened.
Syreeta suddenly saw Kim. Kim who looked nothing like anyone in the family, especially as she grew, but who Syreeta never failed to recognize on sight. There was a very handsome man with her, and he was carrying a baby.
What could Kim be doing here, she wondered distantly. She didn’t wonder how she’d found her because Kim could always find her. The city was small, the junkie world a limited and rather close-knit network. She couldn’t know why she was there, but she could tell the man Kim was with was made of fucking money.
“Hey mama,” Kim said casually.
“Hey baby,” Syreeta greeted her warmly in a gravelly voice.
“Where’s daddy?” she asked.
“Oh, your daddy been locked up,” Syreeta said somewhat gleefully. That dumbass always got locked up when he started doing wrong by her, and the worse he’d done, the more time he got. It was the one evidence of God in her life that she held on to. They were still husband and wife after all. Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church, the Bible said.
“Mama, this is Bel, my fiance,” Kim said.
“Ohhhhh,” Syreeta perked up.
Bel crouched down on the curb and smiled. “Mrs. Pritchard,” he politely addressed her as he took her withered hand and bravely kissed it.
Syreeta gave Kim an exaggerated look of approval. It was obvious where Kim got all her personality.
“Well damn!” Syreeta lilted. Kim laughed.
“This is Jabari,” Kim suddenly said, referring to the baby.
Syreeta looked at the baby
and back at Kim, reticent to make the connection.
“This your baby Kim??” Syreeta asked in astonishment. Jesus, how long had it been?
Kim grinned, nodding.
“Nooooooo!” Syreeta exclaimed in disbelief, putting her fingertips over her mouth. She desperately wanted to hold the baby, but there was nothing safe about that. She didn’t even want them coming near her. It was as painful as anything, but she couldn’t refuse the love.
The baby squirmed and vocalized as he looked unwaveringly back at her with astonishing gray eyes. He was too little to even know what he was looking at, she knew. She thought back to being pregnant, being a young mom, her mountain of ten years of sobriety now dwarfed by her despicable time spent in limbo. Damn, she needed a hit. She smiled politely, not knowing what else to do, wanting them to hurry up whatever business they had with her and leave.
“Well it’s good to see you, baby,” Syreeta volunteered.
“Mama I’m leaving Nashville. I’m going to live with Bel in Ghassan.”
Where? Syreeta didn’t know what or where she was talking about, but it sounded nice. She simply nodded.
Kim her little overachieving carbon copy. She’d graduated high school with honors. Graduated college with honors. Law school with honors. Passed the bar on the first try. And she’d come around every time to tell Syreeta all of it.
Was the bitch trying to rub it in her face? She knew all about honors too, could’ve ran circles around her peers too, so fuckin’ what? She chose not to. The pursuit had left her feeling unbelievably empty, an emptiness Kim didn’t seem to know. But she would. And when she did, Syreeta sincerely hoped she could be there for her.
“I’m going to be a queen, mama,” Kim informed her.
“You deserve to be a queen, Kimberly. You know you already are to me,” Syreeta replied.
Tears ran down Kim’s face at her words. She hadn’t seen Kim cry since she was a girl.
