Secrets of a Side Bitch 2

by Jessica Watkins

  I’mma shake this ass ‘till I graduate

  Nicki Minaj’s verse encouraged a twerk session like no other. I popped my ass vigorously as the song left the speakers.

  “Yea, baby!”

  The white men called out for me in lustful spurts.

  “Damn, that ass is beautiful!”

  Reluctantly, I had to leave the stage and all that white money. Yet, many of them requested private dances as me and the bouncer quickly collected my tips while the next dancer climbed onto the stage.

  I had so many tips that I had to stash them away before giving private dances. I wanted to check my phone for messages from Chance anyway. So, while holding my singles and bra and panties that I had stripped away, I made my way to the dressing room.

  I fought my way through the crowd of men, jealous that I had given all of my attention to the white men. They pulled at me and smacked my ass. Luckily, I had long since become accustomed to the disrespect and had grown a thick skin against ignorant drunk motherfuckers.

  However, one person grabbed my arm so hard that I damn near fell to the floor. We caught eyes, and my heart fell to my chest in disappointment.

  “What the fuck, Rae?! Let me go!”

  This was such typical Rae! But I thought she’d gotten over this shit. Though she still called me and sent text messages frequently, she hadn’t popped up since she walked in on me and Chance.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  But I guess, since I had been ignoring her calls for the past three days, she decided that popping up was necessary.

  Reluctantly, I allowed her to follow me towards the dressing room. I stopped right outside of the dressing room door. The walls were thicker, so some of the music was blocked and we could hear each other a little more clearly.

  “What the fuck is your problem?! Stop putting your motherfuckin’ hands on me!” I fussed as I fought to hold my tips while putting back on my panties and bra.

  Rae sighed heavily and ran her fingers through her dreads. I could tell that our break up had gotten to her. She looked smaller, as if she had lost a few pounds. Her clothes weren’t put together well. The color in her hair needed a touch up.

  “I miss you, babe.” As she spoke she reached for one of my hands as she wiped fallen tears away. Patrons, on their way to the bathroom, and dancers, on their way into the dressing room, looked on curiously. Some of the dancers knew me, so they knew Rae, and they snickered as they watched our exchange. I cringed in embarrassment.

  “Rae, I can’t do this right now. I am at work.”

  “Just listen to me, please.” She was so sincere. Her face was wracked with pain and heartbreak. My heart went out to her. I didn’t want to break her heart. I didn’t want to be the source of the pain evident in her tired eyes.

  But I didn’t love her anymore.

  “You’re all I have. You are all I have had for a very long time.” Tears were streaming so fast at this point that she didn’t even fight to wipe them away. “I can’t live without you. My life is so empty.”

  These were the same words that she left on my voicemail time and time again. These were the same words that she sent via text message over and over again. I felt sorry for Rae. I knew her life. I knew that without me she felt like an outcast. But every time I woke up without a burden on my chest, every time I woke up to Chance’s arms around me, I knew that breaking up with her was right for me.

  Now she had to do what was right for her.

  “Rae, we can’t stay together because your life is empty. Get out there. Find friends. Go link back up with your family. Mend that relationship. Date.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You have to!” I screamed, flailed my arms, and kicked my legs so much that my heels crashed against the old beat up laminate flooring. “You have to, Rae. You cannot cling to me for the rest of your life.”

  She glared into my eyes as she finally wiped her face free of the sea of pain. In her eyes I saw all kinds of emotions; confusion, hurt, pain and anger.

  She was lost, but I was no longer willing to help her find her way.

  Ten

  Omari

  A few days later, things went down exactly how Capone told me they would. For days, Ching sent word through the streets that he’d caught wind that I was the one hitting up his spots. Capone said that was it; it was time to stop playing with these niggas and get rid of Ching, and whoever else I saw fit that were responsible for Ayesha’s death.

  But before I could formulate a plan, before I could find this nigga, he found us.

  Capone and I were standing outside of the spot out south, rapping with one of the block boys, Ringo. Suddenly, amid rotation of the blunt between Capone and Ringo as we talked numbers, we heard a screeching sound coming toward us from the end of the block. A white Tahoe came barreling towards us at sixty miles an hour down the residential block. Through the snowflakes that gently fell, I could see the smoke from the exhaust of the truck coming towards us like a heavy deathlike fog.

  “Drive by!”

  I barely heard the block boy over the sounds of the tires against the pavement; over the screams of the children that were throwing snowballs next door to us. I was mesmerized; watching them run in what seemed like slow motion towards their house.

  I could feel somebody pulling me towards the building as the Tahoe approached. It slowed down to the point that it was crawling while the passenger side window slowly slid down.

  People scattered like roaches; all except me, Capone, and Ringo. We stood behind trees and brick walls, aiming and exchanging fire with the Tahoe. Shots fired through the air. Sparks from our weapons illuminated the air like innocent fireflies detonating deadly bullets meant to kill.

  It felt like the exchange lasted for hours. As I shot into the Tahoe, I wished that Ching was inside; riddled with every bullet from my Glock. Visions of Aeysha clouded my head and were motivation for me to continue to shoot through the cramp in my trigger finger.

  What felt like hours were actually only seconds. It took not even a minute for gunfire to interrupt the peaceful solace of this hood on a cold winter day. The Tahoe’s tires screeched as it took off. Me, Capone, and Ringo ran for our rides for an escape before the police arrived. As I climbed into the driver’s seat, I frantically looked around for anybody struck by our bullets, but, thankfully, saw nothing but nosy eyes peering from windows and doorways.

  We weren’t worried about snitches. We fed that block. We housed homeless teens in that trap house. We gave crack heads odd jobs for cash. We gave the children ice cream cones in the summer and helped their mothers pay the heat in the winter.

  The hood loved us and knew what came with the territory.

  “Told you them niggas was on us,” Capone said through heavy breaths as I weaved through traffic.

  I was headed back to the spot in Riverdale.

  The block boy was long gone in his ‘94 Cadillac.

  “I believed you.”

  With a sly smile, he asked me, “Can we please kill these niggas now?”

  It was an easy question to ask. Yet, for some reason, when for weeks I’d salivated at the thought of putting a bullet in Ching’s head and every cavity in his body, I was hesitant to answer. After that quick moment of gunfire, I realized the capabilities of another body dropping that wasn’t meant to. Ringo was an eighteen year old and the father of two. Capone, though childless, was young and full of ambition that was going to put him on so many levels as he climbed the ranks in the streets.

  Had Ringo or Capone died during that exchange, it would have taken a piece of my heart, when I had a piece left only big enough to keep it beating.

  “C’mon, boss. It’s time,” Capone convinced me. “It’s either pop this nigga or keep having gunfights like we in the Wild Wild West. Next time somebody gon' get hit. And, I don’t know about you, but I like being on this side of the grave getting money. You started this shit, now let’s finish it.”

  He was right. Though I was enjo
ying fucking with this nigga for weeks and making rack after rack off his product, it was time to make Ching pay permanently for what he’d done. It was time to stop playing these childish little dope boy games and be the G’ that I suddenly was.

  “A’ight, man. Let’s do this.”

  Simone

  For the second time within a year, I was at a gravesite watching someone being lowered into the ground that I played a major part in putting there.

  Only this time, Omari wasn’t with me.

  He couldn’t stand to watch Dahlia being buried. He didn’t want funeral services or a public burial. Against his family’s wishes, against his mother’s continuous pleas for a chance to say goodbye, he insisted that I just make this all go away as quick and painless for him as possible.

  I did as I was told; found Dahlia a resting place close to Aeysha’s. They were within three feet of one another, laying diagonally with each other in the earth.

  Chills ran through me as Dahlia’s small silver metal coffin was lowered into the frozen dirt. It was adorned with a beautiful bouquet of white roses and misty blue limoniums, her birth flower, per Omari’s request.

  Even after Tammy, even after Aeysha, I still surprised myself with the lengths I would go to be someone of significance in this man’s life. The level of desperateness within me scared the shit out of me. I could still feel the biting cold of the patio door handle in my bare hands as I snuck back into my condo after watching Tiana’s boyfriend go in shortly after Tiana thought I’d left that night. They were so busy smoking weed and listening to loud music that they didn’t even hear my footsteps as I tiptoed back into the house, through the kitchen, and into Dahlia’s room.

  I stood before her crib and pondered what I was about to do for so long that it was amazing that Tiana never caught me in there. I was waiting for something in me to snap and tell me that what I was doing was insane. But all I could hear were Omari’s constant loving words for Dahlia that overshadowed anything he felt for me or my unborn child.

  Dahlia’s autopsy would take weeks. But I was sure to make it look like just what they assumed it was; crib death. The investigation into Tiana and her boyfriend in relation to the child abuse was heavy.

  As I stood in three inches of snow in red Giuseppe nappa boots, my cell phone began to belt out its ringtone. The bells and whistles ricocheted off of the trees in the quiet cemetery.

  It was Chance, so I ignored the call.

  I ignored the call, but I couldn’t ignore the gnawing feeling in my stomach where a baby should be. Chance just would not go away. For every stunt I pulled, for every life I took, there was constantly something or someone in the way of my happily ever after.

  Watching the coffin being lowered deeper and deeper into the ground, I replayed Omari’s loving touches on my belly a few days before. I closed my eyes and engulfed myself in that love, realizing again that it was all for the best. The lengths I’d taken, the schemes, the lies, the murders; it was all for the best.

  No ordinary woman would understand. No typical woman easily settled into a life with a committed loving husband would ever know the desperate need to be loved. No wife would know the feeling of always coming second. No beautiful woman would ever know the feeling of being looked over and passed up.

  I didn’t expect anyone to understand. That’s why I kept my secrets buried inside of me under the comfortable notion that I had done it all for the best; for my best.

  I stood there, finally the only woman that mattered in Omari’s life.

  Chance

  “Man, Omari must really fuck with you if he wants me to bring you to his crib.”

  I shook my head as Capone tried to pass me the blunt while I drove down 94-East. No matter how many times I told him that I didn’t smoke, he always offered.

  “I keep telling you, I don’t smoke,” I told him with a chuckle.

  “How could you not smoke? Drugs are great.” We broke out laughing as he continued. “I see why Omari don’t smoke, pretty boy ass. But you, I figured you a smoker.”

  “Naw, drinking is my thing. Besides, we weren’t allowed to do drugs in the home. So I guess that shit just stuck with me. Now drinking is my shit.”

  “I feel you. Well anyway, like I was saying, Omari must really fuck with you. He don’t want nobody knowing where his family lay their heads.”

  “Right. You told me that before. Something about a situation that happened in the past.”

  “Yea. Fuck niggas killed his girl.” Capone’s facial expression suddenly changed. I saw deep sadness in the eyes of a nigga that usually always had a happy drug induced grin on his face.

  “Damn. For real?”

  “Don’t tell him I told you. I guess since he fucks with you, one day he will tell you himself. But yea, this nigga thought he snitched so he popped his girlfriend a few months back.”

  “Damn. That’s fucked up.”

  I figured this game was pretty cut throat. I was raised deep in the middle of the trenches of the hood. I had been hearing about unforeseen tragic murders since I was able to comprehend English. Those tragedies ran across my mind often now that I was on the streets hustling; especially since I myself had murdered somebody in cold blood. I figured that at some point, I was going to reap what I sowed.

  But I was willing to endure all of it to keep my pockets fat. Things had been so gravy for me since I started trappin’. I was pushing my own whip, splurging on Gia a lil’ bit, and even paid a few of her bills so that I could keep comfortably sleeping there when I wanted to.

  “What’s this all about anyway? Do you know?”

  Capone shrugged his shoulders as smoke escaped his mouth and filled the car with the smell of ganja. “I don’t know. He might want us to make a run or some shit. Who knows?”

  As I drove towards the Roosevelt exit, it excited me that Omari thought enough of me to pull me in on whatever he had in mind. For years, even while living in Lexington House, I didn’t know how my future would look. Even as I roamed the streets in Minnesota with twenty five grand in my pocket, I was worried about what my future held; if anything. Now, being alongside Omari and Capone, gave me some hope for a future, a lucrative one at that. It wasn’t the most ideal choice for a career. It wasn’t the safest or the most concrete either. But it gave me things that I never had before in my entire life; money and family. I belonged somewhere, finally.

  Rich Homie Quan had spit a couple of bars on his “Type of Way” joint by the time Capone directed me to Omari’s condo downtown. We were able to park right in front of the building and hop out.

  “You good, homie?”

  I assured Capone that I was good. I know that he noticed the look on my face. It wasn’t bad though. I was simply taking in my surroundings. This was how I someday wanted to live, maybe even with Gia; in a beautiful neighborhood with our flashy cars parked in front of a multi-million dollar building that we lived in together.

  That was the life. I was ready to live it. I was making my way there, one bag of heroine and one molly at a time.

  Capone and I were buzzed in and, once going through the security door, were at Omari’s condo that was on the first floor. The door was left open. I could hear two voices as he and I entered the kitchen.

  Omari was standing behind, who I assumed was, his girl who stood at the kitchen sink washing dishes. He kissed her neck and smacked her ass right before noticing that we walked in. I heard him speaking but I was too focused on his girl to pay attention to what he was saying. I shook his hand while being mesmerized by his girl. Her ass was off the chain, but it wasn’t its voluptuousness that had me mesmerized. It was its familiarity that had me shook. As she turned to face us, its familiarity hit me like the butt of a pistol crashing on the side of my head.

  I was stuck and everyone noticed it, while Simone tried to front like she didn’t know me.

  “Nice, ain’t she?” Omari stood proudly by Simone with his arm around her and an arrogant grin. “Now stop staring at my lady.”
<
br />   Simone didn’t even fucking flinch! But she quickly got the fuck outta there.

  “You stupid, baby,” she told Omari with a giggle. Then she walked out of the kitchen as fast as she could.

  Even Capone noticed how she belted out of the kitchen. “Well, damn. Hi, Simone!”

  I was stuck. Rage filled my body so much that the surface of my skin was covered in heat and goose bumps. I couldn’t even hear what Omari and Capone were talking about. I just followed them as they walked out of the kitchen through the patio while fighting to keep my composure and putting all the pieces of the puzzle together in my head.

  Their words went over my head as we stood on the patio. I tried hard to act like I was listening, but the only thing I heard were Capone’s words in my head that he told me as we rode over there.

  “This nigga thought he snitched so popped his girlfriend a few months back.”

  My body wanted to fall unconscious. The trees and air spun around my head in violent loops.

  “Aye, Omari. Where is your bathroom?”

  I barely heard his instructions before opening the patio door and going back into the condo. I was looking for Simone. I walked through the kitchen and passed a baby’s room. I followed noise down the hallway. I passed the bathroom and came across a closed door. Without even thinking, I opened it and saw Simone pacing the floor.

  “BITCH…”

  Immediately, she quieted me with harsh whispers as she met me in the doorway. “Ssssh!! Would you shut the fuck up?!” Before I could say another word, she hit me with a ton of questions. “What are you doing here?! How do you know them?! How long have you been…”

  “Fuck all that!” This crazy bitch had a lot of nerve to question me! “You lied to me! You fucking bitch! You tricked me! Was that his girl that I killed?!”

  “Chance…”

  Without even thinking, my hands were locked down tightly on her elbows, squeezing them until I felt her bones amongst my fingertips as I forced my way into her bedroom. “Was it?!”