by B. M. Hardin
No, I didn’t believe she had anything to do with it, but for myself I just had to ask.
“Oh. So since y’all broke up or whatever it was that y’all were doing, you won’t mind me making her pay for what she done to me will you?” I questioned Lee Lee.
She shook her head.
“No, what do you have in mind?”
I smiled at her and zipped my lips.
That was for me to know and for her to find out.
She and Jinx were on my list of get back and I was going to be sure that both of them got what they deserved.
Stupid heffas!
Lee Lee managed to change the subject and actually had me laughing for the rest of the day.
I knew that she was cutting a fool because she knew that I needed it and I was thankful for her sense of humor.
We reminisced about the old days and we laughed about everything under the sun.
I forgot so many of the things that she talked about.
I guess it was because of all I had gone through, I simply blocked a few of my happiest moments out.
I could only pray that sooner or later my life would get back to that happy space again.
Later on that evening, I waited for Drake to get home.
Lee lee had left only an hour before he could make it in after I assured her that I was going to be fine.
I’d tried to cook for him.
It had been only two weeks total since everything had happened, but I was tired of feeling so helpless, so I tried to do something not only nice for him, but something that made me feel useful.
Drake and I hadn’t discussed much of anything.
We hadn’t talked about the baby situation nor the living arrangement.
He just seemed to be concerned with making sure that I was okay.
He was still acting slightly different.
But it wasn’t towards me, it was just him in general.
But eventually we were going to have to have a conversation.
Not a day and barely an hour went by that I didn’t think about the baby or what had happened.
I cried all the time whenever I did get a couple of minutes alone.
What was I going to do without being able to have kids?
I just didn’t see my life being full or fulfilled without them.
And what about Dray?
He wanted kids just as bad and now I would never be able to give them to him.
So what did that mean for us?
Every time I thought about the situation I got upset all over again and I also thought about Jinx and killing her.
The police said that she had a strong alibi for that day and even footage of her being at the car lot and never leaving during the time of the attack.
Of course she wasn’t with them.
She had paid someone to do it but the police only went by facts and they still promised to look into it but I knew that wouldn’t happen.
Had I been thinking I should have scratched one of them or ripped off one of the masks and hoodies and pulled their hair so that I could have had some kind of DNA but I wasn’t thinking.
I was too busy fighting for my life I guess.
Still, Jinx was going to get it.
And she deserved it too.
“Moet?”
I heard Drake call my name and I screamed for him to come into the kitchen.
He walked in carrying take out from our favorite Chinese place and I frowned.
He looked at me and then at the table and then sat the food on the counter.
“You cooked?”
I nodded but looking at the food and because one arm was broken and on the other my hand was fractured I hadn’t been able to stir quite right or flip the chicken like I was supposed to, so maybe it was a good thing that he brought food.
“I tried. But let’s eat what you bought,” I told him.
“No.”
Drake took off his blazer and took the Chinese and put it into the refrigerator.
He sat down at the table, got the spoon an fixed both of our plates.
“I tried. I don’t know if it will be good.”
“It will be fine.”
We said our grace and we sat and ate and even managed to hold a decent conversation and laugh.
I looked at Drake as he ate.
That food was nasty as hell but he ate it anyway.
The chicken was burnt.
The rice was mushy and the broccoli was hard and undercooked.
But he ate every bit of it on his plate and I knew that he had done it just for me.
Hell, I barely managed to force myself to eat half.
But little things that he did just for me, gave me hope.
After clearing the plates and washing the dishes, Drake helped me to the bathroom and ran me a bath.
For the past two and a half weeks, he’d been doing pretty much everything for me.
He bathed me, brushed my teeth and even combed my hair.
He would get me dressed and even put deodorant under my arms and lotion on me.
And not once did he ever complain.
As he got me settled and started to wash my back, I thought about how much I loved him.
I loved him so much.
No one ever quite understood but it was things like this and things similar to this that he’d always done in the past that had always made me love him.
Whether it had been him getting rid of his parents, off the record I should say, or the way he defended me when kids taunted me in school.
It was everything.
He’d always managed to be there when I needed him the most.
“Thank you Dray.”
“You’re welcome. But you don’t have to thank me. I got you. As long as you got me.”
Hearing him say those words made me smile.
Yes!
I was winning him back.
He was coming back to me and though tragedy had pushed us closer together, I would take him in any way that I could get him.
We didn’t say much else as he washed me and made sure that I was clean.
But there was one thing on my mind that I just had to get off.
“Drake I know Jinx did this to me because she’d threaten to take care of the baby if I didn’t. I hate her Dray.”
“I know you do. I hate her too.”
“I want her dead Dray. I just have so much rage inside. All I think about is making her pay for taking my child away from me. She already has a child and now she took mine and my ability to even have one.”
Drake didn’t say anything.
I wasn’t sure how he would respond to what I was about to say next but I was hoping that he would adhere to my request.
“Drake can you do me a favor?”
“What?”
I became nervous.
I was nervous for the most part because he had never really voiced it before or admitted to it and other than that I didn’t want him to think that I was crazy or something.
And asking someone to murder someone wasn’t all that easy of course.
“Can you take care of Jinx the same way that you took care of your parents?”
I was as nervous as a mouse sneaking past a sleeping cat.
I breathed hard as I waited for his response.
“I got you,” was all that he said.
And I knew that he meant it too.
~***~
“Kane what are you doing here? And how do you know where I live?”
I stared at him.
I wanted to smack the crap out of him but I wasn’t sure if I was strong enough to put enough power behind it.
And how did he even know about this house?
How did he know where we lived?
“If Drake catches you here you are a dead man,” I said and tried to shut the door.
“I just wanted to see if you were alright. You won’t take any of my calls. I just wanted to see if you were okay,” he said.
He was as dumb as a bo
x of rocks.
We didn’t have anything to talk about.
What didn’t he get?
He had a wife and a side chick and not to mention that he was a bold face liar, manipulator and everything else in between.
I didn’t have a thing to say to him.
“Don’t come by here again.”
And with that I shut the door.
It wasn’t but all of two minutes later that my phone started to ring.
I rolled my eyes, assuming that it was him, or my sister explaining why she was late coming to sit with me but it wasn’t.
It was Jinx.
Oh, she had some nerve!
“You should have went on and let him come in for a little taste,” she said.
At her comment, I hopped over to the window to see if I saw her car, but I didn’t.
“I don’t want him. I want you. And not the way that you might think.”
“Whatever. I told you to stay away from my husband.”
“I don’t want your husband. And you should tell your husband to stay away from me. But where are you? You can gladly come to me. Come on.”
With my body messed up and all, I would use whatever I could to do some serious damage to her.
“You know you wanted to have sex with him.”
“Stupid, I have been telling you from the start that he forced me to have sex with him.”
“You wanted to do it. You don’t have to lie to me.”
“I’m not lying to you. You know what, whatever Jinx. Believe your lying ass husband if you want too. But you got what’s coming to you for what you did to me.”
“No, you got what’s coming to you for what you did to me. You were the only friend I ever had. The biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life,” Jinx said and hung up the phone.
I meditated on her words for a second.
I had felt the same way.
The only real friend I’d ever really had was Drake.
And after Drake, it was Jinx.
I had a few others but they were never as close as Jinx and I had become in prison.
She was one of the only people I could ever be completely honest with and real with since she was somewhat in the same situation.
We just seemed to relate.
But that was then and this was now.
And now she was my enemy and I couldn’t wait for Drake to take care of her like I’d asked him to.
Maybe the request was a bit extreme but I really wanted her to pay for what she had done to me.
But at the same time, I didn’t want Drake to have to pay the price for his actions and I figured that if he did it the exact same way that he’d done it to his parents, then we should have any issues.
I just wanted her dead.
At the crashing of my car window and my wailing alarm, I knew that Jinx must have been near all along and she had done something to let off a little stem.
As I called Drake, I shook my head.
She just didn’t know who she was messing with.
But she was surely going to find out.
Soon.
And how in the hell did she, or her husband know where we lived?
They were one weird, stalking, psycho couple and I was convinced that the world would be a much better place without both of them.
And it was time to do what needed to be done.
Period.
~***~
I listened closely.
I had stopped calling Lee Lee’s name.
She must have butt called me accidentally or something but I didn’t really like what I was hearing.
She was arguing with Vicki and it didn’t sound pretty.
Vicki was cursing up a storm and Lee Lee’s responses surprised me.
She was a lot more passive than I felt like she should have been.
It was almost as though she was a little scared of her or something.
After about a few minutes of going at it, finally Legacy got fed up and she started to scream and she told her to get out of her house and not to come back.
And then I heard Vicki say that she loved her.
Yeah right.
How is that possible?
They hadn’t been fooling around long enough for all of that. But then again, maybe Lee Lee hadn’t been as open about it all as she portrayed to have been.
You just never know.
Not wanting her to discover me listening, I hung up and looked at Drake.
“What?”
“Nothing. Can I ask you something? Is Vicki a little on the crazy side?”
Dray shrugged.
“I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never had a problem with her but if you are talking about relationship wise, I have never seen her with a man. Ever. Since I’ve known her or since Naomi and I, well, you know, I’ve never seen her in a relationship. With a man, or a woman for that matter.”
Humph.
Maybe there was a reason she stayed single and maybe she was so crazy that she couldn’t keep anyone long enough for anybody to see her in some kind of stable relationship.
Well, whatever she was doing, she had better leave my damn sister alone!
If she didn’t want her, she was going to have to accept it and move on.
“Can you lay with me for a while?”
Why did I smile so hard that my face was about to crack?
Drake and I were still avoiding obvious conversations, but maybe he wasn’t ready.
I laid my head on his chest and he put his arms around me.
“No matter what happens, I’ve always cared about you.”
I looked up at him.
Why was he talking to me like he was about to die or something?
“Is something wrong Drake? You haven’t seemed like yourself lately.”
He didn’t say anything for a while.
“Everything is fine. I’m fine. I’m just fine,” he said.
But who was he trying to fool?
I knew that he was lying.
~***~
Drake and I entered the jail house.
The last time I was there I was taking the rap for the murder that Dray had committed.
But this time we were there to pick up Lee Lee.
She and Vicki had gotten into a fight, in public, and they were both arrested.
From my understanding, Vicki spotted her with a man and damn near lost her mind.
I was still working on the perfect way to get my revenge on her but her verbally abuse had gone to physical abuse and she was starting to piss me off!
She definitely needed to be taken down a notch.
She was just too damn reckless for me.
It was time that someone showed her that she wasn’t as bad as she thought she was.
And obviously it wasn’t Lee Lee because to me she seemed scared of her.
I couldn’t wait to see if Vicki had gotten the best of her, but at the sight of her she looked fine.
Her hair was all over her head, but other than that not a scratch or bruise on her anywhere.
That’s my girl.
We paid Lee Lee’s bail and listened to her side of the story.
She was always getting herself into something so I half ass listened to her but Drake seemed to be paying attention.
She was complaining about Vicki of course but it was her fault for getting herself into some real life “fatal attraction” situation.
It was way past time for her to get her act together.
Although I didn’t have a whole lot of room to talk.
Kane was still calling me like crazy these days and so was Jinx.
It was like when one hung up, the other one would call.
As though they were sitting there saying to each other:
“Your turn.”
I’d decided that I was going to go ahead and get my number changed but since hopefully I wouldn’t have to worry about either of them too much longer, maybe I could just continue to ignore them.
Drake promised to take
care of Jinx for me and I was hoping that he still wanted to get Kane back for pursuing me and blackmailing me to sleep with him.
Hopefully he could kill two birds with one stone; well or at least kill them both with one plan.
Maybe he could do Kane’s car too.
Just as we headed towards the exit, in walked Naomi, belly first, with the little girl on her hip.
She glanced at us but she didn’t say a thing.
I eyed her from top to bottom.
She looked like she was about to explode!
How many months was she?
She had to be almost due.
Continuing to check her out, I noticed a ring on her finger.
Hmmm…
Was that from Kane?
He couldn’t possibly be engaged to her and married to Jinx at the same damn time.
She couldn’t be allowing that.
Even I hadn’t been that desperate.
But you know how men these days do.
They will tell the side chick anything and make them all kinds of promises just to hold on to them for a little while longer.
Just to keep them in their back pockets.
I’d been there before so I definitely knew a thing or two about it.
We exited the jail and immediately I spotted Kane’s car.
He must have driven Naomi to the jail.
He was just a waste of human flesh.
I couldn’t believe that I used to think so highly of him.
I started to talk and engage in the conversation to try to keep Drake from noticing him and once we were in the car, I glanced back in his direction.
And he was looking dead at me.
Psycho.
And as if he didn’t know that I was with Dray, right then and there, he started to call my phone.
I quickly turned my phone on silent and stated that it was a 1-800 number and Drake didn’t bother to ask any questions.
Though Drake owed him an ass whooping, doing it at the police station wasn’t a good idea.
I could fix him.
They made apps for people like him.
Riding down the road, I started to think.
Kane was crazy and so was his wife, his sister-in-law and even his side chick slash baby mama was a little looney too.
They all needed counseling or to be evaluated or something.
To be honest, I just wanted it all to be over and I wanted Dray and I to move on with our lives and build a future.
A future without Jinx or Kane.
And hopefully soon enough we would get just that.
