Chaser

by Miasha

  “Is that really what it’s been? Be truthful. Because I must admit I’m starting to think it’s more you not making time for me anymore than chasing. I mean, you’ve been a workaholic since I met you, but you still made time for me. And lately, Nasir, that’s been changing. It really seems like you are distancing yourself from me. And I have to say my instincts are tellin’ me that you have someone else.” Tara called me out on my recent change of behavior.

  Damn, she hit the nail on the head, I thought. I didn’t know what to say to her. I felt like lying to her would be no use, because she would know that I was doing just that. However, I didn’t know how she would handle the truth, and if I told her, I would run the risk of losing her. And, of course, by my cheating with Leah, I was already running that risk, but I told myself that that could change. I could stop messin’ around with Leah and keep the stable relationship I’d had with Tara before Leah came into the picture.

  “So, what is it, Nasir? What’s pulling you away from me?” Tara must have got tired of waiting for my response.

  “It’s not another girl, that’s for sure,” I said, deciding against telling Tara the truth. “But it is something,” I added, wanting to give Tara some sort of justification for my behavior that would act as a diversion to her suspicions.

  “What?” she asked.

  “To be honest with you, I’ve been feeling under pressure about us gettin’ a house together. It seem like every time we’re together, that’s all you talk about, and I don’t know if I’m ready for all that now.”

  Tara exhaled, “Oh my God, boy. Is that it? That’s what got you trippin’? Well, if that’s the case, then hell, I won’t bring up the house thing again until you’re ready. I don’t want to force you into anything, and I think our relationship is good as is.”

  “That was easy,” I told Tara.

  “It’s always easy when you take time out to communicate,” she said.

  “Well, that’s what I’m goin’ do from now on. I’m goin’ to communicate. And I’ma start by saying I’m sorry. I never meant to make you feel like I was distancing myself from you, and I damn sure never intended for you to feel like I had somebody else. I know that would hurt you, and that’s the last thing I wanna do.”

  “Cool,” Tara said simply.

  “I’m on my way to get you so we can spend this evening the right way.”

  “I’m looking forward to it,” she said.

  “All right. I’ll see you in a minute.”

  “Okay.”

  “’Bye.”

  “’Bye.”

  Driving from the shop to Tara’s apartment at the Executive House on City Avenue, I did a lot of thinking, and I started to feel bad. Tara was a good girl, and I was messin’ up on her. She didn’t deserve what I was doing. I thought about how miserable Kenny’s cheating made Leah, and I realized I was no better than that nigga. I told myself that I would stop dealing with Leah on a romantic level. We could remain friends, but that had to be it. I planned to reinvest my time and energy into somebody who was exclusive with me rather than gettin’ caught up in Leah’s hype. And despite the voice I heard in the back of my head telling me that it was going to be impossible for me to detach myself from Leah, I was determined to do that. But goddamn it. How? I wondered. Leah was magnetic. I was drawn to her and had been before I even met Tara. I was fighting with myself about what to do. But at the end of the day I knew it would come down to love verses lust. Reality verses fantasy. Which one would win, I had yet to find out.

  Leah

  It had been a long weekend for me, being that Kenny wanted me to take off Friday and enjoy my new car with him, and Monday was Presidents’ Day. And in that time period Kenny spent a lot of time schooling me to his plan of how I could wash his money through the shop. I knew I’d have to deal with his scheme sooner or later. I didn’t want to do it, of course, because I didn’t want to jeopardize my good standings with Nasir or Vic, but I had to. It was the only way I’d be able to stay out of prison. So I figured I would try hard to remain undetected, and meanwhile stay on top of Kenny’s dealings with hopes that I’d collect enough information so that Detective Daily would finally be able to get him on something substantial enough to arrest him. And everything that I was doing—from provoking arguments with Kenny to getting him to tell me things that he wouldn’t usually tell me, from sitting in on meetings that I usually missed to working at the shop pretending to spy on Vic and Nasir—would be over.

  So on Tuesday I arrived at work ready to put Kenny’s plans into action. Out of the half-dozen people who worked at the shop, I had all but one on my list to incorporate in the scheme. The one person I excluded was the janitor, Brock. And it wasn’t that I didn’t like Brock that I decided not to include him. It was just that I knew his loyalty lay with Nasir. They were too close. Plus, Brock was the type of guy who liked to run his mouth. We were cool, yes, but he just wasn’t a good candidate for what I was setting up. I had to address only those workers who I not only had a rapport with but who I felt I could trust not to say anything to anybody, especially Nasir.

  I approached each one of them the minute he came in. And if two happened to come in together, I asked to speak to them one at a time. The first to arrive was the painter, Joe. He peeped his head in the office to say good morning like he did every day and to give me a copy of the Metro, a free newspaper that he normally picked up on the train. I liked reading my horoscope and doing the brain teasers and puzzles.

  After handing me the paper, Joe started to disappear to the back of the shop, where he tended to cars in the paint booth all day. But before he got too far, I stopped him.

  “Hey, Joe,” I called out to him. “You got a minute?”

  Joe stopped walking and turned around. He peeped his head back in the office.

  “Yeah, what’s up?” he asked.

  I walked out of the office to talk to Joe on the floor, out of view of the cameras that were installed throughout the shop.

  “I have a proposal for you,” I said.

  “Oh yeah, like what?”

  “It involves you making an extra three hundred dollars per week on top of ya pay. And,” I said, before he could start asking questions, “you would start getting your salary in cash instead of checks, so you don’t have to worry about givin’ a check-cashing place a percentage.”

  Joe nodded eagerly. “That sounds like a hell of a proposal. But what I gotta do to get it?”

  “All you have to do is continue to do your job like you been doing and don’t say anything to anybody about this deal.”

  “That sound too good to be true. What are you gettin’ out the deal?”

  “Your checks.”

  “My checks?”

  “Yeah. Every Friday Vic gives you a check, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, from now on, instead of you cashin’ the check, you’ll give it to me and I’ll give you your earnings plus three hundred.”

  “And what you goin’ do with my checks?”

  “Now, if I tell you that, then I will feel like I can’t trust you anymore and won’t be able to do the deal with you. I will say this, though: it’s not gonna hurt anybody, and it’s not gonna cause nobody to lose any money—that’s if and only if you do not tell anybody. Absolutely nobody.” I emphasized the importance of keeping the deal silent.

  Joe sighed and looked around the shop, as if he were giving what I said some thought. I knew he wanted to say yes—I was offering him something hard to refuse—but I understood his caution. I decided to throw in an incentive to get a quick yes before all his pondering led to a no and possibly even to a talk with Vic.

  “How ’bout I give you a five-hundred-dollar sign-on bonus right now?”

  “Aww, man, you for real, huh?”

  “I wouldn’t play with you about something like this. Now I know times are hard and you could use the extra money,” I said, taking five one-hundred-dollar bills from my pants pocket and placing them in Joe’s hand. />
  He looked down at the bills and, with a smirk on his face, slid them in his pocket.

  “I take that as a yes,” I said.

  Joe nodded. “I don’t have to do nothin’, right?”

  “Nothin’ more than what I said.”

  “All right,” Joe said. “It’s a yes.”

  Throughout the morning, I had that same conversation with the other four of Vic’s employees who were on my list, and they all ended the same way. Well, not exactly the same. The frame guy, Porter, was skeptical about the fact that he had to keep our deal a secret. He asked if there was nothing wrong with what I was proposing, why did I insist he not tell anybody. I used reverse psychology on him, a trick my mom used to use on my sister and me all the time when we were kids.

  “Do you think you have a drinking problem, Porter?” I asked him.

  His eyes grew big, and rather defensively he answered, “No!”

  “Do you think there’s anything wrong with you taking a drink here and there while you’re on the job?”

  “I mean, it’s just to take the edge off sometimes, you know. But it doesn’t affect my work or anything, so I don’t see it as a problem, no.”

  “Well, why don’t you tell Vic that sometimes, just to take the edge off, you go out back or into the bathroom and take a swig of vodka while you’re on the clock?”

  “I got your point,” Porter said. “Some things that we feel aren’t a problem may not fly with the boss, and so it’s better for everybody if we keep them to ourselves.”

  I nodded and smiled. Then I gave Porter his sign-on bonus. He agreed to the terms of our deal and happily went about his way.

  The others had no problem with keeping their mouths shut. Shit, the economy was in a recession, so all they needed to hear was extra pay and they were with it. I even got the parts manager, Fred, to start giving me all the checks he would normally use to pay for parts in exchange for the cash. So basically, when parts would be delivered to the shop, instead of Fred giving the distributor a check for payment, he would give him cash, which would come from me, and then he would turn the check over to me. He would even leave the Make payable to line blank, saving me from having to doctor the check up later. And he agreed to do all that at no extra charge, which was good because that actually presented the opportunity for me to give myself the bonus I would have otherwise given Fred. And with that I would be able to build a stash of my own without Kenny knowing.

  Friday rolled around, and everybody stuck to the plan, secretly handing over to me their checks by placing them in magazines I had on my desk in exchange for the earnings plus an additional sum in cash, which I would leave in various hiding places in the bathroom. For example, Joe the painter knew to retrieve his money from inside the toilet tank cover, and Porter knew to get his from in the middle of the roll of toilet paper. Each one had a specific time to go into the bathroom and get his money, too. And I spaced the times out so it wouldn’t be a nonstop flow of traffic going to the bathroom. I didn’t want it to look suspicious.

  I took the checks home to Kenny, who had some girls he knew wash the checks using nail polish remover to erase the names Vic had printed on them and rewrite them out to various phony LLCs that Sammy had helped Kenny form. Then I was responsible for depositing the checks in different business accounts that corresponded with the LLCs.

  By that following Tuesday, the checks had all cleared, and Kenny had been able to clean up thousands of dollars in just four days. And because we weren’t increasing the amount payable, thus giving Vic any reason to look up the checks after they’d been cashed, we were able to get away with it, and Kenny’s plan had worked. By the end of the first month Kenny cleaned up fifty-four thousand dollars. As for me, I was able to stash twelve thousand and while I felt bad for involving Nasir’s dad in Kenny’s money-laundering scheme, being able to make money of my own and create independence from Kenny was worth it to me. I only hoped Nasir would understand that, if ever a need came for me to explain myself.

  In the meantime, Nasir and I maintained a complicated relationship. One minute he was pulling back, and the next he was all over me. I couldn’t complain, though, because I figured it was hard for him to commit fully to me since I was with Kenny. So I played his game, following his lead. Whenever he acted like just a friend, I reciprocated; when he was in the mood to be more than that, I embraced that as well.

  Overall, though, we kept our feelings for each other on the low, although at times it was difficult to contain ourselves when we were around each other. We had such an intense sexual attraction to each other that I would have thought people would notice just by the way we looked at each other. But so far no one seemed to be able to tell. And we took no chances in changing that dynamic. We expressed how we felt only when we were in private, which was usually during lunch at the Breakfast House.

  We had become regulars at the quaint diner-style restaurant and very familiar with its restrooms, where Nasir and I managed to release our charged sexual energy on several occasions. And like I had imagined, sex with Nasir was pleasurable beyond belief. Between my being extremely attracted to him and his having an impressive-sized part, I found myself in a state of heavenly bliss every time we did it. It didn’t even matter that it normally lasted only five minutes and consisted of our standing in not-so-comfortable positions, almost fully clothed, and burdened with nervous thoughts of being caught. In fact, all of the cons seemed to add to the adventure of our carrying on a forbidden love affair. And although there had been only a sexual relationship between Nasir and me up to that point, I must say, my feelings for him were growing beyond that. I was really starting to feel for the boy.

  “I’m so glad winter is almost over,” I said, sprinkling salt on my chicken fingers. “I cannot stand the cold. And when I get rich I’m movin’ to Orlando, where it’s hot all year round. I’m goin’ open up a Disney-themed hair salon for kids. I’ma make it like a tourist attraction.”

  “Is that right?” Nasir asked, chewing his grilled-chicken sandwich.

  “Yes, it is, and can you please chew your food before questioning my dreams. That’s nasty.”

  He gave me the courtesy of finishing his bite before speaking again, then he said, “I’m not questioning your dreams. I’m makin’ sure you serious, ’cause if you are, I’m goin’ with you. I can’t stand the cold, either.”

  “Who said you were invited?” I teased.

  “Oh, that’s right. That spot is already reserved for Kenny. My bad,” he shot back, a little jealousy in his tone.

  “Oh hell, no, it is not!” I snapped. “The day I leave Philly will be the day I leave Kenny.”

  “And that’s not goin’ be ’til you rich, huh?”

  “Well, you know,” I said, breaking a chicken finger in half and putting a piece in my mouth. “When I get enough money to stand on my own two.”

  “What if you had somebody like me to help you do that?” Nasir quizzed, looking me in my eyes.

  “No, thank you,” I shot his offer down. “I’m not tryna put myself in a position to depend solely on a man again. That shit’s a trap.”

  Nasir nodded, “I respect that.” Then he took another bite of his sandwich.

  “Speaking of which, I’m surprised you don’t have a girl you trick on. You are that type. The good looks, the nice-sized pockets, the street fame to a certain degree.”

  “Naw, I’m not that type at all. My money and my time are more valuable than that. If I’m goin’ spend either one of them on a girl, it gotta be somebody I got plans for. And right now I haven’t found that somebody yet.”

  I smiled and put another piece of chicken finger in my mouth.

  “Naw, I’m just bullshittin’. I’m tryna make you that girl I trick on. What you think I got you here for?” Nasir joked.

  I chuckled and playfully smacked his hand. “You so stupid,” I said, although I believed that Nasir was serious about what he was proposing—that, deep down, he wanted me to be his girl. And even tho
ugh I liked him a lot and wouldn’t have minded being his girl, I wasn’t ready for that yet. I didn’t want to take Nasir’s and my relationship any further, at least until I was able to cut my ties to Kenny. Until then it was best that Nasir and I continued at the pace we were going.

  Nasir and I finished up lunch the way we normally did, talking about things other than a possible relationship between us. Instead, we caught each other up on current events, on what music videos we’ve seen lately and what reality shows we planned to watch that evening.

  Afterward Nasir and I left the restaurant, and he walked me to my car, which was parked on the next block.

  “Well, as always, I had a nice time,” I told him, pressing the Unlock button on my keypad.

  “Yeah, definitely,” he said.

  Then without warning, as I was opening my car door, Nasir reached out and put his arms around my neck, resting his elbows on my shoulders. His back against my car, he pulled me into him, placing my head on his chest. His head gently resting on mine, he whispered in my ear, “I’m not ready to leave you yet.”

  I raised my head and gave him a kiss on his lips. “Neither am I,” I said.

  “Let’s go back in then,” he suggested.

  “And do what?” I asked.

  “Have dessert,” he said seductively.

  I didn’t say anything. Instead, I let my actions speak. I closed my car door back, relocked it, and followed Nasir back into the restaurant. He went in the restroom first, and a couple minutes later I went in behind him. It was a one-person bathroom, so we locked the door and got at each other instantly. We kissed while we removed our bottoms just enough to allow entry from Nasir’s throbbing manhood into my yearning, most-prized possession. Seven minutes and about a hundred quick strokes later, Nasir climaxed and we were redressing. I didn’t have an orgasm that day, but I was satisfied.

  I left to go back to work and was feeling so refreshed. It was always a pleasure spending time with Nasir, and I meant that in every aspect of the word. I valued every second I got to spend with him and wished that our time alone could expand past an hour-long lunch break two or three times a week.