Kiss the Ring

by Meesha Mink

  My own security team.

  Naeema pushed back the covers with her good arm and eased up off the bed. She looked down in surprise to see she was wearing Tank’s old football jersey. He had to have put it on her because she didn’t remember shit after the pain pills he gave her knocked her the fuck out. She didn’t mind the jersey at all.

  She tiptoed over to Sarge and eased the machete out of his hand before he woke up and chopped off his own leg or some shit. Sliding it under her bed she reached for the box and opened it to pull out her pipe and the stuffed baggie of weed beside it.

  She was halfway across the living room when she turned back for her Louis Vuitton bag. She left the living room and crossed the kitchen, stepping out onto the small porch with its missing step. It was the sight of her motorcycle through the open door of the garage that made her knees weak. She thought it was another casualty of the night before.

  The October morning wind was cold as hell against her bare legs and sent her right on back inside to shut the door tight. “Shit,” she swore.

  Still, if her shoulder wasn’t tender she would have dropped everything and hopped her half-naked ass on the bike and rode it around the block to make sure she was truly okay. Just like that.

  The kitchen door swung open.

  She smiled at Sarge standing there, his eyes still puffy with sleep. “I’m okay,” she reassured him.

  “It’s over?” he asked, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening with concern and aggravation.

  She loved his old angry self.

  “It’s over,” she promised.

  He looked over his shoulder. “It’s over?”

  She looked past him at Tank rolling up the sleeping bag.

  “It’s done,” he said to Sarge, although his eyes were on her.

  Her heart sped up.

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with normal,” he snapped as he passed her.

  “Nope . . . nothing at all, Sarge,” she agreed.

  “The same old same old,” he said, his head rocking back and forth like he was preaching or playing a blues guitar.

  Tank laughed. “Get on her, Sarge.”

  “I done did dat,” Sarge hollered to Tank.

  “Same old same old, Sarge,” Naeema promised.

  He paused. He turned around. He nodded at her. “You did what you had to,” he said before he turned and headed through the door leading to the basement. “But you shouldn’t have to do it no more. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Of course he slammed the door shut.

  WHAM.

  Naeema set her weed and her bag on the counter before she walked back into the living room. Tank looked at her as he picked up the chair Sarge had been sitting in by the door to carry it back into the kitchen. She moved over to her bed to pull back the covers and smooth the bottom sheet before she pulled the top sheet and comforter back up tightly across the bed.

  “You’ll bust your stitches.”

  She stood up straight and turned to face him. “I’m okay.”

  He shook his head and turned his lips downward as he gave her a pensive stare filled with everything he was feeling. “No, you’re not. You’re stubborn. Vindictive. Dangerous. You think you’re the baddest bitch born and . . . and . . . because of all that shit, yo, some morgue woulda been calling me to ID your dead body, Na,” he said, as he held up his hands.

  “I’m—”

  “Shut the fuck up, Na,” Tank yelled, his voice exasperated.

  She couldn’t even snap back.

  “I don’t know whether to . . . to . . . choke you or hug you,” he said, his conflict written all over his handsome face as he wiped his hands over his cheeks while he paced.

  She opened her mouth and he held up his hand to stop her.

  “Just because we can’t live together doesn’t mean I want to risk having to live in this world without you,” he admitted.

  Naeema gasped as his eyes got bright. Tears? Tank’s hardcore ass never cried. Like . . . NEVER.

  I will always love him and he will always love me.

  The chorus to that J. Cole song came to her.

  “Nobody’s perfect . . . but you’re perfect for me . . .”

  But they couldn’t be together. They swung between real hot or real cold. Their asses could never find the comfort in the middle. Their love was all about fucking extremes.

  “How you find me?” she asked.

  “Ain’t your ass glad I did?” he barked.

  “Tank,” she said softly, asking for a break from his anger.

  “I figured you were up to something with that crew your son used to hang around and I had my fellas watching all of them. One of my boys hit me up and let me know they had just snatched you up from the house. I told him to go in and check on Sarge and hauled ass to get to you.”

  “Thank you, Tank,” she said, coming over to touch his arm.

  “That leaves Hammer and Nelson,” he said.

  “Hammer doesn’t know about me being undercover,” she said. “And Nelson is as dead as it gets.”

  Tank looked at her like No you didn’t.

  “He killed my son,” she said with emphasis.

  They shared a look filled with understanding.

  “Why’d you go to that church alone?” he asked.

  “I wanted to handle him myself,” she said truthfully.

  His eyes bored into her. “Why?”

  Naeema’s hand fell from his arm. “He looked me dead in the face and told his hit man to kill me,” she said.

  “And that’s it?” he asked.

  No more lies.

  “If it isn’t, you really don’t have a right to ask, with your new boo and all,” she reminded him gently.

  He looked down at her even as the muscles in his jaw worked overtime.

  “Nobody’s perfect . . . but you’re perfect for me.”

  Tank shook his head and turned away from her like he was trying to break an invisible hold she had on him. His jaw was tight and square as he pulled on his boots and grabbed his keys from the fireplace mantel. “I gotta get to work,” he said and walked to the door.

  “I wanted you to deny her that night at your house and you didn’t, Tank,” Naeema said from across the room, causing him to pause in the open doorway. “You wanted me to deny him just now . . . and I didn’t either.”

  “Then I’m glad the motherfucker’s dead,” he said before he walked out of the house.

  Naeema stood there, hoping he would come back, but soon the sound of his motorcycle tearing up the street echoed loudly.

  “Nobody’s perfect . . . but you’re perfect for me.”

  She retrieved the plastic case holding all of her son’s things and removed the police file before walking to the kitchen. She set it on the counter as she pulled a large pot from underneath the sink and then slid the file into it. From her bag she pulled out Red’s and Bas’s cell phones. When she’d called Tank to tell him where she was and that she had been shot, she had taken the phone from Bas’s dead body before leaving the church to wait outside.

  Bas’s cell phone was locked. She tried his birthday but then gave up when it failed. She threw the cell phone into the large pot and set it back on the counter. She leaned against the counter as she went through Red’s call log, a dozen missed calls from Vivica and a dozen more text messages begging him to call her and let her know he was okay.

  Naeema felt a little bad for the woman because she had to be worried that her man never came home and never answered the phone. But there was not a damn thing she could do about it. In time it would sink in that he was dead and gone and she would just have to mourn him and move the fuck on.

  Just like I am . . . finally.

  Scrolling to his older messages with Bas, she could tell they kept it all coded as fuck. She paused her thumb over the touch screen when she spotted her alias, Queen.

  “Damn you really love her?” she read out loud.

  Bas’s reply: HELL YEAH.

  Naeema lo
oked at the date. It was during the weeks she spent at the hotel with him.

  “You really think I ever gave a fuck about you?”

  He’d lied.

  She didn’t know how she felt about knowing Bas could have possibly cared for her but still ordered her dead.

  “I killed my own mother.”

  Naeema shook her head. Bas was crazier than a motherfucker.

  She tossed Red’s phone into the pot as well before she carried the pot outside, being sure to avoid the step with the missing bricks, and grabbed the lighter fluid sitting by the base of the steps. Naeema dropped the pot on the ground and doused it with lighter fluid. She dashed back inside for her lighter and her weed, then came back to set everything in that pot ablaze. The warmth of the fire felt good in the midst of the chilly fall air circling her body.

  She hoped flames similar to the one slowly claiming everything it touched burned a million times hotter in the hell where she’d sent Nelson’s soul.

  “I almost forgot,” she said, crossing the yard to open the garage and reach into her saddlebag.

  It was empty. She checked the other. Same thing. Nada.

  Last night she’d told Tank about the gun for him to get rid of it for her. He must’ve taken the knife too. Fuck it.

  Two less things for her to worry about on her road back to normalcy.

  She looked down the length of her drive and frowned as Coko came staggering past on her way to her own house. She was obviously out of rehab and fucked up. Naeema didn’t move from her spot. She’d done all the saving and revenge-making her ass could take. Coko gon’ have to fight that battle on her own.

  She glanced down at her little bonfire in the pot as she went back inside and away from the cold. In the kitchen she stood at the window inhaling her weed from the dick pipe and stroking her son’s ring with her thumb as she watched everything she had connected to his murder go up in flames.

  “Did you love him?”

  Naeema turned in surprise to find Tank standing in the doorway with one strong arm holding the swinging door open as he leaned his sexy frame against the door frame. Releasing a thick stream of smoke through pursed lips, she locked eyes with him, her heart pounding, her pulses racing like crazy, as she shook her head no.

  “Nobody’s perfect . . . but you’re perfect for me . . .”

  He was hurt. Just as hurt as she was that night at his house so she understood completely. But he loved her. He couldn’t deny her. And it was the same for her.

  Neither one could really take that final step to leave the other alone. It was like the bond was stronger than them and all their issues.

  He held out his hand.

  Naeema licked her lips as she stepped up to slide hers into it.

  As he picked her body up against his and pressed his lips to her mouth, she didn’t give a fuck about anything else in the world.

  Not the weed burning and wasting away on the counter.

  Not even the fire burning in the backyard.

  Work. Sarge. The pain in her shoulder. The carnage from the night before. The bitch that was at his house that night.

  Not a damn thing.

  Tank sucked her tongue into his mouth gently as he backed into the living room to lay Naeema down on the bed. Slowly, like revealing a gift, he undressed her with his eyes, shifting from her hot eyes to the parts of her body he uncovered.

  Her bandaged gunshot wound.

  Her round breasts and hard nipples.

  The smooth skin over her flat belly.

  Thick thighs.

  The soft hairs covering her pussy.

  Tank stepped back from her to pull off his own clothing. “Shave it,” he said, with a subtle lift of his chin toward her plump vee as she writhed like a snake and spread her legs before him.

  He wanted to see the tattoo of his name stamping her pussy as his and only his.

  “I will,” she promised.

  Naeema gasped at the sight of his chiseled body standing between her legs. His dick hung from his body with weight. She loved how it was several shades darker than the rest of him, with the tip smooth and shining as it eyed her.

  With a bite of her lips she maneuvered to her knees before him to lick the deep grooves of his abdomen down to the flat hair surrounding the base of his dick.

  “Suck it,” he said thickly.

  She glanced up at him before she lay across the foot of the bed with her back arched, pushing her hard nipples up high. “Put that dick in my mouth,” she said.

  Tank stepped down by her head to squat his strong thighs and he pressed his dick down with his thumb until it lightly tapped against the tongue she rolled out. She eyed him as she took the smooth tip into her mouth and sucked it deeply and her tongue cupped it. His face tightened, he released a long breath, and the muscles of his thigh clenched.

  Naeema circled him as his hands stroked from her thighs across her pussy and over her belly before he warmly held one breast and then the other and teased her nipples between his fingers with just the right amount of pressure to turn her the fuck on. She lifted her head from the bed, not giving one care about the strain on her neck, as she took more of his long and thick length into her hot mouth.

  Tank pumped his hips, stroking her tongue with his dick as he reached to cup the back of her head with his hand and support her.

  They locked eyes.

  Even during sex he looked out for her.

  She lifted one of her legs and let it rest against his hard chest as she spread the other toward the head of the bed. He didn’t waste a second easing his hand from her nipple to cup her core before he slid his middle finger deep inside her to circle her tight and wet walls and pressed down onto her clit with his thumb.

  “Tank,” she whispered. She arched her hips up off the bed and rolled them as she did the same with her tongue before licking the tip with the flutter speed of butterfly wings.

  “Ah,” he cried out in pleasure, letting his head fall back as his body went stiff.

  He didn’t need to warn her that he was about to cum. She felt his dick harden in her mouth, his pulse throbbing against her tongue. Naeema freed his dick, giving him a second to let his nut ease away. Tank looked down at her with a shake of his head in thanks.

  They knew each other well.

  Rising up, she stood and wrapped her hand around his dick as she pushed down onto the bed with her free hand. She straddled his lap backward and spread her legs wide with heels pressed down into the bed as she bent down to wrap her hands around his ankles.

  “Shit,” he swore, already knowing what was in store for him as he extended his legs and held on to her hips to help her keep her balance.

  Tank looked down as he lifted her and guided his dick inside her.

  With a moan at the feel of him deep inside her at last, Naeema locked her legs and began to pump her hips up and down like she had the motion of a jackhammer. She stopped and then did a slow grind down the length of him before she sped up again like she was trying to pump water from the earth.

  “Naeema,” Tank moaned, closing his eyes, his fingers digging into her soft flesh while she rode him like the motherfucking soldier she was.

  She let her head drop down to rest her forehead against his shins and her breasts against his knees.

  Naeema brought her legs down and released his ankles to work her way up until her back was pressed against his chest. She shivered at the feel of his lips pressed against her skin as his arms came around her body to place one hand on the opposite hip and the other to cup one of her full breasts. She raised her arms and wrapped them behind his head as her head fell back against one of his shoulders. They both worked their hips slowly, sending his dick in one direction and her pussy in the other.

  Just pure fucking goodness as they came together and felt the tiny explosions in their bodies.

  It was more than sex.

  It was the emotions they shared manifested through the physical they both craved.

  There was an energ
y between them that gave Naeema life. And no one could do that for her but Tank.

  No one.

  “Nobody’s perfect . . . but you’re perfect for me . . .”

  • • •

  Naeema climbed from the back of the Tahoe before Grip could leave the driver’s seat and come around to open the door for her. She closed the door with her hip and winked at the annoyed look on his face as he came around the truck. Dressed in all black he posted up by the passenger door as she stepped up onto the sidewalk in front of A Cut Above. She hated that she couldn’t ride her bike, but tenderness from the wound made it hard to steer. As she crossed the lot, all the fellas loitering on the trunks of cars spoke and waved. She half-expected them to run up to her and question her well-being. Of course they didn’t. The fact that she had killed, almost been killed, and witnessed a murder last night was known to very few.

  • • •

  Back in her own life this shit seemed surreal.

  The door to the barbershop opened and Naeema paused as Mone stepped outside. His thin face was filled with concern. She gave him a soft smile. He was the reason she came to the shop. Well, one of the reasons . . .

  “You good?” Mone asked.

  Naeema could tell he was just as glad to lay eyes on her as she was to lay them back on him. They both had made it. “Always,” she lied.

  He nodded and looked off at something in the distance.

  “Derek here?” she asked about the shop’s owner.

  “He just left,” Mone said, looking down at her again. “He said he’s gone for the day.”

  “I’ll call him,” Naeema said, looking over her shoulder at Grip watching them like a hawk.

  “You not working?” he asked, pulling the glass door.

  The men in the barbershop were as raucous as ever and the sounds of them seemed to fall out the open door to fill the air.

  Naeema shook her head. “Nah, not ’til next week sometime,” she said, hoping the soreness of her shoulder would be gone by then. “I gotta go.”

  “A’ight,” Mone said.

  Naeema loved working at the shop and just being there with all the fellas talking shit about any- and everything, but she had a lot on her mind and their noise was a distraction.