* * *
Four days truly wasn’t enough when it came to paradise. The moment Maria stepped off of the plane, she wanted to beg Javier to book another flight back.
“Every day will be paradise from here on out,” Javier told her when he practically had to drag her to the car. “I promise.”
“Yeah, yea. Whatever!” she pouted.
“For real!” he laughed, shutting her door and hopping in the driver’s seat. “Plus, you have things to do. Remember what we talked about.”
Maria nodded her head to let him know that she had heard him. While they were in Hawaii, she reached out to her mother. Her heart was enlightened when Mary began to cry on the other end of the phone. Maria didn’t even have to say who it was. Mary recognized her voice. When Maria tried to apologize for everything, her mother would hear nothing of it.
“We all learn lessons, some of us later than others. But as long as you learned yours, you are welcome to come home anytime!”
That was music to Maria’s ears, and she knew Javier was right. She couldn’t hop on another trip to Hawaii, but when she did, she wanted her entire family to be with her. The couple touched down in Memphis at around eight in the morning. Javier had business to attend to once they got home, but he gave her the keys to one of his vehicles and told her she could go wherever she wanted. Her plans were to take a nap and go across town to visit her mother, and she was looking forward to it. Javier pulled up to his home and unloaded all of their luggage. They weren’t even there for twenty minutes before he had to hit the streets, promising to be back before sundown.
Maria was so antsy that even though she was tired from the flight, all she wanted to do was hit the road and see her mother. Mary wasn’t expecting her until late that evening, but Maria thought it would be fun to surprise her. She hopped in the shower in Javier’s room, soon to be the room they shared, and got dressed comfortably in jeans and a V-neck cotton shirt. The keys Javier had given her were to the gray Jeep Grand Cherokee he’d just added to his collection.
“I’m on my way, Mommy,” she said to herself, pressing the “Push To Start” button in the Jeep and zooming away from the house.
The drive was almost an hour, but Maria enjoyed the solitude of it. On the drive, she thought deeply about Javier. He loved her, he really loved her, and she could tell. There was no time frame on love, and she appreciated him so much. Not just for everything he did for her, but for everything he let her do. Like drive his car and give her freedom like he trusted her. He did trust her, and although they had just been together nonstop, Maria couldn’t wait to get back to him. Next time, he would just have to come with her.
“Next time,” she smiled to herself because she knew there would be a next time.
Javier wasn’t going anywhere, and she for damn sure knew that she would never let him go. She pulled into a quaint neighborhood and looked for the address her mother sent her until she finally found the house. Maria parked and gave herself a once-over in the visor mirror and groaned at her reflection. She looked like shit, and she hadn’t even taken the time to properly do her hair.
Fuck it, she thought and got out of the car.
She was so excited to see her family that she didn’t notice the familiar Cadillac parked on the street. Clearing her throat, she knocked three times on the door and straightened her shirt. She heard footsteps scurrying inside the house, and she smiled, wondering if it was Marisole coming to let her in. When the door opened, Maria stood up straighter and prepared to jump into the arms of whoever was on the other side—but who she saw was not who she expected.
“What’s good, Strawberry?” Sir slurred, pointing a pistol at her chest. “How nice of you to join us. Get in here.”
Chapter 9
Being huddled together in a basement corner was not how Maria envisioned being reunited with her family. The happiness that she hoped to be in her mother’s eyes was overcome by the fear in them. The basement was full of boxes and furniture that nobody sat on anymore. There was one lightbulb hanging in the middle of the room giving them all dim lighting, but enough to see around them. It smelled like laundry since the washroom was down there, but the pleasant smell had nothing on the sinister energy in the room.
Sir sat on the arm of one of the old couches, staring at the three women holding on to each other like their lives depended on it. He’s stripped them all of their electronic devices and made Maria leave her car keys on the kitchen table upstairs. Maria watched him turn his nose up at her new haircut, but still, he said nothing. His eyes lingered on her younger sister, Marisole, a little longer than they should have. She was the spitting image of her older sister, except her brown hair was long. She knew what he was thinking, and she wanted to throw up. What had she gotten her family into?
“Mommy, I’m so sorry!” Maria said into her mother’s hair. “This is all my fault.”
“Now is not the time to be placing blame,” Mary said and cupped Maria’s chin with her hands. “I have been wishing that God would send you home to me, and here you are. No matter the circumstance, I love you!”
“Oh my God, shut the fuck up with all the sentimental shit.” Sir finally spoke up. “Strawberry is the one to blame for all this shit!”
He was drunk out of his mind, and that made him all the more dangerous. He waved the gun around like a wand, and the women ducked whenever it was pointed their way. He got to his feet and went to the corner they were crouched in.
“I want you,” he said, grasping Marisole’s arm. “You look like ya sister. I wonder if the pussy is the same.”
“No!” Mary yelled and tried to push him back. “You stay away from my daughters! Demon!”
Bang!
When his gun went off, he ignored the screams of Maria and Marisole at the sight of their mother clutching the bottom of her stomach. Blood spilled through her fingertips, and her eyes were wide in shock. Sir didn’t shoot Maria, but he hit her hard in the temple with the butt of his gun.
“That wouldn’t have happened if you wouldn’t have run from me, bitch!” he shouted and hit Maria again. “You shoulda stayed home like a good bitch. A good bitch! Now your sister is about to pay the price of you being a disobedient ho!”
“No! Mommy! Mommy!” Marisole screamed as Sir dragged her away and back up the basement stairs. “Maria!! Maria!”
Her screams broke Maria’s heart. Her head was throbbing, and she was seeing blurred doubles of everything, even of her stout mother laid out on the ground.
“Mommy,” she said. “Mommy, I can’t-I can’t focus. I can’t see!”
“Ma-Maria,” Mary panted. “Follow my voice and focus! I forgive you. Do you hear me? I-I forgive you, my dear child! I should have been more of a mother to you and maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Bad people attach themselves to good hearts and turn them black. But not you, mi amor, you found your way back home. You are still good. You are not used goods. You are a queen, and right now, you need to save your sister from that man. P-please. Save your sister.”
“I can’t leave you, Mommy!”
“I got stabbed four times when I was your age and lived to tell the tale. Maybe I’ll live to tell this one too, now . . . g-go!”
A bloodcurdling scream filled the air, and Maria didn’t wait to hear her mother tell her again. She struggled to her feet and blinked a few times to clear her vision. On her way upstairs, she grabbed a piece of scrap metal behind the staircase. It was sharp at the bottom, sharp enough to plunge through that piece of shit’s heart. She held on to the wooden rail and, with some difficulty, got up the stairs. Marisole’s screams were coming from a room in the back, and they were now mixed with hopeless sobs.
“Please don’t do this! Please! I’m a virgin! Please!”
“Nah,” Maria heard Sir respond. “Your pussy is going to pay for the negligence of your sister. Do you know how much money I missed out on because of her? Huh? She’s my property!”
“No, she’s not! You sick bastard! You ruined her
life and took her away from the only people who loved her!”
Slap!
“Shut up! I didn’t bring you in here to listen to you talk. By the time anyone finds any of y’all, you’ll be stinking. Unless you want to take Strawberry’s place on my team.”
“Fuck you! And her name isn’t Strawberry, it’s Maria!”
Hearing Marisole defend her like that, although they had been apart for so many years, gave Maria newfound strength. The metal in her hand no longer seemed as heavy, and her eyesight focused a little better. She walked in the small bedroom and saw that Sir had Marisole pinned down with her dress hiked up to her neck. He’d ripped her bra and panties off and thrown them to the side to give himself full access to the young girl. He slapped Marisole a couple more times so hard that she looked to be on the brink of passing out. All of the fear that Maria ever had in her heart for Sir went out the window as she watched him beat Marisole like a bitch off the street. She didn’t just see Marisole, she saw herself. She had put up with it for so long, and now her baby sister was paying her debt to the devil.
Never again.
“Get your hands off of her,” Maria growled from behind him and ran with the pointed side of the scrap metal facing him.
Sir turned around just in time to be met with the metal being pushed through his stomach. His body began to twitch violently as his lips moved feverishly, trying to inhale air. Maria couldn’t have that either. She grabbed the gun he’d set beside Marisole’s body and pointed it him just as he reached for her.
“Go to hell,” she said looking into the face of the man she once worshipped and feeling nothing but hatred. “You son of a bitch! Just go to hell!”
She pulled the trigger and felt her shoulder knock back from the power of the gun. Her first bullet caught him in the chest, but her second one caught him in the head. Blood and brains sprayed the television behind him, and the look of complete shock was frozen on his face. Maria didn’t wait for him to fall to the ground to tend to her sister. She pulled Marisole’s dress back down and patted her face gently.
“Marisole? Marisole!”
“Please stop smacking my face,” she groaned. “It hurts already.”
Maria gave a relieved laugh and pulled her sister up into a bear hug. She cried in her neck and apologized over and over until finally Marisole leaned away.
“I love you, Maria,” she said with tears in her own eyes and tenderly kissed Maria’s hands. “You’ll always be my sister.”
In the hallway, there suddenly was a loud sound of somebody walking toward them. Maria turned the gun to the door but quickly dropped it to the ground when she saw her mother lean in the doorway, clutching her wound. She had tied some sort of sheet around her waist to slow the blood flow, but slowly, her blood was starting to drench that too.
“Mommy! We have to get you to the hospital!” She got up as fast as her throbbing head would let her and rushed to give her mother a hand. Marisole did the same.
“Yes, that would be good,” Mary said, glancing at Marisole’s bedroom floor and spat at Sir’s dead body. “I never liked him. I hope your new boyfriend is nothing like him, Maria. Otherwise, I’ll kill him at the front door.”
“I’m surprised the police haven’t showed up yet,” Marisole said while she and Maria helped their mother walk through the house and outside to the Jeep.
“These people don’t give a fuck about nobody but themselves. But it’s all right. The next time I hear Mrs. Buxton’s husband beating her ass, I won’t intervene. And when Mr. Winslow’s badass dog runs away again, I sure as hell won’t help him look for that motherfucker!”
Maria rolled her eyes. Her mother hadn’t changed one bit. She thought about calling Javier and telling him about what just went down, but she figured she would do it while at the hospital.
“You OK, Mommy?” Marisole asked, looking at the wound in Mary’s stomach.
“Yes,” she said. “I saw a bullet hole in the basement, so that means that drunk motherfucker shot straight through me. I think it’s only a flesh wound, but it hurts like hell! But I’ll be all right.”
“Thank God,” Maria said, driving a few miles to the nearest hospital. “I have a question, though, Mommy.”
“W-what is it, mi amor?”
“Did you really get stabbed four times when you were my age? And don’t lie! Because that’s what you said when you were dying in the basement.”
Mary looked at each of her daughters and contemplated fake passing out right there in the backseat. Sighing, she leaned her back on the door and tried to ignore the pain in her stomach.
“Yes, it’s true,” she started and saw the surprised looks on her daughters’ faces. “Before I tell you this story, I want you both to know that I wasn’t always this straight shooting woman that you know to be your mother. As you both have learned firsthand . . . some crazy shit happens in the hood.”
THE END
Payback
by
Paradise Gomez
Chapter 1
The Past . . .
I loved him. That’s why, through all the pain, I stayed. In my eyes, Demarcus “Marco” Lancastor could do no wrong. Maybe it was the sex that kept me so submissive, or maybe it was because he was the King of the South. Shoot, maybe it was the fact that he had deep brown eyes that could peer into my soul and make me feel like I needed him. His eyes accented his muscular, caramel build nicely, and that eight inch thick dick? I was a goner way before our story even began. Demarcus was the son and street general to Antonio Lancastor, the King of Houston. Antonio had the whole state on lock, which meant Marco was the rightful heir. Maybe that was why I just felt lucky enough to be the one he called his girlfriend. Me, the poor girl from Houston whose parents kicked her out when she was fifteen. The girl who had to lie and say she was eighteen just to swirl on a pole in front of greasy old men for wrinkled dollar bills.
Surprisingly enough, I didn’t meet Marco in the strip club. We met at the library, and I was just intrigued that a nigga like him liked to read. I had been sitting cross-legged in a big orange plush chair in a corner by myself when I felt a presence looming over me. Now me, I have always had a bad attitude. I hated when people approached me without being invited, especially if they didn’t have at least a hundred dollars to give me. I looked up preparing to go off on whoever had interrupted my reading session . . . until I saw that I was staring up at the sexiest man I’d ever seen in my life. He was smiling down at me with those straight white teeth, and that day, he must have been fresh out of the barbershop because, ooh . . . wee! That boy was fine. His taper fade and beard had been lined up and were sharper than a chef’s knife. I was so startled that I couldn’t do anything but stare at the man.
“Do you know where I can find a biography on Nelson Mandela?”
Those were the first words Marco ever said to me, and after that, it was a wrap for the next two years. I was his, and he was mine. The first year was amazing. He spoiled me rotten, moved me out of the hood, and I was able to kiss my job good-bye. I moved in with him in his big home in the suburbs and lived life like a modern-day Cinderella. I just knew he was going to marry me. Couldn’t nobody tell me I wasn’t going to be Jackie Lancastor. But then . . . Everything changed the second year.
He changed.
I was used to Marco running the streets. I knew what he did, and I respected my place. I was never intimidated by the drugs or the guns, and I never asked questions when he came home with bloodstains on his clothes. Instead, I would go out and buy him another one of whatever he ruined. When his late nights turned into days of him being gone, he just told me he was away “handling business out of state.” When he started to leave the room to answer the phone, I believed him when he told me it was his best friend Tommy talking about their next move. But when our love life started to dwindle and I began noticing purchases in our account that weren’t for me, my mind began to wander. There was once a time where I couldn’t keep Marco’s arms from around my 32-inch
waist. He loved using hands to squeeze and slap my plump behind. He used to have to dive into my ocean at least two or three times a day when he was home, but suddenly, I was only getting it once a month. And when I got it, it wasn’t the same. He was boring with his strokes and didn’t even care if I got mine off too. Being naïve, I thought that maybe he was just tired and his business had him off his game.
It wasn’t until Marco started disrespecting me that I knew something awful was wrong. No longer was I “baby” and “honey.” Marco called me “bitch” so much I almost started to think it was my real name. It was hard because outside of him, I had no life. I moved in with him so quick because I never thought he would turn on me. My main goal was to keep him happy, because, truth be told, he was the only thing I had in the world. So I put up with the bullshit. Even when I caught him texting other girls, I believed him when he said he never slept with them.
“Those hoes ain’t shit to me, Jackie,” he told me. “I just need them to move the pack for me. I can have any bitch in the world, so just be happy it’s you for now. You need to just mind ya business. Be happy I’m not one of these niggas out here slapping their bitch around.”
So I did just that because he was right. There were a lot of things about our relationship that made me unhappy, but he hadn’t put his hands on me the way I’d seen his friends do their girls. One weekend, he told me he was going to be gone from Friday to Sunday, so I decided to surprise him. Because my name was on all the accounts, I found out that he was going to be staying at a Hilton in California. It didn’t dawn on me then that all of his “business trips” had been to California, and he stayed at the same hotel every time.
I packed my sexiest lingerie, hell-bent on pleasing my man and making things the way they used to be. I had never been to California before, so I was looking forward to him showing me around, maybe even taking me to the beach. When I got off the plane that Saturday and caught that taxi to his hotel, I soaked in the daytime scenery. It was just like the movies, and I was so excited to get to Marco. I got off the plane dressed to impress, OK? I had on a skintight, nude, short sleeve Marc Jacobs dress complete with a pair of bloodred ankle strap closed toe four-inch heels. I accessorized accordingly, wearing the thick, gold rope chain necklace he got me for my birthday, along with the gold ruby-studded tennis bracelet he bought for Christmas. The hotel he was staying in was amazing, but I wish I would have paid attention to the bellhop’s face when I told him who I was there to see.
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