Baby Momma 4

I turned completely around in the seat, my nails dug into the leather of the headrest. I was expecting to see blood splatters or five dudes in black wife beaters with crowbars and tire irons. My eyebrows shot up at what looked like a long black weave bobbing up and down. She started screaming down at what I think was Javion on the ground.

“Nigga! I can’t believe you! I cannot fucking believe you right now!” she yelled, stomping her foot over and over.

“Tinesha, stop! Stop, nigga, you’re pregnant,” Javion yelled back.

She gave a final stomp. She stopped putting her hands on her sides. Tinesha was huffing like she was practicing her damn Lamaze. Javion hopped up, minus his ski mask. Light brown dirt speckled the side of his face and head. He tried to dust off the front of his jeans.

“Nigga, if you don’t calm the fuck down, you about to get everybody caught up out this bitch.”

“Nigga, the only person ’bout to get caught up is you and that bitch. I told you, this baby is yours, and you handle it by hiding from me? You ain’t no man—you ain’t shit,” she huffed, all while pointing in my direction with her chest heaving.

“Get the hell on with that. You out here trippin’ over nothing. I’ll deal with you later,” Javion talked quickly over his shoulder as he marched toward the driver-side door.

“You’ll have to back me over to get out of here, bitch! I ain’t goin’ nowhere until you handle this shit like you’re supposed to!” Tinesha stood behind the car with her arms spread out.

“What the fucking fuck, Javion,” I snapped as soon as he opened the car door.

Sweat ran down the side of his face. He completely ignored me and started the car, throwing it into reverse.

“Move, Tinesha, I ain’t playin’ with you,” he yelled out the window at her.

I punched him in his arm for ignoring me. I didn’t sign up for either one of these bullshit situations. Yeah, he might’ve helped out with a bill or two and got my hair done whenever I wanted, but it wasn’t worth all of this.

Tinesha posted up behind the car. “Hit me then, bitch. You man enough to take a life, but you ain’t man enough to raise one? Huh? Really, nigga?”

She pulled off a shoe, hurling it at the car. For a pregnant woman who looked about to bust, she sure as hell had a lot of fight in her.

Javion turned the wheel to the far right, punching the gas. The car made a small arc as we backed around her. A few inches to the left and that would’ve been all she wrote. She gave us the finger so hard I bet she sprained her wrist.

I stared at the side of Javion’s head with my arms crossed tight over my chest.

“Novie, that kid probably ain’t even mine. She was fuckin’ with one of my homeboys who was always doin’ his thing on the side. Shit, we got drunk, she made her move, and I hit it a couple of times but stopped because my boy said they were good. She was being greedy, and I don’t do sloppy seconds,” he explained. “Then she called me outta the blue a month ago, talking about she’s seven months along. Nah, that ain’t me. It can’t be.”

I didn’t know who or what to believe. Another woman would explain all the late-night trips and phone calls, but what I’d just seen this nigga do back in that house explained that shit just as well.

“So what if it is your baby?” I asked.

The corners of his mouth turned downward as if just thinking about a baby with her turned his stomach. “If it’s mine, and my boy don’t kill me for the disrespect, I’ll do my part. But it ain’t mine. It can’t be. I ain’t ready for that shit, and definitely not with her.”

I wrestled with the idea of him having a baby with another woman. We’d only been seeing each other for four months. It definitely wasn’t enough time for me to get crazy attached to him, but it was enough time for me to feel comfortable being with him. I could rock with the idea of us being together for now, but if that baby was his, I’d have to let him go. I didn’t want to deal with any men and their unstable baby mommas.

I scooped my phone up. Shandy had sent me a text.

Javion watched me out of the corner of his eye.

I never asked him his business concerning who called or texted him, but he was sure as hell nosy enough to constantly ask me about mine.

“Whatsup? You got somewhere else to be?” he asked.

“It depends on whether or not you telling me what just went on in that house.”

“Spppsht. That? That shit was just work,” he answered nonchalantly.

I sucked my teeth. “Don’t hit me with that bullshit. That was more than just work, and you know it.”

“All right, Novie. Your boy back there is some kind of UFC World Champ. His dumb ass blacked out, had some kind of posttraumatic fight meltdown and snapped his wife’s neck because of steroids. Boss straightened it all out. Kept him out of jail, kept his record clean, let him keep that title belt too, and now that nigga’s bitch ass acting funny about paying. It’s just work, like I said.”

The look I’d seen on Beau’s and his daughter’s face, I couldn’t shake it. Nobody deserved to be humiliated like that.

I crossed my arms and turned so I could face him. “So, basically, you help rich people get away with murder? And you went after his daughter, who didn’t have shit to do with what he did? If that ain’t fucked up.” The bracelets jingled on my wrist as the palm of my hand fell hard and fast across the back of Javion’s head. If we weren’t so far away from my house I’d have gotten out and walked. I slumped back into the soft leather of the seat and stared at the sun dipping in and out of the clouds overhead.

Yes, I was raised in the game, but it was different type of game. Back in the day, Ramsey Evans was one of the youngest dudes in the game; he was a computer hacker who ran dope in and out of North Carolina and South Carolina. His daughter had a thing for The Hunger Games and Comic Con. They went to every convention every year. She wanted a live deer-hunting contest at one of them. Ramsey went above and beyond and hired the actors from the movie; he even gave people real bows and arrows. Almost caused a stampede when the deer came crashing across the stage waving its antlers, but he paid for a show, so he got one. You had Ewoks, Storm Troopers, and Wonder Women all shooting their arrows, not sure if their target was an animatronic or a real deer.

When it collapsed and the head fell off, people gasped. Ramsey . . . lying there with tape over his mouth so he couldn’t scream. His hands and his legs were tied together. Daddy took over after that. That’s how he did things. He would handle business like a Nigerian warlord when he needed to. But he never touched people’s kids. He had boundaries, rules; there was a code of ethics that he followed. Javion left a bad taste in my mouth with his child’s play. I couldn’t respect a man that did shit like that.

“Novie,” Javion said my name like it was an excuse. He sucked on his bottom lip and alternated between watching the road and watching me. “This is what I do in order to make these stacks we burn through like kindlin’. It’s why I expect you to wait in the car when I tell you to wait in the car. It’s not just me; it’s a family thing, so I’m with my people. We do a lot of infamous shit for famous and financially privileged motherfuckers like him. Sometimes they ask for more than they can afford, and when they do, we have to scare up their payment.”

A family thing, okay. I guess that would explain why I hadn’t met or seen so much as a picture of any of his kin. If we weren’t trying to take it slow and really build whatever this thing was that we had, I’d have started pressing him about this secret-squirrel family business.

I decided to try my luck. “So, who is this boss that you work for?”

He focused on the road in front of him. “Can’t answer that.”

“You move weight too? Have you been doing this for a long time? Have you ever killed anyone?” I fired the questions at him one by one as they popped into my head.

“Novie,” he yelled slamming his hand against the steering wheel. “Chill with the questions. I already told you a helluva lot more than I should have. So let it go. I ain’t telling you anything else.”

I put my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes, unsure of why I wasn’t scared or completely turned off by what he really did for a living. As much as I hated what my dad did for a living, I don’t know why I kept falling for niggas who followed in his footsteps.