Kiss the Ring (23 page)

She poured her a glass of water and grabbed a stiff dish towel then headed back to the living room. She pushed the glass into Coko's hand and covered the throw-up the best she could with the towel.

“Your son worth you getting it together,” Naeema said, looking down at her as fresh wind finally blew through the sheer black and red curtains at the window.

Water spilled out of the glass as Coko struggled to sit up on the sofa. “What the fuck you know?” she asked, before taking a deep sip of it.

I know you need to wash your ass,
Naeema thought, eyeing the dirt under her nails and on the bottom of her feet.
This glass probably the only water her ass been around in a minute.

“I know I'm about to tell you something that if you pop off at the mouth I will pretty much fuck you up,” Naeema said.

Coko leaned back and looked her up and down with her yellowy eyes.

“My son was killed,” Naeema said and then gave her face that was filled with
Now fuck with it
.

Coko just sipped her water.

“Look, I didn't raise him and now I don't have a chance to get to know him,” Naeema told her, reaching up to grip the ring dangling from the end of her chain. “It's the worst feeling . . . so if you can pull your shit together and get your son, you should.”

The sounds of the siren in the distance filled their silence.

“Trust me, I ain't judging you. I'm not in no position to look down on you about your son,” Naeema added.

Coko eyed her over the rim of the glass. “Sure don't fucking sound like it,” she said with a twist of her mouth.

No, this bitch didn't?

“Keep sucking random dicks and fucking for dope, bitch. Live your life,” Naeema said before she reached over and knocked the small bag of heroin from the mantel to spill onto the floor.

Coko threw the glass at Naeema. It flew barely a foot before it dropped onto the floor and crashed. She was too weak to do any better.

Naeema just waved her hand, dismissing her, before she turned.

“I'm sorry.”

Naeema was at the open front door. She stopped at Coko's softly spoken words. The red lights from the ambulance reflected in her eyes as it double-parked in front of Coko's house.

“I'm sick of living like this,” she said.

The EMTs hopped out of the ambulance and came up the stairs just as she heard Coko vomit again behind her. “She's inside. She's up now but she's real weak. I found her passed out and damn near foaming at the mouth,” she told a thin Puerto Rican dude with curly black hair.

Naeema started down the stairs as they rushed inside but she stopped.
This smart-mouth bitch don't deserve no help.

She stood there having an inner battle while neighbors either peeked out the window or boldly walked down the street to see up close what was going on.

But her son deserves a mother—his mother—just like mine did.

Turning, she jogged back up the stairs and stood just outside her living room as they ran tests on her. “You want me to call your mother?”

Coko looked up at her and shook her head. “She would use it against me with my son,” she said, tears forming in her eyes as she hung her head. “I don't have nobody.”

Naeema remembered saying those same words to herself many a night when she was pregnant and homeless. It was the worst feeling in the world.

When the EMTs loaded Coko into the back of the ambulance on a stretcher, Naeema made sure her door was locked and pushed her motorcycle back into the garage before she climbed in the back with her for the ride to the hospital.

• • •

Naeema had been at the hospital all morning and early into the afternoon with Coko before she finally left and made her way home. Coko was admitted to the psychiatric ward for them to begin her detox before she entered a rehab facility. Getting clean off drugs was tough. Getting clean off heroin was one of the toughest. Naeema sent prayers up for her recovery.

She smiled at seeing the door now filling the entrance to the kitchen. As she undressed she walked across the room to push it open. “Well, I'll be damned, Sarge,” she said when it swung back and forth smoothly. “Gotta find some other shit for him to do 'round here.”

Naeema stepped out of her pants, leaving them on the floor, as she sat on the edge of her unmade bed and pulled the original wad of stolen cash from her bag. She rolled it between her fingers and tossed it up into the air to catch.
If
Bas was innocent, did that take the stain of my son's blood off of it?

She dropped it back into her bag atop the gun she'd taken from Rico, then she removed her lingerie and walked into the bathroom for a hot shower. She stood under the spray, letting the water rain down on her head as she wiped her face with her hands.

Naeema had a craving and it was really fucking with her.

She'd been fighting it since the day before and it hadn't edged off yet. “Shit,” she swore, tilting her head back so that the water flowed down her neck and onto her breasts.

Her nipples hardened.

She turned and pressed her head against the wall, letting the water slide down her back and onto the rounded top of her buttocks.
He got me fucked up.

She had dick on the brain. One dick especially. It felt like no matter what she tried to do, there was a male voice in her ear taunting her: “
Come get this dick. Come get this dick. Come get this dick.

She wanted it. She needed it.

Naeema turned again in the shower and reached for her lavender bathing gloves and her bottle of body wash, but the feel of the slick soap against her body wasn't doing shit to cool it down.
Don't call. Don't call. Fuck that.

There was so much other shit she could be thinking about besides the feel of his dick inside her as she came. But there it was.

Come get this dick. Come get this dick. Come get this dick.

Big, long, hard, curving, throbbing dick.

She leaned forward to cool down the water some and rush through the rest of her shower. Grabbing a towel, she
dried off and wrapped it as tightly as she could around her body as she stared at her reflection in the steam-covered mirror.

Go get it.

She shook her head.

Leaving the bathroom, Naeema padded into the living room and used the remote to turn on the television. She settled on a marathon of
I (Almost) Got Away with It
on the ID channel. She was determined to get dick off her brain.

It didn't work.

She dug around in her Michael Kors for the baggie of Canna Sutra. As she prepped her pipe, she smiled at the label on the bag. “Good for bronchial dilation,” she said. Naeema didn't have asthma and she doubted any of her contact's clients did. Although the first medicinal weed shop opened in Jersey in 2012, her connect Mook still brought his shit straight from a shop in Los Angeles.

“California . . . knows how to party,” she sang the chorus from 2Pac's “California Love.”

As she blazed Naeema lifted the TV just long enough to open the container and pull out her “Brandon file” to look through for the hundredth time or better. Her towel fell but she didn't bothering covering up as she took a toke from the dick pipe and settled on the bed to look through the police file.

Through the thick haze of smoke she released from both sides of her mouth she looked at the police photos of the crime scene. She tried to pay attention to everything, even the fucking trees lining the street. Brandon's body in the street. His bones protruding oddly from his slender teenaged body. His eyes vacant with death. His neck slashed.
Blood pooling around him. The tire tracks of the car blackening the shirt he wore. The spit in the street and against the side of his face.
What the fuck am I missing?

Her
Jaws
ringtone on her burner phone sounded off.

Then her other cell phone started vibrating loudly.

She set the picture down and dug both phones out of her handbag. She knew one was Bas calling. She looked at the other. Her heart pounded hard. Tank. She smirked as she looked down from one hand to the other with both phones going off.

Come get this dick. Come get this dick. Come get this dick.

From which one?

Naeema dropped both phones onto the bed and got up to grab one of the containers lining the wall, pulled out leggings and a long-sleeved fitted tee in black. Not bothering with underwear, she got dressed and slid on riding boots. She grabbed her keys and rushed across the room and through the kitchen to leave the house and reach the garage.

Naeema rode her bike through the traffic of the Newark streets until she pulled up outside Tank's house. There was a small yellow car in the drive that she didn't recognize but she parked behind it and walked across the front yard to jog up the stairs and knock on the front door.

The day she'd packed her shit and left him, she had left her keys to the house on his pillow in their bedroom along with a note saying she was sick and tired of being sick and tired of arguing.

She turned at the sound of the door opening.
What the . . . ? Wait. What?

Naeema eyed the full-figured dark-skinned cutie answering the door to the house where
she
was legally still the
queen. And from the look in the woman's eye, she knew damn well about her continuing reign.

Making a face like
bitch please,
Naeema brushed right past her and stepped into the living room.

Tank came out of the kitchen wiping his hands. “Who is at the . . .”

“She just brushed right past me, Tank.”

Naeema looked over her shoulder and gave the woman a nasty up-and-down. “You lucky I didn't walk right over you . . . after I knocked you the fuck out.”

“Na,” Tank snapped, coming over to stand in between them.

Naeema nudged the back of his head. “Oh no, motherfucker, you don't ever give
me
your back,” she snapped.

He turned to eye her hard. “Yo, why you actin' like this?”

“Like what?” she snapped, keeping her eyes locked on his.

“Childish.”

Naeema leaned to the left to look past him at the other woman. “Better child-
ish
than whor-
ish
,” she said with another wicked up-and-down look.

“But you the one in the funky spandex,” the woman snapped, hostile as hell.

“Tina,” Tank said, placing a restraining hand on her waist.

Naeema's eyes dipped down to take in the more than comfortable move. It hurt her. The dick had been calling her and she raced her ass across town to get it and there might as well have been a damn OCCUPIED sign hanging from the tip. That shit hurt like a motherfucker.

His good deed from the day before of ensuring her baby-father, Chance, didn't press charges was forgotten.

“I just came for the updated police report,” Naeema lied to save face. “You couldn't sit here and wait for number one forever so I understand settling for second . . . or third . . . humph . . . maybe
fourth
best.”

Yes, she was being childish as hell and she knew it.

“Tina, excuse me for a second.”

She came around Tank and rolled her eyes at Naeema. “Yes, please do handle
that.
”

Line crossed.

Naeema reached out quick as shit with her right hand and brought it down on the back of the woman's head. She cried out as she fell forward onto the floor. “The police report,” she said coldly, ignoring Tank stooping down to help her to her feet.

“Yo, you got a fucking hand problem, Naeema,” Tank snapped. His date or whatever stood swaying on her feet as she cupped the back of her head.

“And she got a mouth problem. Let's see who fix their problem first.”

Tank came over and grabbed Naeema by her upper arm to steer her back onto the porch. “Why you actin' like this, yo? You left me.”

“The police report,” she repeated, not even looking at him.

“I told you, I'm not giving you the report to go out there and get yourself killed.”

She shook her head as she finally eyed him. “Well, if I'm dead you don't have to worry about a divorce where my childish ass could yank this fucking house we used to live in
together
 . . . where you are now fucking new bitches,” she said, holding up both her hands. “So give me the police report.”

“Man, go home with that nonsense, Tina,” he said.

“Tina!” she snapped, not thinking it was possible for her to feel more hurt and more anger . . . until he called her by the other woman's name.

Tank's face filled with regret. “Na,” he began. “I didn't mean to—”

“Fuck you, Tank,” she said, turning to walk down the stairs.

He reached out and gripped her wrist. Naeema snatched away from him. At the bottom step she looked back and laughed. “What's so crazy is while she in there tryin' to play my position we both know if I told you to send her ass home you would.”

She stormed across the yard and climbed onto her motorcycle.

Tank turned and walked back inside the house.

Naeema climbed her ass right back off the motorcycle and raced down the drive to Tank's garage. She entered her birth date on the keypad to unlock the door and slipped inside using the flashlight on her phone to keep from turning on the lights. In the corner was his desk and she headed straight to it. Right on top of the stacks of papers and receipts was the file.

By the time Tank reached the end of his drive to catch up to her, Naeema was turning her motorcycle and racing away up the street with the file safely tucked in her waistband.

• • •

Naeema hopped out of the cab and came up the walkway to the front door. Before she could knock on the front door
it opened and Bas's tall figure filled the frame. She flipped her long black weave over her shoulder and opened her wrap dress to show him she was as naked as the day she was born.