Real Wifeys: Get Money (7 page)

She started laughing crazy as hell.

I snatched my fucking hand away and ran the fuck out of there, pushing some random motherfucker out of my way. Whoever it was hollered out in surprise. Fuck ’em. I slammed our bedroom door so hard I knew everyone on that floor felt the vibrations.

Peaches was crazy. What I was just taking a guess at before, I now knew for sure. That little bitch was out of her fucking mind.

“What’s your problem?”

I turned away from where I stood at the window and eyed Make$ walking into our bedroom with the DVD in his hand. “You knew about that shit?” I asked, watching the disc as my heart pounded.

“Nah,” he said.

I eyed him. Was this fucker lying? Was he as crazy as his mama? “That shit was so over the top and unnecessary,” I snapped, running my hands through my jet-black weave. “Your mama started a fucking fight and lost. I already fought the bitch. Everything was handled. That shit was dead. You know what I’m saying? So what the fuck is
that
shit?”

“Yo,” Make$ roared, making a fist that he shook at his side as the veins in his neck strained beneath the cover of his tattoos. “I will handle it, Luscious.”

“Handle what? Ya mama out here wilding out, acting crazy, talking stupid—”

“Yo, don’t disrespect my mother!” Make$ shouted, pointing his finger at me like he was ready to storm across the room and slap me up.

My eyes got hard. He could fuck with it if he chose, but then the choice was mine whether to let him get away with it. Love or no love. Being my financial security blanket or not. My father never laid a hand on me—not even to spank me—and I’d be damned if
any
other man used me as his punching bag. There wasn’t a motherfucker alive who would touch me and walk away the same.

I was as serious as a heart attack.

“Why don’t you tell your mother to stop disrespecting herself, calling up radio stations and giving interviews about random dumb shit,” I snapped, waving my hand at him dismissively. “So you cosigning that bullshit? Huh? You okay with chancing your career? Huh? You wanna go to jail for that shit that she fucking
taped
? Huh, Terrence? Huh?” I asked him, my voice hard and my eyes blazing. “Y’all better get up off that motherfucking Soprano-Godfather-Scarface-gangbanging mind-set! Fuck y’all think this is?”

“A’ight, Luscious,” Make$ said, sounding aggravated. “I’ll take care of it.”

I came across the room, damn near slipping on the pile of photos. I kicked at them in frustration, sending some flying up into the air to float down around us. “Take care of what? What exactly did she leave you to clean up?” I asked, my hands whizzing across the air. “Where is that girl? What’s going to keep her from going to the police? Who was the people in there whipping her ass? Who taped it? Is that the only copy? Why—”

Make$ flung the DVD across the room and it sliced into our custom-painted walls. “Shut the fuck up! Damn! You fuckin’ five-oh or some shit? What the fuck? I
said
I would handle it.”

I left well enough alone and just released a heavy-ass breath that was filled with aggravation. I wanted so badly to tell this Negro that his mother and/or his crew would be his downfall. Fuck it, though. That nigga was hardheaded as hell, so why waste my breath?

When Make$ turned to leave the room he was already unscrewing his pendant of the world. Getting fucked up wasn’t going to change shit. Everything he cherished in that small world of his was nothing but an escape. A fucking cop-out. A reason not to deal with the real world. I couldn’t stand that shit. It was a sign of weakness that I didn’t want to see in him.

I looked up and caught sight of myself in the mirror, thinking of the times I did coke with him because I didn’t want to disappoint him. It was a sign of weakness that I couldn’t stand seeing in myself.

I turned away from the reflection.

Funny thing was, it wasn’t the sight of my own image and shame that fucked with me. An image of that girl beaten and laid up in some abandoned house flashed.

Where was she?

How was she?

I sat on the windowsill and looked down at the triangle-shaped Military Park. I didn’t know shit about its history or all the statues but I knew there was many times in the months since we moved here that I would sit in the window and look out at the park and find some peace. I grew up in Newark, and nothing about the small park ever stood out to me as a kid. And now I lived in a upscale apartment building overlooking it.

I should be mad happy.

Not hoping that some girl I fought in the club—to defend my man’s mother—wasn’t in a hospital bed or grave.

It was shit like this that made my parents side-eye my relationship with Make$. The only thing my daddy hated more than me stripping was having Make$ in my life. My father hated hip-hop and especially hated Make$’s use of profanity and half-naked women in his videos and photo shoots.

We all went to dinner when I first introduced him to my parents and they couldn’t wait to call me to their house the next day to beat me over the head about his tattoos, his chain-smoking, his ever-present shades. His everything. So now I just kept them separated, because no one was going to change. When I did fuck with a family function, I didn’t bring Make$, and he didn’t mind one damn bit.

They didn’t even know the half about Make$, and if they did, shit would only get worse. If my parents knew I use to ride with Make$ when he was in the dope game, they would probably kidnap me away from him. Thankfully, he stopped all that hustling and focused on his music. Still, all of that mess plus the nights I cried myself to sleep because I was so lonely and worried that my man was fucking around on me? My parents would flip.

I closed my eyes and drew my legs up to my chest, resting my forehead on top of my knees. I wished things could be different with my parents. My family.

It had been months since I been to their house, and we all lived right within the limits of the city of Newark. They were in Weequahic, a working middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes. But our disagreements over the way I chose to live my life kept plenty of distance between us. The nurse and college professor didn’t dream of raising a college dropout turned stripper turned live-in wifey of a rapper. (Kanye they would swallow up, but Make$, with his tats, open love of weed, and jail record? They wasn’t cosigning that at all.)

But I felt their disapproval way before I climbed my ass on the pole. I was never their perfect angel. By the time I went to college and got some freedom to do what I wanted, whenever I wanted, I went crazy. I did everything I thought they wouldn’t want me to do and it made it all even more fun. Partying. Smoking weed. Drinking. Fucking. No church on Sundays. No curfews. No rules. No disapproving looks.

Life was
bananas
back then
and
secret as hell, until my grades got sent home. My parents wanted to know just what I was up to since my grades wasn’t up to shit. But I was too far gone by then. Freedom was everything to me and there was no turning back.

That was the beginning of the end of my relationship with my parents. Now it was all about quick phone calls over visits and dropping gifts off on the holidays. The less time we all spent together the better.

Bzzzzzz . . . Bzzzzzz . . . Bzzzzzz . . .

I looked over at my BlackBerry vibrating on my nightstand.
Fuck it.
I didn’t feel like talking. In that moment I was feeling too much like my parents were right about the world I chose to live in. I used to laugh off their claims of danger, thinking they was just being hypersensitive middle-class black folks who didn’t understand that a lot of hip-hop was about upholding an image more than anything.

But that DVD was fucking with me. There was no excuse for that girl to get jumped like that. No excuse.

Bzzzzzz . . . Bzzzzzz . . . Bzzzzzz . . .

Pushing up off the windowsill, I walked over to the bed to pick up my cell phone. I frowned at the number before I answered. “Hello?”

“Miss Jordan?”

I rolled my eyes, feeling irritated as hell. “Yes?” I said, just short of snapping.

As the words filled my ear, I went from feeling weak at the knees to being strengthened by anger. “Oh hell no.”

My heart pounded.

I felt nauseous.

I felt like crying.

I was fucked up. Fucked all the way up.

I dropped the phone. I was shaking all over like I couldn’t control myself as I stormed out of the bedroom and came marching down the hall like I was going to war.

The sight of Make$ and his motherfucking mooching-ass minions howling with laughter without a care in the world just kicked shit up a hundred notches for me. Wasn’t a bit of pause on this shit.

I pushed niggas out my way hard as fuck, ignoring their shouts of surprise, grabbed the remote from Make$’s hand, and flung that motherfucker dead into the center of the flat-screen on the wall. The silence in the room came with a quickness.

Make$ jumped to his feet. “Fuck wrong with you, Luscious?” he spat, stepping up to press his face close to mine. Nose to nose. Angry eyes locked. Both chests heaving.

Fuck it. It was on.

“Get the fuck out!” I yelled at the top of my voice, giving him one last hard stare before I turned and pushed past these openmouthed, shell-shocked motherfuckers to throw the front door wide open.

“Yo, Make$, man, what’s up with your girl?” someone asked, with way too much attitude.

I paused and calmly nodded my head as I walked back toward our bedroom like I didn’t have a care in the world. “I got nine motherfucking reasons why this living room better be cleared out when I get back,” I said, easy as hell. No worries. Make$’s nine-millimeter was in my name anyway.

We’ll see if these heads get a little less hard when the barrel of a gun is pressed to them.

Yes, I was that serious.

“Yo, let me handle this little dustup real quick. I’ll get with y’all later.”

I turned and stood, hands on curvy hips, as they all filed out the apartment. As soon as the door shut behind them I stalked over to Make$ with long strides and arms already swinging. “You no-good, lying son of a bitch,” I spat, landing two blows to his chest that caused him to stumble his skinny ass backward.

“Bitch, what the fuck wrong with you?” he roared, stepping forward to grab at my throat.

“Get your fucking hands off me,” I said in this hard voice filled with all the emotions getting at me in that moment. I pushed him away from me and he stumbled again. I snatched up one of the glasses sitting on the end table and flung it at his ass.

He ducked.

It bounced off the window.

“I trusted you, motherfucker, and now you and one of your nasty little side-fucks gave me a fucking STD,” I told him in a voice that was a small whisper that was filled with all these big-ass emotions. PAIN. ANGER. HURT. HATRED.

“An STD? That’s some bullshit, Luscious,” Make$ said, holding out his hands to block anything I might fling across the room at his ass.

Tears filled my eyes, but I fought the urge to crumble to the floor and have a good cry. Fuck that shit. I started picking up random shit and tossing it at that cheating bastard, hoping I knocked him the fuck out.

The remote.

CRASH.

His new diamond and platinum watch.

BOOM.

“Luscious!”

A box of blunt cigars landed against his cheek.

“Stop it, Luscious!”

The CD cover they used to snort powder whizzed across the room.

“Why you tearin’ up the fucking house?!”

“Because my doctor just told me I got trich, bitch.”

A old takeout container filled with chicken bones and remnants of fried rice landed against his chest.

I looked around for something else to throw and Make$ came storming across the room, wrapping his arms around mine and locking me tight against his body. The little fucker was thin but strong.
Shit.

We both stumbled, lost our balance, and fell backward. My head caught the corner of the glass buffet table against the wall. The table tipped forward and crashed down on us. He pushed it off.

“Luscious, baby, you all right?” he asked.

I cried out, closing my eyes with a wince as I felt the warm oozing of blood against my scalp. Even as the pain throbbed, I fought his hands off me, not able to stand his touch. “You lying motherfucker,” I screamed, tears burring my vision and pain searing my heart.

I clawed him like a cat with nothing to lose.

My fingernails dug into the skin of Make$’s face and he cried out.

That shit wasn’t nothing against the pain I was feeling. Fuck the gash on my head and the blood I felt running down my neck. This nigga right here broke my heart. My world felt like everything was crashing around me. It felt out-of-body. I
wished
it was unreal. But this was the realest shit ever.

There was no denying a nasty-ass STD, and there wasn’t but one way I could get it. In my twenty-four years I had
never
even had a fucking yeast infection. Ugh!

“Luscious, that’s a fucking lie,” he said again.

I eyed him hard before I pointed my finger against his forehead. “No, you the lie, motherfucker. You the no-good, cheating, disease-spreading trick master. Motherfucker,” I said with emphasis, swatting them stupid-ass shades off his face.

He slapped my hand away.

Whap.

“A’ight, Luscious, keep your hands to your fuckin’ self before you get hurt,” he said.

I laughed, bitter as hell. So bitter. “What you gone do, whup my ass? Huh? Huh? Nigga please. Try me, nigga,” I said, claiming my anger and letting it fuel me because the pain of his betrayal and his disrespect would destroy me if I didn’t.