I’d be lying if I said that my cousin hadn’t changed my life. Being Street’s corner man paid me better than the streets ever did, and that was saying a lot.
I wasn’t gone lie and act like I didn’t still move on the side, because I did. Old habits and old money didn’t just disappear because your life got better. But it wasn’t my main thing no more.Soon I planned to go all the way legit. My girl was gone make sure of that, with her upstanding citizen ass.
Street had put me in a position where I didn’t have to risk my freedom every day just to eat, I took that seriously even when I didn’t say it out loud. Watching him go from fighting in basements to being a top ten ranked heavyweight in the worldwas something I still had to remind myself was real sometimes. My cousin was genuinely about to be the heavyweight champion of the world if he kept moving the way he was moving and I had a front row seat to all of it.
That meant something to me that I didn’t have the right words for. Hood niggas were raised not to show emotions, but I was proud as fuck. Everything that I did in the past for him, it was all worth it.
What I did have now was Simone. We even had a joint checking account we had just opened for the house we were about to put an offer on. That was the most unbelievable part of everything if I was being real. Me and Simone looking at houses. I never thought that I would be the man to own anything beside a car and a damn social media account.Shit, I never thought she’d be my girl for real. She gave me the chase of my damn life, but I didn’t care. I wanted her ass and did what it took to get her too.
She had turned me into somebody who thought about a real future and I wasn’t even mad about it.
She wasn’t easy to deal with at all. Nothing about her was easy. She fussed about everything, the dishes, the way I drove, the way I talked sometimes. But I had figured out a long time ago that her fussing was just her love language. She cared about the details because she cared about me. Once I understood that I stopped fighting her on it.
Still, that shit didn’t mean I wanted to go to the grocery store either. She was staying at my crib because her roof was getting fixed before she put her house on the market. She was going to be here for a week and was already stressing me the fuck out. Living together was about to be hell.
“Come with me,” she said Saturday morning without looking up from her phone.
“I’ll be here when you get back.”
She looked up.
I looked back at her.
We did that for about four seconds.
“Come on! Damn!” I said. Having to give in to her spoiled ass.
She smiled, grabbed her purse and I grabbed my keys.
—
The store was packed just like I knew that it would be on a Saturday morning. I was doing what I always did in grocery stores which was exist next to Simone. I would try not to say anything about how long she was taking reading the back of every single box she picked up.
We were on the cereal aisle when something bumped into my leg.
I looked down.
It was a little girl that had bumped into me. Running and not paying attention to where she was going. Couldn’t have been more than three. She had bumped into me and stopped. She was looking up at me trying to decide if she needed to cry about it or not. I crouched down the way you did with little kids.
“You good? Where your people at?”
She just looked at me.
And I looked at her.
And everything in me went completely still.
She was a beautiful little girl. Deep chocolate skin, thick curly hair in two big puffs, round face. She was looking at me with these big dark eyes and I felt something in my chest that I had never felt before in my life and couldn’t explain it. I didn’t want to explain right now in the middle of a grocery store with my girl right behind me.
She had my face.
Not kind of. Not a passing thing that could be explained. My face on a three year old little girl looking back at me like she recognized something she had never actually seen before.
I was still crouched down when I heard footsteps coming fast.
“Amara—”
I stood up.
