“Explain? My phone number hasn’t changed. You didn’t call or text me to explain before now, so why do you think I give a fuck? Man,” I shook my head. “I swear I’m not in the mood for this right now.”
Despite my words Tasha stepped closer to me. “Your father went from threatening me to humiliating me to offering me money back to threatening me. He looked me in my face and told me that you were stringing me along. H-he said that you were going to marry someone that was worthy of having your last name. He brought my mother into it. He even threatened to burn down my uncle’s store. I panicked; I didn’t know what to do.” Tears ran down her cheeks, but that didn’t move me. “And it seems to me that he didn’t lie because here you are rocking a wedding band,” her face contorted with disgust.
“If you panicked and your first thought wasn’t to call yo’ nigga, then I was wasting my time with you anyway.”
“How do you make money, Pearce?” The way she stuck her chin out while her bottom lip quivered made me think she already knew the answer.
“What?”
“How do you make your money?” she repeated slowly. “Is it simply from a cleaning business?”
“I don’t know what you’re asking me but if you have something to say just say it,” my jaw muscle ticked.
“Your father told me that you get money by being a hit man. I wanted to laugh in his face and tell him he was just pulling shit out of his ass until he started making a lot of sense. That made me wonder if what else he was saying was true. If I didn’t know that what else didn’t I know? He was threatening me and telling me stuff about you I didn’t know. What was I supposed to do?”
“Talk to me!” I roared so loud that she jumped. “All you had to do was come home to me.”
“Do you get paid to kill people?”
“Does it matter? You’re gone right?”
“And I’ve been miserable this entire time. I cry every day. And I come back, and you’re already in the bed with some chick on our trip. Married to her! Why are you even acting like you care that I left? You have clearly moved on!”
“There is no our anything, Love. You forfeited the trip when you took money to walk out of my life.”
“Are you with her now? Is the marriage real or some arranged fake shit that you’re doing to make daddy happy?” I saw the hope in her eyes. She wanted me to tell her the marriage to Vanya wasn’t real.
Pressing my hands together in a praying motion, I inhaled deeply through my nose. “We are done, Tasha. I promise you.”
I turned and walked inside. As tired as I was, after that confrontation, I knew I would be too wired to sleep. I huffed like an angry bull. A sudden thought made me laugh angrily. Kalim really told her what I did for a living. He told another human being that I was a hit man. “Bitch ass nigga,” I mumbled.
He was going to say whatever and do whatever to get Tasha out of my life, and it worked. Shorty had me going crazy all because of some BS that Kalim put in her ear. Every time I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt he made me regret it. Snakeass, rat ass, nigga. My blood was boiling. Next time his attorney called, I was going to tell him to tell his client to get someone else to handle his affairs. No matter what he did in the past, no matter how many times I swore I was done with him I’d always back track. Because he was my father.
Anything bad that happened to him his ass deserved it. I sat down on the couch, and my left leg bounced anxiously. I wanted answers then. I didn’t want them anymore. Tasha pretty much forced them on me, and it made me feel worse. Nothing he could have told her should have changed the way she felt about me. I had spent the last year doing everything I could to show Tasha how much I rocked with her, and she folded quicker than a lawn chair off the strength of what a person that I barely dealt with said. That showed me that if her back was against the wall, she wouldn’t stand ten toes down for me.
“Fuck!” I blurted out as I stood up to get weed from my bedroom. Smoking would be the only way I made it to sleep.
Running one hand over my waves, I tried my hardest not to get frustrated from my mother’s line of questioning. The day after my blow up with Tasha, I went to visit my mother, and she was asking me about my father.
“Can he have visits? Are you going to go down there?”
“I’m not sure and no.”
“Why?” her brows furrowed. “I know you two aren’t the closest, but he is your father.”
“And what does that mean, ma?” my tone came out icier than I intended it. “I’m his son, and he never used that reasoning to cut me any slack.”
“What are you talking about?” my mother frowned. She was genuinely confused. “Did something happen?”
“A lot happened. He paid Tasha to leave me. Told her that I was going to marry someone else. He even threatened her and her uncle’s business.” Before walking inside my mother’s home, I took the band off my finger and slid it into my pocket. She didn’t need to know that I married Vanya to protect her from Kalim.
“Oh my God,” my mother’s jaw slacked. “Why on earth would he do that?”
“Because he told me she wasn’t good enough for me. He wanted me to marry some chick named Adrienne. He talked about Tasha like she was scum. Never once did I think about leaving her because he wanted me to. She knows what kind of man I am. She believed him over me. Just straight up left without a word. I’m not doing it. I couldn’t care less about his construction company or his strip club.”
“I’m speechless. I just don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry you have to deal with that.”
“It’s done,” I shrugged. “I tried. I really tried. I tried to let it go and get past it, but Tasha showed back up, and it pissed me off all over again.”
