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My home was always spotless. I would clean, even when there was nothing to clean. My car, I couldn’t say the same thing. It’s not that my car was dirty; if anything, sometimes it was just junky. I would have heels and sandals in the backseat, folders from work, and things of that nature.
Once Miami was inside the car, he put on his seatbelt and looked down at me.
“You cold? I know your ass always cold,” he said.
“You could make it a little warmer,” I told him, and he did just that.
Once he did, he shot out of the driveway and started flying down the street like a bat out of hell.
“Toddrick! Damn, slow down! You’re going to fuckin’ kill me!” I yelled.
“I ain’t going to kill your ass. Ain’t shit going to happen to you when you’re with me, so calm down. You hungry?” he asked.
Miami did this thing where he would take his eyes off the road and look at me when he talked, and truthfully, I hated it. It scared me each time because I felt like he needed to pay attention to what was in front of him instead of looking at me. I hated to even compare him to Trip, but the two of them drove just alike.
When Trip was a free man, I absolutely hated getting in the car with him. I think I was in the car with him a good two times when he’d gotten into a car accident. I remember at seventeen years old, sitting my dumb ass in the passenger seat crying while he did like 95 miles an hour on the turnpike. Trip drove
fast and was an asshole about it. Miami just drove fast, and I think what made me scared is the shit that I had to endure with Trip.
“No. I’m not getting out. You said we didn’t have to get out,” I reminded him, and he let out a laugh while shaking his head.
“We not! I would have taken you to a drive-thru or something. You act like it’s a bounty on your head or some shit. Fuck you running for?” he asked.
“I’m not hungry. My grandma cooked earlier. I’m not running from nobody; I just don’t want to get out looking crazy,” I let him know, and he nodded.
“You would have to put in hours of work for you to even look remotely close to crazy. I wish you saw what I see.” He mumbled the last part.
I’m not going to lie; I could feel the butterflies in my stomach turn when he gave me that compliment. I tried so damn hard not to smile too. After almost five minutes of silence, he finally started a new topic.
“Your grandma told me about the class that you went to today. How’d that go?” he asked.
We were getting on the highway now, and I noticed that he wasn’t driving as fast. Miami was so much different from Trip. I could tell Miami something, and I swear, right then and there he would fix it. He knew he was scaring the shit out of me with his driving, and look how quickly he fixed it. I liked when I was heard. With Trip, I swear I wasn’t heard. It had pretty much always been his way or nothing at all.
“It was different for me. I’m so closed in that I’m not used to sharing my problems with a bunch of strangers. I’m not opposed to it, though. They offer the class every third Sunday of the month, so I’ll go back next month,” I let him know.
“Taylor tried reaching out to you yet?” he asked, doing that thing again.
“No! I have nothing to say to her, Miami. She probably knows that you told me, which is why she hasn’t reached out. There were voices in my head telling me to find her and kill her and that baby, but I can’t. I can’t allow her to have that much power over my damn feelings to the point that she’ll have my ass in jail. The craziest thing out of all of this is I know for a fact that had Vonte still been here, she would have lied to my son until she was blue in the face and made him believe that baby was his.
“In middle school, I started talking to Vonte about girlfriends and how he needed to be mindful of certain girls. We see this shit all the time with these girls pinning these babies on these men because of what they have or what they will one day have. That’s basically what Taylor did to Vonte. I called it like that from the jump, but when it came to Vonte, I tried not to be that ‘I told you so’ type of mother. I wanted him to see his fuck ups through clear lenses.
“Bitches like Taylor are fuckin’ heartless, though. That little girl was in the hospital with me the night I was crying over my dead son. Her little ass saw my pain, yet she would have kept a lie going until she got caught by you. Can you imagine if I had actually held that baby and formed some type of bond, and then I found out later? Miami, I’m serious, I would have been in jail. Either way, it goes, it’s fucked up that I had to find out the way that I did, but this way was best,” I let him know.
“I hear you, shorty. Believe it or not, you’re special to me. I wouldn’t have felt right keeping some shit like that from you. Trust me, I didn’t want to tell you that shit, but the longer I would have waited, the more love you would have had in your heart for that child, so it was only right that I went about it in the way that I did. I can’t even begin to know what something like that has got to feel like, but shorty you’re right, she ain’t worth your freedom. Whatever thoughts you have in your head, just dead it. Let God deal with her, yo,” he finished.
I didn’t bother replying to him. During the ride, I found myself staring over at Miami every two to three minutes, just in complete awe of his entire appearance. Was it weird that I somewhat felt lucky? This man was beautiful enough to have any woman in the world, yet he was driving around in the car with me. I loved that serious look that he sported when he drove. The way his jaws would flex and tense up whenever a driver in front of us did something crazy that he didn’t like. Whenever he cut someone off, he did this thing where he would sit up in the seat with his left hand on the steering wheel, and a look of seriousness and concentration would fill his face. Although it was so simple, I loved it.
When he wasn’t sitting up in his chair switching lanes, he was laid back, as if he was just cruising. It took a while, but in no time, I noticed that he was taking an exit toward Hollywood Beach. As long as I’d lived in Miami, I had never really come to this beach that much. Like everyone else, I was used to going to Miami Beach.
Once Miami reached the exit, he turned the air off inside the car and rolled our windows down. He also turned the radio down a little bit. I loved the sound that came from outside. It was happiness. I heard music playing and people yelling and talking; I even heard a few babies crying. Eventually, the sounds started to die out as we drove further down.
I was beginning to think that Miami was just riding us through this area to get us to where he was taking us, but he finally pulled the car into a nearby parking lot. From where he parked the car, I could see the water, although it was dark as hell outside. A few lights were out, which didn’t make it impossible to see, and as I sat there, I found myself noticing how beautiful and peaceful this was.
“When I lost my mama, this is where I used to come. I would park my car in this same lot and sit out here for hours. At times, I would come out here around this hour, and it would be a whole new day before I knew it. I shed a lot of tears out here, did a lot of taking with both God and my mama, smoked a lot of blunts, and took a lot of shots to the head. I was leaving the club tonight when Jabari and I happened to pass by this same lot, and I instantly thought of you, which is why I was calling. Sometimes, with all the shit that’s going on, it’s like you just need a fuckin’ escape, and this peaceful ass place out here was that for me. Notice how all the commotion and shit died down? A lot of people don’t really be over here like that. They probably don’t come because it is too fuckin’ dark,” he let me know.
The whole time Miami spoke, he didn’t look at me. He was looking ahead at the water.
“You ever get out, or you just stay in here?” I asked him.
