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“Yooooo,” Dame said when he saw me. He didn’t smile wide like he did at home. Instead, he grinned slyly and nodded in my direction. He got up with an air of careful coolness and came over to me as Benji took his seat at the table.
“Hi,” I said, noticing again how handsome he was. Even in the same white T-shirt I’d seen him in every day, he looked brand new. Clean.
“I can’t believe you came. I just knew you weren’t going to make it.”
“Here I am,” I said.
“Well, welcome to my world.” He raised his arms and looked around. “Lord of the flies.”
“I see,” I said, watching Benji puff one of the joints.
“What?” Dame turned to look over his shoulder. “Oh, don’t pay those fools no mind. They just in the cypher.”
“Are you smoking?” I asked and suddenly I regretted it. I sounded like his mother.
“I’m on my best behavior,” he said. “None of that for me.”
“Oh.”
“Dame, we can’t wait any longer,” Naima said, rushing onto the patio with her clipboard. “The crowd is about to get rowdy.”
“I’m good,” he said. “My guest is here.”
“Wonderful. It’s so nice to see your family supporting you,” she said disingenuously. She looked me up and down and sneered, as if to say in so many ways she was sure I was Dame’s older sister or aunt visiting from wherever. “Nice slacks.”
I was growing tired of her nasty routine. I said, “I can’t wait to see you onstage, baby,” and kissed Dame on the lips.
Her eyes went from tired to tortured. She slammed the clipboard at her side and trotted off in a huff.
“Now, I went from being a baby to being your baby?” Dame laughed.
“I was just fighting fire with fire.”
“Yeah, Naima is one of my promoters. She’s never been shy about wanting to come home with me.”
“I guess you haven’t done that,” I pressed.
“Of course I have. Did you see her butt?” he joked playfully.
“See, that’s why she was acting crazy.” I slapped his arm.
“I’m a man... . I’m a man.”
Dame’s show was fully phenomenal. Just as he’d mesmerized the kids at school, he easily controlled the crowd at the Apache. He had a live band and two backup singers. “This is what I do for fun,” he said when he finally managed to get through the crowd and was up on the stage. “Other people go to the mall, go out for dinner, kick it with some broads, but when I’m not selling out arenas around the world, I do this. Up close and personal. Because I’m a real MC and ain’t nobody gonna test you like the people in the street.” Everyone went insane, hollering praise at him. And by the time I paddled up to the front so I could see just a bit of the show in the packed room, Dame was hopping around the stage, pushing his energy off into the crowd like he’d been performing all his life. He was electric. On fire. Sweating and flexing. Building up so much intensity in the room, so much give and take between him and the crowd that was so close they could touch him, it had almost become sexual. And then he took off his shirt and a girl standing right in front of me nearly fainted into my arms. It was a good thing she had her girlfriend there to help though, because I didn’t even move to catch her. Like the other open-mouthed women standing around, I was too busy watching Dame. Beads of sweat dripped over his tattoos. They rolled down slowly as he continued to rhyme about something I couldn’t hear, tumbling toward his navel and then around the V-shaped slits his taut pelvic muscles made just above his—
“Journey !” Dame’s voice boomed through the microphone. Hearing my name, I shook and refocused my attention away from the V shape to see that it was now right in front of me. “Journey!”
Dazed, I looked to see that all of the women lined up in front of the stage were now looking at me.
“Journey!”
I looked up at Dame.
“Yes?”
“Come on stage,” he said, holding the microphone to his side and reaching down to help me up.
“Me?”
