Thong on Fire (16 page)

I
FOUND OUT
real quick that Free wasn’t like the rest of them niggas on the rap scene. Yeah, he was down with all the action and got mad respect in the music industry, but either he was broke for real, or he wasn’t impressed by most of the flash and shine and the other shit that truly impressed the hell outta me. I knew he was feening for a piece of this ass, though, and I couldn’t wait to turn him out.

Whenever we hung out he would pick me up in a regular old red Honda. It was clean and all, but that shit was so basic you had to roll down the damn windows by hand. It had a dope stereo system in it though, and he liked to pump that shit up.

There had never been shit I liked about a broke nigga, but I did like Free. We talked about all kinds of stuff. Marshall had laid down the rules about bringing dudes up in his apartment, but for Free I broke them real quick. I took him home with me twice, and the first time we sat up just talking. I told Free that Kimichi was a junkie and still living right in Harlem, even though I never went to see her. Free told me some things about his mother too.

“My moms was just out there,” he said, looking down at his hands. “She used to drink all the damn time. I mean
all the time
. One of them mothers who shows up at your elementary school tore down drunk with a nightgown under her raggedy fur coat and rollers in her hair.”

I nodded. I felt that shit real deep. Kimichi had been the same way, but it was worse with her because I was the only one in class who had a drunk Asian momma up at the school showing her ass.

“Mine too,” I said. “She couldn’t talk for shit and embarrassed the hell outta me. I used to wish she was somebody else’s damn mother.”

“Yeah.” Free laughed a little. “Me too. Them days was just crazy. Crazy.”

“My father got popped when I was a kid,” I revealed. “My uncle took me in and raised me. His daughter got sick and died, so I kinda took her place. He had a little boy too, but I was his heart.” Tears came to my eyes when I thought about Uncle Swag and everything that he had done for me.

“So you grew up with a little brother too?”

“Yeah. Kinda. Kaz was real quiet though.”

“Not my baby brother,” Free said, shaking his head. “That little cat talked all the damn time. I couldn’t even go to sleep at night ’cause he would be all in my ear, talking me to death. I miss that shit, though. I really do.”

“Where is he now? Is he into music too?”

Free’s whole face changed. He looked down at his hands and rubbed them together, then a hardness came over over him as he gazed into my eyes. “He got murdered. In a car. A drunk driver got him. She was holding a bottle up to her mouth when she crashed into a van.”

“Did they catch him?”

“Not him. Her. They didn’t have to chase her down or nothing. The cops knew exactly who killed my little brother. It was my moms.”

Damn. I could tell by the look on his face what kinda pain that musta caused him.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “It musta been real hard to lose your brother and your moms like that. Damn.”

“Nah, I didn’t lose my moms, Saucy. She’s still out there living and breathing. I just walked away from Liz Moore and never looked back. Ain’t nothing in this world that could make me speak to her again neither. Didn’t shit happen to her that night. She crawled outta that twisted-up pile of metal with nothing but a broken ankle and a sore back. She was so blasted that when they got to her she was fightin’ them, screaming and searching all over the car.”

“Searching for what? Your little brother?”

“Nah, baby. For her liquor bottle.”

Damn. Now I knew why he didn’t really drink that much. I hated to see Free feeling that low, so I tried to bring his mood back up. I kissed all over his neck and he rubbed my titties, but that was as far as we got because his phone rang and he told me he had some business to take care of.

“Next time,” he promised me on his way out the door. I was mad as hell! I had wanted it to be this time!

But the sexual tension between us was broiling, and we joked about who was gonna make who nut first when we finally did that thang. But it was more than just the dick I was anticipating. I liked hanging around him. Free paid attention to everything I said and made me feel like a priority. He had a power about him that just screamed, “I’m the shit!” and I guess a lotta other females in New York musta felt the same way, because every time I looked up there were bitches ten-deep trying to jump on his dick and get his juice.

“Damn,” I said one night as we sat eating crabs in a soul food restaurant out in Staten Island. Free had family out there and had some people he wanted to see, and some bitch who was sweating all over herself in a played-out cat suit was trying to worm her way into his sights. “She act like she know you like that or something.”

Free just shrugged and cracked a crab leg open with his tool.

“She’s cool. I used to mess wit’ her girl, so now she wanna see can she get some for herself.”

I looked at him to see if the nigga was feeling himself, but it didn’t look that way. He wasn’t being cocky or nothing like that, just saying it the way he saw it. For about the tenth time I wondered what this nigga mighta heard about me. I knew how shit got around in the music world, and I had been with enough artists that the name Brainiac mighta gotten back to Free.

“Yeah,” I said, testing him out. “Some people do that type of thing. I mean, they’ll hear something about you, good or bad, and judge you based on that. Sometimes what they hear might not even really be true.”

He shrugged again. “I ain’t with that. I don’t even listen to nothing nobody else gotta say. Cats know not to come running they mouth around me like that anyway, ’cause I ain’t gonna hear it. I judge everybody for myself, Saucy. ’Cause ain’t a nigga out here whose judgment I trust more than my own. Nah’m saying?”

I sure was glad to hear that!

“Me too,” I said simply. “I don’t listen to all the noise going around in the industry either. Half the niggas be lying and the other half just ain’t telling the truth.”

We laughed on that one, and when Free pulled a big chunk of crab meat out the shell, he reached over and put it in my mouth and I sucked a little bit on his finger.

“I’m a grown man, Saucy. I ain’t about playing no kiddie games. When I’m feeling a lady she ain’t gotta worry about nobody else coming up on her block. I got credibility with chicks because I believe in having responsible relationships, dig?”

Oh hell yeah, I dug. I dug the fact that this nigga had never even sampled this ass and already he was mentioning the relationship thing. But in the back of my mind I wondered if his shit was all a front and he was really broke like a lot of people said. He hadn’t bought me one damn gift! Yeah, he’d taken me out to some dope clubs and restaurants and paid for everything, but all I could do with fancy food was shit it out. I didn’t understand how bitches got geeked off of a man buying them a damn meal. Shit, niggas had to buy me diamonds to get my nose open. Pay my rent, lease me a Hummer. Gimme something I could work with.

Normally, I woulda been turned off by some dude talking about responsible any damn thing if it pertained to me and fucking, but I had never been with a nigga like Free before. He had asked me to come to his house in Jersey, and even though he rolled up in that ugly-ass Honda of his, I jumped my ass in like it was a Porsche.

“You got a nigga writing bars again, girl,” Free said as we rolled. He had a dumbbeat thumping through his big-ass speakers, and I grinned as he put his hand on my thigh and spit some real sweet shit while he pushed his little-ass car down the highway.

Now Saucy!

You know how bad your body is calling,

For me to give it to you how you want it,

So what’s it gonna take for you to come and rock with me?

Yo, what my bank gotta be like to take you out for a bite?

Breeze out on the pike, and take you out for the night?

Aaight, well, maybe my perception is off,

So let’s just conversate and see where this connection evolves,

Brown skin, nice slim frame calling the kid,

On my mind while I’m driving, it be hauntin’ the kid…

So I guess I gotta check for it, dress up real fresh for it,

That main position in ya life? I’m the best for it!

And I guess I can take the first chances,

No lie, ’cause a nigga was hooked at first glances!

I hope I can advance and get some romance in,

Slide you up outta them tight jeans you cramped in…

Baby lemme tell you the truth…I really feel you and I’m tryna make you mine tonight…

Know ya need a nigga like me,

I’ll be your homey, I’ll protect you hold you down when it’s time to ride…

When we pulled up in Free’s driveway my mouth was hanging open.

Yeah, his crib was in the same state as Whitney and Bobby’s, but it was nothing like I imagined theirs was.

For one thing, it was small.

Real small. Just a regular little house on one of them blocks that you see folks getting up every morning to go grind for a paycheck. Yeah, it was clean and everybody had a decent car and kept their grass trimmed and shit, but there were mad little kids running up and down the block, and chicks my age had big bellies and were sitting on the porch watching Man and Pookie race to the stop sign on their tricycles. Only they called they kids Michael and Peter out here.

I guess my feelings were all over my face, ’cause he just laughed as he unlocked the door and let me in. The inside was small too. Definitely not Whitney and Bobby’s joint.

I walked up ten steps and back ten steps. That was the foyer.

For a single baller living by himself this was not what I had expected at
all.
Free’s kitchen was tiny, but it was real clean. There were two plates stacked in the rack, but not a dish was in the sink and the trash can was empty and had a plastic bag in it that was folded down over the rim.

His living room was small and the furniture looked old, but nice. He had a small—no, fuck that—a
tiny
television and a banging Bose stereo system, but other than that it didn’t look like a whole lot of doe had gone into the place at all.

“The bathroom is right through that door over there if you gotta go,” he said, and locked the front door behind us. He turned on the television to a ball game, then turned the volume all the way down and cut on the stereo. There were two bedrooms, but both of them was real small. I heard a track from Spoon Dinero’s mixtape hit the speakers as I walked through a small doorway and into the tiny bathroom.

It was just as neat as the kitchen. The sink was baby blue, and so was the toilet. He had a navy blue shower curtain hanging from a real short bar, and a small clothes hamper sat under the sink. I used the bathroom and flushed the toilet, and that shit was loud as hell. I used the noise to cover up the sound of me opening his vanity cabinet over the sink. I saw two razors, a half-rolled tube of Crest, a bar of Ivory soap still in the wrapper, and some expensive cologne. I also saw a small jewelry box, and when I opened it up the most beautiful white-gold earrings lay on a square of cotton.

Without even thinking about it I turned on the water in the sink, and then shook them bad boys out and held them in my hand. They were phat as hell! I ripped off a few squares of toilet tissue and set the earrings in the middle and wrapped them up good before sticking the whole wadded package in my bra up under my left titty. Closing the box back, I set it exactly where it had been and shut the cabinet door quietly. Then I washed my hands, surprised that the towel on the rack was real soft and smelled like Febreze.

When I went back into the living room Free was standing in the kitchen looking in the refrigerator.

“I put your bags in the room, baby,” he said over his shoulder. “Go on in there and make sure everything I got is good enough for you. Don’t be shy about nothing either. Look under the bed and in the closet too. I keep all my real personal shit in a box on the top shelf of the closet, so make sure you hit that too.”

“Oh, you are funny for real,” I said, laughing.

He laughed too. “You know how you females like to do. Got ya eyes everywhere. Did you see your little present in the medicine cabinet?”

Aw shit! I didn’t know how to act.

“What present? All I did was use the bathroom. I didn’t go snooping all through your medicine cabinet, boy!”

Bet I ran my ass back in that bathroom real quick!

I snatched them earrings outta my bra and stuck the tissue in my pocket. Then I opened the vanity cabinet and grabbed the box and set them back inside.

“Ooooh!” I screamed and ran back into the kitchen. “Free!” I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him all over his face. “These babies are sweet as hell!”

Forget that I had just tried to jack his ass for his jewelry. I sat the box on the counter and pressed my body up against his. Fuck all that waiting and getting to know each other better shit. I wanted some of what he had and those earrings had just guaranteed that he was worthy of getting some of what I had.