Page 56 of He Thugged Me First

“Nah ya here now, but you niggas didn’t think this through. Who's gonna cook?” I asked.

Before anyone could respond, there was another knock on the door. I watched Mazz walk over and get it. When he opened it, a little lady walked in holding food cartons and behind her was another one carrying a silver pan. Once they sat everything down, they walked over to Mazz. He paid the lady and they left. The moment he locked the door behind them he looked at me. “What was that you said, nigga?”

I laughed. “Shit, I’m good as long as the eggs don’t taste like cardboard.”

For a while we ate and conversed, but at some point the ladies found themselves in Mecca’s office. That meant they were about to talk some shit about us.

“You want me to handle that?” Quari asked.

“His mom? Nigga you finna off his moms?” Mazz asked, causing us all to bust up laughing.

“Hell nah, that’s not my jurisdiction, bu?—”

I couldn’t even form sentences to say what I had to say. Quari was with it and in this world you needed a nigga ready to finish whatever you needed in your corner. Even if I was making the wrong decision, he’d be down to make it with me. “Nah, nothing changes. She chose her life and that’s that. What we need to be focusing on is who the fuck was able to walk into Mel’s school and just pick her up.” That shit made my blood boil right there.

“I bet is a connection to whomever the fuck wants you dead. That happens to be ya brother Miles.”

Mazz looked from Quarry to me before at the ground. He wasn’t used to this shit and neither was I, so a lot of this was newterritory. “What brother?” he asked. It was like he’d just caught on to what Quari said.

Quari and I ended up explaining everything to him about the visit with Gotti. The more we explained the more it seemed like this man’s head was about to come off his shoulders. I had never seen him this angry, but he had good reason. Some nigga was literally poking at his life and playing fire using the brother card.

Mazz pulled a small white piece of paper from his pocket and threw it on the table. “This is what he gave Mel to give to me.”

I inspected it before shaking my head. “Can’t be this fucking hard to find one nigga. I gave Sass his name and all that, but she needs a middle name. I’m just hoping she can come through with something.”

“Or I pull up on Gotti’s blocks and start playing target practice with those nigga’s heads? There’s no way nobody knows this man. He’s familiar with them.”

I couldn’t even hold back the laughter with that one because he was right. “We’ll sleep on it.” Before another word could be spoken it sounded like the women were walking back into the room. That had to be a good way to end the conversation because I didn’t need Mecca hearing anything and carrying it in her brain with her overthinking ass.

“You guys didn’t have to get quiet on our accounts.” Mecca walked over and took a seat on the arm of the chair that I was sitting in.

“We didn’t, I just told them how you trapped me.” I cut my eyes at her with a smirk.

“The fucking opposite. What the fuck would I be trapping, she asked?”

The room erupted into laughter.

“It’s a lot of that going around, huh?” Love cut her eyes at Quari.

“What’s on your mind?”Her voice calmed my pulse, almost putting my thoughts at a halt.

“Why?” I asked, inhaling and resting against her being while she continued to massage my scalp. Today had become somewhat of a lazy day. After everyone left, we ended up laid up on the sofa watching some bullshit that she told me was good. The thing is I had been thinking the whole time, so I didn’t know what the hell was on the television in front of us. I wasn’t paying attention.

“Because physically you’re here lying between my thighs, but mentally you’re elsewhere. Is it about your mother?”

I glanced up at her, noting the concern in her beautiful brown eyes. “Nah.”

“Then what is it about?”

I cut my eyes at her before I swallowed the lump in my throat. I didn’t discuss business or any of that with her because of her worrying, but when I talked to Mecca, things felt better and I thought clearer. Her insight and greenness to what we had going on gave me a different side to matters and made me see differently. “All these years Mazz ran things, it was based on the way he thought, right?”

She nodded waiting on me to get to the point.

“The thing is we don’t think the same, I see things in a different light and I handle them differen?—”

“Then what’s the problem? It’ll all be you, Mazz is handing things over to you because you don’t think the same. I don’t think he wants you to run the streets the way he does, that’s close to impossible. The both of you are two totally different men, and it’s different. Things are no longer the same, I mean look at it.You just found out that—” She wasn’t even able to finish her sentence because I had crawled up and pressed my lips against hers. Everything that she’d just said was all that I needed to hear but already knew.

When I pulled back, she just looked at me. “What was that for?”

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