Page 121 of Just Listen
“That thing you do with your pussy. You know that shit’s my weakness.”
“Then you answered your own question.”
“So, you wanna make me weak?”
“Just for me.”
We both stared at each other for a long moment.
“Jaylah,” he uttered, eventually breaking the silence. “You know I love you, right?”
My lips formed a smile, while my heart did the same. “You know I love you too, right?”
He grinned. “Now, I do.”
“Yeah,” I huffed out, as he rolled off me.
“What do you think about looking for a new house when we get back to Houston?” He suddenly questioned.
“A new house?” I frowned in confusion.
“Yeah.” He grabbed my hand, and interlocked our fingers.
“But we both already have houses.”
“Right. But that nigga used to be in that house, and Paisley was in mine. So, both houses are tainted. I feel like we should sell them both. Or you could rent yours out. However you wanna do it. But I want us to live in something that belongs to the both of us. Something that we’ve never shared with anybody else.”
I took a deep breath. “I’m not opposed to that…but let’s address the elephant in the room, Malice. Do you want to move because of the beef with Paisley’s family?”
He sighed. “To be honest, once muthafuckas start pulling up unannounced to wherever I’m laying my head, then I’m gonna be uneasy. And this shit is the latter. Even if they pose no threat. I just don’t like the idea of being that accessible. But we aint running. I’m just not giving my enemies no type of advantage.”
“I hear you. But…I could just tell my daddy—”
“Nah, I got it,” he immediately interjected. “But I promise…I promise to God that if I can’t handle it, then I’ll call your daddy my damn self.”
***
Two weeks later…
Things had been moving at lightening speed. As soon as we came back to Houston, our feet hit the ground running. We immediately began house hunting, and found the perfect house after two days into our search. Then after getting the house inspected, we closed on it five days later, paying cold hard cash. Well…I’m not going to lie and saywe. Yes, we both closed on it. We were both on all the paperwork, but only Malice had opened his wallet.
Thankfully, when I told my parents about the move, they actually thought that it made sense, being that we were starting new, with something that was never attached to either of our exes. Personally, I usually preferred getting a home built from the ground up, to have it customized to my liking. However, I was satisfied with the new house, because it had been newly built, was very modern, had three floors, multiple balconies, and a pool out back. It was in a gated community, and I was now closer to my parents.
During the whole process, I kept thinking about how I had been underestimating Malice’s wealth, tremendously. Sure, he had nice cars, dressed well, and even had a few properties. But I knew several d-boys with those same things, and all it took was one loss or two, and they were flat on their asses. Because accumulating all those things didn’t amount to what they actually had in cash. Malice had a nice amount of legal money, I realized, but had three times that amount in actual cash. So, when I asked him for a magical number for him to stop hustling, I think that he couldn’t answer that, because he didn’t even know, anymore.
As I accepted that my man was rich-rich, I also had to reexamine what I’d been asking of him. I wanted him to walk away from moving dope, without looking back, when things weren’t that simple. I didn’t know what type of agreement he had with his connect. I didn’t know everybody that ate with him. Didn’t know if he paid certain people to do certain things to keep the vultures away. I knew nothing. I was just in love, and wanted things my way, after knowingly getting involved with a hustler.
So, now, I was trying to take my own advice. I’d told Paisley to meet her man where he was at, or leave. And as much as I talked shit, I knew that I was weak in the knees, and wasn’t trying to leave that man. Therefore, I had decided that I’d stop applying so much pressure on him. No, I wasn’t abandoning the topic of him retiring, completely. But I wanted to step away from the badgering, while allowing him to clear his head, and deal with whatever was in front of him.
With everything going on, I didn’t really know what the status of me and Paisley’s beef was. She hadn’t tried to call me, and she no longer knew where I lived, so there’d been radio silence. Or so I thought. I realized that Malice could really hold a poker face, when he took his sweet time mentioning that two of his trap houses had been robbed, and the streets said that Drop was behind it. The nigga dropped that bomb on me casually, as we were in my Maybach truck, headed to Sin J’s boxing match.
“What do you mean that he robbed you?” I pressed, while gripping the steering wheel.
He sighed, while nonchalantly leaning with his elbow on the armrest. “That’s what the streets is saying.”
I frowned in confusion. “Okay. And there’s no emotion behind that?”
“Nah. Not really. Nobody got hurt, and those two spots brought in the least amount of money. Keeping it real, the shit really been maintaining itself. I been wanting to shut it down, but the people who hustle there had been pleading with me not to. So, I just closed shop.” He yawned.
