Page 127 of The Need to Know

“Yeah, but it can wait until tomorrow.” Some Mondays I’d sleep in, and others I’d get my ass up and take myself to Phat Fitness. “What’s up?”

Cesar faced my father as well, giving him his total focus.

A smile turned one corner of Pops’s mouth up as he eyed me first. “You were right.”

I didn’t get it. “About?”

“You haven’t heard?” Pops grabbed his phone from the edge of the desk and began swiping through it. “It seems your Battle of the Sexes Night went viral.”

Pops held his phone out for me and Cesar to see. He’d found some blog, the CelebriTea, and the headline read out It Goes Down in the A! There was an article with photos, and Pops scrolled past all that to click on a video embed from Twitter of Paisley and me up on stage. Paisley had just played “Unloyal,” and the women were singing along word for word, a move that had almost killed me until I responded with “I Don’t Fuck with You.”

There was a clip of Jackie Boy performing as well and the crowd reacting with love.

Pops was proud as he shut his phone off and set it down. “Your mother stumbled across that.” He tipped his head my way. “You were right.”

“Always bet on Eazy, Pops,” Cesar remarked.

I could only agree. I never lost.

Pops saw it my way as he nodded along. “I’m starting to see that. Anyway, I called this meeting—this very short meeting—because I was scrolling down this blog and stumbled across a local rapper. You guys know of a Glocc?”

Cease looked at me as I looked at him, both of us breaking into the same smile and soon laugh.

Glocc was the latest up-and-coming rapper from the A. Everyone loved him, he had his street shit for the men, and he’d just put out a collab with Tiffany Thomas called “Hold Me” for the ladies. He was a good mix of old T.I. and Jeezy with a distinct gruff like the late Pop Smoke. Straight ATL with it.

“Yeah,” I said as I sat up and chuckled a little. “Glocc up next for sure.”

Pops eyed me and then Cesar. “Think we should book him for a show? Get ’im now before the price goes up? Or is it a potential safety hazard?”

Some rap dudes didn’t know how to leave the street alone, making them liabilities for hostings. Glocc was a little different. He didn’t profess to be a gangster or killer, but that he lived and seen a lot. It made him a safe bet and relatable.

“Nah, Glocc cool. He ain’t the shooter or nothin’,” Cesar joked.

“Yeah,” I co-signed. “That’ll be a moment.” My mind worked fast when it came to putting together events for the club and already a smooth idea hit me. “We tryna do a weekend date or a Thursday theme?”

Pops’s brows pushed together. “What theme?”

“Homecoming.” I opened my hands and gestured around us. “This is Atlanta. Glocc got the city on lock. We went viral for a little friendly spar. We get Glocc to do a show? We’ll break him easy.”

Glocc was still releasing mixtapes and building a buzz with his team. He wasn’t yet signed, he hadn’t completely blown up, but one post from the CelebriTea and the Barr, the biggest hip-hop page online, and it was over.

Pops scratched at his head. There was a reason he came to me and Cesar. He didn’t know a thing about this new generation of music. If it wasn’t Marvin and Whitney, he was out of the loop.

“You sure?” he asked, peering into my eyes.

“You can bet on me,” I assured him.

From there, there was no questioning it. He reached out and tapped Cesar’s shoulder. “All right, let’s make this happen.”

Cesar sat back in his chair and began obsessing over his phone, no doubt reaching out to Glocc’s people.

Pops came back to me, a gleam in his eyes. “How’s Nastasia?”

It was kind of growing to be a routine, but I hadn’t meant to stay the night Saturday. After our dinner with her family, she’d reached a break-through with her father, something evident with her red swollen eyes when she came out from talking with him. Nas had held my hand all the way back to her house, and despite her assuring that things were okay, I didn’t want to leave her.

When I’d stopped by after BLVCKJVCK, wanting to see how she was doing, I found the front door unlocked and Nastasia was sitting cross-legged at her coffee table eating leftovers. One look at her adorable, sleepy face and the sight of her feast, and I knew I wanted nothing more than to sit beside her for the rest of the night.

“She doin’ good, we just had dinner with her parents last night,” I said.