Page 175 of Buy Back My Love

“What else I’m supposed to think? You block me right after I get engaged, now every time I try to call about my son I can’t get through.”

“You got my email. You know where I work. If something was really about the baby, you would’ve found a way to ask without standing on my porch accusing me of being jealous.”

JB sucked his teeth and looked off toward the street. “You acting like this because I moved on.”

That pissed me off enough to make me stop pretending I didn’t care. “I’m not jealous that you getting married, JB. Am I happy I wasted fifteen years of my life with a boy, went to prison behind him, came home and still let his ass get me pregnant just for him to turn around and marry the next bitch? No. I’m not happy about that.”

His face tightened, but I kept going. “You hurt me. There! You wanna hear me say it? You hurt me! Seeing you propose to her hurt my feelings, and I hated that it did. But that don’t mean I want you back. It actually made me want even less to do with you.”

For once, he didn’t have something smart to say right away. Then he gave me that same look he always did when I said something he didn’t want to accept.

“Too bad.”

I frowned. “Too bad what?”

“We got a baby together. You can keep doing all this blocking and acting like you don’t wanna deal with me, but we family now.”

“No. We have a child together. That does not make you my family.”

“It make me something.”

“It makes you my baby daddy.”

He laughed. “Aight. Keep talking.”

“I will.”

“You know what? When you have him, me and Hannah can take care of him and you can get the hell on if dealing with me such a problem.”

I stared at him because he said it so casually, like he was offering to pick up dry cleaning instead of talking about the baby I had been carrying for months being handed over to him and his new fiancée while I disappeared. I didn’t even know what to say.

Maybe JB saw it on my face because he kept going. “Hannah good with kids. You know that. My son would be straight.”

The way he said my son did something to me. Not our son. His, like I was a surrogate or something. After that, I didn’t have nothing else to say to him. I stepped back and started closing the door.

“Lee.”

I kept closing it.

“See, now you doing that shit.”

I shut the door in his face and locked the deadbolt.

“Go ahead and run in the house!” he called from the other side. “You always wanna run when somebody tell you the truth.”

I stood there with my hand still on the lock while Holly came trotting around the corner.

Then JB said, “I’ll have that boy calling Hannah Mama before he calling some damn jailbird Mama anyway.”

My hand flew right back to the lock. For one second, I was going to open that door. I could already see myself doing it too. Open it, slap the shit out of him, and deal with whatever came after. But that was exactly what he wanted. He wanted me outside screaming and mad enough to put my hands on him so he could turn around and act like I was the problem.

I backed away from the door. He said something else, but I stopped listening. I picked Holly up, carried her to my bedroom, and shut that door too. Then I curled up on my side with her tucked against me and cried until I fell asleep somewhere along the way.

A few days later, JB showed up at my nail suite holding the keys to an Infiniti QX80. I looked from the keys to him. “No.”

He hadn’t even gotten his sales pitch started yet. “Can I say what it’s for?”

“No.”