Page 41 of Buy Back My Love

Skye walked up beside me after they were gone. “She got a man?”

“Apparently.”

“That’s a shame.”

I looked down the road one more time before turning back toward the house. “Yeah, it is.”

JB

Tuesday night, I pulled up to my house in Saraland and knew something was off before I even got out the truck. The whole house was dark.

Usually, JJ was posted somewhere near the front door waiting to run up on me the second I walked in. Most nights I could smell whatever Hannah had cooked before I even got the door shut. Tonight, there was no JJ running up on me, no food cooking, nothing that usually let me know my family was home.

I locked the door behind me and headed upstairs. That’s when I heard Cardi B blasting from our bedroom.

“Bae?” I called when I pushed the bedroom door open. “You in here?”

She didn’t answer, but the music was louder now. I followed it to the walk-in closet and stopped in the doorway.

“What the fuck?”

Hannah was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of my clothes with a pair of scissors in one hand and a bottle of paint beside her. For a second, I just stood there trying to figure out what the hell I was looking at. Then I saw one of my suits cut damn near in half. Shirts, hoodies, jackets, all kinds of shit I had paid too much money for was either cut up or covered in black and red paint.

“What the fuck, Hannah?” I stepped into the closet. “What are you doing?” She looked up at me with tears all over her face, then went right back to cutting through one of my shirts like I wasn’t standing there.

I started toward her, but the smell of the paint hit me before I could get close. That shit was strong as hell, and she was sitting right in the middle of it pregnant.

“Man, give me that.” I reached down for the bottle. “You sitting in here breathing this shit in with my baby in your stomach.”

Hannah snatched it away from me. “Bitch nigga, please. Don’t act like you care about me or my baby.”

I looked at her.

My baby.

That’s when it hit me that I hadn’t seen or heard JJ since I walked through the door. I looked toward the bedroom, then back at Hannah. Fuck them clothes.

“Where my son at?”

Hannah didn’t answer me right away. She set the scissors down and wiped at her face, which only made me more nervous.

“Hannah, where the fuck is JJ?”

“With my mama,” she finally said.

I let out a breath and rubbed my hand over my face. “You could’ve said that shit the first time I asked.” She rolled her eyes and looked away from me.

Now that I knew my son was good, I looked around the closet again. Thousands of dollars’ worth of my shit was all over the floor, cut up and covered in paint.

“Why the fuck you do this?”

Hannah looked right at me. “Why the fuck you lie?”

“I ain’t got time for this shit.” I stepped over what used to be one of my jackets and headed out of the closet. “Come out this damn closet, turn that music off, and be woman enough to tell me what you think I did.”

I went over to the sitting area in our bedroom and sat down while Hannah stayed in the closet. A few minutes later, the music finally cut off, and she came out with something balled up in her hand.

She walked over and dropped it in my lap without saying a word. I unfolded it and saw the Fish Out of Water logo at the top, then Santa Rosa Beach underneath it. Of all the lies I could’ve told, my dumb ass had told this woman I was hauling a load to Louisiana.