Page 41 of Love me Like XO

She laughed as well. “Malik isn’t my blood, but he is my brother, and I know him like the back of my hand. I can honestly say I’ve never seen him as happy around anyone as he is with you. Both you and this marriage that he is proclaiming make him extremely happy and he needs that considering his childhood.”

I wanted to ask her what she meant, but I had a feeling that it wasn’t her place to tell me about his childhood. It was his if he wanted to. “He told you about this wedding that he’s planning too?” I had a smirk on his face.

“Yes. Then when I asked him, he talking about securing it. The man is a mess.”

“Isn’t he? But it’s his energy for me. Since we met he’s come with the type of energy that has me here right now with him.” I just watched him with my grandmother laughing and dancing. It was the type of sight that made a cold bitch all warm inside because it was heart melting.Fucking heart melting…

Chapter 7

Flawless

EMPRESS

My brain was foggy, and I couldn’t help but feel like a passenger in my own body. The day we came home I found myself standing in the feminine isle of the Target near my house stumped. When I say stumped, I meant fucking stuck staring at tests I’ve never had to buy before. The entire time I stood there my heart thumped, and all I could do was stare. I was supposed to be hurrying to buy it at the pharmacy before Zero returned from the dog food isle getting Blue’s food. It didn’t hit me that I was possibly pregnant from all of the unprotected sex we had until I was hovering over the toilet in our hotel room on our last day. Thank God Zero was out smoking with Rev, because he would have for sure been all in my face. This was one of those moments I needed some space. If it was I needed to processes it within myself before anything.

I reached for one of the tests that said something about results in minutes, before snatching my hand back because the one below it said the same thing. The accuracy was higher though, so maybe I should’ve gotten that one. This was the hardest fucking decision of my being and the fact that I was in arush made it all the worse. At any point Zero would be standing next to me asking what the fuck I was looking at. Only lord knows what my answer would’ve been, shit I probably would’ve told him I had a yeast infection.

Finally, I reached for the test that looked the most trustworthy and the fact that it was on almost every commercial sold me. Then like the human panicking machine that I knew I was, I grabbed two. Right when I thought the hard part was over, I bumped into someone nearly falling back on my bum when I felt a pair of strong arms grab me to help me regain my balance.

“Em, that you?” A familiar voice that sent the hairs down my back into a frenzy.What the fuck was he doing in this isle?

When I was back on my feet I peered at the shithead before me. He hadn’t aged a bit, and he was still alive no matter how many funerals I had in my mind for him. Dionne looked the same.

“Yep. Now le?—”

He bent down to pick up the pregnancy tests that I dropped during my loss of balance. “You’ve…moved…on.”

“Yep, I have.” I accepted the tests from his hands with a fake smile plastered across my face.

“I miss you an?—”

“Baby girl, you finished over here? I’m tryna get to the popcorn isle and then back to the crib.” Zero walked up on the other side of me from the opposite side of the isle entrance.

“Yeah, I’m finished.” I for sure wasn’t finished, because now I had to buy the test with him and have a conversation that I wasn’t even ready to have with my damn self. We should’ve probably had this conversation already because we were for sure having the nastiest unprotected sex on a regular.

I looked from Dionne to Zero, before I caught the hint that they were sizing one another up. “Zero, baby this is my ex, Dionne. Dionne this is my boyfriend, Zero.”

Zero nodded his head in Dionne’s direction before his attention was immediately on me. “You get what you needed over here?”

I nodded my head and we walked out of the isle seconds later with me clutching the pregnancy tests in one hand.

“You popped off by me, baby?” he asked a few seconds later before we reached the snack section.

My eyes momentarily enlarged, before my lips smacked closed, because I didn’t have a response. Well I had one, but it wasn’t definite, and I didn’t know… which was why I was buying pregnancy tests.

“Well?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I just spent the last twenty minutes of my life in the pregnancy test isle.”

He nodded.

“How would you feel about it?” I couldn’t help but ask.

He shrugged. “I mean I ain’t in no rush to make a kid, but we’re both reckless as fuck and I can’t say I’ma start strapping up when I slide, so it’s to be expected.”

I narrowed my eyes looking at him momentarily. Noting he just said told me exactly how he felt. When I was about to speak, he did before I could.

“To answer yo’ question I don’t know how I’d feel exactly until we know for sure. But I know I wouldn’t be mad about it.”

---