Page 5 of Only for Me
I'm so fucking screwed...
Chapter 2
Omiri Hayes
Iwas tired as fuck and had been tipsy as hell before I walked into that pharmacy. The alcohol in my system clouded my damn brain, but the minute I locked on a pair of eyes that had haunted me for the past year, I sobered the fuck up.
My night had been pretty fucked up. The past month had been a blur. My team, the Crescent Falls Sharks, had won the Super Bowl for the second consecutive year and I should have been living on a high. I wasn’t because all I could think about was what was coming. Two years since things got totally fucked up in my life. Two years since I lost the one person who always held me down no matter what.
The reminder had my chest tight and anger pushing through my veins. I couldn’t fucking breathe thinking about how he should be here instead of me. Those feelings were what had me pulling up at Local Cue last night with a bottle of Hennessy that had a bunch of people side-eyeing me when I moved to the back corner of the room and dropped into a chair facing the pool tables.
I had a hat pulled down over my head and a hood tossed over it so no one could see my face but even if they did they wouldn’t have fucked with me. Blaise noticed me as soon as Iwalked through the door which meant he would make sure his staff kept everyone out of my gotdamn face. I appreciated that he understood why I was there and left me the hell alone. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last I had a night like that.
By the time I finished what I arrived with, he had four bottles of water sent to my table. I drank them without complaint. We had a deal. I could drink my problems away as long as I promised to never leave out of here without the ability to make it home. I half ass kept my promise because there had been a few times he wasn’t here and I barely made it home. I think a part of me was hoping I didn’t but the universe was cruel as fuck and had a twisted sense of humor. Here the hell I was, alive and well while my brother was six feet deep.
When I pulled out of the parking lot of Local Cue, my goal was to hit the drugstore, buy some condoms, and hit up a shorty I fucked with who lived on that side of town. She was always down for whatever and never asked for anything more than a couple tickets to the games for her and her homegirls. The only time I felt anything at all these days was when I was nutting in a woman. That ended the minute I filled the condom but I didn’t get that far, because again, the universe had a sick and twisted sense of humor.
Unfortunately I was no longer feeling the effects of the liquor I had hours before because the wallet sitting on the leather ottoman across from me had my mind clear as hell. I hadn’t removed anything from it just yet because doing so meant admitting what I felt in my gut and acknowledgment meant I had to do something about it.
That kid is mine…
I have a daughter…
She kept my fucking daughter from me.
I was pissed but did I really have the right to be? If I hadn’t lost O’Rion I wouldn’t have cared. I never wanted kids. That washis thing. He had his life mapped out and I was doing whatever the fuck I wanted. He had the opportunity to have it all but his legacy was snatched away from him because of my life. Choices I made.
I didn’t want this shit but I also couldn’t ignore it. I owed him that much. So regardless of how I felt or what I wanted, I sat up and reached for the wallet. After I flipped it in my hand a few times, I slid the thin plastic from the first slot and flipped it in my fingers before I focused on the face then the name and address next to it:
Makari Phoenix
3224 Rochelle Lane
I knew where she was, which meant I had no excuses. I stared at her face, trying to remember that night. Most of it was a damn blur, well most of what happened after we left that party and ended up in a suite at The Metropolitan. We talked, she was cool as hell, chill on levels I wasn’t used to. She didn’t give a damn about me winning the Super Bowl and had only ended up at the party because of an invite from a client she was working with. Or at least that was what she told me.
Kameron was a decent guy but I knew he wanted to fuck Makari based on how he watched us all night after she ended up next to me at the bar. He was a Crescent Falls Royal who ran through women just as frequently as I did, and truthfully, as beautiful as Makari was, the only reason I invited her to my suite that night was so she wouldn’t end up in his.
Hell, I wasn’t even sure she would have because she wasn’t the type. That was why I hadn’t really planned on taking it there. Makari was the type of woman who came with strings attached, but for some reason, she let me have her that night. When I woke up the next morning, she was gone.
Another error on my part. When I fucked randoms, I made sure they were out of there before I crashed for the night. Ilet Makari stay and it didn’t have a damn thing to do with the amount of liquor in my system. I wanted her there and had been the one to convince her to stay, even after we both came more times than I could count.
And she had your gotdamn kid and didn’t think you deserved to know…
My jaw clenched as I tossed her license back on the ottoman, snatched up my phone, and typed her name into the search field. The first thing that came up was a profile on NETwurk where she was listed as marketing executive for a firm here in Crescent Falls. The next thing listed was a profile for her with a business called I Fix Shidd. She was a freelance social media crisis manager. I vaguely remembered her explaining that she worked to clean up images when athletes said dumb shit.
She laughed amusedly because she mentioned that she would be a millionaire by the end of the year because athletes always said dumb shit and she was very skilled at fixing their fuckups. She then proceeded to tell me that I should hire her the next time I put my foot in my mouth.
I thought that was hilarious, because dealing with me, she wouldn’t get any rest. My mouth was reckless but I kept that in mind. I was known for saying a lot of dumb shit, especially when I had been drinking and blazing trees, which was damn near every minute of every fucking day that I wasn’t on the field in the past two years.
I located her personal page which was private and it also pissed me off. I couldn’t find a damn thing about the kid, which further confirmed what I was thinking. She was deliberately hiding her…
Probably from me.
That shit irked my soul because she had a prime opportunity to cash in. The kid had my gotdamn eyes. She could have cashedout and been living a good life, which meant she didn’t give a damn about the money.
Based on the way she freaked the fuck out when I saw her, it never crossed her mind to hit my pockets. She didn’t want me or my gotdamn money to be a part of her life which really annoyed me. Considering I had just secured another Super Bowl and my stock went up, she could have easily pulled up like, “congratulations on your win, here’s your kid, pay up ,muthafucker.”
Yeah, that shit was dead. I didn’t want a kid but I also owed this to O’Rion. Maybe it was a stupid fucking reason for pushing this but it was the only reason that mattered currently and made sense to me.
