Page 1 of All The Smoke
1
Solomon “Smoke” Tate.
“Where Solo?” I asked, bypassing Brianna to enter her apartment. Like any other time I came, it was clean and smelled good. I had to get on her ass about the spot smelling like weed and shit when my fucking son lived there too. Since then though shit had been smooth.Well, somewhat.
“Hello to you too, Smoke.” She rolled her eyes as she closed the door.
“You been knew I was coming to get him this morning, Bri. Why you never have him ready whenyou knowwhen I’m pushing up?”
“I’ve been cleaning, nigga, so I didn’t have to hear your mouth when you came.”
“AKA you been smoking in here around my fuckin’ son.”
“No,” she lied.Allshe did was fucking lie. “Solo has stuff all over the place all the time. Him and Brianni…”
I cut her off. “Bruh, they’re kids. If you didn’t want to be bothered with that kind of shit then you should have did what the fuck you were supposed to do with my bread.”
She waved me off. “Y’all don’t even believe in abortions in your family.”
“Naw, Bishop and my fuckin’ mama don’t believe in that shit,” I said, referring to my parents. My father was a bishop at the church. “I very much so believe in not procreating with mothafuckas that I have no intention of being with.”
“Yet we procreated.”
“Yeah and I still owe you a bullet to the dome for fuckin’ playing with me.”
Bri wasn’t even the one that told me she was pregnant at first, with her conniving ass; her best friend did. Granted, her best friend told me the shit out of jealousy because she wanted to be with me but knew I was in love with Bri. She had been begging a nigga to have a kid but I kept declining because I was mad young and wasn’t anywhere near where I needed to be in life to have a kid. Yeah, a nigga was in the streets heavy then, working my way up the ladder to work as closely as I could with Rock and Keem, but I was still a small fry. Plus, around the time she was asking I had started to pull away from the relationship.
I was fourteen when I met an eighteen-year-old Brianna and a nigga was in fucking love. She was the baddest bitch on the block and was on my body as soon as she saw me. Having a four year old on her hip should have been a red flag for me, considering I was still a child myself, but I ain’t give no fucks. I didn’t think anyone of her caliber would even look my way, but the older I got, the more I learned she was just as much a bop bitch as the rest of the hoes. She just disguised her shit better.
It took me striking her best friend on some drunk shit to learn how much of a hoe she really was, fucking everything moving that had some bread,includingthe stud bitches. Still, I was a young, dumb nigga so I kept her around and just started doing me and wearing condoms with her. Bri hated that shit, and because she was so vindictive, she sabotaged all my shit,poking holes in them, and voila; nine months and three DNA tests later, we got Solo.
“Anyways.” She rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, any fucking ways,” I repeated then nodded toward the hallway. “Go get my son.”
I could tell from the look on her face that she wanted to say something smart in return but she knew how short my fuse was. So she stomped her little ass down the hall and a few minutes later her daughter Brianni appeared.
“Hey, Smoke.”
“What’s up, Nini.” I smiled and hugged her when she was close.
“Nothing. I’m going to Shake It, Skate It tonight. Can I have some money?”
Reaching into my pocket, I produced a blue note and handed it to her.
“Don’t spend all this shit tonight and don’t tell ya mother that I gave it to you.”
She nodded and smiled. “I won’t. Thank you.”
After she pocketed the money, she rushed down the hall to put her shit up. Brianni, or Nini as me and my people called her, asked me for shit often and most of the time I did the shit, but only whensheasked me directly. Brianna tried that shit all the time, asking for shit the kids didn’t need or want, so I had to shut her ass down. Nini wasn’t my kid, but I had been around for a few years so I always looked out when she asked for shit.
Minutes later Bri surfaced again with my lil man still asleep in her arms. He was dressed in one of the new outfits I had gotten for him, a lil UNC blue Chicago Bulls set and he should have had on the matching shoes I’d gotten for him but he didn’t.
“Fuck is the nines I just dropped off to yo’ ass, Bri?”
“In his room. I don’t want him to mess them up.”
“You didn’t fucking buy them so that shouldn’t matter.” I frowned. “Nigga is five. He not gon’ keep his shit crisp.”
