Page 1 of Arris, Jayme & Dyani
Chapter 1
Arris
I exhaledand stretched my neck one way then the other before taking a step back and looking at my handiwork. I felt like it was just yesterday when I was putting a crib up for my little boy to have when we brought him home from the hospital and now here I was putting up his big boy bed. That shit was insane to me.
I was doing my best to act aloof but honestly it was killing me inside a little bit to realize Jayme and I had brought Blake home four entire years ago.
“You good?” Jayme’s voice came from the doorway and I looked back at her.
She was a hundred times more beautiful now than she’d been when we met. She had her naturally curly hair pulled back in a large claw clip. She’d dyed it a deep shade of red that went well with her medium brown skin and beautiful brown eyes. She was wearing sweatpants and a plain black T-shirt tight enough for me to make out the little barbell rings of her nipple piercings.
Jayme and I had pretty much grown up in the D-Ville Projects. We both lived on the second floor and would catch the bus with all the other kids from the projects. I’d known she wasspecial even as a stupid ass kid and I’d made her mine when we were just thirteen years old.
Jayme had watched me grow from a boy to a man and I’d watched her grow in return. She’d been there when I was jumped into my gang and started repping those same projects we lived in. She was there when I started drawing and eventually tattooing, through my first apprenticeship and my first real job having my own room in a tattoo shop. I’d watched her practice doing hair on herself and any person willing to let her. I watched her do hair in her house and other people’s homes too, making house calls at outrageous hours to get paid and now she had a chair in an actual shop.
We’d been down bad for each other and had our son at twenty-four. Our relationship survived another three years before we split, but Jayme knew I had love for her. That could never be questioned. We’d known each other almost our entire lives and had spent more time dating than just being friends.
Our breakup had been mutual.
There wasn’t any big break up or blowout or anything. Shit just started changing gradually. I’d been tattooing and hanging out with the gang more. She’d been doing her own shit. We were both growing and learning ourselves, raising our son and trying to navigate adulthood. Somewhere along the line, we stopped learning each other while we were learning ourselves.
We’d gotten complacent. I could admit I definitely had, but that wouldn’t have helped anything. Neither of us were the same people we started dating over a decade ago and we deserved that clarity. Shit. She deserved it and apparently it was going well because she had a live-in girlfriend she’d been with for over a year now.
“Yeah. I’m straight.” I gave her a small smile and held her screwdriver out toward her.
“You’re lying.” She laughed and I shrugged before I couldn’t stop myself from letting out a little snicker. “Are you going to cry or what?” she teased.
I didn’t even dignify her with a response.
“Man, climb your ass in his bed, Jayme.” I gestured toward it and slipped out of the way.
“Why do I have to get in? You probably didn’t even put this shit up right.” Jayme rolled her eyes but made her way toward the bed.
“If I didn’t, we’re about to find out and I’m not gon’ lie. I’d rather you fall through the bedframe than Blake any damn day.”
Jayme sucked her teeth but didn’t comment. She climbed into the bed that replaced his toddler bed and plopped on her ass. She leaned one way, then the other before lying down and looking at me. She propped her face on her hand.
“I think our boy is going to be alright.”
“Alright. Cool.” I exhaled. “You need anything else looked into while I’m here?”
“Nope.”
“Good because I’m not—” I paused mid-sentence when my phone rang with the specific tone I assigned to DP members.
I saw it was my best friend Darryl and rejected his call. That nigga called me all the time for nothing and I wasn’t trying to hear about the dumb shit he had going on with his constant rotation of women.
Darryl and I had been jumped into the Douglasville Projects gang when we were both young and stupid. We’d known of each other before that but hadn’t been close until becoming members.
He was the godfather to me and Jayme’s son, and even though he didn’t take a lot of shit seriously, the oath he’d taken to me and Jayme was one of the few.
“Damn. This shit looks good.” A voice from the doorway pulled my attention from Jayme.
I glanced back at her on-again, off-again girlfriend Reena.
“Thanks.” I looked back at Jayme. “You sure you good?”
She didn’t get a chance to respond before my phone rang again. I saw it was Darryl again and immediately picked up. I rejected his calls frequently and he usually left it at that or shot me a text message. The fact that he’d called again was a little bit worrisome.
