Page 38 of Turned Out by His Hood Mentality 3

The second I said that, Khari and Normani walked over. Khari stepped over her brother to get back to her seat, while Normani stood right in front of Suki, sizing her up.

Suki looked up and down at my wife’s stomach, and then she let out a petty smile. “I was just coming over to say hi. I hadn’t seen him in a while,” Suki said to Normani.

“I thought you told me that you speak to him frequently, though. Isn’t that what you told me in New York?” Normani asked.

“Suki, go ahead and go. This shit is embarrassing,” I said to her again, and this time, she finally left.

I followed her with my eyes and watched her say something to her girls. Instead of them waiting for a table, they just left altogether. I didn’t understand why she even brought her ass over there in the first fuckin’ place. Instead of Normani taking her seat, she stood in front of me. I pulled her into me and wrapped my arms around her waist as her stomach poked me in my chest.

“I leave for five minutes, and you got old flings all up in your face, Billionaire,” she spat.

In the middle of a restaurant, I pulled her in my lap and snuggled my head into the crook of her neck, sniffing on her skin.

“Chill out. That shit was nothing, and you know it,” I said and kissed her on her cheek.

I leaned my head down and kissed her a couple of times on her stomach.

“Prosper, you hear your mama out here trying to start some shit?” I asked, speaking to my daughter.

“One day, Ima just shock the hell out of you, and whatever woman I see you talking to, Ima just start swinging, and I ain’t going to ask no questions,” my wife told me, and I laughed at her.

“Just make sure you know how to fight. I used to mess with gutta bitches. You the most proper of them all,” I said.

Normani shrugged and even tried to stand up from my lap because she didn’t find that shit funny.

“Chill out. I’m fuckin’ with you, ma. You ain’t gotta know how to fight because I ain’t going to have you involved in no shit like that anyway. Don’t be acting like I just be going around, being friendly with bitches. You know I’m antisocial,” I told her.

She waved me off, not wanting to give me my credit, but it was cool because she knew I was right. The rest of our dinner was spent just having family time. We’d long ago finished our food, so right now, we were just talking. Khari’s sixth birthday was coming up, and she was talking everybody’s ears off about the big, over the top Disney Princess themed birthday party that she wanted. She kept talking about wanting a big birthday party like her brother, but the shit she was asking about just sounded like some shit that would have me spending double what I spent on my son.

Khari’s birthday party would require both of my baby mamas and my wife to be in the same room, and I just hoped that shit ran smoothly. Well, I knew I wouldn’t have no shit out of Nesha and Normani because the two of them were cordial. It was Denim’s ass and Normani that I was worried about.

“For the charge of attempted murder, the jury has found the defendant... guilty. For the charge of attempted murder of an unborn child, the jury has found the defendant... guilty. For the charge of murder in the first degree, the jury has found the defendant... guilty. Lastly, for the second charge of murder in the first degree, the jury has found the defendant… guilty.”

I couldn’t get those words out of my fuckin’ head, man. Those words… those fuckin’ charges were haunting a nigga. The exact words that a nigga had feared ever since I sat down with my lawyer for the first time months ago, and he ran down to me the different charges that I was faced with. I was told by my lawyer that he was going to do everything in his power to fight for a nigga, and he literally didn’t do a motha fuckin’ thing to help me.

I mean, if you wanted to count the drug charges that had been dropped, then so be it, but it really didn’t matter, especially when everything else that I was charged with outweighed that shit anyway. Although I feared the worst when I went before the judge a few days ago, I already had an idea of how I wanted everything to play out.

Denim was up from her coma, and I just knew that every murder charge they were trying to pin on a nigga would get thrown out of the window. I knew that I would still get hit with an attempted murder charge on Denim and the unborn baby, but still, my lawyer promised that I wouldn’t get the max for that charge. I was so fuckin’ sure they wouldn’t pin the murder of Karl and his son on me that I did years ago, but there were fuckin’ witnesses in the fuckin’ court that I didn’t even fuckin’ know.

They testified against me in court, talking about they were outside that night when the murder happened. Those fuckin’ witnesses had been paid by Nate, and I knew it because they were saying shit that only Nate and I would know about. I couldn’t believe a nigga that I’ve known since I was a little ass boy had turned on me like that. I think the nigga turning on me and being responsible for me about to rot in a prison cell for the rest of my life hurt me more than the charges that I was found guilty of. That hurt me as well as the cries of my mama that had filled the entire courtroom, once she saw that her one and only child would never get out of prison.

Even right now, as she saw me for visitation, and I zoned out, I couldn’t help but look over at her and see all the sadness on her face. There were bags under her eyes, which showed me and everybody else that she wasn’t getting any sleep at home. Her eyes were bloodshot red because when she’d come into the visitation room a few moments ago, she had already been crying. This wasn’t my mama’s first time coming down to see me, but it was her first time coming to see me since the charges had been put on me, and everything had been finalized.

I sat across from the woman who carried me for a long, painful, nine months, and brought me into this world. It had to hurt her to her fuckin’ core that there wasn’t shit she could do about these fucked up circumstances.

“When’s the last time you saw Khari and Rylo?” I asked after about ten minutes of not saying anything to each other.

I knew that I needed to be the one to break the silence because she didn’t drive all the way down there, just for the two of us to sit in front of each other and not say shit. My mother used to be a solid built woman. When she wasn’t working, she spent a lot of her time in the gym, plus she loved going on her jogs in either the mornings or in the evenings. Right now, she was the smallest that I’d ever seen her. Small, and the head full of hair that she used to have was looking really thin these days. That was more than likely due to it shedding because she hadn’t been keeping up with it.

When I asked her the question about my daughters, all she did was shake her head, as tears fell down her face.

“I haven’t seen Khari, Reginald. I probably will never see that little girl or get to have a relationship with her because of the circumstances. I went five years without even knowing that little girl was my granddaughter. And now that I know she’s my grandchild, I can’t even build a relationship with her because of what you did to her mother. I haven’t even heard from Rylo in months. I’m assuming that when Denim was in a coma, her other grandmother had to have changed her phone number because the number I have for her has been out of service for months. Can I ask you something, Reggie?” she asked.

I sighed, already knowing that she was about to ask me some bullshit. I didn’t tell her that she could ask me something, but I also didn’t say that she couldn’t, so she just went ahead and asked me anyway.

“Knowing that you are getting ready to spend the rest of your days in here, I want to know if you regret what you did? Seeing your fate, do you now see that there were other ways you could have gone about this? I’ve always gotten on you about your temper, ever since you were a little boy. I used to tell you that one day, you were going to take it too far, and there wouldn’t be anything that I or anyone else would be able to do to save you. You could have done something so different. Why did you have to take a gun and pistol whip a pregnant woman to the point that you almost cost her and the baby their lives?

“Look at what you’ve done to yourself! Look at what you’ve done to me! To us! You were all I had. I’ve always told you that my biggest fear was losing you to murder or losing you like this. You’re not even thirty yet, and you are serving a life sentence. This breaks my heart to come down here and have to see you like this. Baby, I don’t know how long I will be able to do this because each visit, the pain gets deeper,” my mama spoke, and the whole time she was speaking, she cried.

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