“Why’ont your man Gino here tell me what the fuck is up?”
I glanced at Gino, who had never taken his eyes off Jimmy.
They were staring each other down like dogs in the street and all of a sudden a tight feeling swelled in my chest.
“What the hell are you talking about, Jimmy?” I jumped defensive.
“Nah, Juicy.” Gino waved me aside. “Let your brother speak. Niggah got something on his chest he wanna get out. Let him.”
Jimmy laughed and shook his head. “Y’all motherfuckers are trifling and foul. As much as G done gave both of y’all, this is how you fuck over him.”
“You accusing me of something, Jimmy?” Gino stepped toward my brother and I could see his body tense up. “You bringing a charge to the table on me?”
Jimmy stepped up to meet him. “Yeah, motherfucker. I’m accusing you of fucking my sister. Better yet, I’m accusing your monkey ass of fucking over my father.”
“G ain’t your goddamn father.”
“Then he ain’t yours either, you dirty motherfucker. Coming up in here violating his space like that.” Jimmy turned on me. “And you. Scandalous ass! How could you do him like this? G gives you more than you ever deserved. If it wasn’t for him you’d probably be strolling on 136th Street, or even worse, working this same back room with a whole crew of tricks.”
“Watch yourself, Jimmy. Don’t disrespect your sister like that-”
“Disrespect? What the fuck do you know about respect? If you was any other niggah I’d do G a favor and take you out. You better be glad it’s my sister you fuckin or I’d take both of y’all out-”
Gino swung a left and it was on and cracking. Jimmy didn’t have no wins, that was obvious from the jump, but I wasn’t gonna let Gino hurt my baby brother neither. And I could tell he wasn’t really trying to. He was mostly holding on to Jimmy and slinging his ass from one side of the wall to the other. Jimmy was big, but Gino was bigger, and no matter how much I cursed and tried to pull one off the other or get in between them, I couldn’t break them up.
It was Flex and Cooter who came around the corner and managed to pull them apart.
“Yo, yo, yo!” Flex hollered. “Yo, Jimmy man. Chill, dawg. Chill!”
Cooter pulled Gino back, and Jimmy caught him with a right on the break.
The connection was so hard and solid everybody froze.
“Aaight, then.” Gino shook Cooter off like a booger and knocked Flex down as he grabbed for Jimmy. “You my niggah, J, but your young ass needs to be taught a lesson.”
I started hollering then. Gino punched Jimmy in the face three times, slamming him to the floor. He was standing over my brother ready to stomp him into the ground when he stopped and looked over at me.
“You better learn to show some respect, niggah,” he said to Jimmy, then started walking down the hall.
Cooter ran behind Gino yelling, “What the fuck was that about? Huh? What was that about?”
It didn’t sink in on me until later that Cooter had lost his stutter, and all I could do at the time was stand there as Flex helped my brother get up. Jimmy’s nose was bleeding and anger still burned in his eyes. I rushed over and wiped away a drop of blood that fell on his lip.
“Damn, dawg,” Flex said, leaning Jimmy against the wall. “What the fuck was that about?”
Jimmy pushed my hand away and stood shakily on his feet. He looked at me like I was somebody’s criminal, then he turned toward Flex and said, “Ask Juicy.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Jimmy didn’t speak to me for three whole days. Even though I kept going to his room trying to talk to him, cooked his favorite foods, and tried real hard to reconnect with him, he just wasn’t having it.
“Don’t kiss his ass,” Gino told me as I stood in the kitchen cutting up some potatoes to make Jimmy some fries. “He ain’t no baby, Juicy. Jimmy is a man and you need to start treating him like one.”
“But I disappointed him, Gino. He loves G, and it fucked him up when he caught us like that.”
Gino shrugged. “Then he shouldn’t have come looking for nothing he couldn’t handle. Besides, everything is gonna come to a head one day anyway. If it wasn’t Jimmy who checked us it woulda been somebody else.”
I felt miserable inside. I didn’t want to lose Gino, but I loved my brother, too.
“So are you saying we should stop then?”
Gino gave me a look like Girl, are you crazy? and then he snuck and kissed me on the neck. “Hell no. I don’t ever wanna stop being with you, Juicy. Not for G or for Jimmy. You know I wasn’t gonna hurt your brother. But I couldn’t let him disrespect you like that neither.”
I turned the flame down under the pan and dropped in a handful of fries, jumping back when the grease sizzled and popped out at me. “I know. But still, try to understand where he’s coming from.”
Jimmy eventually came around and started talking to me again. I knew he wouldn’t stay mad at me forever, and I also knew that he would never betray me to G. But putting the burden of my secret on him wasn’t fair to him either, and I would have done anything to turn back the clock to erase that disappointed look from my brother’s eyes.
The summer was about to end and I was looking forward to going back to school. Yeah, my life still revolved around G and the Spot, but now I had Gino to fill all the holes and give me the love and the loving I had been missing.
It made me crazy trying to do everything on the sneak tip. I kept wishing that somehow G would just disappear and let me and Gino and Jimmy live happily ever after. But I wasn’t a stupid young girl no more. I knew those fairy-tale thoughts were whack. And a part of me also knew that Gino had been right when he said things were gonna come to a head one day. But what I didn’t know was how big that head would get and how far the fallout would reach. I guess that’s why you should be careful what you pray for. Just in case you end up getting it.
By Thanksgiving Jimmy was in so deep with G I was scared I’d never get him out. I still hadn’t figured out how to get out of my situation, with or without G’s money, and I was scared that any day Gino was gonna announce that his six months were over and he was skying up.
He’d told me that G was only a few weeks away from closing a deal with some big-time connects in B-More, and that he’d already leased a building and started handpicking the crew he was gonna take down there with him to launch the opening of the G-Spot 2.
“Is he taking you?” I asked, hoping like hell the answer was no.
Gino shrugged. “I don’t know if that’s his plan, but it sure ain’t mine. When I leave Harlem I’m heading back west, not south, so to answer your question, no.”
Somehow that didn’t make me feel any better. So what he wasn’t going to Baltimore. He hadn’t said shit about taking me with him out west neither. And even if he did, I could forget about making Jimmy go with me. He was on G’s dick so hard he should have been gay. There was no way he was leaving that man. Jimmy would leave me first, and as close as we were, that was some knowledge that hurt me to my heart.
It was three days before Christmas when Jimmy came home one night and told me he was making an overnight run to Atlantic City. G was at the Spot counting drugs in the cut room, and me and Gino were decorating the Christmas tree that G had brought home earlier in the day.
We’d never been big on Christmas growing up. It was easy to overlook it when there was never any money to buy presents. G always bought me and Jimmy expensive gifts for the holiday, but this would also be the first time we put up a tree in celebration of it, and the only reason he went out and got one was because Gino said he wanted one.