𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐪𝐮𝐞 | machine gun kelly

⸻ ACT II, PHASE TWO

"DO YOU REMEMBER ME, MY LOVE?" I CRIED, my voice barely above a whisper as I rocked the gentle boy against my chest, my arms wrapped tight around him. 

The van door was slid shut, as Noah—his dark brows pinched together and his dark skin glistening with perspiration and anxiety—jumped back in his seat after bringing the little boy to me and punched the roof of the van to signal the driver to speed up. 

"Do you remember me? I'm your mama," My voice broke, as tears gushed down my face. 

I touched his round cheeks and pushed his soft blonde hair back from his forehead.

"I'm your mama, my love." 

Connor Baker, four years old now, looked up at me with an expression that flickered between recognition and curiosity. There was a certain intrigue in his round features, something that stemmed from perhaps being suddenly torn away from whatever he had been doing at his daddy's house and thrown into the arms of a lady in a dark van whom he partially recognized. 

"Please remember me," I shut my eyes briefly, every nerve in my body shaking violently. "I need you to remember me Connor." 

The memory from two years ago was still fresh in my mind, plastered into my senses permanently. Every time I closed my eyes, I was haunted by it. Haunted by the vision of my unconscious form lying on the cold hard road as the man I loved walked away holding my child in his arms, not once turning around to look at me—brutally killing me off from the story of his life just because I was dealt a fatal wound and had lost my senses to darkness. 

It didn't matter to me that he had chased down Luke and taken his life for shooting me down. What did revenge matter when he wouldn't even stay and look at me? 

If he had, he would know that I was still alive. He would know that I was not breathing, but I would come to. He would know that my heart had suffered from the shot—my arteries butchered, but I hadn't died. He would know that his mother had stayed behind, and that her sobs had revived me to my senses, after which she had hitchhiked us and had me taken to a hospital. 

He would know then that I was made to have a heart transplant if I wanted to live. He would know that the Manhattan hospital had a dying forty year old lady who had matched my blood type and had graciously given me her heart. I had barely been in my senses, yet I had kissed her frail hand and cried when she was brought to my side on a wheeler. She couldn't speak, and had only looked at me in bewilderment. 

The man I loved didn't know any of these things, for he had extracted himself from the narrative. And when Annie—his wholehearted mother—had desperately begged me to let her call him, I had refused thinking I didn't want to worry him or my child. 

Then, Trippie Redd had shown up in the surgery room the same night, his eyes veiled behind his short dreadlocks as he looked at me with an expression I couldn't decipher. At first, I thought it was a hallucination. A fault in my senses that only catered to make me realize how close to death I was, touching the door that could envelop me any moment. I wanted to yank it open and plunge myself in, but I held back, for Connor, for Colson. 

After two years of properly facing Trippie Redd, I had—in my near death state—realized how daunting he had become. It was as though everyday had doubled on him, multiplying his hatred and anger inside him like a cancer that only seemed to spread and spread. He had been twenty when I had met him in early 2019, I had been twenty one then. The years since had only made everything more blunt. 

"Luke didn't succeed, I believe," He had spoken to me, his words plain, as he let out an airy chuckle. "Fucker died for it." 

He had stayed quiet then for a while, and I had glanced at the surgery room window, desperately wishing for a nurse or doctor to come by and stop me from getting murdered. Because that was what Trippie Redd was here for, wasn't he? To cut off my chance for life once and for all. Outside, Annie had dozed off in the waiting seat, oblivious.