Down Chick

Chapter Eleven: The Inner Circle

Chapter Eleven: The Inner Circle

“Angel,” she protested, looking over at me with that expression on her face.

 The one that she got whenever she thought that I was being too much for her. I always found it amusing. Keish really thought that she could fight me on these things. She didn’t understand. I wasn’t in this for sex. It wasn’t a game to me. It wasn’t even a challenge. It was serious. I wasn’t looking to hit and run. I wasn’t even looking to ruin things. I was in this for the win. I was pursuing her with the intentions of a grown man. I wasn’t boy and I hadn’t been for a long time.

Keish was the genuine real thing and the sooner she realized that, then the better off she’d be.

“Keish,” I mimicked.

She sighed and then reached over and slapped my arm. “Why you gotta be so damn insufferable?” she questioned.

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” I told her. “Persistence and determination is what you can consider it. I’ve waited for you for three years.”

Keish

  Being with Angel felt different. Oddly, I hadn’t expected this. For him to turn out to be so persistent or to seemingly have a smooth and sweet side to him. When he was like this, he made it difficult for me to trip over him being a man who danger followed. His words, the way he looked at me, told me that what he spoke could be sincere. Yet, I still didn’t want to trust it. To be honest, I was feeling just a little afraid.

Afraid that I would let him in and somehow he’d either hurt me or he’d be the death of me. I wasn’t a simple girl. I probably never would be. I knew that most girls would’ve been swooning all over the place and shit if he said those words to them. I wasn’t most girls. I was…me. And I never made things easy. Easy was too simple, especially when it came to things like relationships.

Angel was making me feel things that I hadn’t expected, but it didn’t mean that I had to cave to him. He had been right about one thing: I didn’t know him. Therefore, it wasn’t fair of me to judge him as I had been doing. Fear didn’t justify presumptions.

Fear didn’t allow for relationships to soar either.

A month ago, I’d never have felt like this. A fear that he truly did care for me. Hell, a week ago I didn’t. I didn’t like feeling this. Yet, in order to protect myself and be well prepared, I needed to be around him. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep this up. I wasn’t ready to cave, but I was smart enough to know that if I stayed around him too long then I was bound to either fall in bed with him or to fall into his words or even worse fall in love with him. If I did that, then I would allow myself the pain of possibly losing another person in my life.

I didn’t want that.

I couldn’t lose another person in my life.

I felt like too much had been taken from as it was already. Maybe not all of them were by death, but drug addiction might as well had been the same. I didn’t have a stable mother, a father or brothers or sisters. The closest I had to that were Maria and Viktor. Sometimes, I wished things could be like they had when I was five. My mom hadn’t been strung out on crack at that time. It haunted me that one person could change so drastically in the course of a short period of time.

“Keisha, baby,” Mama pleaded, “tell me what’s wrong. Why are you crying?”

Sniffling I looked over at her and let one tear drop slid down my cheek. I didn’t want to tell her why I was crying, she would think that I was being a crybaby, like her boyfriend of the time said. He called me that constantly. Every time something happened and I cried he would give me a look and mutter, “Fucking crybaby.”