College Fiend [A$AP Rocky]

Twenty-eight

That was it.

There was something about him all along, a secret that he’d been hiding. Besides all of the criminal possibilities, I mean—there had always been something about him that I felt like he was hiding, something embarrassing. Definitely, this was it. What could be more embarrassing, anyway? Maybe the person who he got HIV from. I wasn’t going to ask, though. That would just make things worse for him; he would maybe regret telling me that he had the disease, because now he’d have to confess something else.

Still, I was curious to know, and it killed me inside as I slept. When Quincy told me in the car, neither of us said anything. We parked the car, went inside our apartment, finished up dinner, ate, and went to bed—no conversation whatsoever. I got up to take out the garbage in the middle of my sleep; I’d been having a dream that someone came and looked in the bathroom garbage to find the pregnancy test. When I woke up, I found him lying on the couch with open eyes. All he said to me was: “Go back to sleep. I’ll take care of that.”

How many words was that? Nine? So he’d said nine words to me since his famous confession. This morning, I woke up before him and was in the kitchen preparing pancakes for us. He loved pancakes; maybe seeing those would make him feel better.

When the pancakes were finished, and his were soaked in maple syrup just how he liked them, I called for him.

“Quincy! Come and eat, babe.”

I sat down and ate a whole pancake before he at last emerged into the kitchen with sleepy eyes. As soon as he lay eyes on the pancakes, though, he smiled brightly like a little boy.

“All it takes is food to cheer you up, huh?” I laughed.

“I guess you could say that.” Quincy shrugged and began to devour the first pancake. “How’d you sleep?”

“Pretty well. The only disturbance was this dream I had; that’s why I got up to take out the garbage. What about you? How did you sleep?”

“I couldn’t sleep at all. I thought if maybe I went to sleep on the couch, just to…this may sound harsh, but just to get away from you. Because feeling you next to me in the bed only reminded me of what I told you last night.” He said softly. “Wish I hadn’t said anything.”

“Don’t say that, Quincy. The fact that you said it just brings us even closer. Now I know something about you that I didn’t before. That’s a good thing all around.” I touched his hand on the counter, and while usually my touch makes him see the bright side of things, he still looked glum. There was another down side to this that he was thinking of, there had to be. Maybe it was where he got HIV from that he didn’t want to tell me.

“I used to think that I was your first,” I said suddenly. It came out against my will. “That you’d never loved any girl before me, and I was your introduction to love. The idea used to make me feel bad, because if I was your first, then I was a bad start. But obviously, you had to have had someone before me for you to have something like that.”

Quincy smiled. I didn’t know why he was smiling, but then again, at times like this, I never did. The oddest things amused him. But it wasn’t real amusement, just something sarcastic, like he laughed because he didn’t want to cry or yell.

“Get dressed. I’m taking you to the doctor.”

                                                                  * * *

Never had it occurred to me that if Quincy had HIV, well…I had it too. I’d had it for a long time.

Still, he wanted me to go to the doctor just to make sure. He said that he went to the doctor to check if he had HIV a long time ago, when he couldn’t afford a doctor anywhere outside of the ghetto.