College Fiend [A$AP Rocky]

Thirty

A/N: Only included the song at the side because, well, I had it on repeat while writing this chapter.

“I think I wanna go back to Harlem,” Wayne said. We were standing on the roof of his house, leaning against the rail and watching the stars above our heads. After the meeting with Jeanette and Joannis, I demanded Quincy to drive me home and not to touch me, look at me or speak to me. He did just that, and then I took a shower and drove myself over to Wayne’s house. He was the only one who could give me any further information. “My family is there, my roots are there, my heart is there.”

“I’m not there,” I said.

“You can come if you want to.” He proposed, looking at me then. I shrugged.

“Is Harlem an appropriate place to raise a child?”

He shrugged like I did and looked away from me again, twirling a toothpick around in his mouth. Right now, he looked very Harlem: oversized varsity jacket, toothpick, unkempt hair, and a scruffy demeanor in general. Still, he had a bad-boy look about him that made me want to just throw myself onto him. It was strange how I had such a fondness for bad boys. Maybe if Wayne had been like this throughout our relationship, I would have chosen him.

“I don’t know. It can be if you have the right protection, and I’m sure Quincy can protect you.” There was an underlying tone of attitude in his voice.

“You can protect me, too, and the baby. I’m sure you’d protect him or her like he, or she, was your own child.” I told him, still looking at him despite the fact that he wasn’t making eye contact with me.

“It’s still wild to me how we used protection and I didn’t even notice. I could have sworn we didn’t.” Wayne remarked.

“Well it’s a good thing we did, anyway.”

“Yeah,” He said in a low almost-whisper. I told Wayne I had HIV early on in my visit to him, and he didn’t reply how I expected him to. He just shrugged and told me that he hoped I could live with it and it wouldn’t harm me or my baby (mind you, he didn’t mention Quincy). That was when I realized that Wayne’s attitude was much like mine towards him: he cared about me, sure, but he didn’t love me as much as he used to. He’d given up and had just come to terms with the fact that we would never work out. We tried, we did, but we had to remain close friends. That’s what we were meant to be.

Wayne and I stayed silent, staring over the rooftop at the cars below, then at the other rooftops to see, well, nobody, and then up at the big, scary stars in the sky. We stayed like that for a few minutes—quiet and gazing—until I remembered why I came in the first place. His answers were the ones I needed most.

“Tell me your side of the story,” I looked at him. “You’re the only one who hasn’t given their version.”

“You don’t want to hear mine.” Wayne replied.

“I do, more than you think.”

He sighed, took the toothpick out of his mouth, tossed it over the roof, and then looked me in the eye. “Jaamani and I met in the middle of the street one afternoon. We were both in high school back then, so it was an afternoon after school at about three o’ clock. She was walking home and I was hanging out with friends on the corner by a bodega. She was walking with a bike, pulling it at her side instead of actually riding it. I think she didn’t want to ride it because the street was crammed with cars, being that it was rush hour, and she wasn’t allowed to ride on the sidewalk. She had a container of food in the bike’s basket, and as she was passing me and my friends, I backed up a little bit—I don’t remember why—and bumped straight into the bike.