Always Unique Page 3

  Unique closed the door with a content smile on her lips. It was funny how her life had changed in just under a year. Her life had become a real-life motion picture, and as she stood in the foyer looking around her home, she exhaled in wonderment. Marble floors, granite countertops, vaulted ceilings, a theater room, and a Jacuzzi tub. She couldn’t believe this was all hers. Well, half hers. The craziest thing of all was that she was actually in love and hadn’t even been looking for it.

  A part of her was waiting for the credits to roll, the lights to come up, and to find that she was still in that small bedroom in her grandmother’s house in Virginia. But the truth of the matter was that the curtains weren’t ready to drop because this drama was hardly at the end.

  In fact it was about to get real interesting.…

  FROM WHORE TO HOUSEWIFE

  Unique was still floating on Cloud Love as she walked back into the kitchen to wash the breakfast dishes but as she was about to enter the room, she got stopped in her tracks.

  “I thought I would never find your sneaky ass,” a voice said. “I bet you didn’t think I would, either, huh?”

  Startled, Unique’s head jerked toward the voice, and when she looked, she couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw who was sitting at her kitchen table, eating the rest of the sandwich that Kennard had left behind.

  The man was slim and dark-skinned with a big nose and mean eyes. She’d never seen him before. Her first instinct was to run; her second instinct was to pick up something to defend herself. He saw her eyeing the butcher knives on the counter but her hands were not as fast as her thoughts were. She was reaching for the knife when he whipped out a big 9mm.

  “Don’t even think about it, Unique,” he warned, his voice firm and intimidating. He said her name as if it were a deadly cancer. The gun was trained steadily on her. In return, she looked at him as if he not only smelled like shit but he was shit. This man had the nerve to come in her house and sit at her table and talk smack to her? What part of the game was this?

  But the warning wasn’t needed. Unique knew better than to bring a knife to a gunfight. As she stood there eyeing his gun, he let out a chuckle.

  “You don’t even remember me, do you?” Then he smiled at her with a mouth filled with silver teeth.

  That’s when it hit her like a freight train. She’d know that yuck mouth anywhere.

  “Fat Tee,” she said, nodding. “Definitely a blast from the past.” She knew him from her days in Richmond, Virginia, only he wasn’t fat anymore. All the weight he had lost, and the fact that his face looked like all the life had been sucked out of it, made it almost impossible for her to recognize him on sight.

  “And what the hell are you doing in my house?” Unique knew that he wasn’t there to catch up on old times. The last time she had seen him, it hadn’t ended on good terms. She had pretended that she liked him so that Took, her boyfriend at the time, could rob him blind. He should’ve known better. Why would he even believe that a chick as fine as her would look his way other than for monetary gain? There was no denying that Fat Tee was getting money back then and had the whole neighborhood on lock, but judging how he was looking now, it seemed that things had slackened off a little for him.

  Fat Tee had been an obnoxious oaf, but he had proved to be an easy victim for Unique during her guttersnipe days. After gaining his trust, Fat Tee kept no secrets, including where he kept all his money and drugs. That’s when Unique persuaded him to take her to Atlantic City while Took and a couple of friends dressed as movers and cleaned out his house. They stole a half million dollars in drugs and cash, and didn’t stop there. They stole all his furniture and even took the food out of the man’s refrigerator. The sting went off so sweet that Fat Tee’s neighbors even aided them; they didn’t care for him much anyway and were ecstatic at the thought of him moving. Happy to be getting rid of him, they actually served “the movers” lemonade to help fight off the heat.

  When Unique and Fat Tee got back from Atlantic City, she didn’t even go back to Fat Tee’s house with him. She made up a b.s. excuse about how she needed to stop by a girlfriend’s place. Being the doting boyfriend, Fat Tee obliged. He dropped her off and told her he would see her later. Well, later was seven years ago.

  “I’ve been looking for you for a real long time. Heard you had made your way to the Big Apple—big city, big dreams.” He drank the rest of the orange juice out of the carton that had been left on the table. He belched. “I’d been in this overcrowded city searching for you for over three months now on a one-bug scavenger hunt, from hood to project, from project to strip club, and then I hit up the record labels.”

  Unique didn’t say anything. Two things ran through her mind: first, she hoped that Kennard hadn’t left anything behind, causing him to double back and walk through that door; second, how in the hell was she going to get this loser out of her damn house?

  He smiled. “And just when I was about to give up, I saw you on ESPN. Fucking ESPN. Who’d have thought? I was shocked, but I ain’t surprised. After I saw you and your boy, I Googled him, got his work address, and then waited outside his office for three hours until you pulled up in your brand-new Benz.”

  Unique crossed her arms and looked him dead in the eyes. “Cut the bullshit background story. What do you want, Fat Tee?” She wasn’t going to let him intimidate her.

  He looked at her like she was the old Unique, like she was still a bag of trash in his eyes. Unique tightened the belt on her robe, wishing she had something on that was a little less revealing.

  “I want a million dollars. That’s what I want. A million fucking dollars, bitch!”

  She looked at him as if he had lost his mind. “A million fucking dollars?” She repeated it, then cackled as if it was the funniest thing she had ever heard.

  “This ain’t no joke, or no laughing matter, Unique.”

  “Fat Tee, seriously, like where in the hell am I going to get a million dollars?” she asked, as if he knew something that she didn’t.

  “Being that you are such a scheming, conniving, clever thieving bitch, you figure that shit out.” Those words hurt Unique not because they came from him, but because the truth hurt. His words reminded her of who she used to be and all the memories she was trying to forget.

  “Steal it from this motherfucker.” He pointed to a picture of Kennard that was hanging on the wall. “Or the gotdamn Easter Bunny for all I care. I could give a fuck. Just get it.”

  Kennard knew almost nothing about her past. He knew she was from Virginia but had said that he was more concerned about what they could do together in the future, rather than what they’d done with other people in the past.

  Unique was nobody’s fool. She knew that was Kennard’s way of avoiding talking about all those skank bitches who were always smiling up in his face. But Unique had rolled with his philosophy because she had her own skeletons. Now one of those skeletons was sitting in their kitchen, asking for a million dollars.

  Unique looked directly into Fat Tee’s eyes. “You and the Easter Bunny can go suck on an egg,” she said derisively. “And I would appreciate it if you would get the fuck out of my house. There’s the door.” She pointed.

  Fat Tee got up, walked over to her, and then smacked her so viciously that she fell to the floor. “Bitch, you don’t show me no motherfucking door.”

  She was on the floor and reaching for something to throw but he was standing over her in such a way that she couldn’t move.

  “This ain’t no motherfucking joke, bitch!” He bent down so that they were eye to eye. “But I can show you better than I can tell you.” He smacked her again and then tore her robe open.

  Unique yelled, “Get the fuck off of me!” Desperate, she tried to kick him in the nuts. The kick only grazed him, and didn’t slow him down at all.

  In response, Fat Tee tried to take her head off with a hard-pimp, backhand smack. Then he hit her again. The second blow rattled her brain so hard, Unique almost faded to black. He pushed
his body between her legs. She tried to fight him but there was no use—he was much stronger than her.

  This bastard is really going to rape me!

  He was choking her with one hand while he used the other to undo his pants. When she tried to move, he applied pressure, cutting off her air even more.

  He smiled as he forced himself into her. It was a soulless smirk that grew every time he plunged inside. Unique glared up at him, with tears in her eyes. She wanted nothing more than to kill him for what he was doing to her, but she was defenseless. He was bigger. He was stronger. And he had the upper hand.

  She could still smell Kennard’s scent on her body from the beautiful love they’d made together as Fat Tee violated her.

  When he saw tears roll down her cheeks, it made him more aggressive. He made an ugly face when he came inside of her, uglier than he already was. Even though the tiny-dick bastard finished quickly, the whole scenario seemed to be playing out in slow motion. Every second seemed like an hour.

  Unique almost gagged when she thought about this low-down dirty troll’s semen mixing with Kennard’s, like some vile, disgusting soup congealing in a pot. She thought about the man she loved with all her heart.

  She cried.

  During all the things she had been through—serving time in a federal prison for crimes that she had not committed, working in the Mexican whorehouse, the lies, the betrayals—Unique had never cried. She always found a way to get even.

  “See, I knew some things never change. Same old Unique…”—he leaned in with an evil grin—“with the bomb-ass pussy.” A wicked laugh escaped his lips.

  Unique was boiling with anger as tears continued to stream down her face.

  “I don’t give a fuck about no tears,” Fat Tee said as he stood up and fixed his pants. “That there pussy of yours was the first interest payment on my million fucking dollars. The interest stops when I get all of my money. You heard me?”

  Unique looked at him in total disgust, and when she didn’t answer, he kicked her in the stomach. It knocked the wind out of her … what was left of it anyway.

  Fat Tee grabbed an apple off the counter and looked over his shoulder at her lying on the floor, balled up in the fetal position.

  As he left, he said, “A million fucking dollars, bitch!”

  GET HIM BEFORE HE GETS YOU

  Unique took the longest shower of her life. No matter how much she soaped and scrubbed her body, she couldn’t get Fat Tee’s nasty, disgusting stench off her.

  It had taken less than five minutes for Fat Tee to turn the fairy tale she’d been living into a nightmare. Unique just wanted to go back to sleep, and when she woke up, for everything to be like it was. But this wasn’t a movie: this was her life and that was one wish that wouldn’t be granted.

  How can I make this go away? she kept asking herself over and over again.

  Her first thought was to flip the script and do what she had been bred to do. Be the hunter instead of the hunted. How hard would it be for her to get her hands on a gun? Not hard at all, she thought. She’d never killed anyone before, but an ex-boyfriend once told her that killing someone wasn’t difficult. Living with the knowledge that you’ve taken another person’s life, he had said, was the most difficult part but the actual act gave you an adrenaline rush. The old Unique wouldn’t have had any problem whatsoever with knowing that she’d put herself out of the misery and had rid the world of Fat Tee’s low-life ass. But she was neither the same girl she used to be nor did she have any desire to be.

  So, what were her other options? She couldn’t tell Kennard how her jacked-up past had caught up with her. What would she say?

  Hey, honey. I know you said that you didn’t want to talk about our pasts, but I have one little bitty thing to share with you. It’s really no big deal at all. It’s just that back in the day, I used to set niggas up to get robbed, that’s all. I know how it sounds, but it wasn’t really like that. They weren’t like you; they deserved it.… Trust me, this is as hard for me to say as it is for you to hear, but I have to tell you this. There was this one dude that I lived with for one week. Yeah, that’s how long it took for me to rock him to sleep with the pussy. After he broke down and came up off of the combination to his safe and a few other secrets, I passed the information to my boyfriend and gave him the keys to the dude’s house. He stole everything the dude had to his name: drugs, money, furniture, everything. Now the dude has surfaced and wants to collect. He wants a million dollars.

  Not an option at all! She wasn’t trying to send Kennard running, full speed, in the other direction, but she had to come up with something.

  After it seemed like her skin was washed raw, she finally abandoned the shower. She examined her entire body in the mirror, and was glad to not find any telltale bruises on her body or face. She exhaled as her cell phone rang while she was toweling off. It was the administration department of the culinary school. Fortunately for her, the ventilation system was still screwed up, and class would most likely be canceled all week. “We will notify you when the problem is corrected or if we relocate the classes,” said the woman on the other end of the phone.

  Puh-leeze. Lady, you even seen real problems? she thought to herself after thanking the woman for the information and disconnecting the call.

  At least she didn’t have to go to school and, sitting around a bunch of strangers, feel like a victim. That wasn’t what she needed, not this day anyway. What she did need was someone she could confide in, someone that would understand and be nonjudgmental.

  There was only one person in New York who fit that criteria.

  Tyeedah and Unique had met in the prison camp at Alderson, West Virginia, the same place where Martha Stewart had served her time for insider trading. Unique and Tyeedah had worked out together. No one could keep up with either of the girls’ endurance. In the beginning they didn’t talk much. But after months of grueling calisthenics, light weights, and running around the track, they opened up to each other, finding out that they had more in common than just a passion for toning their bodies. Tyeedah knew a lot about Unique and had seen her scheming ways in prison and accepted her for who she was. The friendship forged by Tyeedah and Unique in prison was stronger than two people just trying to pass idle time. They really rode for each other, and the friendship transcended the prison walls.

  After a quick phone conversation touching on the basics, Tyeedah told Unique to get her ass to her house. Unique followed her friend’s instructions and got dressed and drove to Brooklyn, knowing this wasn’t going to be a pity party. She confided in Tyeedah not because she wanted a shoulder to cry on, or needed an ear to listen, but because she knew that, if push came to shove, whatever solution she came up with, the odds were that Tyeedah would be her co-conspirator to help her carry it out.

  “I can’t believe this shit,” Tyeedah said, after hearing the entire story. “For a whole lot less than a million dollars, I can have that clown merked. Deese folks that I’ll get to take care of it would make that shit look like an accident.” It sounded like some Lifetime Channel drama, but Unique knew one thing for certain: her friend was dead-ass serious.

  “I don’t want to kill anyone,” Unique said firmly. “That’s not the route I want to take.” Unique had done a lot of foul things in her life. Her actions might have ultimately even caused the death of people, but she wanted to always be able to keep her conscience clear of never being the person behind the trigger.

  Tyeedah looked confused. The Unique that she knew had more heart and bigger balls than the above average dude. She was unsure about this girl sitting on her couch. It looked like Unique, walked like Unique, but wasn’t sounding like the Unique that she had grown to know and love.

  “Then where are you going to get a million from without asking or telling Kennard? Even then, is he going to give you that type of cash to hand over to some nigga? Bitch, please.” She looked her friend up and down. “I know your shit might be golden, but this sounds like a job for Ro
bert Redford and an indecent proposal,” she said. “I know I don’t have to remind you that this shit is serious, do I? Fuck. The bastard raped you, Unique. Hellooo! Where is the Unique I did hard time with? The one who didn’t give two fucks in a bucket about a nigga or the rachet-ass existence he calls a life.”

  Unique thought hard and long about what her friend had said before answering. “I don’t wanna be her anymore. She was bad news. Big-time. To be honest…,” she tried to explain, “Fat Tee is only having a reaction to an action I had already put in motion. If I hadn’t set him up in the first place, he wouldn’t have the need to seek retribution or compensation. It’s not like I’m an innocent victim in all this. The shit’s like a merry-go-round.”

  “Okay … fine. If you want to be this ‘new and improved’ person, I support you one hundred percent. But”—Tyeedah paused for emphasis—“first you’re going to have to get rid of the skeletons that belong to the old you, which could possibly tear down the new you.”

  Tyeedah let her words marinate for a second. Unique took a heavy, restorative breath.

  “I know you’re feeling Kennard and don’t want to fuck up what y’all got. I get that, but you have to handle this nigga, Fat Tee, before you end up with nothing. Maybe, not even your life,” Tyeedah spat. “Who says he’ll stop at a million dollars?”

  Everything Tyeedah said was the truth. Unique knew this. But where would it end?

  Unique asked, “And how do I deal with the next nigga that finds me? Every nigga Took and I robbed probably saw my face on that show, so tell me how does this all end? Like I said before, it’s like a merry-go-round. And where it stops, nobody really knows.” After a few moments of silence, she wondered, “Maybe if I can give Fat Tee something to hold him, he’ll back off until I can come up with a better solution.”

  “Fuck that!” Tyeedah said emphatically. “You pay one time, and then you gotta keep paying. That’s the way it is for people like him.”