He rolls his eyes and steps around me to lead the way up the next flight of stairs.
“Ten minutes,” he says sternly. “We look for ten minutes and then you’re leaving with or without him.”
So he thinks. If I haven’t found Hakeem in ten minutes, we’ll renegotiate.
But we do. On the next floor in a room with a few guys, and thankfully, no phones out taking pictures or recording it. And yes, with cocaine everywhere.
“Please let me handle this,” I ask Jared in the hall outside the room. “You helped me, and I appreciate it, but this is my guy. You’ll be right here if I need you.”
For a second he looks like he’ll protest, but he finally nods and leans against the wall.
“If you’re not out in five minutes . . .”
He leaves a trail of unspoken consequences in the wake of that sentence. I nod my agreement and head in, closing the door behind me.
“What the hell are you doing, Hakeem?” I ask with no preamble.
He glances up, his eyes droopy and dazed from the drugs.
“Huh?” He blinks a few times like I’m a hallucination. “Banner?”
“Yes, Banner.” I stand over him, pointing to the drugs and bottles of liquor on the table. “You already had two suspensions for weed. What do you think they’ll do to you for this shit?”
“Nobody would tell—”
“Somebody did,” I cut in, slit-eyed and furious. “And they called me.”
“It’s a private party.” Dismay and panic clear some of his haze.
“Nothing is private. I told you that day one. Maybe once your little coke party pops up on Instagram you’ll believe me.”
He glances around the room, probably seeing the faces around him with new eyes. Some he knows and some he doesn’t. I pray he’s realizing how foolhardy it is to do drugs at all, much less with guys he doesn’t know and can’t be sure he can trust.
I step closer and bend to speak so low only he will hear me.
“Think of Adeago,” I whisper his sister’s name to him. “She wants to go to Northwestern, right? She doesn’t have a scholarship. She’s depending on you, Hakeem. So are Kambili and Ekeema.”
I pull back and touch his shoulder. “So is your mother. You know this.”
He glances from the table littered with coke and weed and destruction then back to me and nods solemnly. He’s a good kid, barely a man, who went from having nothing one day to having riches and resources beyond his wildest imagination the next. It’s a lot. It’s a trap if you don’t have the right people surrounding you. I don’t recognize half the men here. They’re not the right people. Not ballers, but hangers on. Opportunists. Some of them predators. By now, I’ve had enough predators assume I was prey that I know how to spot them.
“Let’s get out of here.” I reach for his arm, but someone reaches for mine.
“You do lap dances?” The huge man attached to the arm asks me, staring at my ass.
I was out, for once, having dinner with Quinn when Tanya texted me, so I’m dressed well. Black harem pants that snap tight at the ankles and a silk blouse longer in the front and cut higher in the back, exposing my lower back and butt.
“Hands off. I’m not a stripper,” I say for the third time tonight.
I mean, really? Do strippers dress this well?
“I like this fat ass,” he says, smacking the derriere in question.
Oh, hell no.
“I said hands off, hijo de puta,” I snap, slipping into the language that always seems to best convey my strongest emotions.
“Uh, I don’t know what you called me,” he says, amusement lighting his drug-hazed eyes. “But my dick got hard.”