Pop smiled. “Damn, Ms. Reed, you got the bomb pussy.”
Diamond smiled. She already knew that much. “Damn!” she said, sitting up in bed.
“What’s up?” a concerned Pop asked.
“I gotta figure something out. They about to cut off my lights, and I don’t get my check for another two weeks.” She placed her head in her hands, pouring it on thick.
“How much you need?”
Diamond smiled. It was just that easy.
A little while later, Pop walked out onto the porch of Diamond’s building and put a blunt into his mouth. He walked down the steps and proceeded toward his crew, lighting the blunt on the way.
Back inside, Diamond lay in the bed naked, counting the money Pop had given her for her services. Her body glistened, and satisfaction was written all over her face. She thought about the fact that she didn’t even have to ask him for the money outright.
***
Diamond walked back out onto the porch after taking a shower and changing her clothes. She’d just reclaimed her seat on the stoop when another one of the neighborhood dealers came walking up the street. When Diamond looked up, he was standing directly in front of her.
“What’s up, Tyquan?” Diamond asked as she looked at a Mercedes driving by.
“What’s up?” he asked. “Pop was up in the crib?”
Tyquan was another young boy she’d managed to slip into her bed without Dante knowing. At seventeen, he was a year older than Pop.
Diamond looked at him in a motherly way. “What did you just ask me?”
“I heard Pop was with you up in your crib.”
“Do you hear the key words here? My crib,” she said, rolling her eyes at him in disgust.
Diamond was over Tyquan because his street status wasn’t as high as Pop’s. Tyquan was a nickel-and-dime hustler, something she found out soon after she slept with him. Tyquan couldn’t feed her the type of cash she was looking for. He talked big, making her think he could back it up, but when she told him she needed him to pay her two-hundred-dollar rent, he choked up and started stuttering, trying to make excuses. She’d been giving him the cold shoulder for the last several weeks, and now he was standing in her face, questioning her like she owed him something.
“I-I-I’m saying—”
“I, I, I nothing, nigga. You better raise up outta my face!”
Pop and the crew turned to see what was going on when they heard Diamond yelling.
Diamond may have been a sex symbol, but she was also one of the few women who could hold her own. She almost always carried a small caliber gun in her bra, and she wasn’t afraid to use it. In fact, she had used it plenty of times during her life. Most people knew not to take Diamond there, but Tyquan wasn’t from that side of town, and had never seen her get down like that.
“Oh, word? It’s like that?” he asked, shocked by her sudden change in behavior.
“What the hell you think?”
“Listen, bitch. Don’t forget I’m the one giving you money!” Tyquan was getting pissed. He really liked her and didn’t appreciate the way she was flaking out on him.
Before Tyquan could blink twice, Diamond had leaped from the porch with her small-caliber weapon and forced the nose of the gun into Tyquan’s nostril.
“Yo!” he protested.
“Yo, my ass! Don’t you ever fuckin’ disrespect me!” she growled.
Pop and two more of his crewmembers made their way up the street. “We got a problem here?” Pop asked, his arms spread open.
Tyquan looked at him with hatred in his eyes, and then he looked back at Diamond with pleading eyes.
Pop and Tyquan didn’t particularly care for each other, but they tolerated each other only because they knew the same people. Although he wasn’t from that side of town, Tyquan had originally set up shop there first because he knew people from that neighborhood.