Nico didn’t respond.
“Back on that quiet shit?” Mia asked Nico. “Fuck you! You clown!” Then she abruptly hung up the phone.
By this time we had reached Queens and were sitting in front of my crib. Things hadn’t exactly played out the way I’d wanted them to with Mia mentioning pictures, so I knew I had to do some serious damage control. And the best way to do damage control was to back up what I had been saying.
“I don’t know what the fuck she is talkin’ about, but I ain’t never sold my ass to anybody. That’s just some delusional, desperate shit she is spewing right there,” I said to Nico.
Nico took both of his hands and ran them down his face, sort of like he was stressed. “Look at me,” he said.
I sat up and looked him right in the eyes.
“There’s not an ounce of truth to what she was saying, right?”
“Baby, no! Urggghhh! My God! How could you even ask me that, Nico? You know what? Bye. I’m going in the crib to sleep. I’ll call you tomorrow.” I reached for the door handle to let myself out of the car, but I knew Nico wouldn’t let me leave.
Nico grabbed me by the arm to prevent me from leaving the car. “Jasmine, I’m about to wife you, so I’m asking because I need to know what’s good. I know how Mia thinks and how she moves. She’ll pay private investigators to find out who you are and all that, and when these dudes start digging, they start finding shit. So I’m just saying, come clean with me and don’t have me wifing you and I later find out some shit. Because word up, take this how you wanna take it, but I swear on everything, if you on some double-life, double-person shit, and you break my heart, I’ll have your ass murdered! That’s straight the fuck real talk right there.”
My heart was pounding, I was repeatedly tapping my right foot, and my head felt like it was going to explode. On one hand, if I told the truth, I would spare myself any drama down the road, but if I told the truth, there wasn’t a chance in hell that Nico would even call me again. If I lied, I would have a great chance at being with him because as he had just said, he was going to wife me.
The only wildcard was Mia and the information she had on me. She knew about my secret life as a prostitute, but I had no idea how the hell she knew. And if there was one thing I had learned in my short years, it was that it wasn’t so much what you knew that could hurt you, it was what you didn’t know that could later come and bite you in the ass.
I decided to roll the dice and hide the truth. “Baby, you can trust me. She’s lying,” I said to Nico, tears coming to my eyes.
“That’s all I need to hear.” Nico let go of my arm. “Now what the fuck is this Miami shit you was just talking about?”
I sighed and I sucked my teeth. “See, I wasn’t gonna say nothing because I didn’t know if it was my place to say something.”
“What are talkin’ ’bout?”
I could tell Nico was on edge. I pulled out my phone, went to the video
, and played it. I fast-forwarded it, so I could get to the part with Mia actually fucking. Then I handed the phone to Nico.
Just sitting there watching Nico was like literally seeing somebody transform. Nico had a look on his face that scared the shit out of me. I really thought he was going to put the car in drive and go find Mia and choke the life out of her.
“Where the fuck did you get this?” Nico screamed at me.
“Kelvin sent it to me.”
Nico handed me the phone and asked me how long the video was, and I told him that it was about an hour long. Then he asked me to forward it to his phone. I told him I would have to e-mail it to him, since it was a big file. Then he gave me his Blackberry e-mail address, and I sent it right to him.
“Yo, I gotta go,” Nico said to me.
I leaned over and gave him a kiss on the lips.
“Nico, I did want to tell you about the video but I felt it wasn’t my place . . . and I didn’t want to hurt you. I know how you feel about her.”
Nico nodded his head, but he didn’t say anything to me.
I exited his car and went straight to my bedroom, where I pulled out my laptop and got right on the Internet. I had one goal for that night, and it didn’t matter how long it took me. I was going to make sure that anything and everything related to my prostitution activities was deleted from the Internet.
My heart pounded insanely as I covered my Internet tracks. I was thankful that I had never shown my face in any of the online ads I had posted. But my tattoos were visible in many of the online photos that I’d posted. If Mia had printouts of any of the ads that showed my tattoos, my ass would literally be toast in Nico’s eyes.
The anxiety I was feeling was ridiculously overwhelming. I wanted to smoke some weed to calm me down, but I didn’t have time for that as I feverishly logged on to different web sites and deleted anything and everything related to Chyna.
After I deleted everything, I had calmed down a little. I sat and thought that, no matter what Mia produced, I was going to continue to lie my ass off and never admit to shit. If Nico were to question me about any pictures with tattoos, I would say that it was just a coincidence, that it wasn’t me in those pictures.
Was I totally confident? No, I was not. But I was determined. I was determined to bag Nico and take him away from Mia. I was on the verge of achieving my goal, with just one small hurdle left. I knew guys never played that “sharing-the-pussy-that-they-are-wifing” bullshit.