“If that’s what you want to call me, there it is.”
And there it was. Bianca loved the fact that Caesar believed in her, but he had some nerve. He sold every kind of drug a dope head could fiend for.
He was well respected in the streets, took care of his workers, and never brought work home. There was something about his method. Bianca had never once heard him say anything about a worker stealing from him, or any of his connects trying to set him up, mainly because he used middlemen to handle his business. This dude was like the Wiz behind the curtain, controlling everybody with the super powers everyone thought he had. Meanwhile, he was just a man. But he was Bianca’s man, a man whom she loved and believed in too.
“You could run Wall Street if you would use your gift for good,” Bianca had said to Caesar.
He looked down while he laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“I used to tell my brother that all the time.” His laughter drained out. “He’s the one that taught me everything I know.”
Caesar stared off like he was contemplating his words regarding his brother. Caesar had spoken very little about his family to Bianca. However, she did know that he had one brother, who was almost three years older than him, and a twin sister, who had tragically passed away.
“Then why’d you leave it all to come here?” Bianca had asked Caesar.
His reply was, “People may love you when you’re coming up, but sometimes a king just doesn’t get praised in his own throne.”
Caesar had shared with Bianca how he was that young, trusted kid on the streets in Miami that everyone knew and had grown up with. It was just unspoken that nobody messed with him and he messed with nobody. But he was getting too high up there in the ranks. Cats started dropping his name when they’d get busted, so he said he knew that was his sign to relocate, which was how he ended up Virginia. He had been there for three years.
From the day they met, they stayed joined at the hip. And even though they loved being up under one another, they knew that when it was time to take care of business, they had to dip out and handle that.
“At least if we lived together, we’d be able to come home to one another,” was what Bianca had said to Caesar when she brought up the idea of them moving in together.
It didn’t take much convincing, because after five months of seeing each other, they became roomies. To Bianca, even though Caesar was all man, she often felt like she was living with her best girlfriend. She really could share everything with Caesar, and he understood her. He could relate to her feelings. He listened, and when he had something to say, he talked. He told her how he hadn’t spoken to his brother since leaving Miami. His brother was disappointed and ashamed of him for leaving the so-called family business.
When Bianca questioned him about his and his mother’s relationship, he told her that he hadn’t spoken to his mother either. His mother saw him as being a coward, running away and abandoning his family. “She just didn’t understand what my brother and I were involved in,” Caesar had said. “She just didn’t understand me.”
His mother had disowned him. Even though his brother had disowned him as well, Caesar was still family, so his brother wasn’t going to have him in another town scraping to survive. He broke him off a piece of the business, making sure Caesar still had work, but he didn’t deal with Caesar directly. He left that to his right-hand man, Jacques. Caesar’s younger sister was the only one who still loved him openly. He communicated with her directly through her cell phone.
That was the one and only conversation Bianca had had with Caesar about his family. After that, seeing how talking about his family filled Caesar’s eyes with pain, she never brought them up again. Every now and then, she’d mention them taking a trip back to Florida. She had hopes of reconciliation for them more so than she did her own relationship with her mother. The difference between her and Caesar was that he cared; Bianca didn’t. Caesar longed for that family bond and unit. It was important to him and his culture. So, she vowed that she would be his family. She would give him all of her, so much of herself that he wouldn’t need anyone else.
She smiled while in the closet, thinking about how they had made the pact, “Since we both have family problems that we don’t discuss, let’s be each other’s family.”
They shook on it, and it had been nothing less than the best ever since. Life, for the first time in years, was good for Bianca. She was in love, and from all indications, her man was in love with her. With that being said, she wanted this night to be a night to remember for them both . . . and boy, was it destined to be.
CHAPTER 5
“Looky here, looky here,” Caesar said as he entered the candlelit bedroom. His voice woke Bianca from her little catnap.
“Hey, babe.” She gave him a big smile. “I don’t know how I dozed off.” She was too groggy to jump up and wrap her thighs around his waist, so there went that plan out the window.
“You were tired.” Caesar ruffled her hair. “Had a long day, huh?”
“Not too long. What about you?”
“Uneventful. Nothing too heavy, baby.” He came and sat down on the edge of the bed beside her.
“I know nothing you can’t handle,” she reminded him. She thought so much of her man. Lying on top of the heavenly white comforter, Bianca stretched out of her slumber, extending her long, fair legs. “Hey, Cee,” she said, her eyes closed, with a soft smile on her face.
“You doing that shit on purpose,” Caesar said.
