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“Whatever.”

Still laughing, I hung up just as I pulled up to my trap house.

“Fuck,” I mumbled under my breath as I peeped Jackie walking towards my ride.

I had been avoiding her since me and Aaliyah reacquainted, but I figured that I would bump into her at some point.

She stood in front of my ride, clutching a cup of Starbucks in one hand and a Gucci bag in the other. Her breath fogged in the cold, curling from her nose with every exhale. Her light brown eyes were glaring at me. If she wasn’t so full of herself, I would have admired how good her curves looked, even in the knee length Moncler coat. For a short girl, she was stacked like a brick house. She even had her natural kinks all over her headin a huge, brown fro. With her chocolate skin and that hair, she looked like a goddess. Her appearance was pretty but, unfortunately for her, a dude like me measured beauty from the inside out.

“Hello, Fabil,” she hissed as I climbed out.

I cringed, always hating when someone called me by my government name. Jackie knew that. That’s why she was standing in my pathway with her arms crossed over her chest and that fucking smirk on her face.

“Jackie,” was all I said as I passed her and kept walking.

She was on my heels, as I knew she would be.

“Really?” I could hear her spit behind me as I approached the house.

I hated that she knew my routine. She knew that after the holidays, I would be getting right back to the money and would be at my spot.

“You’re just going to walk away from me?” she hissed as she forced herself between me and my security gate. “Where have you been?”

I took a deep breath, trying to keep myself from losing it. “I told you, I had a lot going on with my family.”

She sucked her teeth. “And? I’m supposed to be your woman. I wanted to be there for you. I had to spend the New Year alone.”

“I told you that I was at the hospital with my brother.”

Her eyes narrowed at how cold and nonchalant I was being. “I wanted to be there with you.”

“That wasn’t necessary, Jackie. I wanted you to have fun for the holidays.”

“And I wanted to be with my man,” she snapped as her hands went to her hips.

Oh shit, it’s about to go down.

I could see her getting more pissed off by the second. She was about to explode. I knew that I needed to dead this situation before she acted a fool.

I started to scratch the top of my head, what most men did when they knew they were about to bust a woman’s heart wide open. “Look, Jackie...This isn’t working for me.”

She looked shocked. Though I knew she had heard me, she pressed me to have the nerve to repeat myself. “What did you just say?”

“This arrangement…It isn’t working for me.”

“How isn’t it working for you all of a sudden?”

“It’s not all of a sudden. I’ve told you plenty of times that you were moving too fast. I never told you that I was your man and we’ve only been fucking for six months. It wasn’t appropriate for you to be at the hospital with me when my brother is damn near dying. You’ve never even met my family before.”

That was all facts, but the raw truth was I had been waiting too long for Aaliyah to take her from one toxic relationship to another. So, Jackie had to ride out.

She shrugged dismissively with a smirk. “I’ve met your brother.”

“When I took you to his club to have a drink and you wanted to leave five minutes later because it was ‘too hood’ for you,” I reminded her as I stuffed my hands into the pocket of my jeans to keep them warm.

She groaned, rolling her eyes. “That place was full of hood boogers in the middle of the ghetto, and you know it.”

I chuckled sarcastically and told her, “Look, Jackie. We just aren’t meant to be together.”