This Life (BxB)

|10|

Ace

"Why are you so infatuated in watching people suffer?"

I was laying on the couch at my weekly therapy session as I stared up at the ceiling. I still don't like to go to these but it is what it is. I'm feeling calmer anyways after taking my medicine.

"Because I believe if they deserve it, then they deserve it," I shrugged.

She writes down in her notepad and it became silent for a few moments until she looks back up at me.

"I think the reason you are the way you are is definitely from past trauma. You said it was just you and your brother, correct?"

I nodded my head.

"Take me back through that experience if you can."

My eyes went elsewhere. I hate talking about the shit. "Can you imagine taking care of a kid while you're just a kid yourself? Shit was horrible. We practically didn't have nowhere to go. Our family either don't fuck with us like that or they're dead. Man, we seen a lot of shit on the streets."

Dr. Shannon was writing while listening to what I was saying. "What about your parents? What happened to them?" She asked, all while still writing.

I blew air from my mouth. "My mama overdosed off of heroin. And as for my dad, he left when my little brother was a baby. Never heard from that nigga again."

"Must've been horrible to experience all of that at a very young age. No child should live in that type of environment—"

I cut her off, not wanting to hear that sappy shit. I don't need nobody to pity for us. "Well, we did. There was nothing that we could've done about it."

The blurred memory still is in my brain of my mom hitting us for every little thing that pissed her off. My hand balled into a fist just thinking about the shit.

"I didn't want to get separated from my brother in the system, so we ran away together. We lived on the streets for a while. I remember one day we saw this flashy looking ass car pull up to this liquor store. Tried to catch him slippin' by breaking into his car and stealing his shit—we got caught. Turns out, that was the original leader of Notorious. He helped us out."

"Helped out by doing what? Taking you two in?"

I rubbed my chin hair. "Yeah, something like that." I don't like talking about him much. I never even told Tobias this. "He even taught me how to survive on the streets by teaching me how to shoot a gun and all that. He was always reminding me how lucky I was to meet him that day."

"He went by Keem."

Everybody was intimidated by him from what I can remember. Nigga had a big ass scar on the side of his face from some incident.

"His dad was the founder of Notorious and he passed it down to his only son after he died." I looked down at my hands, taking a pause. "He was the first ever dude I messed with."

"Oh, really? How old was he?"

"Twenty three I think when he recruited me."

She completely stops writing in her notepad and gives me a concerned look. "How old were you when you got recruited?"

"Fifteen," I mumbled.

I never talked about this with anyone, not even Gee. He was too young at the time to understand anyways and it's not something I can just bring up.

I shook my head. "It doesn't matter. The mothafucka is dead anyways. Some niggas smoked him in a drive-by when I was nineteen. I was second behind him, so I took over his gang. He always talked about giving me the gang."