Another Man's Treasure (Joey Bada$$ Story)

Part Quattordici

I cooked for him.

He was still asleep at nine o’clock, and when I woke up, I took Latara carefully out of his room and rest her onto the couch. This was one of many mornings that she didn’t cry when she woke up, which I assumed to be her way of saving her voice for around noon when she was frustrated from not being able to walk out of her stroller. If she did cry, it would wake Joey up, so I had to feed her before him so she wouldn’t be fussy.

Joey was a heavy sleeper, though. I did escape from his arms slowly and carefully, but I was sure he’d wake up by the time I was out of the bed. Still, he slept. Either that or he pretended to be asleep for whatever reason. I wanted to wake him up, to see him open his eyes with the sluggish smile he always did, just to make sure it was tangible. To make sure that he was there, real and alive and breathing, that I wasn’t experiencing some kind of withdrawal syndrome from Edwin and making him up in my mind.

I wasn’t surprised that it felt so unreal. It should, anyway. This was a first for me - not living with a man and surviving off of his money, because I’d definitely been through that before - I had never had an interaction with someone like this. No one, especially not a male, had ever depended on me. I was always the one depending on someone in all ways possible, I was always the beggar who couldn’t choose, the one in need. But now, the tables were absolutely and completely turned. I had money in my bank accounts (well, it wasn’t my money, but that didn’t matter because it still wasn’t Joey’s), which meant I didn’t depend on him financially. As a matter of fact, I probably had more money now that Edwin left me than Joey did. He needed me. I was ready to walk out the door, to stop being an inconvenience to him, and he almost begged me to stay. He said it himself, he had trouble being alone. He was the one depending on me now, mostly for emotional support. For love. It felt good, empowering. Different.

Latara ate and bathed in an hour’s time, so I turned on the television with low-volume and let her crawl around on the living room rug and ate my portion of the porridge that I cooked. There was no rush to call Joey for his breakfast. I liked the peace and quiet - well, the peace and quiet featuring Latara’s excited infant noises when something ironically unexciting happened on her favorite show.

By the time I finished eating and washed up my bowl, Joey had woken himself up. He ambled out of his room like a zombie, crust still around his eyes. He yawned, stopped in the living room, and picked up Latara to give her a good morning kiss (I wondered if she could smell his morning breath). Then he placed her back down on the rug and sat next to her. The two of them watched the children’s cartoon together, Tara with a broad smile and bright eyes and Joey with drooping eyelids and a bobbing head. I watched them for a few moments, maybe ten minutes, before finally the show went on commercial and Latara turned to Joey and started squeezing his cheeks. Only then did he wake up out of his almost-nap and see me. He grinned, just like he did when he first woke up, placed Latara on the couch, and walked toward me.

“I thought you were asleep.” He said.

“Where?”

“I don’t know. I figured when I got out of bed, you were still there but I just didn’t see you.”

“I’ve been awake for some time now, and I watched you spend some quality time with Tara too. That was nice.” I smirked. Joey shrugged.

“I’m good with kids. You knew that.” He walked past me and followed the scent of the porridge, still hot on the stove. Joey prepared his own bowl but I still sat down with him to eat, just to keep him company and listen to him talk about his dream in which he had to fight a lion cub to its death and then fell off a never-ending cliff. There was way more to this dream but I couldn’t help but be distracted. There were new kitchen towels on the oven’s handle, cream ones with red maple leaves on the front. Once Edwin and I went shopping for kitchen towels and I picked up those. He called them hideous and demanded that I didn’t buy them. We had a full-blown argument about it, not just the towels but the fact that he was telling me what to do and he could survive with the towels easily. He responded that he had a right to decide what was being bought with his money.