Trapped Wishes: A Genie and Her Goon Page 2

  When I released Lovie, she skipped over to the couch where her grandmother was seated and sat next to her. My mother wasted no time pulling Lovie into her side as she flipped through the channels on their eighty-inch TV.

  “I’m out, Ma,” I announced, turning and heading for the door. I’d already given her a goodbye hug, but that was before Lovie chased me down for another hug. This last one made five since I’d told her I was leaving in her room at my parent’s home. She’d followed me all the way down, hugging on me every so often.

  My father was sitting outside with no shirt on, in forty-degree weather, smoking a damn cigar. You could tell he was from Chicago. People often migrated and traveled between Memphis and Chicago for some reason. It was on a trip to Memphis to see family that he met my mother. They fell in love, and he ended up moving to Memphis to be with her. There weren’t as many jobs available there as it was in Chicago, so he went to the streets to make some fast money.

  What started out as him working as a lookout for Fat Tony turned into him being a corner boy. Eventually, he started his own organization. Now, he ran it with his brothers and my uncles. My brother and a few of my cousins and I were their second in command. We didn’t even have to get our hands dirty to make money, but again, breaking a nigga off was a way to relieve stress for me. I was starting to regret the last hit I did though.

  Pierre took over South Essence. He gave the corner boys that ran the blocks out that way some product to push as a show of his desire to work with them. They really didn’t have a choice other than working for him or moving to another part of the city, so they accepted the product and started to move it for him. With each delivery, their cuts got smaller and smaller, so eventually they rebelled.

  They ended up taking Pierre’s product, selling it, and pocketing all their profit. When they didn’t deliver that package, Pierre called me and my crew in. We took care of all twelve of them with no problem. Unfortunately, one of them was smart. He wrote a statement naming Pierre as the person responsible for his death, and he went a step further to say that I was the man Pierre typically used when he had these kinds of issues.

  Outside of his statement and a bullshit ass witness saying they saw me on the corner when everything went down, the state didn’t have any evidence against me or my crew. They still picked us up for twelve counts of murder three weeks ago. I had my first court date in two days, so that meant I had twenty-four hours to find this witness and make them disappear. There was no doubt in my mind that it was someone who knew one of the victims and was just saying they saw me to get a conviction.

  I never left a trace.

  Even when a motherfucker could see me in these streets, they didn’t see me.

  I was just that damn good.

  “You find out who it is yet?” my father asked, staring out into the distance.

  “Nah, but I will.”

  He nodded as he looked down at his phone. “I know you will.”

  There was nothing else that needed to be said between us. I had a duty, an obligation, to handle this shit before I stepped foot in that courthouse. If this went to trial, my family would be in the spotlight, and we had our hands in too many illegal dealings for that. We were dealers, hitmen, gun slangers, and some of us were immortals.

  How in the fuck would they explain being in a jail cell at the age of one hundred one minute and randomly vanishing the next?

  You’d think with us being able to live forever that we’d have some kind of superpower, but that was it. Just life forever in this fucked up ass world we lived in.

  “Keep my daughter safe,” I demanded, stepping off the porch.

  “Don’t I fucking always?”

  I smirked with a nod. “Still.”

  “I got you, young blood. You just make sure Pierre knows Malik men are loyal. If he makes a move because he questions that, he will start a war that he will not win. Make sure he knows that there will be bloodshed, and I will personally wipe out everyone in his family and keep him alive just to make him suffer if he comes for you or my granddaughter.” I turned back to look at him as he kissed his teeth. He put the cigar between his lips as his eyes tightened. “And get me that witness, Hareem.”

  I nodded again before turning and walking away. If there was one thing enemies learned quickly about the Malik dynasty, it was that we didn’t make threats… we made promises. And we never made a promise we couldn’t keep. Pierre would get one warning out of my father because of how long they’d been working together, but not even the longest of business relationships would spare him if he crossed that line. The moment my father made the order, I would strike – and I didn’t give a fuck what it would take – I’d bury a million motherfuckers to make sure my Lovie stayed safe.

  I ended up meeting with Pierre at Emma’s Soul Food Kitchen. He voiced his concerns about the loyalty of my men, and after I assured him that they were solid, he seemed okay. They could have easily shaved off some of their potential time by admitting Pierre hired the hits, but I was confident that it wouldn’t even get to that point. No witness, no case.

  On my way out of Emma’s, I saw an older woman struggling to carry a brown box into the antique store that was next door. With no hesitation, I walked over to her and took the box from her.

  “Thank you, baby. I sholl appreciate the help.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She opened the door for me, and I carried the box over to the counter. Instead of waiting around to see what all they would buy just in case she needed help taking the box back out to her car, I made sure to tell the woman behind the counter to help her carry whatever they didn’t want out for her. She agreed, and the older woman handed me a gold lamp as her way of thanking me. I tried to give it back to her, but she insisted on me taking it. The only reason I did was because it looked like the genie lamp in Aladdin and that was one of Lovie’s favorite movies so I would clean it off and give it to her.

  I was missing my baby already. This whole her staying with my parents shit wasn’t gon’ fly. But I had to keep telling myself that it was safer for her there. They had a crew of people in the house at all times, so Lovie would never be alone. And my father rented out the house next to them for his full-time security team. Lovie was in good hands. Still, I was even more determined now to find this damn witness and handle this shit.

  My plan was to go home, shower and change clothes, then head back out. But when I set the lamp on the coffee table in the living room… something shifted inside of me. It was like it was calling to me. Not vocally. No sounds were coming out. But in my soul. Something was drawing me back to the lamp every time I tried to walk away from it.

  Unable to resist, I picked the lamp back up and brushed it against my shirt to wipe the dust off of it since I was about to take it off to shower anyway. As I went to sit it back down, purple and pink smoke began to leave the spout. It got bigger and bigger, forming the shape of a person. A woman. The longer I stared at the smoke the clearer an image became.

  When the image solidified, it wasn’t an image at all. It was a woman. Floating mid-air, she coughed and shook dust from her body. It didn’t take long before she was falling flat on her ass and letting out the cutest, “Oww,” I’d ever heard. I wanted to be a gentleman about the shit and help her up, but I was frozen. In complete shock of what I was seeing.

  She was beautiful, there was no doubt about that, but she looked like she’d been to hell and back. Dust covered her body and her clothes were ripped and tattered. Shaking my head, I forced myself to look away. I couldn’t necessarily say she wasn’t real because there were people who would say Nairobi men weren’t real either. After grabbing the blanket I kept on the couch for Lovie, I walked over to her and wrapped it around her body.

  She must not have even noticed me because as soon as I did, she jumped back and let out a clipped scream. “Who are you? Where am I?”

  I opened my mouth to answer her, but no words would come out. This woman had me captivated. All I could do was stare at her. She was a Genie. A beautiful Genie. A real Genie.

  Her spiral, curly afro was brown and gold. And big as fuck. Some of it was pulled frontwards, like a curly bang, and it came down to her piercing silver eyes. She had a round face… smooth cinnamon brown skin. Plump, juicy ass pink lips.

  Fuck.

  This woman was bad as hell.

  But it was something else about her that drew me to her beyond her looks. Something that had me forgetting how to speak as I inched toward her on my knees. If her ass didn’t stop me soon, I was going to kiss her, and that was nothing like me…

  He was going to kiss me. It wouldn’t be the first time a man tried to kiss me as soon as he saw me. It would, however, be the first time I wanted a man to. I didn’t know anything about this man other than he was fine as hell and nice, too. He’d offered me a blanket instead of going crazy trying to figure out who I was and what I was doing there. Already, that made him different in my book.

  I’d seen a lot of men over the years, but none of them made my pussy pulse and leak the way he did. His hair was cut short, very, very black, and wavy. It was on his face too – thick and shiny. And his skin was the color of peanuts. His eyes were dark and under turned. Bedroom eyes that I couldn’t pull my eyes away from. But as he inched closer, I forced myself to look down at his full, pomegranate colored lips and how they were dangerously near mine.

  There was a beauty mark about an inch away from his nose. I couldn’t resist running the pad of my pointer finger against it. When I did, that must have pulled him out of his trance because he hopped up quickly.

  “Who are you?” he asked, with a voice so deep and strong I had to bite down on my bottom lip to keep from releasing a moan.

  “I asked you first.”

&nb
sp; The left side of his mouth lifted but he dropped it quickly as he grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet. “But you’re in my house.”

  At his chest, I inhaled his scent. I couldn’t trace all the notes, but it was definitely sandalwood, citrus, and something else that smelled divine. “You smell really, really good.”

  Gripping my throat, I turned away from him as his eyes softened towards me. I felt like I was about to have another coughing spell. As soon as I began to cough again, he rushed out and came back with a glass of water. I couldn’t even manage to thank him as I reached for it because I was coughing so hard. “More,” I requested quietly, throat sore already. He left and came back holding two arms full of water in clear, plastic containers. The gesture made me laugh until I started coughing again.

  After tossing them onto the couch, he opened one and handed it to me. The more water I drank the better I felt. And looked. The dust began to dissolve from my skin, and I felt my blood circulating again.

  “What year is this? And where am I?”

  “2020. Essence, Tennessee.”

  Clutching my heart, I shook my head at the thought of Quenton and the fact that I’d been in my lamp for exactly two hundred years.

  “What part of the country is this?”

  His head tilted and confusion covered his face. Even with his partially opened mouth, wrinkled eyebrows and questioning eyes, he was still beautiful.

  “America. How long were you in there?”

  “Two hundred years. I… need a moment to filter in today’s times and trends. I have to acclimate myself because of what I’ve missed. Do you mind?”

  His head shook softly as he weakly fell onto the couch. Turning my back to him, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and silently called upon Crimsen, asking for her divine powers to give me a glimpse of the past two hundred years and implant within me everything I’d need to know and be to survive this current time.

  Hundreds of images flashed before my eyes, including one of Quenton dying. As much as I wished that would have given me some type of happiness or peace, it didn’t. It only filled me with sadness for him that was laced with anger. Because of him, I’d been trapped for two hundred years. I don’t know how on earth I made it to America and why no one had ever rubbed my lamp to get me out, so it must have been fate.

  Fate.

  To be here, with him. And I didn’t even know his name.

  Turning to face him, I extended my hand and told him, “My name is Genevieve Yates, but you can call me Genie. I’m actually your Genie.”

  His face was blank until I smiled. When I did, he blushed. But that blush quickly turned into lust as he licked his lips and pulled me between his legs. Not bothering to stand, he looked up at me as he asked, “How does this shit work?”

  I was used to men stumbling over themselves when it came to me, but I’d never been the one feeling all weightless and nervous and silly because of them. Until now. For a moment, all I could do was stare into his beautifully dark eyes.

  “Genevieve?”

  Genevieve.

  No one ever called me by my name.

  No one ever saw me for me.

  Pulling my hand away from his, I turned and took a step away from him. As soon as he stood behind me, I felt his presence. My eyes closed as I felt the heat from his body transfer into mine.

  “You good?” he checked softly, gripping my arm gently and turning me to face him. The place he touched grew cold, which was the complete opposite of what it did with most men. Usually it grew hot. I remember explaining that to Quenton and he said it was a good thing – sparks. A fiery connection.

  But I never felt like that was true. I never wanted to burn or hurt when a man touched me. But this man… his touch cooled me. Calmed me. Gave me relief.

  “Yes. I—I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  He smiled softly with the right side of his mouth before pushing my curls off my forehead. As if he wanted to get a good look at my full face. “You are so fucking beautiful, Genevieve.” He released my hair, and it fell back to my face as I blushed.

  “Thanks,” I almost whispered, crossing my arms over my chest to hide my hardening nipples.

  “I can’t see?” The low, lust filled pitch his voice had taken on only riled me up more. Chill bumps covered my skin as I inched back from him. Yes, I was used to men being physically and sexually attracted to me… but I wasn’t used to reacting to them like this. “I’m sorry if I seem a bit... Usually I’m never like this. I just… can’t stop looking at you. Wanting you. But I’ll never violate you. You’re safe with me.”

  I’m sure he didn’t know how much I needed to hear that. Quite frankly, I didn’t know either. Not until my eyes watered, heart began to race, and breathing hitched.

  His voice was softer when he repeated, “I asked how does this Genie thing work?”

  Smiling, I nodded, thankful for him repeating himself. “First, thanks for the blanket and the water. Second, you get three wishes. You can ask for anything except that I take a life or give you someone’s love.”

  He nodded as he scratched his chin through his beard. “What happens after the three wishes are made?”

  “I go back into my lamp until I get a new master.”

  “This is… a lot.”

  Smiling softly, I watched as… I still didn’t even know his name. “What’s your name, Master?”

  His head whipped in my direction quickly. “Don’t call me that. I’m not your master.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes you…”

  “Genevieve.” He inhaled a deep breath as his eyes closed. Nostrils flaring, he massaged his temples. When his eyes opened, he added, “My name is Hareem. Hareem Malik.”

  “Okay, Master.”

  Hareem chuckled softly before biting down on his lip and took the side of my neck into his hand. He used it to pull me closer, causing a quiet moan to escape my lips.

  “I don’t want you to call me master.” A wicked smile lifted the corners of his mouth before he added, “Unless I’m mastering that pussy. Then you can call me that.”

  I waited for him to say he was just playing or look like he was telling a joke, but his expression remained serious as he stared down at me. My height was five-five, Hareem was a good five inches taller than me. His hand gripped my chin, and he used it to tilt my head back. Closing my eyes, I wrapped my hand around his wrist and wondered if Vanzette was smiling down on me. Could this be the man I was supposed to fall in love with?

  What else would explain what was happening?

  “Open your eyes.” I did. “Do I grant your wishes too?”

  The giggle that escaped my lips was new. “No. Th—that’s not how it works. I’m here to serve you. Besides, I only need one thing, and I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be able to give me that.”

  Pulling myself from his grasp, I picked my lamp and the blanket up off the floor. He couldn’t seem to not be near me, because Hareem was making his way behind me again. It was cute – his attachment. I don’t even think he realized he was doing it, because when I turned, he took a step back.

  “What do you need?”

  Dropping my head, I walked over to the couch and sat down. With his hands in his pockets, Hareem exhaled and made his way next to me. I told him about my time with Quenton, his keeping me around for thirty years, then cursing me after wishing for magic and power. When I told Hareem that only being wished free or falling in love with a man who loved me would save me… his head dropped. He cupped his hands between his open legs as his head shook.

  “Love is an illusion for the weak, Genevieve. I ain’t interested in that. But anything else you need, I got you.”

  My heart dropped. I don’t know why, but that disappointed me. In such a small amount of time, I had already started to like him. Or at least, the way he was handling me. He seemed to be a caring gentleman, possibly a little rough around the edges, but a kind gentleman, nonetheless. So much for him being my key to freedom.

  Clearing my throat, I causally scooted to the left and put a little space between us. “Do you mind if I walk around outside and stretch my legs before we get started with your wishes?”

  Hareem scratched the back of his neck. “How can I trust you to not run away since it’s clear you want to be free?” His head shook before he confessed, “I still can’t even believe this shit.”