Kiss the Ring Read Online Free PDF

high ass out the street!” the driver shouted out the window, his accent unrecognizable.
    â€œFuck you!” the woman shouted back, punctuating the exchange with a thorough-ass flip of her middle finger.
    He maneuvered his car past her on the narrow one-way street lined with parked cars.
    Naeema looked on in growing surprise as the woman scratched her ample ass in the brightly colored leggings she wore, stepped up onto the sidewalk, and pushed her tangled and matted weave from her face.
    Naeema’s eyes widened when she recognized one of her neighbors. Coko stepped up onto the sidewalk and stumbled, falling forward. “Well, damn,” Naeema gasped as she rushed down the stairs in her bare feet. She struggled brieflywith the wayward gate of the fence before running down the street to kneel beside the woman.
    â€œWho da fuck are you?” Coko asked as she struggled to rise.
    Naeema gagged at the stench of her breath, offended as hell. It smelled like a mix of shit and everything else fucked up in the world. The fuck?
    â€œGet the fuck off me. Shit!”
    Oh, to hell with this stank-breath bitch . . .
    Naeema rose and stepped back while Coko fought like a bitch to rise to her feet in the scuffed and tattered heels she wore. Her movements made the funk of her unwashed ass rise up in the summer heat. Naeema didn’t know what was worse: her breath or her twat smelling like cat piss and old sex juices.
    Long after Coko moved up the steps and into her brick house just two doors down from her own, Naeema stood there thinking of the demons that had chased yet another woman into the arms of drug abuse. It was clear the death of her man, Keno, had pushed her with far too much ease toward getting high. Word was thick on the streets that Keno pissed off one of the factions of the Mafia when he took over an underground gambling and loan-sharking business after his best friend, Dane, got busted by the police. The only thing everyone knew for sure was somebody blew his ass up in a warehouse explosion.
    In the year since Keno’s death, Coko had slid from being a sexy thick chocolate chick to an ashy shadow of her former self. Even the little Asian “thot”—that ho over there—that used to trail behind her had stopped coming around. Still, though Naeema knew she was busy on the trail of her son’skiller, she’d had no clue Coko had fallen off so much. She was strung the fuck out and Naeema would bet her light bill money that some of her stench was from tricking to support her habit.
    She gave the little brick house one last look over her shoulder as she made her way back to her own home. Naeema wasn’t one to judge. She had come close as fuck to crossing the line into addiction herself. These days she relied on her medicinal weed to elevate her but she could just as easily have become Coko years ago when she was young and trying anything a young boy with a hard dick and a slick tongue offered her.
    Drugs wasn’t shit to play with because there was no way to win in that game.
    She jogged up the stairs of her house and entered, pausing long enough to pick up her weed pipe before she lifted the door and then firmly shut it by pressing her body against it. Feeling the effects of the weed, she set the dick on the dresser and opened her Louis Vuitton handbag—the only authentic bag she owned. She pushed aside the wad of fifty-dollar bills—her share of the take from the bank—Bas had surprised her with to grab one of her two cell phones. One was a touch screen that she’d had for over a year. The other was a twenty-dollar throwaway or burner phone she used just to chitchat with the Make Money Crew. The cheap flip phone was lit up. She had three missed calls from Vivica.
    â€œFuck her,” Naeema muttered, dropping down to sit on the stool in front of her full-length mirror.
    Honestly, she knew she shouldn’t be so hard on Vivica. When she saw her name