Free Forever a Hustler's Wife by Nikki Turner Page B

Des.
    “Getting your freak on, huh?”
    “Trying to, but you holding me up. Cock-blocking just like a lil’ sister would,” Yarni added.
    “Well, let’s definitely do breakfast, or lunch, or maybe even dinner, depending how he put it on you.”
    “You mean how I put it on him,” Yarni said, giving Des a sexy smile.
    “A’ight, kill it,” Des told Yarni, no longer trying to control his excitement at being with his wife again. “You can jabber with your sister on your own time, not during our quality time. No cell phones allowed.”
    “Well, call me in the morning or whenever,” Bambi said. “Go handle your B-I.”
    As Yarni was finishing the call with her sister, Des’s cell phone rang. “You need to turn your phone off while you making demands on me,” she said.
    Des looked at the caller ID on his phone. “Baby, let me get this. It’s Sister Khadija giving me the nightly update.”
    Sister Khadija was Des’s personal assistant. Her husband, Ahmeen, had been Des’s cellie, and she kept things in order for Des. She was organized and extremely loyal to Ahmeen, who was doing life in the penitentiary, and she was also loyal to Des. Des looked out for a bunch of guys in the penitentiary, men who didn’t have any business being incarcerated in the first place and weren’t leaving there unless someone broke them out or pulled a legislative Houdini. Des knew that he had been spared from the system by the grace of God, but some of the brothers he met were doomed, and one of the things he vowed after doing a dime in the joint was that he wouldn’t forsake them.
    From the first day his lungs inhaled the sweet taste of freedom, he had kept true to his word. That was part of how Sister Khadija came into play. She kept up with the inmates’ kids’ birthdays and made sure Des sent birthday cards, paid for parties, or supplied whatever a specific situation called for. She reminded Des what needed to be taken care of. She kept up with the new addresses when his comrades were moved to other prisons as well as got money orders to ensure his friends’ inmate accounts were plentiful. That was the lightweight part of her job.
    The heavyweight part was making sure that Des’s boy, Slim, kept his girls in check. She made sure that the cars were serviced and that there were rides and wake-up calls for the girls who smuggled his drugs into the penitentiary, an endeavor that generated a net profit of over $150,000 a month. Then there was Des’s ghetto philanthropy work and the money he blew on attorneys to work on his loyal comrades’ dead-end, sometimes hopeless cases. Thanks to Des, some little white boy was able to go to private school because Des was pouring money into the hands of his appeal-fighting father. Keeping up with the attorneys and their caseloads was all Sister Khadija, too.
    Yarni had no problem with Sister Khadija, mainly because she was the ultimate Muslim woman. She kept her head wrapped and was always so pleasant and so submissive to her husband. There were days that Yarni felt she could learn a few things from her.
    Des answered and listened as Sister Khadija filled him in on the work that was supposed to be done at the shop. “Brother Des, I forgot to tell you that the phone company is coming tomorrow to transfer the lines over to digital.”
    “I’ll be there first thing in the morning,” Des informed her, then hung up.
    “You gonna cut our date off early?” Yarni whined.
    “Sister Khadija just called and said that they were going to be digging up around the office, and I need to be there.”
    “I understand but—”
    Des cut her off with a passionate kiss. “We’ll deal with that tomorrow,” he said. “Right now is about you and me.”
    Yarni smiled. She placed a gentle kiss on his lips and whispered, “I’ll be right back.”
    Yarni grabbed the overnight bag that she always kept at her office and hurried into the bathroom. She returned a few minutes later wearing a short, red