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don’t do this. I promise to be faithful to you. I love you. I promise to come see you, and I’ll write to you all the time.”
    “I don’t want you to come see me. I don’t want you to write to me. You are a young, beautiful woman. You have the rest of your life in front of you.”
    I broke down crying hard. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “I don’t have a life without you. I need you. You’re my whole life.” I couldn’t breathe. How could he be saying this to me?
    “I can’t be a part of your life anymore. That life is over for me.”
    “No,” I cried. “Your life is not over. Don’t say that.”
    “My life is inside now, with my father and my uncles. It’s like this is where I always been goin’ all my life,” Lorenzo said as the deputy opened the door. “I’m dead to you now.”
    “That’s it,” the deputy said, as he uncuffed Lorenzo from the table. “Sorry, ma’am, but it’s time to go.”
    Lorenzo stood and put his hands behind his back. “Good-bye, Nina,” Lorenzo said as the deputy put him in chains.
    “What am I supposed to do now?”
    Lorenzo smiled at me and mouthed the words sell drugs .
     
Five
    When Lorenzo was sentenced to life without parole, the reality of my situation finally began to sink in. I was alone, I was about to be broke, and I was depressed about it. I stayed in bed for a few days. When I did get out of bed, I wouldn’t come out of the apartment. Everybody came by to holla; make sure I was all right. I told them all the same thing: I was fine and just needed some time to get myself together.
    One afternoon, a friend named Amel came by to see me. She worked as a masseuse at the spa that I used to go to. She had been my masseuse for the last couple of years. I knew she did a little private dancing on the side, but there was a whole other side to her that I never would have even suspected. When an attendant walked in on her while she was having sex with one of her customers, she got fired. And yeah, that customer was a woman.
    It took me a minute to come to grips with that fact that the woman who had her hands all over my body was, as she called it, a woman who believed in choices. She said she hated the term bisexual. By the time that happened, we’d become friends. Our relationship had gone beyond her providing me with a service, so I accepted her. We could be cool as long as she never came at me like that, and she never did.
    In spite of that, Lorenzo would have freaked if he knew. Although he’d never admit it to me, gay and bisexual woman intimidated him for some reason. “Maybe it’s because we come at a woman on a level that he could never understand , much less compete with,” Amel told me once, but that shit was too deep for me to even wrap my mind around.
    Naturally, I couldn’t afford to pay her for her services now, so she dropped in to gossip and smoke a blunt. “What are you gonna do now, Nina?”
    “I don’t know. I’m not ready to sell drugs, and I’m definitely not ready to get a job,” I said, but that was exactly what I should have been ready to do. I had a degree in business administration. I could hear Lorenzo telling me that I was a young, beautiful woman, and that I had the rest of my life in front of me. Still, I wasn’t ready to make that choice.
    “Why don’t you dance?” Amel asked me.
    “I never even pointed my mind in that direction, but I could damn sure use the money.”
    “And it’s good money. You’re a very pretty woman. You’re young, your breasts are big and firm, and your stomach is flat.”
    “And I have the kind of ass that makes men follow me around.”
    “You’ll get nothin’ but paid. Believe that.”
    “Okay, you talked me into it. Who do I need to talk to?”
    “Don’t worry, Nina. I’ll take care of everything.” Amel went on to explain that she worked for an agency that provided dancers for private parties.
    “Y’all just dancin’, right?”
    “Some of the girls sell pussy; some