The Black Widow Clique

by Genesis Woods

  When my father made the announcement that he was passing the torch on to me and crowning me head of the company, everyone was happy about his choice, including Benji. But even though he was happy for me, it seemed at times that Benji was still competing against me for my father’s accolades. This explained why he had crashed the meeting I had today with the Japanese investors. Ten minutes before we were to end our presentation, there he was, waltzing into the conference room like he owned the place, then charming these uptight assholes with his fluent Japanese and suggesting we come to this strip club to celebrate the start of a beautiful business deal. As much as I hated how he’d popped up at the meeting at the last minute, I was kind of glad he had. I didn’t think the translator I’d hired to translate at the meeting had done a good job in the two hours we spent going back and forth with negotiations. It had taken Benji only five minutes to come in and seal the deal, and now he had us at this upscale strip club, enjoying drinks and looking at all these scantily clad women. Well, at least they were.

  “So you will have all the paperwork done by when, Roman?” Benji asked, breaking me from my thoughts.

  When I looked up, all eyes were on me, including Marques’s. “What did you say?”

  “Dude, you zoned out again,” Marques whispered in my ear.

  Benji smirked and said something to the investors in Japanese that made them laugh.

  “Yew like stwip club, hey?” one of the investors asked me in his broken English.

  “No, not really. But if you like it, I love it,” I replied.

  All six heads turned to Benji for a translation. After he finished speaking to them, they all laughed again, then summoned the waitress over for more drinks.

  “Can we get two more bottles of the Decadence Gold, the assorted sushi platter, some of those filet mignon sliders, and a side of those crispy onion rings?” Benji told the waitress after our clients had ordered. “And make sure you put it all on the boss man’s tab here,” he added, patting me on my chest and shaking my shoulders.

  The waitress turned to me. “And what about for you, handsome?” she asked. She was a nice-looking girl, no doubt about it, but I wasn’t checking for her at all. Given the different shades of purple in her hair, the tons of makeup on her face, and her eagerness to get me to notice her, I had already decided she was more Benji’s speed than mine.

  The whole night she’d been over here in our section, and she’d been trying to get my attention, which I was used to, but I wasn’t about to bite. I didn’t like a pushy woman or the type of woman who came on to a man before he came on to her. Let me make eye contact with you first to let you know I’m semi interested, and then let me take it from there, I had kept thinking. Girls like her were the ones my uncle Kazimir had always told me to watch out for. “If a woman has the balls to approach a man for sex, she will use those same balls to kill him,” he would say in his thick Russian accent.

  In answer to her question, I told her I was just fine, and then I continued to go through the e-mails on my phone as she seductively licked her lips and eyed me up and down.

  “If there’s anything else that you do need, Mr. Black, please know that I won’t have a problem making sure you get it,” she said and twisted her hip so that a small bit of her ass was poking out in my direction. “Anything you need, I’m here to make it happen.”

  Ignoring her, I continued to mess around on my phone until she finally got the picture and walked away.

  Marques stared at me. “Man, if you don’t want her, I’ll sho’ take her.”

  Benji leaned over. “You or my little brother wouldn’t know what to do with a girl like that,” he said as we all looked in the direction in which the waitress had gone.

  “Yo, Roman can take her down, just like the both of us could. Right, Ro?” Marques said, looking at me.

  I shrugged. “You already know she’s not even my type.”

  “But shawty’s bad, though. You gotta give her that,” Marques noted.

  “Shawty?” Benji asked. “I see you’ve been watching Sunset Park again.” He laughed.

  “Man . . . fuck you, Benji,” Marques growled. “You know the majority of my family is from New York. So it’s only natural that I pick up on some of their lingo.”

  “Lingo?” Benji shook his head. “Marques, make up your mind, bruh. You’re either from the East Coast or the West Coast. Stop mixing the two.”

  I had to laugh at that, because Marques did switch up the way he talked a lot. I noticed it all the time. But I was so used to it now, that it didn’t bother me at all. I guessed he could feel the same way about me as well, seeing as I could switch from English to Russian in a heartbeat whenever my mother’s side of the family came round. Well, more specifically, my uncle Kazi.

  “Up for a little friendly competition, fellas?” Benji asked after he finished explaining something to the investors.

  “What kind of competition?” Marques asked.

  Benji smiled and looked at Marques, then over at me. “Let’s see who can get the waitress’s number before we leave, and get her into his bed before the end of the night.”

  “Awww, man, that ain’t no friendly competition,” Marques replied, waving Benji off. “We already know she wants Roman’s ass. I bet she gives him her number and address written on her panties before we leave for the night, without him even asking.”

  Benji looked back at the waitress, who was looking back at us, and rubbed his hands together, fire blazing in his eyes and a small smirk on his face. “Five hundred dollars says I’ll get her number and have her on the front page of every gossip blog tomorrow morning, when she leaves my house in the same thing she has on right now,” Benji offered.

  Marques thought about the bet for a minute before he looked at me, then back at Benji. “I can’t get with that. But I say five hundred dollars you don’t get her number at all and she disses you for Roman.”

  Benji stuck his hand out and shook Marques’s hand. “That’s a bet. Now watch me work my magic. Oh, and your ass better have my money in the morning. I know you just got access to all that trust-fund money, so you’re good for it.”

  I shook my head as the two of them continued to go back and forth with this silly bet. Needless to say, by the end of the night, Marques was five hundred dollars richer and Benji had to settle for taking one of the strippers home instead. The waitress, whom I now knew as Fiona, did slip her number to me before we left, but I crumpled up the napkin she had written it on and threw it right in the trash. Like I said before, she wasn’t my type at all, which was kind of weird in a way, because the stripper who had run off the stage earlier wasn’t my type, either, but for some reason, I couldn’t shake her from my thoughts. Those gray eyes and full, plump lips were the last thing I saw that night before I finally made it home and fell asleep.

  Melonee

  Lying in my bed, I closed my eyes and prayed that whoever was knocking at my door would leave at any second. Unfortunately for me, my prayers weren’t going to be answered anytime today. For the past fifteen minutes, someone had been banging on my door as if they were the police, and I had yet to get up and see who it was.

  The reason for that was that I already knew who was crazy enough to be knocking on my door at six in the morning. Only one person would try to piss me off to the highest degree because I did something she didn’t like.

  The loud buzzing of my phone told me that my unwelcome guest had switched to calling my cell phone back-to-back since I wasn’t answering the door at all. I reluctantly answered the phone.

  “Melonee! I know you hear me out here! If you don’t want me to wake the rest of your building up, you better come open up this damn door!” she screamed in my ear.

  Shit! I silently cursed. Fiona knew that these assholes around here would have no problem calling a residents’ meeting and fining me for the loud disturbance or, better yet, voting to put me out. Yet here her loud-ass mouth was.

  The residents had never had a problem out of me un
til I had a few shouting matches with Proof a few months back, and that had ended with me paying a nice amount of change for the home-owners’ rule violation and receiving a warning letter signed by the HOA and informing me that if I broke one of the rules again, I would be asked to leave. Well, if they asked me to move out, it wouldn’t really matter one way or the other. I still had my three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom home in Baldwin Park, which I stayed at in between jobs, as well as my granny’s house, which I had paid off a couple of years ago. Of course she didn’t know that. The check she sent to her mortgage company went right back into an account I had set up for her when I got my first big insurance payout. She had a debit card for it and everything. I had told her that it was my account and that I wanted her to have access to it just in case the munchkin needed anything while I was away for all those months. Every now and then she used her card, but other than that, the money was just sitting there, gaining interest.

  The house phone I had installed only for security reasons began to ring, which told me that someone from the HOA and or the management was calling. Instead of dealing with them this early, I sluggishly got up from my bed and walked to the front of my townhome. As soon as I swung the door open, I was met by a very pissed-off Fiona and a smirking Cowboy.

  “I knew your ass would get up if I called that landline,” Fiona said, walking into my house uninvited. “Thanks for getting me that number, bro.”

  I didn’t even look at Cowboy as he followed behind his sister and made himself comfortable on my couch. I should’ve known his ass had my unlisted number somewhere.

  Normally, I would go and slip on some shorts or something, seeing as I had on only a white wife beater—with no bra—panties, and my yellow Tweety Bird socks, and I had a male guest, but I knew that Cowboy wasn’t checking for me. For as long as I’d known him, he had never brought a girl around, which had led me to believe that he liked playing with dick rather than pussy. So seeing a little of my skin wouldn’t do anything to him.

  “Fee, what I tell you about coming around here with all that loud shit? You already know what went down the last time with Proof’s ass. Do you want me to get kicked out or something?” I said as I sat on my lounge chair across from Cowboy.

  Being that I wasn’t 100 percent sure of his sexual preference, I did pick up one of my big decorative pillows and place it on my lap so that it covered my nipples, which were starting to poke through my shirt, and any view of my sweet peach he could possibly get by sitting across from me.

  “Bitch, please! It’s been over a week since your ass ran off the stage like Flo Jo, and you’ve been MIA ever since. I’ve called, Proof has called, hell, even Granny has called a few times, but you haven’t picked up for anyone. What if something was wrong with Madison?”

  I rolled my eyes. Her ass could be so dramatic sometimes. Fiona knew damn well that if something was wrong with my daughter, Proof’s ass would’ve busted this door down to get to me or would’ve blown my phone up to tell me something like that. Shit, my granny had the house phone number but had never called it once, so I’d figured that whatever it was that they wanted wasn’t that important. Besides, I knew that Fiona, Proof, and the rest of the clique who had been hitting me up only wanted to know what had happened that night I left the club.

  Fiona shook her head. “Do you see this shit, Cowboy? The bitch doesn’t even have anything to say. The only reason I knew her ass wasn’t dead was that she been watching movies and TV shows from my Netflix and Hulu accounts.”

  I looked over at Cowboy, who was sitting there on the couch, laughing his ass off. He had always been a little silly, but the boy was smart as hell, especially when it came to that computer shit. I didn’t know the gist of everything he could do, but I did know that the boy could find out any and everything about you, from your professional life to your personal stuff, in a matter of minutes. He was the person from whom we used to get those crazy personal details about our marks, details that they had secretly thought no one knew about. Like, for instance, no one ever knew that my deceased husband, Douglas, had a real big fetish for feet. All I had had to do was get my toes done with red nail polish and he’d give me anything I wanted, including adding me to all his insurance policies after only a month of dating. Cowboy had found his profile, which was under a different name, on one of those freaky fetish Web sites, and we had used that against him.

  I looked at the time on my phone. “So is this why you came to my house at seven o’clock in the morning, banging on my door like you were the police and yelling at the top of your lungs like a crazy woman? You wanted to bitch about me watching movies and TV shows on your Netflix and Hulu accounts?”

  “Mel, if you don’t stop acting stupid, I’m going to really beat your ass, on top of the ass whipping I already owe you for that little stunt you pulled. By the way, Raul said if you ever want to strip again, you need to have your ass back to work by tomorrow night, or he’s going to let you go.”

  I gave her the stinkiest look I could muster. “Tell Raul he can kiss my natural black ass. I’m never going back to that club again. We will just have to find some other way to get at Roman Black.”

  Cowboy and Fiona shared a look, then turned their attention back to me.

  “And why, may I ask, don’t you want to go back?” Fiona asked as she turned on the bar stool she was sitting on and shook her head. “Melonee, this could be one of our biggest scores. We could all actually stop doin’ this shit if everything goes according to plan, and you can finally find that fairy-tale love you’ve always talked about having. Why do you wanna fuck it all up? Because your conscience decided to kick in on the night we been planning for, for the past three months?” She stood up from her seat, walked over to where I was sitting, and sat on the arm of the lounge chair. “If the money isn’t enough motivation for you anymore, just think about that ‘happily ever after’ life fit for a princess you’ve been promising Madison.”

  It was just like Fiona to bring up the one thing she knew I’d always wanted, in an effort to entice me into getting back on board with this whole thing. I mean, I understood everything she had just said. We could all finally start living our own lives and doing whatever it was that we all had dreamed of doing, but for some reason, I didn’t want to go through with this anymore. I didn’t know if it had something to do with the way the guy in the red T-shirt, the one I thought was a bodyguard, had looked at me that night, but something just didn’t feel right about it anymore. The look he gave me with those piercing green eyes had made me want to straighten my life out and do better. His aura had made my whole body freeze up and relax at the same time, and then the disappointing look on his face when I was about to remove my top had made me feel like shit. I had felt all these different emotions in the presence of a man whom I didn’t know from Adam and who had probably already forgotten about the ho-ass stripper who ran off the stage in the middle of her set.

  “Look, Fee, to keep it one hundred, I didn’t want to be a stripper in the first place. I agreed to it only because I wanted to be a team player and do my part. Yeah, the money was good, and I enjoyed meeting some of the girls that I met, but I can’t get with that again. I’m down to doing anything else so we can get this money and finally be done with this shit, but if stripping is my only option, then y’all can count me out.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Sorry.”

  A look of annoyance flashed across Fiona’s face before it was replaced with a small smile, and then she nodded her head.

  “Lucky for you, Cowboy was able to get access to Roman’s schedule for the next few weeks. It just so happens that he’s scheduled to attend some kind of charity function on Friday night, and as of yesterday, you and I will be in attendance.”

  “Why do we have to attend the charity thing? You didn’t get his number that night at the club?” I asked.

  She licked her lips, then smoothed her hand over her purple-hued hair, which was in a slick ponytail. The black one-piece jumpsuit she had on hugged every s
mall curve of her body. Fiona was a bad chick and would probably make any man she met and fell in love with happy, but her mind had always been and would always be on money. Those green pieces of paper came before any and everything, including her heart.

  “Roman was a bit occupied with the Japanese men he was entertaining, so I never got the chance to talk to him or slide him my number. However, his brother, Benjamin”—she smiled and shook her head—“that boy is something else. He kept flirting with me the whole night and wouldn’t leave me alone about getting my number before he left.”

  I thought about Roman and how he had looked in that French-cut designer suit he had on. Yeah, with his dark hair, dark eyes, and sexy chiseled face, he’d looked fine as he talked to those Japanese men, but he was no match for his . . . Wait, I thought. I hoped the dude in the red T-shirt wasn’t Roman’s brother, Benjamin. I needed to take a look at that file again. Maybe I could find out who that dude really was, figure out if he was a Black.

  “Um, Mel, I know that look on your face,” Fiona said as she looked from me to Cowboy, then back to me. “Is there something you need to tell us? Do you not want to strip anymore because you met somebody? The way you were just looking is the same way you used to look whenever Proof’s dumb ass would come around. All love struck and shit.”

  Just then Cowboy cleared his throat and sat up straight in his seat, which caused me to turn my attention to him. When our eyes connected, he smirked. Cowboy and Proof weren’t the best of friends, but they had hung out together a lot when we were younger. However, the minute Proof and I became a couple, Cowboy had kind of distanced himself from us. It wasn’t until Fiona and I had thought of putting together the Black Widow Clique that he started coming around more. When we’d found out he was a whiz kid with the computer, we knew we needed someone with his talents on the team.

  I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it. Only to do the exact same thing two more times. I didn’t think I was in love with Red T-shirt, but was I? How could I be? There was no such thing as love at first sight, correct? I mean, it would probably be totally one sided on my part, but still, there was no such thing, right?