Hold Me in Contempt

by Wendy Williams

  Nodding, I watched the silver car and the sun bouncing off its every surface. We were stopped at a light again, and I peered into the darkened back windows to try to see inside. I wasn’t looking for anything. Just maybe something. A rapper. A face I knew that I could tell someone else about later. Tamika and I always shared our celebrity sightings in the city.

  I am sure I was almost leaning out my window when all of a sudden the back window of the Bentley came down a little and smoke rolled out in sweet marijuana-laced waves. There was someone laughing inside, a white face with a thin beard. I thought I knew the face but couldn’t recall how and when I’d seen it. That’s when the man started laughing and the tilt of the head took me back to the bar that night with Tamika. Back to Damaged Goods.

  “King?” I recalled aloud. “King!” I felt a happy flutter in my stomach—as if I was seeing an old friend. Or had known him beyond our two-minute meeting in a dank bar in Brooklyn.

  “That’s right! The King of Kings!” the driver repeated my words when the light changed and we started moving again.

  “No, King! King!” I pointed to the car like he had any idea who I was talking about. “Stop!”

  King must’ve heard me, because he looked around outside the window.

  I waved and said his name again, but his car was speeding up and mine, of course, was slowing down.

  “The King?” the driver repeated again, tapping his brakes. “That’s right! We stop for the Lord! Brake for the Lord!”

  “Never mind. He’s gone.” I watched as the shiny silver car rolled away.

  I stopped at the store in the lobby of my building. Watched as the clerk slid a cold bottle of Jameson into a paper bag. He’d asked why I was home from work so early. Mentioned that he didn’t think he’d ever seen me during the day before. I smiled politely and tucked the bottle into my work bag before heading toward the elevator. Besides the doorman, no one was around. And it was so quiet, I could hear the elevators sliding up and down the cords between floors.

  As I waited I tried to free my mind of Paul in my office. Take a week off? Two weeks? What was he saying about me? I had no way of knowing anything was going to happen to Bernard Richard. If Paul had seen him sitting in the conference room staring off like a meth zombie, he would’ve made the same decision. This wasn’t about me or my work. I wasn’t burnt out. I was moving on with my life and not falling for his lies anymore, and he couldn’t handle that. God, what men will do when they feel threatened. But to bring it to my job? To humiliate me in front of simple-ass Easter Summer and Chief Elliot, who probably wanted to see me go down because I’m a woman? I couldn’t let Paul get away with that. He was right that I wouldn’t escalate the situation and accuse him of sexual harassment. I actually had just as much to lose in that kind of battle as he did. Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas proved to all working women that there was no predetermined victor when women stepped up with information about sexual advances, no matter how crass or vile, against men in power. In spite of his nasty-ass Coke-bottle pubic-hair comments, Thomas went on to the Supreme Court, and Hill and her tired, worried face were hardly seen beyond a short list of random television interviews and late-night news panels. I’m sure that wasn’t the life she’d imagined as a rising star when she took the job beneath Thomas at the Department of Education.

  And as much as I hated to agree with anything Paul said, he wasn’t lying about my part in our affair. I’m a grown woman, and I know there were two people in our tango, and as many accusations as I could chuck at him, he could lob double in my direction. Still, however we handled whatever happened between us needed to happen where it started. I wasn’t about to put my career on the line for that.

  Like the lobby, my apartment was quiet with noontime nothingness. In the kitchen, I opened the Jameson and took three shots to calm myself before pouring a glass with three ice cubes. I took the glass and bottle to the couch, where I looked at the blank television screen and thought to turn it on but decided against it. Instead, I looked at my reflection, alone and frozen like a Zoloft commercial for single women who’d failed at everything. I remembered King calling me a queen. Me not answering and walking out of the bar like I didn’t know he was talking to me. Maybe I knew he was joking or thought he couldn’t be right. Some queen I would be. I couldn’t hold anything in its place. All this spectacle in my life, and there I was with no power to do anything about it.

  I poured another glass and lay back on the pillow I sometimes used to ease the pain in my lower back. I needed a plan. I could get everything back in place if I could just focus. I thought about King and how he moved with so much confidence around Damaged Goods. The woman behind the bar laughing at his jokes. His eyes direct but relaxed in a place where most men who looked like him would be either unwelcome or placed under constant speculation that could end in a horrible fight to prove his masculinity.

  I finished my drink, but the ice cubes were still there, so I poured a little more Jameson and lay back again.

  Men and their masculinity. Dr. Davis and Paul acting like I was the reason for their problems. Like I had the issue. I’d fought to get where I was. Every single step of the way I’d fought. Through college. Law school. I’d handled those cases all by myself, and now I was out of line? Me? I needed a break? To go sit in the fucking corner with a dunce cap on? Fuck them!

  I drained the glass and slid it onto the coffee table. I didn’t need a break. I needed everyone off my back, so I could move on. I placed the pillow in the small of my back. My eyes closed and everything went spinning into a disorienting tornado of images that led to someplace in my memory, in my past.

  It was Ronald’s apartment.

  Kim 2 was sitting on the side of the bed in one of those thin bras from American Apparel that only girls with A-cups could wear. I was still in my green sundress, standing at the door with my hands behind my back, looking at her. The creamy little breasts that led to ruddy nipples, brown and red at the same time.

  Ronald had insisted we leave the lights on. In a group text message between the three of us, he’d said he wanted to remember this. To see everything and record it in his memory in case it never happened again. Kim 2 responded with a smiley face and “SURE” in all caps.

  Bassnectar was playing on the radio beside the bed. The music Ronald usually worked out to. He was in the bathroom off the other side of the room, and I could hear him taking deep breaths, like he was doing pull-ups on the bar he’d installed in the doorway.

  Kim 2 stood and ambled to me. Through her thin panties peeked a freshly shaved vagina. I felt myself back up a little, like she was a nude stranger, because that was how it felt.

  “Calm down,” she said, taking my hand and slipping something into my palm. “Take that. Lie down and just relax. I’ll handle this.”

  “What is it?” I looked into my palm and found a round yellow pill with a happy face etched into it.

  “A little Ex for your nerves. You’ll need it.” She laughed. Took the pill from my hand and held it up to my mouth until I opened wide and made a bed of my tongue. “It won’t take long.” Her words slurred into a cadence that matched the music. “Just relax.”

  She pulled me to the bed and told me to lie down.

  “It’s nothing. Just remember you’re doing it for him. Right?” she whispered into my ear, looking at the bathroom door. I nodded. “It’ll be great. Legendary.”

  My head was pulled back onto the pillow by something strong and fluid inside of me. There was a rush from my toes to my brain and then needles dancing from my palms up my arms.

  Kim 2’s laughing turned into the music, and where she was positioned at the foot of the bed, I couldn’t tell if she was dancing or standing. There were just her red nipples and nude, pubescent vagina first under and then outside of her bra and panties.

  “You’re naked,” I said, trying to lift my hands to point at her, but I couldn’t move.

  “You are, too!” She cackled like a witch into the music and pointe
d at me.

  I looked down at my breasts parted on my chest, so cold I was covered in goosebumps. “I’m cold,” I said, wondering where my green dress had gone, and hearing in my voice a slurring whine that made me sound more like Kim 2 than Kim 1.

  “Bitch, you’re fucked up already,” Kim 2 said. “You’ll be fine. It’ll pass in a few minutes. Then you’ll be ready to play.”

  She started dancing, and I tried to focus on her body, to keep pace with something so I didn’t pass out from the pressure in my head. My eyelids were so fucking heavy, and my brain was dragging my mind into the pillow with it.

  Ronald walked out of the bathroom naked with his dick fully erect and tapping at the nappy black hairs over his protruding belly button.

  “What? Hold up!” I tried to get up to tell him he was naked and I wasn’t ready for that, but I hardly made it to my elbows before I fell back again.

  “Oh, you’re already ready for us?” Kim 2 said, sauntering over to my first lover with a grin. “And here I was thinking about how we were going to get your dick.” She laughed.

  Ronald looked at me and sort of smirked before Kim 2 was in his face and turning his chin to her with her index finger.

  With his attention, she got up on her tippy-toes and started sucking on his neck and stroking his dick.

  “You’re so hard,” she purred between nips at his neck, running her fist up and down the shaft of his dick with a visibly tight grasp, making him moan.

  The weights at the back of my head were dissipating, and I managed to sit up.

  “You okay, baby?” Ronald walked over to the side of the bed and stood just close enough to reach over and touch my hair.

  “She’s feeling it now. Aren’t you, Kiki?” Kim 2 walked over to me too and pushed the finger she’d been holding over the tip of Ronald’s dick into my mouth. “Suck it,” she demanded naughtily.

  I looked at Ronald and he nodded.

  And then my lips were squeezing her finger as she teased it in and out of my mouth and the salty taste of Ronald’s pre-cum mixed with my saliva.

  Ronald bent down to kiss me, but Kim 2 pulled her finger from my mouth and slipped it into his. Then she came back to me and started dipping it in and out of each of our mouths, teasing us toward each other until finally our tongues met and we were kissing intensely and deeply. I started sucking Ronald’s tongue, feeling like all I wanted was something in my mouth to ease the vibrations coursing through my body from the tip of my clitoris to my tonsils.

  Kim 2 had climbed on top of me and was straddling my waist with her knees, popping her pussy to Bassnectar’s “Wildstyle Method.”

  “Suck his dick,” she said rather wistfully as she swayed her hands off-beat in the air like a drunken belly dancer. “I want to see it.”

  Ronald stopped kissing me and stood erect with his hard dick. I stared and tried to remember what I was doing. Why I was there.

  “Do it,” Kim 2 instructed then. “I know you’re not scared. Don’t act like you haven’t sucked that dick before. I always hear Ronald moaning through the wall at our place. Let me see. Come on.”

  Ronald wrapped his hand around the back of my neck and pulled my face toward his head. I looked up into his eyes, and he smiled, leaning back on one foot. It was his birthday. This was his birthday wish. I remembered. A threesome with my roommate. The last thing he wanted to do to sow his wild oats before getting engaged. Just the thought of that opened my mouth wide, and I took all of that dick into my cheeks until the back of my tonsils burned and I felt like I might cough up the strawberries and red wine I’d had earlier.

  “Fuck yeah,” Kim 2 coached like an accomplished porn star as I rolled my lips back and forth and up and down his venous shaft as it pounded into me so many times that tears trickled into the creases of my eyes. Ronald had been the only man I’d ever had sex with, the only penis ever in my mouth, but I’d practiced this art to completion too many times to fail—and I certainly was not about to fail in front of Kim 2 and her ruddy nipples and buff pussy.

  Ronald’s penis became more rigid in my mouth, and I held my breath to stop the fluttering in my tonsils. I thought of that train coming into the station at 1:25 and began to disappear into the sensations detonating in my pussy.

  “Fucking, bitch,” Ronald said, holding my neck in place. We caught our usual rhythm, and first my lips and then my tongue and then my tonsils and then my throat went to work. I pulled his dick past the bump at the back of my throat by tilting my head up and took him down my neck.

  “Oh shit, you’re turning me on,” Kim 2 said as she played with her vagina over mine.

  Ronald looked at her desirously as I gave my throat a rest by jerking him hard with my hand. His pupils rolled around in melting swirls.

  “I want to see you eat her pussy,” he said, dribbling, trying to focus in on Kim 2’s mouth.

  She laughed demurely, tilted her head to the side like a Catholic schoolgirl, and stuck her index finger into her mouth.

  Since Ronald had started talking about a possible threesome with my roommate, I’d imagined what it might be like: I’d dreamed up awkwardness and shy playful touching that ended with Kim 2 running out of the room. We’d laugh and go back to our usual one-on-one knowing we’d been there and done that and could move on with our lives into forever. I’d agreed to it because I knew Ronald had a little crush on Kim 2. Why wouldn’t he? She was exotic and wild and experienced. But still, not what he’d want in a wife. Far from it. She had no accolades behind her name. Hadn’t suffered with him through law school. Won the ADA position he’d failed to win. She had bad credit and little more in the world than good looks. He wanted to fuck her and that was it. I could give him that and we could be done.

  I tried to keep reminding myself of that. Kim 2 was no threat to my ascension. This was now, but later would be more. I tried so hard, but in every second of that Ecstasy-laced night there was proof that I was lying to myself. This show was on the road, and I wasn’t making it to the next stop.

  Kim 2 climbed off me and jerked my legs open like she’d done it many times before. Sitting in the middle of the V my legs made on the bed, she tickled her hands up the insides of my calves as Ronald and I looked on at the show. She was in her space. Eyes on her. Live on the runway.

  She lifted my knees and pushed my ankles back, making little pyramids of my legs. Then, like a stretching Siamese, she rolled her breasts down to the empty space on the sheet in front of my pussy. As her lips neared my lips she was blowing and whispering at my vagina, words that turned to senseless purrs in my Ecstasy-sheltered ears. She lapped at my clitoris hungrily.

  “Your clit is hard,” she said, face-to-face with my pussy. “Let’s see if she’s wet.” She looked up at Ronald before pulling her right index finger from beneath my legs and slipping it into my vagina, where she danced her pad from a hook to an arrow like she was beckoning something within me.

  My legs and my lips opened wider.

  “Yeah, she’s wet,” she confirmed to Ronald, and then she disappeared beneath my curly mound and became only sensations I couldn’t see, and then I was riven, wide and flowing. Cake on a plate.

  I’d lost focus, falling back into the bed and closing my eyes, going to a black space with explosions of red and violet beneath my eyelids. Kim 2’s mouth was steady, sucking me hard, but I still heard her whispering into me. I heard more utterances of pleasure and recognized the voice as my own.

  When I opened my eyes, Ronald was standing in front of me at the foot of the bed. His head was hanging back and his chin pointed at the ceiling. His chest was rocking to me and away in short, rhythmic taps. His arms were stretched forward and hanging low to where I couldn’t see his hands because of how flat my head was on the bed.

  Then I felt rocking between my thighs, and the whispering I’d heard inside of me became heavy panting and moaning in desirous agony.

  I pushed back up on my elbows to find Ronald’s fingers and discover what had become of Kim 2 betwee
n my thighs.

  Gradually, as I came up, I saw my boyfriend’s lower arms, wrists, and then hands spread apart on either side of Kim 2’s ass as he bucked into her so hard she screamed.

  In and out my boyfriend went, and Kim 2’s screams got louder and more thunderous, like something great was swelling inside of her and this was the preamble of what was to come.

  She wrapped her hands up around my legs to hold herself in place and leverage her weight, and I felt her push back into his dick.

  “Fuck this pussy. Fuck it hard!” she directed him with such force, it was nearly demonic.

  Ronald looked down at me with no expression and bucked hard and hard and hard and hard at her ass, and she stayed right in position.

  “Yes, give me that good dick. You know how I like it,” she let out in breathy syllables.

  Clouds parted in my mind and opened, and the significance of those words would forever haunt me.

  But Ronald kept bucking and my roommate held tighter to my legs, and soon her nails were digging into my flesh like razor blades.

  “Kim! Kim!” Ronald cried, flushing deeply. He was calling my name. Twice each time. Two times. Two. “Kim! Kim!”

  I looked at Kim 2 and she was looking at me too. Her Asian eyes pierced through me.

  “Ronald,” she called, staring at me. “Cum inside of me right now. I want to feel it again. Let me feel it.”

  He bucked and shook the entire bed again and again, and soon the red left his body.

  Chapter 6

  I woke up on the couch in my apartment unsure if I’d dreamed of Ronald’s birthday wish with Kim 2 that night at his place or had actually relived it. I had to recall my entire day beginning with Dr. Davis’s office and then continuing with Paul and Easter and Chief Elliot in my office, the black cabbie, and King in platinum rolling beside me to remember where I really was. And it wasn’t actually an upgrade when I did remember. Nearly fired? Everything but accused of overusing my pain medication by a doctor who really wanted to get into my pants? A mess. I wanted to go back to sleep for a really long time, even if it meant seeing Kim 2 and Ronald fuck raw right in front of me. Maybe I could try to change some things the second time around.