Hold Me in Contempt

by Wendy Williams

  I cried most of the way from Harlem to Brooklyn. Laid my head against my purse on the back window and cried at the day, the long, long day. All of the losses. The pain coming back at me and how powerless I felt under it all.

  I looked out into the street and imagined every shadow was my mother: hunched over, black, and alone with no home.

  My worry ushered me into a deep sleep that wasn’t broken until I felt the driver pulling me out of the car.

  “Come on, lady. You wake up. We here. See? We here?”

  I muttered something I was saying to Kent in my dream because the driver’s words had become Kent’s. But then he pushed me to open my eyes.

  “You look. You see. See? Open your eyes. See! Please see!”

  “Wha? What?” Though I could feel that I was standing then, I knew I was leaning over too. I could smell the cabbie’s curry dinner. I opened my eyes one at a time and saw a concrete block and above it the familiar behemoth of a clock, aqua-colored, with Roman numerals.

  “The Clocktower?” I slurred sleepily, lifting my head off the cabbie’s shoulder. “Why am I here?”

  “It’s where he lives. His home.”

  “Who? Who lives here?”

  Just then King came rushing out the front door with the two guys from the bar.

  The guys took me from the driver and I nearly fell over into someone’s arms.

  “Thanks, Baboo,” I heard someone say.

  King came in close to look at me. He was wearing black slacks and a wifebeater that lay transparent over a maze of black tattoos on his chest.

  King turned and the men holding me up under each arm followed him into the Clocktower Building.

  “Everything okay, Mr. McDonnell?” the doorman asked, rushing to meet us at the elevator.

  “Just fine, Frantz,” King said. “In fact, I’ll take it from here.” He reached out to take me from the two guys, and I was scared I’d fall over on top of him, but when his arm went under my arm and around my back I felt more support than I had with two men. His muscles seemed to expand. His body was steady and planted. I let my whole weight fall to test him and closed my eyes again.

  King helped me into the small glass elevator where the ding of the doors closing startled me, so I pressed my head into his chest.

  “You okay?” he asked, looking down into my eyes with worry.

  “I’m tired,” I said. “Very tired.”

  The elevator doors opened, and King led me into a space that looked like an art gallery. There were some couches and chairs, a television, and tables scattered in different settings around a huge, open space, and on every wall there was a work of art that was big, colorful, and, no doubt, very, very expensive. But that wasn’t what was stealing my vision, what had me wondering if I was still in the dollar cab and dreaming. It was the clocks. Four fourteen-foot clocks, one in the center of each wall, drawing my eyes to windows that let in a breathtaking 360-degree view of Brooklyn, the East River, Manhattan, and the Manhattan Bridge. I was in the Clocktower, in DUMBO’s most expensive apartment, the one that real estate tycoons had been bidding on for years until some private buyer outbid the likes of Jay-Z and Ralph Lauren. It had been a front-page real estate story in the New York Times for months.

  “You live here?” I asked King.

  “Most of the time,” he said, leading me to the nearest couch. He made sure I was standing up on my own and quickly cleared the pillows from the couch by pitching them to the floor. On his back there was a huge black and gold jester’s hat I could see through his wifebeater.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  He stood and looked at me. “I’m your king,” he proclaimed. “Any more questions?”

  “No.” I fell into King on purpose that time. I wanted to feel his lips against mine and taste his tongue in my mouth. To smell him.

  My nose brushed against his as I slid his top lip into my mouth. He slid my bottom lip into his mouth, and we tasted each other’s newness through bated breath, and everything in my past dissipated. And we weren’t even touching.

  King’s mouth on mine set a hungry pace that promised my body so many things.

  I sighed and let him take control.

  I opened my eyes to watch him kiss. To see us kiss each other. The bright lights from the big city peeked in at us. We were shadows. Not black and white. Just hungry shadows.

  My pussy quivered, and I reached for King’s hand to put it there and let him feel its begging.

  All time stopped when he pulled away from me. Withdrew his hand from my hold. His lips from mine.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You sure you want me there, Queen?” he asked, and I discovered just then looking into his eyes that they were glittering azure blue and looked like captured birthstones. He looked down at my pussy.

  “I just want to feel better. Can you make me feel better?”

  King answered with a soft kiss on my lips.

  “No,” I said. “Not like that. Not soft. I want to feel something. I want to feel it.”

  King took my desire as a command and moved fast.

  This time his hand found my vagina on its own. His full palm cradled the heat emanating from inside of me. He caressed my right shoulder with a voracious mouth, teasing sighs out of me.

  I was about to reach to pull my skirt up and my panties down, but he snatched his touch away again.

  “Wha—” I started, thinking he was done with me, but I couldn’t finish my one syllable before this near stranger had me up in his arms, wrapping my legs around his torso, my brain wondering how he’d moved so quickly to get me into that position.

  When he started walking, I thought he was carrying me to the bedroom, so I was surprised when I felt my ass being set on a cold, hard surface. King left me to turn on a light, revealing a bathroom shining in bright white tile and metal trimming everywhere.

  “Why are we in here?” I asked as he came back over to me, pulling off his undershirt. “You want to see?”

  “No,” he said, picking me up from the counter beside the sink and spinning me around to a colossal floor-to-ceiling mirror. “I want you to see you.”

  He started kissing my shoulders again as he removed my skirt and then my shirt and underwear with near-perfect precision, hardly requiring me to take a step.

  I watched him in the mirror. He watched me watch him. But never once did those blue eyes look at their own reflection.

  “You see you?” King said. “I’m going to make sure you see you, Queen.”

  He moved my feet apart and grabbed me by the back of my neck, pushing his fingers into my hair.

  “You’re fucking beautiful,” he said to my image.

  I looked down at my breasts in the mirror. His free hand played with one of my nipples, and in between his white fingers my chocolate skin was brilliant.

  “You see?” he asked again, sliding a condom from the counter beside us.

  “Yes!” I answered through moans, taking everything in.

  King slid his dick into me like I was the only woman he’d ever enter again. His eyes were on me in the mirror with the most sincere intention of pleasure.

  We didn’t have to say another thing about what we were doing, because seeing him looking at me on the outside as he pulsated on the inside, I knew this was something to him. He was making love to fucking me.

  Once it was clear that I knew that, King left me alone with my image in the mirror. He moved his eyes off the mirror and started beating into me, giving me exactly what I’d asked for: a feeling.

  “King!” I cried.

  “Queen!” he answered, thrusting me so close to the mirror I could see my panting in a cloud. “Queen! Queen!”

  Chapter 8

  At 8:15 a.m. I was usually headed into the district attorney’s office, but after my night with King in the Clocktower Building, I found myself standing on Park Avenue outside Wilhelmina New York cloaked in yesterday’s clothes with wrinkles of last night’s gossip.

 
I knew Tamika would still be mad at me for leaving her hanging the day before, but I just could not hold my news in until she decided to calm down. On one hand, I could count the number of times I’d had sex with a man that quickly—and that included King. I felt a euphoria that sent butterfly wings fluttering in my gut every time I thought of King’s fingers grabbing the roots of my hair as he held my head in place over the bathroom sink. At every second, my thoughts took me back to his long stroke, pulling his penis all the way out of me and then pressing forward until my ass stopped him; he’d called out “Queen” so many times, I looked in the mirror and considered that maybe it was my name.

  Tamika walked into the building with one of her male coworkers who usually rode the train into Manhattan with her from Brooklyn. She was wearing low black Chuck Taylors but had heels tucked into a small reusable grocery bag on her arm.

  I was sitting on a bench beside security sipping a latte I’d purchased from a food truck.

  “Oh hell no, Stan,” Tamika started with the security guard after noticing me sitting beside his desk, “you know we have tight security here. Can’t let strays in Wilhelmina.” She rolled her eyes at me and took a sip of her coffee.

  Stan knew me from my many visits to the office, so he laughed at Tamika’s show, but she, predictably, kept up her matinee performance.

  “I get so tired of the fakes. The wannabes. The liars and duplicitous individuals. Lock them all up, I say. Throw away the key,” Tamika declared so dramatically, her coworker laughed and excused himself to go upstairs. “No need to leave me. There is nothing down here for me.”

  I stood and walked over to Tamika, who was standing in the middle of the lobby like she was Cleopatra or Queen Nefertiti and I was about to bow to her.

  “Humpf,” she murmured to my face. “Looks like the chickenheads have come home to roast.”

  “Malcolm X quotes at eight a.m.?” I joked. “And that’s chickens have come home to roost.”

  “Actually that was Tamika—because I’m about to roast a chickenhead,” she added, but even though she was extending the humor, she had a sour face and I knew she was cool on me. Other workers, hardly awake and looking more like the extras from The Walking Dead than a healthy workforce, trickled in through the sliding doors, and we had to step to the side with our standoff.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what?” she asked.

  “For letting you down by not picking Miles up from fencing.”

  “No. You let your godson down,” she said.

  “Okay. I did that.”

  “And you let yourself down.”

  “Okay. I did that, too,” I said.

  “And you let Malcolm X down!”

  “Him too.”

  “And Spike Lee and Denzel.”

  To that, I rolled my eyes. “Fine. Them too.”

  “Now, say it,” Tamika demanded, looking off.

  “I am not saying all of that,” I said.

  “Humpf.” Tamika looked at me. “Guess we’re done here.” She stalked off in her sneakers and headed for the elevator.

  “Mika, wait!” I followed her. “I have hot gossip.”

  “Tell someone who cares,” she snapped.

  “No, really. It’s good.” As she was about to join a crowd of sluggish coworkers on the elevator, I got close up on her ear and added in a low voice, “I slept with the white cutie from the bar.”

  She froze and then her entire disposition changed. “I’ll see y’all upstairs,” she said to the person holding the door open for her. “Go on. Get! Skedaddle!” she ordered the elevator door as it slowly closed on the widening eyes inside.

  She turned and looked at me with electrified eyes, and we screeched liked groupies, pulling each other out the front door to gossip in private.

  “Oh, my God! I can’t breathe,” Tamika said. “This is crazy. I can’t believe you fucked him! Damn, he was fine! Damn! Whoa. You’re such a slut!” She hugged me like I’d just won a trophy, then backed up and looked into my eyes. “I’m proud of you though,” she said in pretend sincerity. “Sometimes being a slut wins. And I can tell by looking at you that you won last night. Yes, Gawd! Yes!” She laughed and looked me up and down. “Was it good?”

  “It was, girl! It was,” I confirmed.

  “Okay! I need all of the details. Every little bit.” She bit her lip like she was about to tear into a bag of Funyuns. “And wait, just know this does not excuse your behavior yesterday. I am still not your friend. But we both know that juicy gossip overrides anything any day! Now, spill the pork and beans!”

  Telling the story of my night with King was like reliving it, like leaving that morning outside Wilhelmina and returning to the Clocktower. Back to me heaving over the sink and thinking King had cum, but then feeling him pick me up and carry me into the bedroom with a hard dick pressed into my back. Him whispering, “I’m not done yet.” Him making me feel like everything sexual was new in his bed. I was lost, disoriented, found, and perfectly in place all at the same time.

  “I must meet this man who did you right,” Tamika said in her fake noble English accent, and we laughed. “So, after all of that, what the hell are you doing here . . .  ​like, with me?” she added, fanning herself.

  “I did the old ‘I’m cool and I have to go’ routine. You know, didn’t want to seem too thirsty,” I informed her. I’d hardly slept in King’s bed. I lay there watching the moonlight dancing on the ceiling and thinking about how crazy I was for being there with King, but still not regretting it.

  “Well, there’s also the fact that you had to go to work,” Tamika blurted out. “Wait, why aren’t you at work?” She looked confused.

  “Just a few days off. Vacation,” I explained. I hadn’t even considered what I’d say once people realized I wasn’t going to work each day. “You know I won that big case last week. Figured I’d take some time myself. Relax.”

  “You ain’t never relax before,” Tamika said. “Shit, you’ve had a straight pole up your ass since forever. Got to get some drinks in you to calm your tight ass down half the time.”

  “Well, all of that is behind me now. I’m turning over a new leaf. Good times ahead!”

  “Really?” She stepped back and looked at me with a grin. “I guess Mr. King is the new boo-thang?”

  “Girl, are you kidding? No way. There’s no possibility of us getting together. He’s all Brooklyn, and you know I’m Harlem world,” I joked.

  “Just get your feet wet for once. Enjoy yourself. You deserve it. Plus, I hear Monique’s been hanging out with that guy she met there—I think his name is Vonn or something. Isn’t that your guy’s dude? Y’all can, like, go on a ghetto double date. Go see a movie at Kings Plaza. Make them buy y’all some high-top Reeboks and shit like we used to do back in the old days.”

  “Yeah, they know each other,” I said, laughing, “but I don’t think King’s the make-out-at-Canarsie Pier type. He seems a little classier than that.”

  “Classy?” Tamika chuckled. “And hanging out at Damaged Goods? No comprende!”

  “I know, but there was over one million dollars in art in his condo,” I said. “His sheets—they were Frette! Fucking Frette!”

  “Well, then something doesn’t add up,” she whispered, looking devious and crossing her arms.

  “Well, I think he owns the club. I mean, he didn’t say it, but it was evident by how people were treating him.”

  “Humph.” Tamika pursed her lips shadily. “I’m sure there’s gold in the club, but that’s not Clocktower money, honey. He’d have to own, like, half the clubs in Brooklyn to be up in there. And Manhattan, too. You know that. We both read the Times Real Estate.”

  “Look, Mik, King is cool. But, like I said, that was a one-time thing. Who cares about how he got up in the Clocktower? I was in, now I’m out.” I jumped over an imaginary line on the ground. “I’ll never see him again.”

  “Right. Right. Famous last words.”

  After Tamika and
I said good-bye, she walked into the building, leaving me on the sidewalk. Two svelte women who were obviously models walked past me in oversized clothing that exaggerated their frail frames. Still, there was something so sexy or mesmerizing about them. Even on a gray New York City street corner with hundreds of blank-faced people whizzing by in the morning rush, they were special. Something to look at and admire and seek out. People seemed happy at the chance to lay eyes on these images of perfection, of what women should want to be, but in a cruel twist of irony, never could. I remembered how I’d felt walking the streets with Kim 2. How men would stop walking and rush over to talk to her. They could hardly say anything substantial. They’d babble like idiots and beg for her telephone number like circus monkeys begging for bananas or peanuts. It didn’t matter what she was wearing or how she behaved. She could look homeless and gaunt, like, near death, and act like a raving bitch, and still these men would grovel to get her to smile at them. Handsome men. Rich men. Famous men. They’d call the apartment all through the night. Just to have her say she’d go out with them, they’d send Luxor roses from Banchet and No¯KA chocolates and boxes of La Petite Coquette lingerie and airline tickets to wherever.

  One of the models must’ve seen my stare. She rolled her eyes and nudged the other woman before they walked into the building.

  Kim 2’s time at Wilhelmina took a turn when she gained three pounds. It was nothing—that’s what I’d told her as she lay on the living room floor crying about what I felt ridiculous for calling a “fluctuation.” She said I didn’t understand—those three pounds, and her inability to lose them, were a demarcation in her existence, an indication of the beginning of the end. I wanted to laugh. But I didn’t. I actually felt bad for her. That she thought three pounds could mean anything. In the end, she was right though. The agency stopped booking her for shows. The reason: She looked “different” in the clothes; they couldn’t send her out if she couldn’t exactly fit the items designers provided on the rack; and one designer asked that the agency stop sending him “Puerto Ricans,” saying the last one they’d sent (Kim 2—who isn’t Puerto Rican) had a big ass and he couldn’t send that down the runway. This made Kim 2 cry and made me feel horrible for her. I decided to try to cheer her up by having Ronald hook her up with one of his decent friends. While she always had men trying to get at her, most of them were trifling or crazy. I thought maybe a romantic distraction could get her on track again.