“I’m not working today.”
“Who said you were, Tennyson?” Hearing her voice wrapped around my Christian name made me remember that my mother had named me for a poet.
A wall of heat rose with her as she stepped onto her Escalade’s running board to bring us to eye level. There was only one thing to do: Right there on the street in front of ten other witnesses, I kissed Serena Johnston as though I had the right.
TWO
SERENA COASTED OFF MULHOLLANDpast the steep, winding display of Hollywood Hills palaces, stopping at the gate that guarded her own. The ebony placard on a black marble column announced that we had reached the trueCASANEGRA .
Like most people raised in the shadow of ostentatious wealth, Serena had always had expensive tastes. I knew this was the house she had hoped would be big enough to make amends for everything that had been missing during the days when she and her mother and sister had slept in the backseat of their Impala. Before I could see a single window through the isolated property’s well-groomed stands of jacaranda trees, I knew Casanegra would be a wonder, even to me, and I’m not easily impressed.
Silence had haunted much of our drive, so I wouldn’t have learned the story behind Casanegra if Serena hadn’t told me back before it was real. Serena never knew her father growing up—lucky girl, in my book—so she built a fantasy around what she thought he was like. One of the few things her mother told her about him was that he had a thing for old-school film classics.Casablanca. Citizen Kane. On the Waterfront. It’s easy to idolize the parent who isn’t around, which I know from experience—my mother died before I was old enough to know her—so Serena started watching those movies, as if she figured they would give her and her old man something to talk about one day.When my movies were playing, I couldn’t hear the noise around me. Along the way, she fell in love with the actresses. She never figured she would be rapping for long—I’m just going through the door that’s open, T.She was all about Katharine Hepburn, Dorothy Dandridge, and Diahann Carroll. Visions of legacy danced in her head.
If the Casanegra estate was any proof, Serena’s legacy was well underway. The hilltop three-story Spanish-style house was a creamy beige-yellow with a tile roof the color of a wet clay road, like a postcard from the mountains of Granada. I wasn’t going to ask how much she paid, but I guessed the eight-million range; still a bargain compared to Beverly Hills. When she unlocked the front double doors, Serena smiled for the first time since Roscoe’s. Our soles pattered on the mansion’s floors as though we were touring a museum after closing time.
“It was built in 1929. Some movie producer owned it, I forget his name, and he used to throw the bomb parties. Charlie Chaplin would come. Douglas Fairbanks. Mae West. They’ve all been here.” She lowered her voice as if to avoid disturbing the sleep of the guests’ spirits. “Twelve thousand square feet, twenty rooms. Six bedrooms, eight bathrooms, and a home theater. God as my witness, I don’t think I’ve spent more than five minutes in most of the rooms, especially upstairs. I live in my office and my studio. But there’s a room upstairs where you can still see the mark where they say Bugsy Siegel put someone’s head through the wall. And somebody’s kid drowned in the pool in the 1940s. Studios hushed it up.”
Serena paused in the upstairs hall, dusting her fingers gently across the wall. She chuckled, shaking her head.
“What?”
“I was just thinking, T…I paid cash for this house, but I don’t own it. Nobody can own anything that’ll still be standing fifty years after you’re dead.”
That was it, I realized. I couldn’t fault Casanegra’s sheer space, the sheen on the dark-stained hardwood, and the lushness of her potted eight-foot palm trees. But the house was all eggshell white walls, floor-length windows, and yawning floors. There were framed movie posters—most of them classic, except French-language posters for her two movies,Gardez-le Réel (Keep it Real) andMonsieur Rien (Mister Nothing)—but there wasn’t much in sight to tell me that Serena Johnston lived here. My house was the same way.
My stomach growled loud enough for her to hear. It practically echoed.
Serena tugged the back of my sweater. “You know what? All the rooms up here look alike. Let’s go to the kitchen. You figure out that espresso machine, and I’ll fix you a plate. I had a party Saturday, so there’s enough jerk chicken wings and blackened catfish to eat all night long.”
“You always had a way with words, darlin’.”
I was glad to take a detour to the safe stainless steel and black granite of her spacious chef’s kitchen, and not only because I was starving. Sooner or later, her bedroom would have appeared on the upstairs tour, and I wasn’t ready to go there. I’m not shy in the bedroom. But my memory kept gnawing over how Serena melted against me when we bumped into that stranger on Sunset, that shiver in her hand, and I knew that once our clothes started coming off, I could forget about conversation. That was how it had always been. I thought about lying, saying I had a girlfriend to keep her at a distance long enough to coax something out of her. But I’d have an easier time convincing her I could levitate. We might not know each other anymore, but she knew me far too well for that. I hadn’t had a true girlfriend since high school.
Maybe not even then.
The espresso machine perched on the corner of her counter was a beauty, a top-of-the-line Krups pump, but whoever gave it to Serena must have been crazy. Fifteen hundred bucks, and she’d never touched the thing. Espresso can be tricky to make, especially with a pump instead of a steam machine, and not everybody wants a Starbucks in their kitchen. Obviously, the people in Serena’s circles had money to burn.
I went to work grinding beans and filtering water while she dug inside the refrigerator closest to me—there were two, both with massive silver doors—and piled a plate with food. It was a strange feeling, standing there with our elbows brushing in the kitchen. I felt like I belonged there, a new sensation for me. And a dangerous one. Maybe her bedroom might have been safer after all.
“My father just had a stroke,” I said, once the brown foam was flowing. No need to mention his heart attack three years ago. It was all the same story.
Serena gasped. “That’s awful. Is he all right?”
“He’s alive.” No, Dad wasn’t all right, but I’d only brought it up so we could trade tragedies. I’d told her mine, and now maybe she would tell me hers. I was considering moving Dad in with me, taking him out of the zoo where he’d been caged the past month, but I didn’t want to get into that.
“Oh, God. I know that must be hard,” she said.
“It’s interesting.”
“‘May you live in interesting times.’ Isn’t that a Chinese saying, or something?”
“A curse, actually. You look like you’re living in some interesting times, too.”
“More every day.” I waited for her mask to fix itself back in place, but she was having trouble with it this time. Too much of her hurt was shining through. “It shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. There’s always somebody trying to pull you down.”
“If you let them. That’s one choice—but there’s another.”
She looked up at me suddenly, her eyes almost accusatory.Who told you my business? Then she turned back to the microwave, where she was about to heat my jerk chicken wings back to life. By purest accident, I’d said something of significance.
“You got a boyfriend giving you trouble, Serena?”
Her eyes narrowed to slits. “Shoot, I ain’t lettin’ no man stay around long enough to give me trouble. That hasn’t changed, T.”
I was glad I’d never been in love with her, or that would have stung. It almost smarted on principle alone, on behalf of every brother I’d never met. Serena’s music wasn’t kind to the male of the species. A line from one of her songs popped into my head:Were your words just words, or maybe a game? / Is w-w-w-dot-Dog your domain name?
“Something’s changed, though.”
“Nothing you can help me with.”
/> Instead of probing for another dead-end, I sighed. “I’m moving Dad in with me this week.” I’d never said the words aloud. Suddenly, my decision was made.
That seemed to shock her more than the stroke. This time, she cupped my elbow in the soft of her palm. She let out a soft humming sound. A grieved breath.
“We don’t get to do what we want,” I said. “We do what we have to do.”
Yes,Serena’s eyes said, wide with private enlightenment. She looked up at me as if I was a winged seraph visiting her in human form.
She never said what her trouble was, but I think she had made her decision, too.
The first time Serena Johnston saw me nude, I couldn’t get it up.
Tennyson Hardwick. Ten for short—OK, more like eight-and-a-half, but close enough. My name was a prophecy, as if my parents knew my future from birth.
Part of it was my face—the Face emerged from baby-fat when I was ten years old, smooth and sharp in all the right places. Despite a few scrapes and bruises, the Face only improved with age, like peaking wine. The Face stopped strangers in their tracks and made grown women felonious. When I was thirteen, my junior high school drama teacher seduced me in her pool after school; so all things considered, I have to count Ms. Jackson as my favorite teacher. When zit-infested classmates bemoaned their invisibility to the female gender, they were speaking an alien tongue.
Once I realized the power of the Face, my demeanor did the rest. No one ever thought of me as a child again, least of all me. I can wonder how my life would have been different without Ms. Jackson, but since I don’t have a time machine yet, there’s no point in trying to take myself back. Sex had never been a problem for me, even before I knew I wanted it.
Except that night in the suite of the Four Seasons Hotel with rapper Afrodite, when she was ready to see what there was beyond my face. To see if Ten Hardwick lived up to his porn-perfect name. And at that moment, my qualifications lay lifeless across my thigh.
I was twenty-seven and speechless. All I could do was blink and stammer.
“Sometimes I bug out before a show,” she said. “Performance pressure.”
I blinked some more, and a three-alarm fire scorched my face. If I had been anybody else and she had been anybody else, I could have laughed and played it off, enlisting the tongue tricks I first practiced with Ms. Jackson. But I wasTen Hardwick, and this wasAfrodite. Sweat appeared on my upper lip. All sanity had left the world. It was a genuine existential crisis, reinforced by all of my father’s predictions about how I’d never turn out to be shit.If I can’t…CAN’T…
When she reached for my limpness, my stammering became an apology. But Serena grabbed me, a gentle clasp. “Hey, baby, just sit still,” she said. Then, she bent over me and practiced a few tongue tricks of her own. Problem solved.
They say you never forget your first. In a way, Serena Johnston was mine.
Serena’s master bedroom at Casanegra was bigger than the Four Seasons suite, with a balcony overlooking the city and a California King bed big enough for a family. Her walls were bare except for one of her concert posters. More striking emptiness. More of her absence. But she didn’t walk me out to the balcony or show off what was sure to be a luxurious master bath. Instead, she climbed out of her clothes, and I followed her lead. Except for that first time, we were always most comfortable when we were naked together, the way most people feel when they put their clothes back on.
I couldn’t see any signs of the past five years on Serena’s delicious little body. She was petite but thick-muscled, with strong arms and shoulders, and a luscious C-cup to give shade to a waistline that spread out into smooth, ample hips. Her ass was solid enough to knock someone unconscious. She’d had a bikini wax, the Brazilian kind, so she was as bare as a woman could get. The sight of her was pure privilege.
“Damn,”she said, stealing the word from my mind. “You look good, T.”
No repeat history this time. I’d been ready for her as soon as we started climbing the stairs. I was so hard, I plowed into the soft of her belly when I pulled her close to me. I kissed her, massaging her arms from the shoulders down to the wrists. Our tongues wrestled before I sucked her, syrup-sweet, into my mouth. She surrendered.
“You remember what I want,” I said.
With a smile, Serena sat at the edge of her bed. Like a dancer, she raised her bare leg, delicately angling her soft, tiny foot toward me. I lowered myself to my knees, kneading her heel and sole. Heaven. Serena’s feet felt as if she’d never walked a day barefoot. Her toes beckoned me, wiggling. Holding my prize with both hands, I slipped her toes into my mouth and nestled my tongue between them, sucking. Even Serena’s foot was sweet. I’m a foot man. I can suck on pretty toes from dawn until dusk.
“Ooh, you’re still freaky, T.”
First, the appetizer. Next, dessert.
“Spread your legs,” I said.
Every woman tastes different, and men are lying if they say every flavor is good. But Serena had always been like candy, a combination of sweet and tart. Spiced honey, like her voice. Her thighs seemed to guard her honey jar at first, but after my tongue’s first few flicks, I felt those hard muscles relax. Her knees gave a tremor, but not like the tremor outside Roscoe’s. This was the good kind.
My ears brushed her thighs as my tongue bathed her, licking wide at first, then with precise darts to nudge open the warm folds of her skin. I flurried until I felt the first bath of her juices. Serena’s fingernails became claws across my shoulders.
“Oh, shit, shit,shit…” she hissed.
Guys, let me school you on head: Do not treat a clitoris like someone would treat your penis. It’s the most sensitive place on a woman—probably on the human body, period—and it doesn’t need yanking or bullying. It’s a snail in a shell that needs a little coaxing to swell and stick its head out. There is no end to its shudders, given the right tending. I’ve turned women on until they can’t walk right, as if they’re carrying a grapefruit between their legs. Unlocking a woman’s passion is like cracking a safe. When I feel that responsiveness budding—when her hips begin to buck and my chin is drenched—I don’t let it go. I go back to the same spots, again and again. There’s an invisible alphabet down there, and all I have to do is spell her name with the tip of my tongue. S-E-R-E-N-A.
Serena’s thigh muscles locked across my ears when she let out her first shriek, muffling the sound.That’s one, I thought. If I couldn’t get half a dozen screams out of Serena before we got down to business, I was doing something wrong.
“Wait,” she said. “It’s my turn.”
Except for that first time, Serena had never gone down on me. I figured she was one of those women who will give head only when obligated, but I was wrong. After I lay beside her, she nuzzled my orbs with her tongue, taking her time as she savored one and then the other, weighing me in her mouth. Then, the moist tip of her tongue teased its way upward, following the trail of a swollen vein. Sparks shot through me, and my back arched. Her lips came next, fleshy and wet, the entrance to a cavern. I gritted my teeth as I pushed against the softness at the back of her throat. My thoughts swam. Her mouth pulled slowly back, her tongue wrapping me in a slow circle as she retreated. Then, she drew me inside her throat again, locking me tight in her mouth’s urgent caress. The glow under my navel surged, coiled and ready.
I don’t make noise in bed—I pride myself on it, unless it’s for show—but Serena’s mouth made me groan, sigh, and groan again. Each new stroke was a surprise, with exact repetition where it mattered and enough variation to keep my tide rising. Maybe she was spelling out my name, too. Maybe she was growling my name, and her throat’s subsonic trembling transmitted a message directly to my spine, bypassing my thinking centers altogether.
Gently, I rested my hand on top of her mussed hair. “You better stop,” I said.
She gave me a lusty grin. “You sure?” she said, her lips bobbing against me like a dog unwilling to let go of a meaty bone.
&nbs
p; “I want to be inside you,” I said.
Standard dialogue in my script, but this time the words surfaced on their own. Idid want to be inside her. The realization startled me. I hadn’t felt this hungry for a woman in a long time. I could hardly remember when, unless I thought all the way back to Ms. Jackson’s swimming pool, but that memory had a bad smell to it. Not this time. This felt clean.
Serena’s hairless skin was so slick, gliding inside her was like discovering an extension of my own flesh, a new limb. Most women feel tight because I’m so thick, but Serena was a different level altogether, cleaving to me with so much pressure that I forgot to breathe. I locked my arms above her, steadying myself, sure to angle my pelvis against her so I was rubbing her naked clitoris, too—but gently, leaving room for it to breathe between strokes. Leaving room for it to grow.
I stared at Serena’s face. Her eyes had fallen shut, and all the worry had washed away. Her chin was pointing skyward, anticipating the next current of pleasure. I didn’t want to disappoint her, so I pulled back four inches and burrowed into her again. She opened deeper for me this time, welcoming me, and our pelvises locked. I cupped her waist in my palm, positioning our bodies so I would poke the spot deep inside her that would unlock the prize every woman’s body kept hidden.The spot.
I hit it. Serena cried out, and her body rained gratitude, quivering.
The room was cool, but I was sweating. Perspiration dripped from my nose, washing her breast. I bent my head to suck the moisture away, and her nipple was as big and solid as a marble against my tongue. Serena wrapped her legs around me, her fingernails gliding across my ass, tickling first, then digging harder. She probed with her index finger, playing with the perspiration dripping between my cheeks.
“Yes, Ten…Fuck me.”
And I did, as long as I could stave off release in her body’s merciless embrace. But I wasn’t counting her screams, measuring her breaths, or reciting my favorite lines from old television shows. My thoughts were gone. The room was all heat, sweat, motion, and pleasure. I wanted to seep into her skin and get lost in there.
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