As if I was scared he would withdraw his request, I grabbed the back of his head, just a few inches above his neck, closed my eyes, and lead him to the lips that protected my pearl. He kissed up and down my lips then, using his tongue to separate them, he made it to my pearl tongue. That’s when I confirmed Tyrone wasn’t shit!
He couldn’t even do the simple task of giving me head correctly. He kept coming up for air like he was drowning. I know I’m known for soaking through a mattress or two, but I didn’t know I needed to supply niggas with life jackets.
“Hell, no!” I heard the words come out of my mouth and at this point, I wasn’t going to stop them. “What the hell was that, Tyrone? How in the fuck did you expect me to find pleasure in that shit?” I was waiting on an answer, instead, he snapped.
“What the hell you mean, you uppity ass bitch? You have been complaining since we hooked up earlier. First, the damn food at your favorite expensive restaurant didn’t taste right ‘cause your favorite cook wasn’t there; I tried to be nice to your petty ass and pay for that expensive shit and never heard the words thank you come out your mouth. What did your “too good for the ‘hood” ass do next? Oh yeah, you made me drive a hour and 30 minutes from the LA to meet you up here on Pacific Coast Highway ‘cause you like to see the ocean while you’re getting fucked, instead of paying $65 and going to the Snooty Fox on Western like I had planned. Fuck your college degrees and your good ass job; you’re still Na-Na to me, the little tomboy with the jumper from the park and if you weren’t fucking all them bitches on the down low, you would know a good man when you saw one, you dyke bitch.”
See, the old me would have flipped over the bed and tried to fight him. That person died when I moved out of South Central, LA. Instead, I thought I’d give him a piece of what he gave me.
“First off, quick draw, the fastest nut shooter from the west, my name is Savannah and it’s called a chef not a cook. Secondly, I was born on the east side. That doesn’t entitle me to do what eastsiders do. I don’t have sex on 10-dollar an hour sheets, Mr. Small Time Trapper six years in a row. I know where I’m from and I’ll be dead or dying before I come back there to live, so get your tired ass out of my $600 a night timeshare air and hit the 10 Freeway back to your EBT card atmosphere. Do you need gas money? Or did your probation officer give you gate money when you got released? Your mouth still smells like an inmate named Big “D”, so don’t question my sexuality until you get yours in check.” At that moment, Tyrone jumped out of bed, threw his clothes on, grabbed his keys, said his last “Fuck you, bitch,” and left.
Chapter 2: Can I Tell My Story
On the ride back to Malibu, which was only 20 minutes away from my rental property, I kept replaying what Tyrone had said to me over and over again.
“You’re still Na-Na to me, the little tomboy with the jumper from the park.”
It wasn’t the anger in his words that was bugging me, but the fact he called and still saw me as Na-Na, the little girl who should have been a boy because of her basketball skills. I have worked hard to be the opposite of that little girl and he was too blind to see it. His broke ass opinion really didn’t mean anything to me, it’s just that those were the people who needed to see my change the most. I lost all the chubbiness I had as a child and am 165 pounds of pure thickness. My waste is a size 10. Due to having toned thighs and hips, I wear a size 12. Besides the $5700 I spent turning my A cups to DD’s, I am all natural.
Five feet seven, peanut butter complexion and my eyes are slanted like I have Asian heritage. I used to wear a 1990’s Toni Braxton short haircut, but grew it out to a shoulder-length, layered cut. I get a manicure and a pedicure once a week so my feet and hands can be as soft as my butt. I’m not a swap meet or flea market shopper. I only place designer clothes on this body. I don’t mean hip-hop designers like Fetish or Ecko Red, I’m talking about Armani and Dolce suits. I relax in DKNY. I do own a few Apple Bottom, Roca Wear and Dereon items, but that is mostly to blend in when I’m around company that wears those labels. To be honest, I love House of Dereon, Dereon, and Baby Phat clothing, but the places I shop don’t carry them and I don’t shop online because I like to try my clothing on.
How could he not see the difference? My childhood years were rough, but they made me into the successful woman that I am now. I grew up in a house with four men and my grandmother. It was my grandmother’s two bedroom house. We were very poor. We never missed a meal, but money was always funny. My father had full custody of me and my brother after he deemed my mother unfit because she would leave for weeks without notice. Daddy moved us out of her house and brought us to live with his mother.
My mother had an addiction for money and got it in all the wrong ways. To this day, I still don’t know what that meant, but everyone said it when speaking of her. She went to school to be a nurse of some sort and met my father while he was recovering from a car accident. Whenever he told the story of him and my mother meeting, he would smile and say, “Trisha nursed me back to health.”
Trisha, aka my mother, was gone before my first birthday, so I don’t have any fond memories to hold on to. If I knew more about her, I would tell more, but that’s all the information my daddy ever gave us about her besides she had a love for the south and lived down there for many years before she moved to California. That’s why I was named Savannah and my older brother, Memphis. My uncle, Steve, would joke with my daddy and say things like, “Trisha had to go back south to her real life,” and smart shit like that. I hated the fact that he knew more about my mother than I did.
Memphis had made the mistake of asking my father if our mama was a prostitute before becoming a nurse and that question got him slapped in the mouth. “Boy, don’t you ever speak poorly of your mother! She is a good damn woman. There are just some things you will never understand.” My mama must have told him that line because he used it whenever people asked him, ‘What happen to Trisha?’
He always called my mama a good woman, but what kind of good woman leaves her two small children to be raised by their daddy while she lived her dreams? It wasn’t long before I realized my mother would never come back. Whatever life she had in the south must have been better than raising her kids and being married to my daddy. I decided if I ever were to meet her, I’d kick her ass for leaving us the way she did.
I raised myself to be a woman. I didn’t have a positive black woman in my life. My grandmother was around, but she was very sick and didn’t have the energy to help my daddy raise us.
I didn’t get the period talk or the one about the birds and the bees. I learned how to be a woman by incidents that occurred. I started my period at 12 years old. I thought I was dying, like any other girl would if no one told her she was going to bleed for five days and live to see another five days of bleeding 28 days later. Lucky for me, Uncle Steve was a ladies’ man and just so happened to have one of his boy toys at the house that gave me a pad and explained it to me. I could point fingers, but I don’t blame anyone for the way I am. Maybe I would have turned out differently if I had a strong, positive black mother in my life, but I didn’t. Why should I dwell on it?
Since our mother was still alive, my daddy didn’t date. He never said it, but I think he was waiting on my mother to get herself together and come back, which never happened. In addition, there wasn’t room in that house for another adult. My daddy’s brothers, Uncle Steve and Uncle Johnny, lived with us, too. Uncle Johnny was my favorite uncle when I was a child. He was a basketball coach at the Park down the street, hence, my love for basketball.
At the age of eight, he started me as his point guard on his all boys basketball team and I kept that position or shooting guard throughout high school. My basketball talents put me on the ‘Do not Date’ list by the fellas and it kept girls from being my friends because I was too boyish. They assumed I was a lesbian and, because we were poor and I couldn’t keep up with the latest fashions, I sometimes wore my brother’s clothes. It did look like I wanted to be a boy.
With so many memories to block out, I remember telling my father that I would make it to the pros and we would never live poorly again. He looked me dead in my eyes when he told me he couldn’t afford to send me to college, whenever that time came. How in the hell can you look in your 10-year old daughter’s face and tell her she has no future? I didn’t let that hold me back and still promised to get a full scholarship and get us out of the ‘hood.
After hearing my dreams of being someone one day get shot down by my own father, I decided to let whatever people thought of me become my reality and started wearing cornrows straight back, basketball shorts everywhere I went, and carrying my basketball with me like it was my life line. I had a goal and was going to reach it, even if I was the only person to believe in it. No one’s thoughts of me were going to stop me, so why should I put energy into impressing them?
Hanging out with the boys on my team that accepted me landed me into kissing Kim on my 16th birthday. This made everyone’s thoughts of me being a lesbian correct. Kim was on a rival high school basketball team and was a known lesbian; she didn’t try to hide it. She had dated every lesbian or bi-sexual girl in her high school and in our league.
Kim invited me skating to celebrate my birthday and since I didn’t have any friends to celebrate it with, I took her up on the offer. At the end of the night, on our ride back to my house, she pulled over and told me that we should hook up. Not wanting to seem like I wasn’t with it, I agreed by sealing the deal with a kiss. Kissing soon became fingering and finally, full blown sex with hours of amazing head. If there was something I didn’t know how to do sexually, Kim would teach me and made sure I was the best at it.
I had never given head, not even to a boy before, and had no clue what I had gotten myself into. She showed me how to eat her using an orange to help teach her lesson. Cutting the orange into four slices, she peeled all the skin off one slice and placed it on a plate vertically. “This is the pearl tongue,” she said, while she took the next unpeeled slice and laid it horizontally on the plate under the first slice.
“The top half of this piece is the skin between the pearl tongue and the entrance. The peel around the orange is the lips and the bottom half is the entrance.”
I watched her suck and lick on the pretend pearl tongue and then she licked the skin in between the pearl tongue and entrance over and over again. She stuck her tongue in the part of the orange that acted as the entrance and covered her mouth over the whole thing.
While kissing the orange peel, she said, “When you’re making love to a girl you really like, don’t rush it. Kiss her lips and pearl tongue first. Make her crave you.”
I watched for two minutes or more and then said, “I’m ready.” From the way Kim reacted, I knew I was a fast learner. I had her scooting away from me saying, “You sure you ain’t done this before?” That made me want to keep going and I did. Giving her head not only turned me on, I soon began to cum from it. There is something about the taste of it that turns me on. I can’t explain it, but I now know why men can’t live without it.
In our first year of dating, the rumors of me being a lesbian circulated around my neighborhood and got to my uncle, Steve. I’ll never forget this night. It was after one of my basketball games. Uncle Johnny and I sat outside on my granny’s porch going over my stats like we always did.
“Look, Na-Na, if you want to get picked up by a college, you have to be a team player. Get your assist up; nobody likes a hotdog. Those rumors of there being a professional women’s league is true. I’d hate for it to pass you up because you won’t pass the damn ball.”
Right before I could defend my not passing the ball, Uncle Steve came out the house, walked up to me, and grabbed me by the front of my jersey. “What the hell is wrong with you?” Not understanding what he meant, I asked, “What are you talking about now, Uncle Steve?”
He was a known liar and would go to any lengths to get someone to believe him. I think Uncle Johnny thought he was up to his old tricks again, too; he grabbed Steve’s hand off of me, making him release my jersey.
“So, you’re having sex with that dyke girl, Kim, you always with, huh?”
That was the first time I realized I was lesbian. It was also the first time I saw both of my uncles disappointed in me. I didn’t answer the question; I just looked at both of them hoping they would leave it alone. My uncle, Johnny, told me to go in the house and shower. When I got out, everyone, including my daddy, knew about it and wanted to talk to me about it. No one in that house had ever paid me any attention except for Uncle Johnny, yet everyone thought they could yell at me, including Memphis.
I felt the words come out of my mouth. “Look, I’m 17 years old and will be 18 in two months. If I want to be a lesbian, there isn’t anything any of you can do about it; so deal with it!”
The words came easily, but the slap across the face from my daddy made me wish I would have thought about what I said before saying it.
“I won’t have no lesbian for a daughter, do you hear me, Savannah?” I had gone 17 years without him hitting me, but that night, it all changed. After 20 or more hits from his belt and everyone’s show of disappointment, I promised to act like a girl, date boys, and start making friends.
It was too late for me when it came to my brother, Memphis. He disowned me completely and helped everyone in my neighborhood make fun of me and put me down. He even gave Keisha all the details of what happened between me and my daddy in exchange for sex, of course. I prayed his dick would fall off. To this day, with all the changes I’ve made, Memphis doesn’t talk to me. I saw him when he got out of jail and at my grandmother’s funeral, but he didn’t look my way. Oh well, fuck him, too.
My next task was to break up with Kim and surprisingly, it was easy for me to do because I found out Kevin had a crush on me. I started dating him. I wanted to have sex with Kevin, but I wanted the fairytale sex where he takes my virginity while the sun was rose and soft music played. I knew Kevin wasn’t that kind of guy, so I decided he wasn’t the one. However, I was glad he was there to help me get over Kim.
It wasn’t the same for Kim. She always had girls flirting with her, so I thought she would bounce back from me breaking up with her quickly. It didn’t happen that way at all.
She drove past my house two and three times a day, called my phone all throughout the night, and even went as far as fouling me hard during a game, for which she was given a technical foul.
I had to lie to her to get her to leave me alone. I told her I really wanted to continue dating her, but my father had gotten involved and was monitoring everything I was doing. I asked her if we could have sex one last time and go our separate ways in a better fashion than I had done it the first time, and it worked. When that was said and done, it was time to make friends.
I went straight to Keisha because she was the most popular girl I knew. My father had heard the rumors of her sleeping around with different guys, so she wasn’t on his list of potential lesbians. It was sad that my father would prefer me to be a slut than a lesbian, but whatever made him happy kept me from getting beat again.
Keisha, Christina, and Melinda accepted me into their crew because I provided them someone to make fun of. They treated me like shit and talked about me to my face. I didn’t let it get to me because I had received acceptance letters from eight colleges and had started counting downing to the day I left.
Keisha wanted me to become a hoe like her. I remember Keisha leaving me to walk home from the skating rink because she met some guys that wanted to have sex with us and I refused to go. The next day, she told me that I had left her to handle both of them by herself and owed her big time.
I didn’t even complain about my walk home. I just apologized and told her I wouldn’t do it again. I knew my future didn’t include her or the “Hoe Squad”- the name I called them behind their backs. I had two months to go and when I left, I wasn’t taking any of them with me.
I would dream of Keisha getting AID
S and begging me for help. In my dreams, I would treat her like she was invisible and keep walking. That was evil of me to be excited about something horrible happening to her, but it made it easier to be her friend the next day. I felt like she was the shot caller in the day time and I was the shot caller at night, even if it was in dreamland.
If Keisha’s ass would have ever caught fire, I wouldn’t have spit on her. Instead, I’d barbeque ribs on her ass and have a cookout.
I didn’t think Keisha could do me any worse than the way she treated me until she broke the camel’s back by sleeping with Kevin. That was the final straw!
Everybody knew about it, too, and expected me to fight her over it. I wasn’t scary, but what did I look like fighting her over some dick I had already decided I didn’t want?
Keisha even assumed I was going to beat her up. She invited me to her house and asked if we were still cool. I played the role and said “Yes.” It took everything in me not to knock her teeth down her throat.
Kismet (Beyond the Bedroom Series) Page 2