by Nikki Rashan
It was golden until that fool got lazy and realized he could make more money if he substituted sugar pills in place of some of the actual Plan B pills. I couldn’t lie; some of those high school chicks looked like grown women. I had to move three times just because one of them recognized me in my neighborhood after her Plan B failed. She didn’t go for that whole “you probably waited longer than twenty-four to seventy-two hours” routine either. There’s absolutely nothing funny about almost getting beat down by a three-months-pregnant seventeen-year-old Amazon.
Sincere was a dude I’d met while Capone was out to sea on deployment. He worked at the pharmacy at a twenty-four-hour Walgreens where I’d go to get hookups because they were just too lazy to ID on the boxes of Sudafed with ephedrine in it. At the time, you could buy a ton of those and sell them to the good old boys out Ocean View for triple what they cost because they’d use them to make meth. This was before they’d just scan your ID into the system. They couldn’t buy them because they’d gotten busted so many times the police would camp out and watch for them, but I’d never been arrested so I had no problem.
You know how they say a woman knows if she’ll want to sleep with a man within the first five minutes of meeting him? Well, let’s just say that I knew within the first thirty-five seconds of laying eyes on Sincere’s gorgeous ass that I was definitely going to cheat on Capone.
I’d take his dog tags that I’d been wearing on full display around my neck and stick them in my back pocket, purse, glove compartment; anywhere but in plain sight. Sincere was always working the late shift when I’d come through and that night was no different.
It was late summer, one of those kinds of nights where it’s so hot you want to walk around naked. The damn AC in my little beat-up Honda was out so I hated life at the moment, and was riding around with all the windows down. Usher’s “Follow Me” was playing on the radio as I pulled up to the pharmacy drive-through. That Negro was behind that glass, looking like a made-for-me version of Reggie Bush. His biceps made his crisp white lab coat fit a little too snugly in the arms. Something about his looks and that lab coat just didn’t mesh. It was like he was meant to be moonlighting as a stripper for a bachelorette party, except that wasn’t a damn costume. And all I wanted to know was what in the world was underneath all of that stiff professional material?
“So, umm, what are you doing later besides buying up all the Sudafed in Hampton Roads?”
I did my best to hide the ridiculous Kool-Aid grin that was fighting to spread across my face. As many times as I’d come up here, he’d never said more than, “Have a nice day.” Guessed his man senses were on point and he could smell Capone’s scent all over me every other time.
“I’m not sure yet; got a couple of invites to some parties but it’s up in the air. What about you? What you getting into?”
Biting my lower lip I waited, as Usher sang in the background, “You came just in time with what I needed.”
“Mmm, I was hoping you . . . I mean, damn. I meant to say, I was hoping you and I . . . I mean we could maybe . . . ah . . .”
I laughed so hard. He was fine as hell, smart as hell, and unbelievably awkward when it came to dealing with women.
“It’s okay, sweetheart. You can do all the above. 757-303-0306. Call me when you get off.”
We met for drinks at Martini Blue and it took him about a half of a bottle of Cuervo to lighten up. I tried to be good but I couldn’t do it anymore. Capone had already been gone for two months, plus I’d been hearing all of these rumors about a girl out Newport News he’d gotten pregnant. On top of all that I needed my vitamin D, aka my daily dose of dick, something fierce.
Sincere was slurring, going on and on about some boring chemistry lectures. The only way I could think to shut him up was by kissing those sexy, thick, pink-pillow lips I couldn’t seem to keep my eyes off of all night.
That was all it took. My body instantly felt like one of those fires that burn so hot and fast they consume all the oxygen in a closed room. With all the air suddenly gone the surfaces look cool and calm and the flames vanish, as if they’ve been magically extinguished. When in all actuality it’s more like a bomb, and all the room needs is air.
I slid my hand out, creeping it up his leg to do “the test.” It was like a door was flung open or a window was broken and the quiet flames all over my body were fed fresh oxygen as I damn near exploded in my seat. I hadn’t even made it halfway up his thigh before my fingers struck gold and oooh wee this Negro was hard and huge.
The farthest we made it was to his Navigator parked out back. I guess the tequila made him bolder than he’d normally be as he pushed me up against the passenger-side door. He kissed me with those lips and simultaneously slid his thigh in between mine, wedging my legs apart. Instinctively my hips did their own thing and I ground into his strong, muscular leg. We both moaned, and I bit his lower lip just enough to let him know I wanted more.
He growled, and the sound made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Pausing for just a second he opened the door and spun me around into the car. I was leaning into the passenger seat as he stood behind me, lowering my panties from underneath my sun dress. Caught off guard I squealed in surprise when his hand roughly pressed down on my lower back, pushing my face farther down into the truck. That quickly turned into me trying to bite the stuffing out of this fool’s peanut butter and dark brown leather seats.
His nails raked across my bare skin before he parted the seas and went straight deep sea diver on my ass from behind. Flicking his tongue softly across my clit one moment before stiffening it and thrusting so deep I had to look back and make sure it was still his tongue. On my life, I tried to pull away because the last thing I wanted was his nose all up in the crack of my sweaty ass. But he just wrapped his hands around my thighs, roughly pulling me back into his oral assault. The rhythmic lapping of his tongue suspending me in between a state where I didn’t know if I wanted to cry or pass out. Shit, I was just happy I’d shaved that morning; he’d have been upset if he’d dropped them panties and found Chewbacca looking back at him.
My fingers had gone numb from gripping the seats so hard, and I was flexing them when I felt that first quiver. You know, that tremor that usually starts the avalanche. Letting out a deep, throaty moan that almost scared myself, I threw my ass so far back in his face I was surprised I didn’t knock him over. And then he stopped. I heard the condom wrapper tear open and I screamed and almost laughed, cried, and died at the same time.
It hadn’t actually occurred to me how big of a big he was until I felt myself actually stretching around him. Size matters, girth matters, length matters. Dammit, it all matters. I swore he had to have been about as thick as a damn soda can. Every damn second was agonizing. It hurt so damn bad and so damn good at the same damn time. My entire damn body instantly went limp; it was absolute and complete damn sensory overload.
“Damn, damn, damn, damn,” I whispered in between each stroke, my legs shaking like a drunken game of Jenga. “Damn? That’s all you got for me, love?”
Yes, that’s all I got, was the shouted-back reply in my head. I was downright stuck on some kind of “damn”-driven autopilot. And everyone knows you done ran up on some good dick if he got it so you can’t even talk. Or if you can talk, I don’t care if you got a doctorate degree in linguistics and can speak four languages fluently, if all you can say is one word because he’s gone and knocked every other word you’ve ever known in your entire life completely up out of your vocabulary except that one, you done ran up on some good dick.
He actually laughed at me before going so deep I damn near screamed, “Damn,” a couple of damn times. Leaning forward he started biting the back of my neck, sucking on my shoulders, giving me little back-gasms that took my breath away. Then to top all that off, this fool could make his dick pulse on command and he liked to get right there, so deep we probably looked conjoined. He pressed hard right up against my G-spot, and wrapped those big tree trunk arms ti
ght around my waist, and started sucking on the side of my neck, and then thump. Thump. Thump. It felt so good, I started begging for him to stroke it, tap it, hit it, or kill it. I didn’t care what he did as long as he did something. I was about to start pulling on my own hair, and he’d get a kick out of teasing me right up to that point of desperation. You know something, I never even thought about Capone’s ass after that.
Well one day me and “Thumper” were lying around after one of our love sessions. When I finally regained my ability to hear, I noticed he was complaining about a system glitch that dispensed an extra two to four unregistered pills on certain prescriptions. All he saw was a headache, and I immediately saw dollar signs. I suggested we go into business. If he could find a way to get them out of the building, I would sell those vitamin V’s or Viagras, Vicodins, Percocet, and whatever else to the dudes down at the shipyard on paydays.
Frankie Senior, or Sugar Daddy as I called him, was actually my first customer. He was my best friend Rica’s support system; anything she needed she’d call on Sugar Daddy. I once asked her if they were, ahem, “having relations” and of course she said no. He couldn’t function anymore. That was the way she’d explained it to me. She said they’d tried once and he sat there and tugged and pulled on old faithful, damn near gave himself an Indian burn and a heart attack trying to get himself hard. Well, one day I had a tree rat or something in the wall behind the cabinet in my kitchen and she sent his old crotchety self over to my apartment to investigate. That particular month the system was kicking out Viagras left and right so I had all these blue pills I’d stored up from Sincere and no real idea how to really get rid of them, and I also had no cash to offer Sugar Daddy after he’d caught the rat. So, I offered him the next best thing.
Needless to say Rica called me later that night because Sugar Daddy was standing in her living room and was refusing to leave. He’d dropped his pants and showed her his flag was flying at full mast. He was ready for her to pay homage to his die-hard wrinkly dinkley. I laughed so hard I almost peed a little. I didn’t even have the heart to tell her it was mostly my fault. But thankfully he was one of the shift leaders at the shipyard and he let all the old timers know exactly what was up after that. Fifty dollars a pill and he and I were in business.
Shonique messed it up for both of them though. Capone came back and wanted to battle it out with Sincere. Sincere couldn’t believe I’d played him and he was the side dude, while I tried to tell him that he wasn’t. I’d grown to love him and started thinking about a future with him and then everything pretty much fell to pieces. I was holding my world in both my hands and it was still slipping through my fingers. And then there was Shonique. Not only did she show me how the world and the game turned; she taught me how to run them both.
Chapter 9
The World Is Yours—Only If You Take It
Shoni had me backstage with the who’s who of the celebrity world at concerts. That same night we’d be up in their luxury penthouse suites at the after–after parties, and a month or two later we’d be up at Hillcrest, stealing abortion clinic sonograms and threatening to FedEx them to that dude’s wife, the press, whoever, but for five to ten thousand it would all disappear. Those rappers and singers did so much dirt all it took was a picture or a text to remind them of what went down after that show. It was easy money for sex that I would have had with a regular man for free. It was risky because sometimes they’d say, “I don’t care. Have the baby. For all I know you were already knocked up.” But there were those times that they wouldn’t that made it worth the try.
I first met Shoni when we were both working the register at the BP gas station out Five Points in Norfolk. At the time, I couldn’t figure out how this nineteen-year-old was on her own, working part time, pushing a Lexus, and still killing it. She’d come in every day with the insane Gucci purses, the real ones, and they’d be the newest, just-released current line. Not the ones everyone got from the flea market over on Little Creek before it burned down, with the faded straps and the bubble letters poking out of the pleather. Everything Shoni had—I mean everything—was in style, and there was no way she was getting it off of eight dollars an hour.
She was thick like Monique, intelligent, beautiful, and had an ass you could make into a coffee table, nightstand, and probably even hide under when it was raining. If she was feeling nice enough to let you, she was obsessive-compulsive as hell about people being close to her and what not. Niggas used to love her, and she’d let them think she loved them too, but on the low Shoni loved women.
I’d never been with a woman, but I’d thought about it once or twice here and there. Honestly, after dealing with Sincere, also known as Thumper, I just couldn’t figure out what a girl would actually do with another girl aside from be bored. One day Shoni and I were having that very same conversation and I guessed I hit a nerve.
“So do you think when you kiss a woman it’s anything like kissing a man?” she asked me, her Sister Souljah voice turned up on ten, hands thrust on hips. I was not going to win this battle no matter what I said.
“It’s a woman so it’s not supposed to be like kissing a man right?” I asked her.
“That’s not what the hell I meant and you know it, woman. Come here.” Her snippy reply meant I was going to get some sort of lesson.
Reluctantly I walked over. It was like I was seven again, being called up to the teacher’s desk at the front of the classroom. We were at her place, or the Sugar Shack as I liked to call it. Her decorating sense was always a little sensual met modern if I had to describe it. Strands of black or dark chocolate–colored Japanese thread curtains called Wooshie hung over the doorway to each room. They were more like the modernized version of those seventies beads everyone else was used to seeing in their momma and them’s houses.
“I know it ain’t what you meant. You got any tree, Shoni?” I asked her, glancing around, not really paying attention. Her house was just so . . . interesting.
Every wall in there had at least one piece of WAK art that was in existence at the time. I sat beside her on the couch beneath the gaze of the mahogany brown woman with braids, pregnant, with an image of the earth. Pink Sugar invaded my senses. She always smelled good; that was her signature scent as she liked to call it. The smell reminded me of warm, melted cotton candy and vanilla, but if you let her tell you she’d say it reminded any- and everyone of Shoni’s yoni: the Sanskrit word for vagina, because she couldn’t bear to hear or use the word “pussy.”
Indigo Blues candles were lit all over, their woodsy, earthy, masculine scent clashing pleasantly with her feminine one. Both fragrances blended nicely with the Kush aromatics, even though one of the blends she had was so new I just called it Christmas Tree because the buds all stank so good they smelled like raw pine needles to me.
“You know I always got that good-good. Here.” Handing me a blunt, she turned, focusing her radiant deep brown eyes directly on me, the attention suddenly making me nervous. She focused in on me through the smoke, pointing a sharp red painted nail at me before continuing.
“Women were actually made to be the lovers of each other. Only a woman can truly appreciate another woman’s emotional complexity and vulnerability. Because any hole that a man finds in a woman’s countenance, he’d just assume it was meant for his dick to fill before he tries to do any emotional patchwork.”
Now, I didn’t know what she meant by that, but we were high as hell and it seemed to make sense, right up until she kissed me and I tasted cotton candy and a soft, sweet sadness that tasted like nothing no man on this earth deserved. And when she moaned into my lips, I felt something give way in my chest that I never even knew was there, and I realized that was the emotional hole she was talking about.
The one that every man tries to fill by “fucking” it away, when all a woman really needs is for someone to call and say “I love you” or send her flowers for no reason. That hole that goes away when you tell her that she’s beautiful first thing in the
morning before she’s brushed her teeth even if she looks like hell. It’s a weird thing that hole is; it makes you watch someone when they’re asleep, lightly tracing the shape of their nose with your finger, whispering quiet promises to their ears. I learned about all of that with Shoni.
It was Shonique who also taught me how to grab credit card numbers. We’d go shopping off other people’s accounts and then quit whatever job we were working at before loss prevention could even figure out what happened. When we both worked at Sprint, we’d set up fake accounts and have our homeboys in tech support issue equipment refunds against them. Send out new cell phones to phony PO boxes and then we’d go sell the phones at the mall on military paydays. This was before all the high-tech security checks they put in place, so back then we could make anywhere from two to three thousand a week like it was nothing.
She opened my eyes to a world of white-collar scams, where the money was bigger, easier, and my hands stayed cleaner. We had so many different scams and schemes going on at one time that I couldn’t keep up with half of them. As soon as one became obsolete we’d just sit, brainstorm, smoke a little, and then, bam, we’d have a new one. This was all a part of my development, learning how to fly and be out on my own.
Now, granted, compared to all that, the best Vee had to offer me was a two-bedroom Section 8 home in her sister’s name, but what the hell would I look like turning down a chance to not have to work for once? But no man or woman has ever told me that before. If I’d known she was only doing it out of her fear and paranoia about my bisexuality I might not have been so damn eager to say okay.