I made my way to the kitchen, but instead of picking up a sharp knife, I ended up leaning against the island, swilling organic wine straight from the bottle. When the wine didn’t calm my nerves, I started working on the plate of chick pea salad and creamy avocado spaghetti squash that Tamara had set aside for me.
There was a terrific punch of flavor in the meal, but I couldn’t enjoy it. Not with Maverick committing adultery right down the hall. I dropped my fork on the plate and gazed longingly at the knife block on the counter. Though stabbing Maverick in the heart was tempting, I had too much to lose and couldn’t allow myself the pleasure of murdering my husband.
• • •
The next morning I awoke to the feeling of Maverick’s hard body pressed against mine, blanketing me with his heat. With an arm wrapped around my waist, he had molded himself to my spine. His hot hands roamed my body; his fingers seared my skin. Adrenaline flooded through me and I became wet. But when I opened my eyes and realized we were in the guestroom, I remembered the travesty of last night, and I jabbed him in the ribs with my elbow.
“Don’t fucking touch me! I was forced to sleep in the guestroom, and you have a lot of nerve crawling in bed with me,” I hissed with my back turned to him.
“Why’re you so upset? You hired that escort, not me.”
“We were supposed to have a threesome, Mav! But I had to work late. I had the shittiest, most grueling day, ever…and then I had to come home to more bullshit.”
“But it was your idea. You set the whole thing up.”
“If you had listened to any of the messages I left, you would have heard me tell you to tip the damn hooker and send her on her way. I planned to reschedule at a later date when we could all have fun together.”
“My bad.” He massaged the back of my neck, trying to get me in the mood, but my body stiffened. “Babe,” he whispered, inching up on me from behind, pressing his hard-on into my ass. “I had a long, exhausting day at work, too. And when I finally got home, Tamara had an awesome meal waiting. I dug in and wasn’t paying any attention to my phone. I really expected you to walk through the door at any moment. When Katya arrived, I figured you’d be right behind her.”
I turned around and faced him. “But the way you were acting…growling and biting her. What was that about?”
“You’re exaggerating. I wasn’t growling.” Mav said, laughing.
“Okay, what the hell was all that biting about? It wasn’t exactly sensual. You were going at that girl with such ferocity, it was disturbing. Your teeth marks were all over her body.”
He shrugged. “She asked me to bite her. At first I thought she was kidding, but she repeated the request and told me she loved having her ass and pussy bit.”
“You didn’t have to do it, though.”
“You know me, always a gentleman, willing to give a lady what she wants.”
I glared at him.
“Look, I did what she requested. The chick went crazy, begging me to bite her titties and everything else. I was hesitant, but then I got into it.” He leaned closer. “You want me to bite your pussy, babe?”
“Fuck, no, you perverted animal.”
“Come on, Cori. Let me bite your pussy. There’s nothing wrong with a little experimentation. After ten years of marriage, we need to explore more.”
“Kiss my ass! I’m not letting you bite me.” Appalled, I tried to get away from him, but he held me tight. “Let me go, Mav. The driver will be here to pick me up in thirty minutes. I have to get ready.”
“Can’t I get a quickie?” he asked, stroking his dick.
“No! You had more than enough sex last night.”
“But I’m still horny.”
“Jerk yourself off or take a cold shower.”
“Last night with Katya was only about sex. I want to show you my feelings. Don’t you want to feel how much I love you?” He took my hand in his and then brought it up to his lips, covering it with soft kisses. I made the grave mistake of looking into his eyes, and my anger instantly melted and was replaced with an unexpected wave of affection.
“Mav, I’m late. I don’t have…”
Before I could finish the sentence, his mouth abandoned the top of my hand and found its way to my neck, and then down to my collarbone. A mixture of irritation and excitement surged through me as his hot mouth sought out my breasts. I could never resist Maverick’s lips on my body, and I let out a breath of resignation as I surrendered to him.
I wanted to reach for my phone on the nightstand and text Josh and let him know that I’d be running late today, but with Maverick whispering lustfully and rubbing on my pussy, I relinquished the idea. It was my show, and I’d get there when I got there, I told myself as I spread my legs.
I grabbed Maverick by the shoulders as he pumped dick into me. I opened my eyes and watched the muscles in his arms bulging with every stroke. God, how I loved his strong, beautifully sculpted body. After all these years of being together, I still adored my husband and experienced fireworks and all kinds of explosions whenever he made love to me.
“Do you forgive me for fucking that whore last night?” he murmured as he drove his curved thickness inside me, stroking deeply and caressing my most sensitive places. “Do you forgive me?” he repeated.
I nodded.
“Don’t nod your head; say it!”
“I forgive you for fucking that whore last night,” I whimpered as sparks of electricity popped off inside me. He began pounding my walls and my toes curled as a familiar warm feeling began to flood my system. On the verge of an orgasm, I cried out his name.
“Can I fuck her again?” he requested, taking advantage of the fact that my brain had turned to mush.
“Yes, baby,” I responded, but I didn’t mean it. I was in the moment, merely saying what he wanted to hear. Feeling good, I threw the pussy at him, humping and working as hard as he was—desperately trying to get there. Then I felt it. A sensation akin to hot lava gushing through my bloodstream. “Oh, Mav; oh, baby!”
“You ready to cum on this big dick, Cori?”
“Mmm-hmm,” I whimpered, almost there.
“Is your pussy juice gonna run down my dick and drench my balls?”
My husband had such a filthy mind and he loved talking dirty, but I was so close to the finish line, I was no longer capable of speaking coherently. I could only grunt out responses.
“I told Katya I was going to let her lick your cum off my nuts. Are you good with that, babe?”
Needing to concentrate on my orgasm, I ignored his question.
“Is it okay if Katya comes back over?”
Maverick could be annoyingly persistent, and for the sole purpose of shutting him up, I uttered in frustration, “Yeah, okay.”
Finally, I felt explosives beginning to detonate, and an incredibly intense orgasm skyrocketed through me. “Yes. Mmm. Oh, God, yes!” I screamed the words.
Then Maverick let go. He’d been holding back, waiting for me. At the moment of his climax, he exclaimed, “I’m gonna fuck the shit out of both you and Katya tonight.”
Half-crazy from coming, I joined in, ranting and raving about how good he was going to fuck me and his whore. But it was only talk. I didn’t mean it. Maverick had to be out of his mind if he believed I’d ever allow that Russian bitch to get back in my bed, again!
CHAPTER 8
I arrived on the set an hour and a half late, and Josh was having a fit over having to film out of sequence for the second day in a row.
“We need you on the set, like, now, Cori,” he said with a neck roll.
That bastard had tried it! I couldn’t believe Josh had the audacity to bark at me in front of the crew. For his sake, he needed to be grateful that the kids were off-set and hadn’t witnessed him disrespecting me. If they had been around, it was highly likely that I would have come out of my ni
gger bag and cursed him out the way Grandma Eula Mae used to curse out her daughters and grandchildren after she started getting senile.
Mistaking her twin daughters (my mom and my Aunt Chloe) for the hoes that used to work for her back in the day, Grandma Eula Mae would launch into shocking diatribes laced with generous amounts of foul language whenever my mom or Aunt Chloe gently tried to coerce her away from the stove. She was constantly setting off the smoke detector, but that didn’t stop her from standing in front of the stove for hours on end cooking up a bunch of bullshit. It was such a pity that she’d lost her amazing cooking skills with the onset of dementia. But you couldn’t tell her that she wasn’t still the best cook in Philadelphia.
Once when my mom and aunt attempted to escort Grandma Eula Mae out of the kitchen, she yanked away from them and grabbed a huge skillet and began her rant:
“If you black-ass, tar-baby bitches don’t get your stank, cum-dribbling coochie holes out of my kitchen and get back upstairs, you’d better. Instead of flapping your thick liver-lips at me, you need to be wrapping them around the dicks of those peckerwoods that paid good money for your services. Now, get the hell out of my muthafuckin’ kitchen before I knock some sense into your nappy heads with this here skillet! Get on up those stairs and cater to my customers.”
Then she mumbled under her breath, “You heifers need to be grateful that I don’t allow nigga men with their big ol’ horse dicks inside my establishment. If I let nigga men get ahold of you, your pussy holes would be stretched out of shape and not worth a plug nickel.”
Startled, my cousins and I would giggle uncomfortably whenever Grandma Eula Mae forgot she was our grandmother and lapsed into the role of a hell-raising madam. My mother and aunt, however, didn’t find it funny. They loathed being reminded that their fine educations and refined ways had been purchased with whorehouse money.
In her final year, as her mental status seriously began to decline, Grandma Eula Mae no longer recognized any member of the family. She mistook my cousins, our mothers, and me as being part of her stable of whores. She would unleash scathing recriminations upon us, her words generously peppered with the vilest profanity I’d ever heard. From listening to my grandmother, I had learned to curse like a sailor, and therefore, Josh was lucky that I’d only given him the finger as I made my way to my dressing room.
If he talked to me one more time out the side of his neck, he was going to get cursed out, Grandma Eula Mae-style.
Gina was inside my dressing room waiting for me. “Morning, Cori. How you feeling?” she asked as she pulled out a flat-iron from her overstuffed work bag.
To be honest, my life sucks! My husband wants to bite a Russian bitch’s pussy on a regular basis and additionally, he wants me to participate in the freak show. He wants me to lay back and watch while she licks my cooch juice off his balls.
If I had told Gina the truth about how I was feeling, she would have possibly fainted. So, I simply said, “I’m not having a good day, thanks to that prissy bitch, Josh. It would behoove him to keep his distance from me, today.”
Not wanting to get in the middle of beef between Josh and me, Gina wisely refrained from commenting and merely murmured a sound of understanding. As she worked on my hair, Clayton tapped on the door and came in.
“Sorry to barge in on you, Cori, but Josh is having a hissy fit. He said he needs you on the set ASAP. He wants me to get started on your makeup right away.”
I didn’t like having two people working on me at the same time, but not having a legitimate excuse to go against Josh’s wishes, I sighed and nodded in solemn acceptance.
While Gina and Clayton hovered over me with curling irons, makeup brushes, and other beauty tools, my thoughts wandered back to my marital problems. Before I’d left for work this morning, Maverick had confided that he felt completely obsessed with the idea of unleashing his inner freak on Katya. It was on the tip of my tongue to suggest that he get psychiatric treatment, but after giving the idea a little more thought, I changed my mind.
We were part of a culture where surgeons and well-respected medical doctors were known to snap selfies while posing with celebrities who were lying unconscious on operating tables, and there was no way I could trust that a psychiatrist wouldn’t run to TMZ with Maverick’s perverted sex secrets. If word got out that the beloved, All-American golden boy, Maverick Brown, was going around leaving teeth marks all over a hooker’s body, his career would be over. And there was no doubt in my mind that my reputation would be tarnished along with his. As much as I loved Maverick, I wasn’t willing to go down with his sinking ship.
In retrospect, I wished I hadn’t selected Katya from the dozens of photos that the escort agency provided on their website. I didn’t like the bitch’s Siberian husky eyes, and I should have followed my gut instinct and skipped past her photo. It took a really demented bitch to encourage a man to put teeth imprints all over her body and beg him to treat her like she was literally a piece of meat.
Never in a million years would I have imagined that my husband had some sort of carnivorous fetish. Maybe his proclivity toward biting had something to do with our vegetarian lifestyle. Perhaps if I reintroduced meat back into our diet, Maverick would get over his newfound biting obsession.
There was a knock on my dressing room door.
“See who it is and get rid of ’em,” I ordered.
Clayton and Gina both rushed to the door, eager to see who had the balls to interrupt my beautifying procedure. Clayton opened the door to a mere crack.
“Yes?” he said.
“Can I speak to Cori, please?” said a female voice.
“She’s busy,” Clayton growled.
“Let her in,” I said, curious to see who the hell had the gall to disturb me while I was getting ready for the camera. I was surprised to see the sole black female contestant. I didn’t know much about her. Couldn’t recall her name or whether or not the meal she had prepared yesterday was appealing. But it took a lot of chutzpah for a contestant to knock on my dressing room door. I looked her over. She was sweaty. Her makeup was dripping off her face and her hair had shriveled into a fuzzy Afro on one side and was limp and lifeless on the other. Maybe this impromptu visit wasn’t boldness at all, but was actually an act of sheer desperation.
“My name is LaTasha. I’m from Philly, like you,” she said, beaming at me.
“What can I do for you LaTasha?” I replied brusquely, ignoring the fact that we shared the same hometown.
“Being that we’re both Philly girls, I figured you’d understand how embarrassed I’ll be if I’m seen like this when the show airs.” She waved her hand along the fuzzy side of her head. “They’ve had us holed up in one of the kitchens for hours, practicing various recipes from your last cookbook. There’s so much heat in the kitchen, my hair and makeup is ruined,” LaTasha complained.
Wondering what in the hell she expected me to do, I looked at her like she was from another planet.
“We’re not allowed to bring anything with us from the hotel, and…” She trailed off and cut an eye at Gina. “I was wondering if I could borrow your flat-iron so I can bump my hair.”
“Hair and makeup services are only for judges and the host—not contestants,” Gina reminded her.
“I know, but look at me!” Grimacing, she gestured toward her hair. “I have to do something about this mess before I go back on set with all those cameras pointed in my face.”
“I don’t bring extra equipment with me, and I can’t let you borrow any of the equipment I use on Cori’s hair. That’s unsanitary.”
“That’s okay, let her borrow one of the flat-irons,” I said, sounding kindhearted. Being an African American woman, LaTasha was a reflection of me, and I simply couldn’t have her hair looking a hot mess on my show.
LaTasha spilled all kinds of tea while she was working on her hair. She gave us the rundown on all th
e other contestants. We found out that Touki, the petite Asian girl who smiled so sweetly during filming, was a demanding diva off camera. Yancy Dunlap, the Baptist preacher, tended to spread malicious gossip that kept the contestants bickering and at each other’s throats. The dwarf was a nasty little bastard who masturbated so much, he was given a single room. Becca, the Wiccan chick who dressed in all black, had a drinking problem, and when intoxicated, she would threaten her cast mates with witchcraft powers and had even alluded to casting spells on the judges and me.
All of that was interesting, but I was more interested in learning who was talking smack about me.
LaTasha had a bad case of diarrhea of the mouth, but I appreciated getting a heads-up on who my enemies were. According to LaTasha, the gay guy, Lionel, who always wore bright-yellow suspenders, said he wouldn’t dream of serving my heart attack food to any of his friends or loved ones. He went as far as to say that unhealthy slop like mine should be banned from television.
Although I was deeply offended, the yellow suspenders-wearing guy had a point. I no longer ate the artery-clogging crap I was famous for, either. But still, how dare he come on my show and openly criticize my food among the cast? Colorful and zany, he was proving to be an interesting character on the show. But I didn’t care how entertaining he was—Yellow Suspenders was not going to make it to the final four. He could kiss his culinary dreams goodbye; he was out of here!
LaTasha also disclosed that all the female contestants had the hots for Michelangelo, the super-hot black guy, but he didn’t pay any of them a bit of attention.
“We think he has a big crush on you, Cori,” LaTasha divulged.
“Me?” I was pleasantly surprised.
“He’s never said anything, but he’s constantly flipping the pages of your cookbooks, committing all your recipes to memory. And you should see the way his face lights up when you arrive on set.”
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