by Noire
He pulled me toward the coatroom snatching my plate so fast the wing I was chewing on slipped from my fingers and hit the floor, sauce everywhere.
“Man, what you doing?” I twisted out of his grasp. The spot where his hand had touched me was hot and tingling.
He put his finger to his lips. “Ssshh . . . c’mon, girl. You know what time it is.”
I let him pull me into the coatroom. I melted. “We gonna get caught. . . .” I felt like a kid sneaking a hump in the closet. On some level I knew that I was playing with my life, but the thrill of it all had me on fire. I wanted this guy to do me. I wanted to feel him on me, in me, all over me.
He pulled up my dress in the dimness of the room, and pressed his lips to mine. His breath smelled sweet like chocolate. I felt his hands on my ass and I rubbed my titties against his chest. “Damn, you taste good,” he said, his tongue thick and hot and leaving wet streaks on my lips, chin, and collarbone. I was panting, unable to speak. Scared as hell we would get caught but too turned on to even think about stopping.
His fingers were between my legs, urging them wide open. He hiked up my two-thousand-dollar eggshell Armani dress and got on his knees and bit down on my crotch right through my panties. “Oh, damn,” I whispered as his teeth raked across my clit and sent chills shooting through my pussy. “That feels so good.”
He pulled my panties down with his teeth and lifted my thigh over his shoulders. “Yum,” he said, looking between my legs and smacking his lips. “Cute little monkey.”
And then it was on. The moment I had been waiting for and hoping for and praying for. His tongue was everywhere, up, down, probing, licking. I felt his lips on my clit and on my asshole, too. He made his tongue stiff and pushed it in and out of me, using it like a mini dick. I cupped his face, pulling him closer as I worked my hips faster. My fingers were wet and sticky with my juices that were covering his cheeks and dripping from his chin. I shivered and shuddered and almost snatched his cornrows out as I held on to his head and came harder than I ever had in my life. My orgasm had to have lasted only seconds, but it was so sweet it felt like forever. The intensity of it scared me. I felt the whole building rock. It was totally unlike anything I had ever felt before and I never wanted it to end. But as soon as it was over I got hit with a blast of reality. I was up in G’s spot, wearing his clothes, eating his food, and fucking with one of his customers. How stupid could I get?
“Stop,” I said, pushing him away from me. He stood up and pulled his long dick out his pants. I wanted that shit real bad, but I knew better.
“What?”
“I can’t do this.” I jumped into my panties and pulled down my dress. “Sorry, I just can’t. I’m G’s woman and this is his Spot.”
“Motherfuck G,” he said, but at least he didn’t try to stop me. I opened the door and peeked out to make sure nobody was in the hall, then I ran out and pulled it closed behind me.
Back at the bar I sat on my stool and tried to look normal. My pussy was thumping in a delicious afterglow and I kept replaying the act over and over in my mind, feeling his tongue swirling around inside me, rolling over my clit, stabbing up into me. Moonie was standing down at the other end of the bar, so I asked Cooter to go get me a bottle of cold water. Moonie saw me sitting there and came up to the top of the bar. I could feel his eyes studying me, trying to read me like a book.
“Did you get your wings?”
I shook my head and took a swig of water. “Nah. They were frying up a fresh batch and I didn’t feel like waiting.” I don’t know why I lied, but I did. Moonie just looked at me for a minute, then he nodded. “Be right back,” I told him, grabbing my purse. “I’ma hit the bathroom right quick.” I could feel his eyes on my back as I walked away. At the entrance to the hall that lead to G’s office and the ladies room, I turned and looked back. Moonie had left the bar, and was heading toward the kitchen, moving fast.
I went in the bathroom and washed my face. I wet a paper towel in the sink then took it into a stall and did my best to wash myself down there. Then I stood in the mirror and combed my hair and put on some fresh lipstick. G hated to see women who had eaten off all of their lip color. He said it made them look busted.
When I went back out to the bar, there was something on my stool. It was my hot wing. Half-eaten with the crown bit off. I frowned and looked up and saw Moonie standing behind the bar and staring dead in my face. I didn’t miss a beat.
“Damn,” I said and poked out my lip. “Greco needs to check his cleaning crew.” I took a napkin from the bar and picked up the wing, holding it out like it was a used tampon. “Some people are so damn trifling.” I switched my ass around to the end of the bar and flung the wing in the trash, then got another napkin and wiped the sauce off the seat real daintylike before sitting down one stool over.
Moonie was still grilling me with his eyes, but so what? Fuck him. He hadn’t been in that coatroom holding no light so he couldn’t tell shit he didn’t know. Besides, I was just getting started. I had finally gotten my pussy licked, and G or no G, I wanted it licked some more.
Chapter Ten
Fletcher Boykin was a kid who grew up with me and Jimmy on 136th Street. His mother had actually ran with our moms for a while until she went down south and got religion. Miss Boykin was too busy preaching and ministering to the sinful souls at tent revivals to come back to Harlem and raise Fletcher, so just like a lot of us he lived with his grandmother and got raised the best he could.
Fletcher was a snotty-nosed kid with buckteeth and thick glasses. He followed Jimmy around like crazy, and all he ever talked about was how one day he was gonna make it rich and buy himself a Cadillac and a diamond ring.
I ignored Fletcher most of the time. He was always in our apartment trying to eat up our little bit of food, and he swore to my grandmother that one day I was gonna be his wifey and he was gonna take care of me like a queen. I was two years older than Fletcher and a whole foot taller. He was more of a nuisance than anything, but Jimmy loved him to death so I tolerated him for my brother’s sake.
When I was in the eighth grade and Fletcher was in the sixth, something happened to him that neither me nor Jimmy ever truly figured out. There was a guy named Macaroni who lived in a building a few doors down from ours, but liked to hang out on the roof of our building. Macaroni was in his twenties and still lived with his mother and grandmother, who both dressed in all white and stood on the corner praying for winos and hoes who passed by. Macaroni was in and out of jail all the time, and Grandmother had warned me and Jimmy to stay away from him because he was crazy and didn’t like little kids, so whenever we saw him lurking around our building we hurried up and booked up, running into the house.
One afternoon Jimmy and Fletcher were playing skelly in the hallway outside of our apartment. Grandmother was taking a nap, and I was laying on the pullout couch in the living room doing some math homework. Jimmy and Fletcher were loud talking each other and plucking caps right outside the door, and with all that hollering and carrying on I couldn’t concentrate. I kept getting up and going to the door to yell at them, but they were both hardheaded as hell and didn’t pay me much mind. I got mad and decided to make Jimmy’s little ass come inside.
“It’s your turn to clean the bathroom,” I went to the door and reminded him. “And you better get it done before Grandmother wakes up.” Now Jimmy was lazy and didn’t care nothing about cleaning nobody’s bathroom. Grandmother had already been cutting his ass left and right about showing out in school and forgetting to do his homework, but he wasn’t scared of her the way I was so my threat didn’t mean much to him. That is, until I said, “Besides. Grandmother got a letter about James Joseph today. I bet he can probably have visitors now, but she sure ain’t gonna take you to see him if you don’t start listening and doing like she says. She’s probably so tired of telling you over and over to do stuff she hopes Bellevue will just gone and give you a bed right next to him.”
Yeah, it was a low-down lie,
but so what? Jimmy was still hyped about our father, who was just as crazy as they came. James Joseph hadn’t even tied his own shoelaces since me and Jimmy were babies. Our father swore up and down he was Jesus in the flesh, and was forever talking cash mess out of his schizophrenic head, but Jimmy was blind to his shortcomings and still held out hope that one day he’d get better and Grandmother would take us to see him.
“I’ll be right back, man,” Jimmy told Fletcher, and ran to get the Ajax and the sponge to clean the bathroom. I hurried up and closed the door in Fletcher’s face, just in case he had any ideas about coming inside and waiting until Jimmy was done.
I went back to my homework and forgot all about Jimmy in the bathroom and Fletcher out there by himself in the hallway. The sound of a woman’s scream and running feet on the stairs sent me flying over to our peephole, and then running to look out the window.
“Jimmy!” I yelled as I leaned out the window and stared at the crowd of people running out of the building and others running toward my stoop. Jimmy squeezed in next to me and when we realized just what we were looking at all I could say was, “Oh, shit. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!”
“Oh, what?” Grandmother came up behind me. “I know you ain’t grown enough to be cussing up in my house like you paying the damn rent.”
I didn’t even turn around to answer her. I couldn’t. My eyes were fixed on the scene below. Macaroni was laying on the concrete just to the right of the stoop. He was on his back with his eyes open, and a puddle of blood was leaking from the back of his head.
Grandmother looked out the window on the other side of the chair and I heard her catch her breath. “Lord have mercy! That fool done finally fell his ass off that damn roof. He shoulda kept his crazy behind from up there in the first place. Now poor Mother Leland gone have to pray up some money to put his no-good ass in the ground.”
But less than an hour later we were all back at the window again. This time it was the police car we were staring at. The morgue hadn’t even come for Macaroni’s body yet, although somebody had thrown a white sheet over him, and when Jimmy hollered for me and Grandmother to come look again, it was little Fletcher being led out in handcuffs that bucked our eyes this time.
We never did find out what happened to make Fletcher push Macaroni off that roof, but of course we made up all kinds of stories. Whatever it was that Macaroni had done to Fletcher when I made Jimmy leave him out in the hallway by himself, it was enough to make Fletcher kill him. And he ’fessed right up to it, too. Went right in his apartment and told his grandmother what he had done, and stayed there waiting while she prayed over him and called the police.
A few years went by before we saw Fletcher again. We’d heard he got sent to some boy’s home upstate, but by the time I was a senior in high school Fletcher was back in Harlem again. By then his grandmother had died and some Puerto Ricans had moved into her old apartment, but Fletcher said he wasn’t looking to stay there no way. He never did tell us where he lived, but Jimmy heard he was staying with somebody on the Lower East Side, even though he ran the streets of Harlem every day.
I had cut school and was hanging out with my girl Brittany down in Taft projects when I found out that Fletcher was scrambling for G.
“Whassup, Fletcher,” I said as me and Brittany waited for the elevator. He was playing handball against the mailboxes on one wall, slamming killers like he was outside on a court.
“Flex,” he said catching the ball and looking me up and down. “It’s Flex now. How you doin, Juicy?”
“I’m good,” I said, looking at him for signs of a killer. Fletcher’s glasses were gone and his teeth were almost fitting in his mouth. He had gotten a little taller and put on a few pounds, but he still had that same grin and hopeful look in his eyes that he did when he was a kid.
“You looking good, too,” he said, and I remembered the crush he had had on me all those years ago. “Know what?” he asked.
“What?”
“Remember when we was little and I used to like you?”
I nodded and laughed. “Yeah. You was a pain in the ass back in the day.”
“Well, I still like you.”
I shook my head and threw my hand in the air like I wasn’t trying to hear it.
“Naw, naw,” he said, grinning and bouncing his ball. “I know you G’s woman now, and I respect that. I ain’t stupid enough to step on my boss’s dick. I’m just saying you was always real nice, Juicy. I still think you nice.”
“You was a cool kid, Fletch—I mean Flex. We missed you when you left the building. I’m glad you’re back in the city.” I was hoping the elevator would hurry up and come so we could get this convo over with.
He nodded. “I missed y’all too. You and Jimmy was like the only real family I had.” The elevator finally came and Flex waved as I waited to get on. “Later, Juicy. Do your thing. But remember what I told your grandmother that time. I still mean that shit.”
I waved at Flex and got on the elevator. When he was ten he’d told Grandmother that one day I was gonna be his. That one day he was gonna marry me and buy me mad gold jewelry and set me up in a big phat house with cooks and servants and the whole nine. It was a trip that all the things Flex had promised my grandmother he was gonna do for me were exactly the things that G was doing for me now.
Chapter Eleven
New York City was hot as hell. Sisters strutted the streets wearing shorts so tiny they showed the black of their asses, and I planned to be dressed just like them in a minute. Before long I’d be down in Brooklyn starring in a ghetto version of a wet T-shirt contest. I’d be hitting the streets with my titties busting out of a tank top and jumping in front of a Johnny pump to get sprayed with cold city water.
For now all I could do was hold back my excitement and count down the days. G was heading to the West Coast and he was taking Jimmy with him. They were going to his son Gino’s graduation and would be gone for five whole days. I couldn’t wait until they got on that plane. Me and Rita had all kinds of stuff planned. House parties in the BK, a Thug-a-Licious concert at the Garden, talent night at the Apollo, shopping till the stores closed down, you name it I was gonna do it, and do it all in five days.
G had asked me if I wanted to go and I almost screamed out hell no. Instead I ran him some line about how this would be a good time for Gino and Jimmy to get to know each other and how they didn’t needed a girl hanging around stepping all over that. The truth was I wanted some down time, some time away from G and his damn Spot. I wanted to put on a pair of cut off shorts and let my hair hang down to my ass. I wanted to stroll up and down 125th Street, and maybe even Fordham Road, and eat slices of pizza with extra cheese and fried shrimp with hot sauce straight from a paper bag.
I also wanted to steal some time away from Jimmy, who was sho’ nuff smelling his ass these days. Every time I turned around he was running his mouth about the jobs G had lined up for him and how much bank he was gonna be slinging. And he’d been right about Gino, too. He was coming back to Harlem with G, which was totally crazy if you asked me. Why would G spend all that money to send his son to college if he was gonna bring him back to Harlem and put him in charge of a bunch of crackheads and hoes? You didn’t need no college degree to do that. The streets held class 24/7 and G was living proof of it.
That’s why I knew I had to confront G. I didn’t wanna risk him getting mad and putting me on lockdown while he was gone, so I decided to wait until he came back. But we were gonna talk, that much was for damn sure. Grandmother hadn’t worked like a dog to raise us right just to have Jimmy hustling up in no Spot. It was bad enough that I had to put up with G’s shit just to get my education, but have Jimmy miss out completely on his? No. Just like Gino went to college, Jimmy needed the chance to go too. G didn’t love his son no more than I loved my brother.
I rode with Pacho and Moonie to take G and Jimmy to La Guardia airport in Queens. Inside the terminal I held on to Jimmy’s arm trying to cuddle with him like we used to do wh
en we were kids. He’d gotten so tall, so damned muscular it was almost like he wasn’t my baby brother no more. Dressed like one of them bad-ass thugged-out playas/rappers/dealers who hung on the streets of Harlem, you couldn’t even tell he was the same kid who used to sleep next to me on a pissy, bug-infested mattress.
I took his hand and made him hold mine tight. I could tell he was embarrassed to have me hanging all over him, but at least he kept grinning and squeezing my fingers so I could feel his love. I clung to G a little bit too. Truth was, it was the first time Jimmy would be out of New York City, and I was scared the damn plane would crash and I’d find myself alone without my soul or my source of income. I kept telling myself that nothing bad was gonna happen, that people had to get where they were going and planes flew back and forth safely every day.
Moonie said we couldn’t go all the way with them to the gate because of airline security, so we said our good-byes as they got into a long line of people waiting to go through the checkpoint. Despite my self-talk and all the stuff I was looking forward to doing for five days, I was still scared to see them go. Jimmy looked happier than I’d ever seen him before. He was all up on G’s dick, laughing and joking like he climbed on a damn airplane and left me every day.
G came over and looked down at me. His clothes fit him to a tee and even a fool could see how expensive they were. I stared into his eyes. He was so damn fine. He hugged me to his chest and his arms felt strong and warm around my waist. Why couldn’t he make me feel like this all the time?
“Be good, Juicy,” he said. “If you need anything, see Moonie.” He squeezed me tight. “You know you my girl.”
I raised myself up on my toes and waited, begging him from my heart. Kiss me, G. Please. Put your mouth on mine and let me feel your tongue inside of me. I’ll be a good girl, G. I’ll make you feel so good. Just help me a little bit, G. Please kiss me. I was dying to feel his lips, let him taste mine. Whatever issues I had with G, he was everything to me and Jimmy. He put a roof over our heads when we didn’t have nobody else and even though he’d beat me, I knew he didn’t really mean it. Things could get better, I just knew they could. If we could start with a kiss then maybe we could work our way to a point where G wasn’t turned off and disgusted by having good sex and I wasn’t afraid to show him how much I needed it. But I was waiting in vain. G was old and set in his ways. I was young and busting loose. He pressed two fingers to his lips then touched my forehead. That was it. That was my good-bye kiss.