by Miasha
She knocked my hand down. “Where’s the camera?”
Stew tried to lift his head to see what was going on, but the girl on top of him was suddenly holding a tiny blade to his neck. It must’ve been under her tongue the whole time.
“Don’t move another inch or you will lose your life tonight,” she told Stew.
My smile quickly faded. Had we caught them on tape before and they were here for revenge? I pondered. But that could not have been the case, I thought, because I would have remembered the ass on that girl.
“We know y’all be secretly taping muthafuckas,” Purple Hair said. “Now all we want is fifty G’s and we’ll walk outta here smiling like we had a good time. If not, we will shine the light on y’all lil’ operation and I’m sure that’ll cost y’all way more than what we askin’.”
Extortion. I shoulda known. The eye contact and the ass shake at the bar were too strong a come-on even in a place like this. But fifty G’s wasn’t actually a lot to ask for. Stew and I had it, but did I want to part with it under these circumstances? Absolutely not. Extortionists got under my skin the way rapists and child molesters did. I wanted to tell her and her big-booty ho to bounce their thirsty asses out of my room and out of the club. But there was a blade to my husband’s throat.
“Whose to say you won’t cut us anyway after we hand over the money?” I asked.
“Whose to say we have that kind of money here?” Stewart talked over me.
“You keep quiet, old head,” Big Butt told Stew.
Then Purple Hair summed it up: “Just like we know there’s cameras in here, we know there’s a stash in here. Now I can fuck all y’all shit up looking for it myself or you can hand it over peacefully and still have the chance to make it back with the next unsuspecting couple y’all lure back here.”
“So what the fuck is it gonna be?” Big Butt shouted.
“Stew . . .” I began nervously.
“Give it to ’em,” he surrendered. “Just give it to ’em so they can get the fuck outta here.”
“Aye,” Big Butt said, pressing the blade harder against his neck. “The aggression isn’t necessary. It’s not like we askin’ for ya whole life’s savings. We’re being nice enough to leave ya business still intact.”
“All right, all right, everybody calm down,” I said, walking over to our stash spot behind one of the leather panels in the wall. I angrily counted out fifty thousand dollars, then closed the panel and turned to Purple Hair. “Here,” I handed her the stack of bills. “Now please just go.” I was livid, definitely no longer high.
Purple Hair flipped through the money to make sure it was what she had asked for. “It’s all here. Let’s go,” she told her girl.
“I’m gonna get up off you and you are not gonna make a move. The slightest motion and my girl will take her blade from out her mouth and make a real mess out ya pretty little wifey there, you got it?”
“Got it,” Stew said.
And with that she slowly backed up off him. Meanwhile her girl would not take her eyes off me. I stood stiff, waiting for them to walk out and that be that.
Big Butt and Purple Hair backed their way over to the door, unlocked it, and walked out. As soon as the door shut behind them, I rushed over and locked it.
Stew jumped up and scrambled to another one of our stash spots. I was sure he was going for the gun.
“No,” I stopped him. “If you run out there chasin’ behind them with a gun, our cover will be blown.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” Stew shot back. “These bitches just threatened my life and the life of my wife.” He loaded the gun.
“It was just to get the money,” I told him. “They weren’t going to kill us. We overreact, we lose everything, just like that.” I stood in front of him, looked him in his eyes. “I’m just as pissed as you are, believe me. But it’s not like we were robbed making an honest living. We do to people what they just did to us except we don’t use a weapon and the people we take from never find out they’ve been robbed of anything.”
Stew eased up. His heavy breathing started to slow down.
“It’s a drop of defeat in a bucket overflowing with victory,” I concluded.
Stew let the clip out of the gun and put it back in our stash spot.
“From now on, no one comes in this room without being scanned by a metal detector. And first thing Monday, I’m having someone come through and outfit this place for guns. I want one under the bed, behind the TV, attached to the swing, everywhere. It just got real.”
Chapter 5
No Apologies
JuJu & Ferrari
The temperature dropped drastically, from the low seventies earlier in the week to the low forties by the weekend. February wanted everybody to know she had arrived. JuJu was waiting beside her car in the parking lot of the yoga class she took every Saturday morning. Mike was meeting her there with some new information. She shook a little but it wasn’t from the cold. Anxiety had set in.
Mike’s car finally pulled up, and he stepped out carrying an orange envelope. She knew that meant pictures were inside. And Mike only brought pictures when there was something worth showing. A lump formed in her throat.
“Hi, hun,” Mike greeted with a hug and kiss on each cheek like usual. She reciprocated.
“What did you find?” she got right to the point.
“Well,” Mike said, pulling the envelope from under his arm, “you were right.”
He handed JuJu a small stack of 5x7 black-and-white photographs. She examined the shots as he narrated.
“He had this young lady at the lake house on several occasions. The first was a couple days after you left my office. The last was last night.”
“Son of a bitch,” JuJu mumbled. “This is her.” She looked up at Mike. “This is the girl I told you about.”
“I know. And I put two and two together and found out that she’s the same girl you suspected he’d been messaging on Facebook several months back.”
JuJu’s mouth flung open. “So you’re telling me that he’s been having an affair with her since back when I first hired you?”
Mike nodded and rubbed his hands together. “You wanna get out of this cold? Go grab some coffee?”
JuJu thought on it.
“I can tell you what he’s planning,” Mike added.
JuJu grimaced. “There’s more?”
Mike nodded. “He booked a hotel room for Valentine’s Day, and at first I thought maybe he’s booking the room for the two of you. But that’s not the case. Let’s go somewhere and talk.”
JuJu gave in. She needed to figure out her next move and Mike could help her do that. She had him follow her to Land of a Thousand Hills, her favorite coffee house in Atlanta.
During the fifteen-minute drive, JuJu wondered how she had let Ferrari get so far from her grasp. When did he grow the balls to do the things he was now doing. It was one thing for him to send inappropriate messages to a person on Facebook, but for him to actually invite the girl to their home, her home—that was a whole different level of disrespect and disregard. Then it dawned on her: if this same girl was the one he had been talking to on Facebook, then the night they met at Puss & Boots wasn’t the first time they’d encountered one another like they had led everyone to believe. In fact, JuJu thought more into it, it couldn’t have been a coincidence that Ferrari and this girl ended up at the same club that night. No one’s luck was that good. They had to have planned it. JuJu grew more furious as she thought about just how conniving and underhanded Ferrari had been.
I made him, she told herself. I took him from nothing. Everything he is, everything he has, is because of me! And I get repaid like this?
Her intuition had turned out to be right. Her fears were legitimate. She was losing the control she had over her husband. Part of her felt like she should have expected this day would come sooner or later. She had met Ferrari when he was nineteen modeling in Los Angeles. She had taken one look at him and wanted him. She liked sp
oiling him and being in control in their relationship, and sex with somebody so many years her junior had started out thrilling.
But in the back of her mind, she always thought he’d get tired of being her possession. He would become a man one day and want a younger woman. That had always haunted her. That was why she could be so violent and threatening toward him. She thought those tactics would scare him into staying with her. It sure worked for her mother, who had managed to keep ahold on her father for thirty-plus years using a similar approach.
JuJu recalled times where she’d hear her mother, at the top of her lungs, hurling insults at her father. She’d lie at the top of the stairs and look down. She’d witness her mother hitting her father with household items like irons and toasters. She’d watch her threatening to electrocute him while he was bathing. All this and still her father remained married to her until his death. It was how you kept a man—or so JuJu grew up believing.
She was concerned now, though, that those very tactics might have been what was driving Ferrari into the arms of this girl. He was probably at the point of no return, where he felt he had nothing left to lose, so fear no longer drove him—desperation did.
Tori & Kevin
I had just walked in from another overnight stay with Ferrari at the lake house. It was becoming a pattern much like our conversing back and forth over the Internet where this whole thing began. I kept telling myself it was going to be the last time, but something kept pulling me back. I ended up blaming it all on fate. It was my way of justifying my actions. Maybe it’s meant to be, I often told myself, maybe it’s God’s plan.
It was ten a.m. Typically Kevin would be at the gym at this hour. It was his Saturday-morning routine. That would have given me the chance to shower, organize my thoughts, and deplete my guilt so that I wouldn’t come off as sneaky or guarded by the time Kevin got home.
But that morning Kevin didn’t go to the gym. He was just getting out of the shower when I got to our bedroom. I was caught off guard, but I tried to carry myself as normal as possible.
“Hey,” I greeted.
“What’s up?” he replied, drying his hair in the mirror.
“You goin’ somewhere?” He didn’t tend to shower before the gym.
“Yeah.” He brushed past me, his eyes avoiding contact with mine.
I put my pocketbook in the closet and took off my sneakers. I always dressed down when I went to see Ferrari. I didn’t want to raise any red flags by fixing myself up to go “help my mother out.”
“My mom is doing better,” I volunteered.
“Oh yeah?” He rushed his clothes on.
“Everything okay?” I had to ask. Kevin was throwing me too much shade.
“Yup,” he said flatly.
“Where are you going?”
“I gotta meet somebody real quick.”
“Who? Where?” I removed my sin-covered clothing.
“A friend. At the Land of a Thousand Hills.”
“The coffee spot?” I was confused. Kevin wasn’t a coffee drinker.
“She picked the spot, not me,” he said nonchalantly as he tied his sneakers.
“She?”
He pretended not to hear me and left the room. I hurried behind him, naked and all.
“Who the hell is she?” I yelled at his back as he jogged down the stairs.
Kevin was no longer pretending. He was outright ignoring me. I ran down the stairs behind him.
“Who are you meeting, Kevin?”
He grabbed the car keys off the wooden peg that hung on the wall in the hallway leading to our two-car garage.
I followed him to the door, but no further. I couldn’t risk the neighbors seeing me in the nude.
“Kevin!” I shrilled.
He opened the car door.
“KEVIN!”
He didn’t respond, he simply started the car and backed out of the garage. The screeching of the tires was like an exclamation point on the end of his silent anger.
He knew something. What and how, I had yet to find out.
Lyssa & Jacob
Boy how I wished the expression What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas was true. I wished Jake and I were able to leave the shocking revelation we had discovered back there out west. There was no way, though. I was still suffering from unanswered questions.
And as soon as we got back home to Atlanta, we sought out a family therapist. Jake and I had no idea how to deal with our daughter’s desires and choices. We felt like hypocrites every time we tried talking to her about it. The end result was that all of us had to come clean. It was hard as hell. But it had to be done for us to open up the lines of communication.
We finally confessed to Alexandria that it wasn’t an assisted living home we invested our retirement money in, but a swingers club. And that we had in fact called her out to Vegas not to bust her but to interview her. It was what we were into.
In turn, she admitted that she began working as a bartender at a strip club after her first semester in college. She said that had progressed to dancing. And she had experimented with being a live-in for a couple near her campus that same summer. It was purely for fun and an additional source of easy income.
The information was difficult to digest. For her as well, I could imagine. But at least by the time Alexandria left to return to school, we were all understanding one another. It was awkward to be in each other’s presence, yes, but we only saw each other during holidays and summers, so it wouldn’t be too bad.
We promised to keep our admissions between the three of us. Not to let it get out to our extended family and especially not to Jake Jr., Alexandria’s older brother. He was heavily grounded in the church and we were all sure our secrets were too seedy for him to handle. He was likely to disown us all if he found out.
Jake and I went back to work running Puss & Boots as if nothing had happened. We did however put trying to find another live-in on hold. It was hard to screen girls, interview them, and even think about bringing them into our bed without thinking they could be our daughter. So when Morgan called the club asking if she could come back to work for us, I was prepared to decline. But I was also curious.
“What about the baby?” I asked her through the phone.
“There was never a baby,” she huffed.
“What do you mean?”
“I was never pregnant, Lyssa. Please don’t get mad, but Jacob wanted me to tell you that. He said he thought you were getting too clingy with me. He didn’t want to cause any problems in y’all’s marriage. I wanna respect his wishes, but I ran outta money. I need a place to stay. And . . .” she rambled on.
I could not believe what I was hearing, but it made sense. That was the reason Jake had wanted to choose our next live-in. He wanted to pick somebody he felt I wouldn’t be so drawn to. Well, the joke was on him. Not only did he pull the wrong card, our daughter, but now he was going to have to deal with Morgan, ’cause I was moving her back in.
Danielle & Stewart
Stewart and I were driving to the gun range where we had an appointment to get some weapons training. Ever since the robbery, extortion, or whatever you choose to call it, Stew has been getting us ready for war. But in the process of all of the preparation for another incident, I started having doubts. How was I to ever relax and let myself go thinking about the possibility of somebody robbing us at knifepoint or gunpoint. How much money were we willing to lose, and more importantly, what if the next time the knife actually gets used?
I was beginning to think twice about the whole idea. Then I realized I was ready to do what we always did when the tides changed in our business—relocate.
“You know what I was thinking?” I began.
“What?” Stew asked, eyes on the road.
“How about we just move again?”
“What are you talking about?” He glanced over at me.
“All this outfitting the room for guns and getting weapons training is scary, Stew, and ready or not, I don’t want to have to
even worry about needing all this stuff, not in a place where I’m supposed to be completely at ease and carefree. How can I work the same with the threat of someone sticking us up hanging over my head? It’s never going to be like it was before.”
Stew nodded. “I’ve been thinking the same thing, actually. Our safety has been jeopardized and we can arm ourselves to the teeth, but it will never be the same.”
“I say we look at the top three places we’d want to go. Book us some flights and spend a couple weeks checking them out. We come back in time for the event at the club. Make a good amount of videos that night to last us until we get situated in our new place, then we leave Atlanta as just another marked territory.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Stewart said, making an abrupt U-turn. “Call and cancel the weapons appointment and look up flights to Vegas, Phoenix, and maybe even Dallas since that cowboy brought us in so many new subscribers.”
I got on my phone and did just that. There was something special about starting fresh. Going to a new territory where nobody knew nor could suspect what you had or who you were gave me a new sense of security.
Chapter 6
Sunglasses and Advil
JuJu & Ferrari
JuJu nervously sipped away at her third cup of Haitian Blend. Her eyes peered out the window, but instead of taking in the beauty of the Chattahoochee River, she was watching every person who approached the front door, anxiously awaiting Kevin.
After Mike disclosed all of what he had discovered about Ferrari and Tori, JuJu’s wheels got to turning. She wanted to figure out a clever way to bust Ferrari that would leave him unable to make excuses and unable to get one red cent from a divorce settlement. She had come up with a plan and called Kevin.
After an hour or so, she finally spotted him walking through the door. She stood up and waved him over. The last time she had seen him she was giving him fellatio. The memory shot through her mind as she hugged him hello.
“Thanks for coming all the way out here,” JuJu said as she and Kevin sat.