“You still want to be my wife?” Kenyatta said.
All the anger in me diminished instantly at the prospect.
“Y-yes, of course. Of-of course I do,” I said. An unexpected tear raced from my eye and Kenyatta leaned in and kissed it away. He kissed both eyelids, kissed my forehead, then planted one, long, soulful kiss on my lips that made my knees weak.
“Good luck today, Kitten. I love you.”
“I love you too, Kenyatta,” I replied.
I felt better, more resolved. As Kenyatta walked out the door, I was already preparing myself to do battle in the job market. Then Angela spoke up and ruined everything.
“You’re a fool, you know that right?”
“Angela, don’t.” I held up a hand to silence her.
“He’s playing you. You know you’re not the first white woman he’s done this to?”
I looked at her in shock.
“He didn’t tell you? You’re not the first, but you have come the farthest. Most quit in the box. He’s had to get real creative to keep challenging you. He never expected you to make it this far.”
I shook my head.
“I don’t believe you.”
But what she was saying made sense. Why would I have been the first? Did I think I was the first white woman he’d ever dated? Did I think I was the first one he’d ever loved?
“Did he ever tell you about the first white woman he ever fell in love with? What he did to her family?”
I shook my head. I didn’t think I wanted to hear this.
“She told him she couldn’t see him because her parents were prejudice, so Kenyatta took a knife, went to her house, and killed them both. He stabbed the girl’s mother about twenty times and her father more than fifty. He slit the man’s throat so deep he almost decapitated him. He was only fourteen so he was tried as a juvenile and declared insane. They put him in a mental institution until he was an adult. On his twenty-first birthday, he was released and his juvenile record was sealed. He killed two people and walked out of there with a clean record.”
My hands shook as I stood up and began clearing the breakfast dishes. I didn’t know what to think. How could Kenyatta have killed someone? It didn’t make sense. But the real problem was that it made too much sense. It answered too many questions.
I slammed the dishes down in the sink, shattering them.
“Why the fuck are you telling me this now? Why didn’t you say something before?”
Angela stood up and tried to put her arms around me. I pushed her away.
“Why now? Answer me!”
“Because you might make it. I never thought you would before, but you might make it. And marrying him would be the biggest mistake of your life. Kenyatta doesn’t love you. He doesn’t know how to love anyone. All he’s got inside him is hate. He wants everyone, every white person, to feel the pain he felt when he was rejected at fourteen. That’s what he’s in this for, and it won’t stop when this is over. It won’t stop when you get a ring on your finger. You need to think about this, girl.”
And I did. I thought about it while I walked to the bus stop. I thought about it as I rode the bus to the BART train. I thought about it as I took BART to Market Street and even while I walked up Market to my first job interview. It was all I could think about. Had all this been for nothing? Was Angela just saying all that because she wanted him to herself? But that didn’t make sense. Angela was a lesbian. That could have been bullshit though. She was definitely bi, but just because she liked pussy didn’t mean she didn’t also love dick.
The interview was for a job as a waitress at a diner on Market and Church Street. I tilted my head back, lifted my chin, and marched in. The diner was designed to look like the dining car of an old train. Being in San Francisco, there was every possibility that it had once been. It was green and black with little green shades on the windows with gold tassels. Every seat was filled and the waitresses looked harried but competent as they hurried up and down the aisles taking and delivering food orders. I could easily imagine myself among them. It would actually be a relief to have a job, for once, that ended when you clocked out. No tests or papers to grade or assignments to plan. No stressing over some complicated lesson plan or student issue. Just take the order and bring the food. No thought involved. It would be a relief.
I walked up to the cash register and put on my brightest smile.
“Hi. I’m here to apply for the waitress position.”
The woman behind the counter had thick blonde curls and bright red lipstick. She dressed in a tight cream-colored cashmere sweater and a black poodle skirt with a red kitten on it, like she stepped off the set of Happy Days. But she was much too young to have ever seen the show, except perhaps in reruns. There was some odd combination of smile and frown on her face that was supposed to be sexy, judging from the way she stood with one hand on her hip, breasts thrust out prominently, twirling her gum around her finger and winking at customers as they walked in.
“Um, okay. Have you ever waitressed before?” she said, glancing my way only long enough to pass me an application before she resumed smiling and winking at customers. She even flirted with the gay couples.
“No...um...not really.”
She turned and looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time.
“Is that permanent?” she said, gesturing toward my face, with a dismissive flip of the wrist. I wanted to grab her by the hair and slam her face into the cash register. Instead, I willed myself to hold that fake smile on my face like it was chained to me.
“No. It only lasts two or three weeks.”
She looked me up and down then turned to blow a kiss at an old man I assumed was a regular. He returned the gesture, beaming from ear to ear.
“We might still be hiring in three weeks,” she said, without ever turning back to look at me. I stood there for nearly a full minute, during which she never looked at me again. Finally, I walked out of the little diner, refusing to cry, determined not to give up. I caught a bus to Haight Street and walked down to the Lower Haight district where there were quirky little shops and bars that were used to people with odd tattoos and piercings.
There was a bar called The Mad Wolf that had advertised for a cocktail waitress. It was right in the middle of the block. The kind of bar with saloon doors, pool tables, dart boards, and a sparse smattering of lonely drunks, having their first drink of the day when most people were still digesting their Froot Loops.
I walked up to the bar. The guy behind it was a big, six-foot, urban redneck/punk in a black cowboy hat, a black Sex Pistols t-shirt with the sleeves torn off, black jeans, and black combat boots with spurs on them. He had gray hair and crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and lips. He was old enough to have seen Sid Vicious live.
“What’s up?”
“I’m here about the cocktail waitress job?”
“What’s the tattoo for?”
“It’s a long story.”
He leaned over the bar and locked eyes with me.
“If you want to work here, I think I need to hear it.”
“Basically, my boyfriend wanted me to see if I could get a job looking like this.”
His eyes remained fixed on me, and his expression was deadpan. I felt so uncomfortable under his gaze that I almost turned and left.
“Ever worked in a bar before?” he said finally.
“No. I was a schoolteacher. I taught seventh grade English.”
“But you couldn’t teach kids with ‘Slut’ and ‘Liar’ tattooed on your face, so you’re slumming at a bar, hoping my standards are low enough to hire you?”
I smiled and nodded.
“I guess so.”
“Well. You’re in luck. My standards are just that low. Welcome to the Mad Wolf!”
He spread his arms wide and gestured around the nearly empty bar.
“Thanks!” I said, a little too energetically.
“It pays nine dollars plus tips. Most girls make a hundred a
night in tips. Two hundred on the busy nights. That okay?”
“That sounds perfect.”
I reached across the bar and shook his hand then turned to leave, but he didn’t let go.
“You in a hurry? Let me show you around the bar.”
He stroked my arm with his other hand and I quickly snatched my hand away.
“I...um...I—”
He smiled a wide predatory smile.
“Let me show you where we keep all the kegs and the cases of beer.” He leaned close enough for me to smell the marijuana and beer on his breath. “We’ve got a bed back there.”
“No. I don’t think so,” I said.
“Come on. Why not? I told you I’d hire you.”
“So I’m supposed to fuck you for a job?”
He sneered at me.
“You’re the whore with ‘Slut’ tattooed on your forehead,” he said.
“Fuck you!” I yelled. My voice echoed in the near empty bar. A few of the drunks laughed. The others barely looked up from their drinks.
“Fucking asshole!” I flipped him the bird over my shoulder as I stormed out.
“You’re fired!” he yelled back and then I heard him laugh. His laughter was worse than any insult he could have hurled at me. I wanted to crawl in a hole and die.
I stormed out of the bar. That was it. The last straw. Fuck this. I walked back to the bus stop. I was done. I had a decision to make. I could either go back to the plantation, as Kenyatta suggested, or I could say fuck the whole thing, as Angela suggested.
An hour later, when I walked up the steps of Kenyatta’s home and opened the front door, I was still undecided. It was the sound of the headboard smacking the wall, the moans and screams coming from Kenyatta’s bedroom, that made up my mind.
CHAPTER XX
He was fucking her. I walked in and caught him, fucking his ex-wife. Fucking her hard and angry. Crushing her into the mattress with each stroke. His ass was poised in the air, preparing for the down stroke, that beautiful, muscular ass I loved so much, poised there. Her legs tossed over his shoulders, her moans of pain and pleasure echoing from everywhere.
He had been fucking her all along. I don’t know why I was surprised. I would have had to be a fool to think he wasn’t. But, I had been that fool. Even as I was lying on a bed of straw in the backyard, as I was being whipped and almost raped at Mistress Delia’s farm, pulling a plow and picking grapes. As I was being humiliated day after day, walking the streets with this damned tattoo on my face, I had believed every second that there would be a happily-ever-after for Kenyatta and I. I had believed that he would love me and protect me and be all those things a man was supposed to be according to the romance novels and romantic comedies.
Angela spotted me first and the look of guilt on her face confirmed everything.
“Oh, shit!”
She pushed Kenyatta off her and pulled the sheets up to her chin in some ridiculous show of false modesty. I had fucked this woman. I licked her pussy and she licked mine. What did she think she was hiding that I had not already seen? But she wasn’t hiding her body, she was holding up a shield, protecting herself with the only thing she had, a thin sheet. Kenyatta, however, was unfazed. He stood, naked, cock still hard and bobbing in the air like a divining rod. He held out his arms for me.
“Come join us.”
That’s when I found my voice.
“NIGGERRRRRRRR!” I screamed it loud and long. Then I screamed it again.
I picked up whatever I could find off the dresser and threw it at him as I repeated it over and over again. “NIGGER! NIGGER! NIGGEEEEEEERRRRRR!”
Kenyatta rushed across the room, raised his hand, and slapped me to the floor. He didn’t slap me as a master slapping his willing slave. There was nothing safe or sane about it. Perhaps there never had been. I had been slapped like this by men before. There was anger in his eyes and in his heart. It hurt me more than anything else I’d endured during those long arduous months of servitude. I turned and walked out, Kenyatta chased behind me, apologizing, begging me to stay. I guess the safe word didn’t matter anymore.
“Okay! Okay! Wait! Forget about the experiment. It’s over. I don’t care about the safe word. I’ll marry you, okay? I’ll marry you!”
He was standing there in the doorway as I walked out onto the porch, down the front steps and down the walkway toward my car. He was naked, beautiful, but somehow pathetic, diminished, and not merely because his cock had shriveled. I could see him now clearly for what he was, a sad, lonely, angry man who was full of self-loathing.
His ancestors had been through horrors and atrocities that most people could scarcely imagine, let alone survive. From the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and Jim Crow, through the civil rights movement, right up to the insidious institutionalized racism that holds so many of his people in economic dungeons to this day. Black people in America have suffered what no race of people should have ever had to endure, but he hadn’t. Kenyatta had never been a slave. He had never been through segregation. He was handsome, successful, and should have been happy. But he would never be, because he clearly hated himself. I pitied him now, and I could never marry him.
“Goodbye, Kenyatta.”
I turned my back, shaking my head, as the tears began to flow. I kept my head held high as I strode down that walkway to the sidewalk, sobbing openly, heartbroken. I felt hollow inside, shattered and gutted. But I was me again. I’d been here before. I was no one’s slave anymore. I was no one’s second-class citizen. The tattoo would fade. I’d get a job, and my life would resume. I’d come back from heartache after heartache and I would come back from this one. What Kenyatta put me through, would always be a part of me. Like it or not, he had taught me a lot about race and racism. Things I would never forget. He’d literally scarred these lessons into my flesh. Perhaps I owed him for that...but fuck him.
I didn’t know where my car keys were. Kenyatta had taken them from me when we first began this sadistic game. I didn’t care. I kept walking past my car, down the street, to the nearest bus stop. I sat there, seesawing from relief, to anger, to overwhelming sadness. I didn’t know what I should do next, then I cautiously probed my cheek with my fingertips. It was swollen and still felt warm to the touch from where Kenyatta had slapped me. My lip was swollen as well and I could taste blood in my mouth. I sighed deeply, pulled out my cell phone, and called 911.
EPILOGUE
⇁↽
I sat down at an outdoor café in South Beach, sipping a mimosa and waiting on a shrimp cocktail. The tattoo had faded away months ago. I was back working for the school district after cutting my hiatus short. My life was almost back to normal.
I pressed charges against Kenyatta for slapping me and took out a restraining order against him. Angela called me a few times to beg me to reconsider. She even threatened me on more than one occasion until I recorded one of her more hostile phone calls and had her arrested for making terrorist threats. That was four months ago, and I haven’t heard from either of them since.
The waitress brought my shrimp cocktail, and I made a mental note to leave her a big tip. I took another sip of my mimosa and was just about to dig into the shrimp cocktail, when a familiar silhouette caught my attention. He was across the street at a used bookstore. He wore a white shirt and a red tie with the sleeves rolled up like a politician on the campaign trail. There was a woman on his arm, a tall blonde with big tits, wide hips, and a big round ass. Kenyatta’s type. He reached over and patted the woman on her ass. I could hear her giggle from across the street.
When I saw the collar around her neck, the same one I had worn, I felt a twinge of jealousy. Then I spotted the book in his hand. I couldn’t read the title from where I was, but I didn’t need to. I had seen it so many times before. When he opened it and began to read from it to the tall blonde, a chill raised over my skin. He was doing it again. He had found another victim for his twisted mind games, another fool.
I reached into my wallet and pulled
out two twenties to cover the bill, then I stood and began walking across the street. I reached into my purse one more time. Living alone in the city was scary sometimes. I had long ago taken to carrying protection. I felt the familiar weight of it in my hand as I approached the two of them. I had been submissive for far too long. It was time to end the game for real. And this time, there would be no safe word.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
⇁↽
Special thanks to R.J. Cavender and Marc Ciccarone for having faith in this project. Thanks to Monica O’Rourke for her invaluable editing advice. Tod Clark for his keen eye for the little things. And Christie White for the inspiration.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
⇁↽
Wrath James White is a former World Class Heavyweight Kickboxer, a professional Kickboxing and Mixed Martial Arts trainer, distance runner, performance artist, and former street brawler, who is now known for creating some of the most disturbing works of fiction in print.
Wrath is the author of The Resurrectionist, Succulent Prey, Yaccub’s Curse, Sacrifice, Pure Hate, and Prey Drive (Succulent Prey Part II). He is also the author of Voracious, To The Death, Skinzz, The Reaper, Like Porno For Psychos, Everyone Dies Famous In A Small Town, The Book Of A Thousand Sins, His Pain and Population Zero. He is the co-author of Teratologist co-written with the king of extreme horror, Edward Lee, Orgy Of Souls co-written with Maurice Broaddus, The Killings and Hero co-written with J.F. Gonzalez, and Poisoning Eros I and II co-written with Monica J. O’Rourke.
Also from BLOOD BOUND BOOKS
DREW STEPEK
“Stepek is masterful in enabling the reader to actually feel sorrow and empathy for a few of the characters and to see the human in the monsters and the monster in the humans. 3.5 skulls out of 4.”
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