Later that night, I heard the crack of leather, the whine of pulleys and strained ropes. Moans mixing in an accidental chorus.
In his speeches (yeah, there were more speeches, plenty of them), Isaac kept hammering the idea that the enemy was white men and Asian men—these were the ones who didn’t want to mix with us, who felt threatened by black cock, black sexuality, black exuberance. White men who wouldn’t let our princes into the boardroom and who thought our women were strident. Asians who didn’t want us in their grocery stores or even in their districts.
Of the two enemies, the Asians were worse, he argued, because their attacks went largely unnoticed. White men went through the show of justifying themselves in positions of power to Latinos, even to Asians who “claimed” (Isaac’s quotes, not mine) that they were disenfranchised. Meanwhile, Asians took over the West Coast, growing in numbers, embedding themselves, forcing everyone to deal in their language. (As if they had only one? Another conspiracy?)
I was a little mystified by his bigotry. Asian men were the bigger enemy, but as he said, second-generation Asian girls were welcome, the “Westernized” safe Asian girls. From a tactical perspective, maybe he thought this preaching would go over better with the choir. Certainly most of us could cite an example where we came face to face with the raw bigotry of an Asian person, but in my book, there’s no “hierarchy” of racism. An Asian guy in a shop treating me rudely isn’t worse or better than the white estate agent who tells me that the house I want isn’t available. I can do without them both.
My brother likes to say London drives him crazy because you’re never quite sure what’s going on, whereas in America you know where you stand.
But I know my brother doesn’t think every Asian guy’s out to get him, or every white guy either.
Isaac, however…
My father used to say people hate what they are or they hate what’s completely alien to them.
Danielle, if I’d been right about her from Sharett’s description, had been in Nigeria checking on the heroin trade. Real hypocrisy if Isaac and Danielle were buying dope from Asians to sell in the States.
I mulled over Danielle. That woman sure knew how to balance. Here she was surrounded by black girls, a couple of Asian girls, one Indian girl, three white girls, but my radar didn’t pick up any vibe of resentment in the group over Danielle’s color and what it might imply for Big Daddy High Priest. She had managed to navigate those politics.
I found out how well when I strayed into an attic studio on the second floor that happened to look out over one of the rear bedrooms. There was a sizable skylight in Gordon’s room. I saw them, but they didn’t see me.
Below was Danielle, her green eyes wild, her pale body with a slight sheen of perspiration, kissing Gordon frantically as he lay on his back. Her small fist gripped his cock, and I caught sight of her tongue flicking out, desperate for his mouth, his hands playing with her dangling breasts. She cried out suddenly, her white fingers tracing his toned build. She’d cried out because Trey was ramming his thick dark girth hard inside her.
I watched the quiver of her white buttocks with the momentum. I watched her eyes shut to slits, and her lovely mouth open, her hair flying back like an ocean wave. She said something I couldn’t hear.
Gordon moved, and she took his place on his bed, rolling onto her back. Trey’s cock was back inside her with savage force, and I watched his penis slam inside her again and again, Danielle’s anxious fingers straying past her wedge of black fur, playing with her clitoris.
Gordon put his penis in her mouth.
She sucked him for a long moment, and then he broke away, trying to hold back his climax. She smiled at him and then looked with glassy eyes at Trey. I couldn’t see his face. Gordon, his long thin cock still powerfully hard, sighed and laid down next to her, kissing her, fondling her, and she began jerking him again.
I watched from above, fascinated, envious. It was Trey who came first, grunting as if his orgasm was an expression of rage, and then Danielle let herself go, convulsing and shuddering with an out-and-out wild scream, Gordon spilling himself all over her, which only excited her more.
They lay, the three of them, for ten minutes.
And then she got them up again, both of them. Insatiable.
I watched, rocking on my knees, and then I had to find a corner in the room where I could make myself come. I imagined Gordon and Trey with me. I imagined them both playing with me as my wrists were bound in leather cuffs.
Naturally, it wasn’t all meditation, spanking paddles, and free love. Everybody had work to do. But it was hard to tell how much was genuine and how much was “busy work.”
Some was legit, of course. Hey, I’m a city girl, but even I can understand that a farm needs steady care. I’d look out the windows and see princes and princesses in their “work robes” toting this or that bale, feeding animals in pens. It got my heart beating a little faster when I spotted a hunk of a prince stripped to the waist, his brown skin chiseled in the sun as he wiped his brow and then went back to pulling weeds.
The kitchen was my favorite place, and meal preparation never felt like labor. It was one honking big mansion, so everybody pitched in for cleaning, even Isaac and Danielle. I took this as a public-relations ploy, all “monastic humility,” etc. They were with the Little People, yet still removed.
The office work was the puzzle. In the great library, I put in shifts researching and cross-referencing ancient African civilizations. I got this gig because it was what my master’s in history was supposed to be in (and wouldn’t my poor, scandalized dad have had a fit over that one, since I never earned my degree and had dropped out of college). Danielle claimed all my findings would help with book manuscripts that were being prepared to at last “spread the teachings” of the sarcophacan temple. Gordon was supposed to be the author of the first book.
“Not Isaac?” I asked.
She laughed. “Isaac doesn’t want this project to become about him! It’s what we believe that counts. It’s the temple. Besides, he’s thinking for the future. Gordon will author a volume, Trey will do another, and so on.”
Clever, clever, I thought. Don’t commit anything to paper under Isaac’s name, and nobody can scrutinize his teachings. I wondered if these volumes would ever see the light of day.
It was almost like Danielle and Isaac had studied the downfall of every cult organization to avoid the pitfalls. Nothing written down, so no easy reference to check contradictions. I hadn’t finished my digging on their finances, but it was a sure bet they paid the taxes on their legal income. No children here, not one tyke in sight—so no allegations of abuse or inappropriate exposure to a sexualized environment. And I hadn’t seen any drugs used here. Wine, sure, but no hard liquor. Tactically, they were brilliant.
As the days passed, I often saw Violet seated at a desk in the main foyer with her bare legs swinging free, a kid on a river dock, staring at a chalky blackboard full of equations I couldn’t understand. I was conflicted. On one hand, she was in heaven, I bet. On the other, I could tell they had her spinning her wheels over something they didn’t need at all.
I had to figure out what was really going on.
“How are you doing, girl?” Isaac’s voice—soft, paternal.
We sat opposite each other on mats on the floor in his “office”—a modest room where incense burned and candles flickered. There was a computer on a desk and a pristine green blotter that looked like nothing had rested on it in ages. The room was decorated in African art, and I saw a wooden mask of an Igbo water spirit and another Igbo pattern of a funerary stone on a framed block of wood on the wall. Coincidence? But there was a Kamba stool off in the corner, and on the desk was a Kongo soapstone sculpture.
I was here because Isaac conducted “interviews,” as he called them, every week or two weeks with devotees. He helped them in their spiritual training, supposedly guiding them as they wrestled with an issue or the occasional personality conflict. Who knows wh
at he did with some of them behind the closed door while the rest of us meditated? I only know what happened with me.
“You like it here, Teresa?” he asked now. “Are you happy with us?”
“Oh, very much,” I gushed. “I think I’m fitting in—am I fitting in? If I’m doing anything wrong, please tell me so I can—”
“I’ve heard no complaints,” he laughed. “What’s troubling you, sister?”
“Nothing. I’m fine. Really…”
“Everything is confidential in this room, Teresa. And besides—we’re family.”
“I feel guilty, Isaac.”
“Why?”
“Well…I want to pull my weight around here. I’m doing research, but maybe I could be doing more. We live so well, and it must be expensive even with the food from the farm—”
“Teresa, Teresa,” he purred. “That’s all taken care of, and it’s nothing for you to worry about. Each devotee graduates to higher levels of responsibility when we determine the person is ready. I know what this is, honey, I’ve seen it before. It’s guilt over our affluence…. We know how our brothers and sisters out there suffer. But listen, we have earned our success, and we will raise them up as our movement spreads. And in time, all will be shown to you, when you have proved your maturing in our practice.”
“I do want to prove myself to you,” I said, and took his hand in both of mine. I lifted it to my lips and kissed it.
“I know you will, Teresa.”
He stroked my hair and my cheek for a second, and then his hand slid down to rest on my breast. Our eyes locked. I was conscious of both of us breathing a little faster. With delicate care, his fingers slipped and pulled back the folds of cotton until he had my brown flesh exposed, gently squeezing and fondling the nipple, tracing the circle of my areola. The moment went on, neither of us pushing things forward, and then, just as I was about to lean in to kiss him—
“You should return to meditation now,” he told me. “Please nod to Trey and tell him to come in.”
Strange. I didn’t feel rejected. More like baffled. I knew what I saw, and it was clear desire as much as I recognized it in any man. He was the one who’d asked me: Will you submit to any prince now by your own free will? Including me?
But he didn’t want to help himself to this princess.
What was holding him back? Danielle? He had to know she had her fun with the other guys.
Damn. No intimacy, no whispered confidences. Guess I’ll have to play detective after all.
When the meditation session was over, Anwar asked me—didn’t order but asked me—to come with him. I liked his manners. I liked his passing resemblance to the mystery boy in Oliver’s basement who had let me dominate him. He made the effort to talk with me and ask about my background and my interests before he “took what was his right.” He said he had worked as a systems analyst in Brooklyn before coming to the temple.
“Isaac’s the wisest man I ever met,” he confided. “My dad’s a smart guy, but Isaac’s wise, you know what I’m saying?”
So sweet. And gullible.
We talked for an hour, and he seemed unusually shy for one of the princes. At last he began to stroke my thigh, giving me a signal. He couldn’t even bring himself to use their special vocabulary for his sexual demands. “I can give you pleasure,” he said. “I know I can.”
His lack of confidence didn’t exactly inspire me. But I let him lock my wrists to my ankles in this elaborate metal harness, and I allowed him to put the ball gag on me. It was just as well, because Anwar turned out to be unusually talented, and hogtied like that, I got very loud.
I felt his hot breath on my pussy, and then his lips were gently kissing my labia, his mouth closing around my clit. His tongue probed the shallow depth of my vagina. My fingers shook in this palsy of ecstasy, my toes literally curling, and I could not move at all, and still his mouth lapped me and lapped me, my face so hot with blood rush, inhaling rapidly through my nose, and he finally granted me the mercy of removing the gag. Oh, God.
Half an hour later he unlocked me, my limbs with their rubbery feel from the released tension, and he fucked me like a jackhammer, deep, rapid strokes. Harder, I told him, harder. “You’re beautiful,” he whispered, panting after he came.
It was the most personal any of the princes ever got with me, the only show of affection mixed with their touted prowess with domination and sexual acrobatics.
God, I hoped he wasn’t mixed up in any of the sideline business. But I didn’t have the luxury of feeling for him. And the truth was, as good as the sex was, I felt oddly hollow when he got up and left, just as I did with the other princes. Isaac and Danielle could create this family atmosphere for the group, but in one-on-one dealings, all their “philosophy” couldn’t lift the sense of detachment from the intercourse.
Maybe that’s what the other girls wanted. Maybe they had come here to stop feeling emotionally attached—or at least to stop having to worry about entanglements and conventional relationships.
If that was true, I learned, it wasn’t true for them all.
I took to regularly using a terminal with the screen facing the window—less chance for someone to walk up and ask what the hell I was doing. Had to give them some more credit. They were much too sophisticated to try a strong-arm obvious tactic like denying you access to news or outside sources of information. That could always be turned around as a criticism. No, they trusted you with broadband up to a point, I’m sure). There were plenty of firewalls and such to protect against accidental virus downloads, but no blocked sites.
Took me a few seconds to get into the page I needed, and it would take a bit longer to cover my tracks. We’re talking steps a little more sophisticated than going into your properties menu to “clear history.” If they had a screen-monitoring program or a keystroke tracer, I was dead.
But no one interrupted me, and no one came for me later. I was in the clear. And my “research” and library privileges helped me justify all my time on the keyboard.
Chip at the stones of a church, and you scratch corporation. This I expected and already confirmed—the mansion in Danielle’s name, etc. What I didn’t expect to find after patient digging was an ancillary expense account with a Caribbean bank for Oliver. Oliver, my brief client, friend, and manager of Bindings bookshop Oliver. It was in his name.
There must have been more than four hundred thousand dollars in there, several thousands for each deposit.
And my immediate cold-sweat thought was: I’ve been played. Oh, shit, all this time, I’ve been played.
Had to calm down, had to. It took enormous self-control not to bolt out of there and run for the road.
Oliver? Behind all this?
But that didn’t make sense. Sure, the whole Nigeria trip could have been a wild-goose chase just to delay me and throw me off. But I had told him who my client was. I had been chained up in his dungeon weeks ago, and if he were a killer, he could have killed me then. If you think you’re big enough to go after Ah Jo Lee in Bangkok, you won’t be afraid of murdering his investigator on your home field.
Then I got another shock that threw me—and yet it helped me understand how that secret bank account got started.
I helped prepare the big meal with the other women in the kitchen, washing and chopping vegetables, and as I obeyed Danielle and fetched a colander from a top shelf, I bumped into one of the girls I hadn’t met yet, her hands full of tomatoes from the mansion’s garden. Hadn’t seen her before.
“Hi, I’m Eve Baker,” she said. “You must be Teresa.”
“Hi.”
I smiled and my face froze to hide my reaction. Pretty girl, mocha complexion, oval face framed by short hair, nice smile. Kelly Rawlins.
The same Kelly Rawlins who was supposed to have died with her face bludgeoned to hamburger in a hotel bedroom.
9
We were free to come and go as we chose, and it was left to peer pressure and gentle coercion to herd us back for the grou
p regimens, including the curfew (which they never came out and referred to as a curfew). Since I was so new, I expected them to follow me on my trip back to Manhattan, and they did.
While they excelled at sex and head games, they sure could have used a course on surveillance. Two big mistakes. One, using Eve Baker, not knowing she’d made an impression on me in our brief introduction. Second mistake was the guy. All I had to do was to check for whichever shaved African-American head was a few yards behind.
I needed to ditch my tails at some point and go to see Oliver. He was in for a shock when I explained the massive expense account in his name and an even bigger shock when I informed him of the “resurrection” of his lover Kelly. But Oliver would have to wait awhile—pleasure before business.
Violet had come with me into the city. I invited her to go shopping and to play tour guide—no surprise that she dragged me to the Hayden Planetarium. I loved it, actually. Gotta tell you—I loved the department stores more.
There seemed to be a contradiction, though, in the two of us looking at fabulous clothes and handbags when we spent so much of our time in thin cotton robes in the mansion.
“But that’s temple life,” said Violet. “When we go out with the princes, they love us looking fine! They want a princess to have taste, to take pride in looking good. And they make sure we have nice things. We get an allowance—you will too.”
An allowance. What am I, ten?
Bite your tongue, Teresa. Change tack.
“I know I’m new,” I said, “but what if you start to get sweet on one guy? You feel a real connection with just him, and he feels it with you—”
She shook her head vigorously. “Oh, no, no, no. You can’t fall into that trap.”
Trap?
“We have been disempowered and brainwashed into thinking one man, one provider, and then look what happens?” she went on. “Your mom ends up taking the burden.” She looked away a moment, a cloud of bitterness passing over her beautiful face. A note too personal? “Isaac has freed us, all of us. You know guys! They want variety—they can’t help themselves. They tell you they’re dogs, right? But we’re branded sluts if we feel like a change. Now, that’s unfair. It’s natural for us to submit, but in the temple we don’t have to put up with all the BS of being pursued. We have our own circle. We have lovers we can trust.”
Beg Me Page 17