by M. Roberts
“What to?” he asked.
“How about the moment itself?”
Malcolm’s grin extended, flashing his teeth before saying, “Cheers.”
The liquor went back, warm on the tongue, fire in the belly. She shook it off, while Malcolm stomached it, surveying his new drinking partner. She was radiant, from her red hair with its shimmer, to her pale, but flush skin, exposed on her arms, neck line, and legs, in great amounts. Her red dress covered just what was necessary. Like so many women before, Malcolm enjoyed her fashion, but unlike those before her, she made him feel the weaker of the two. He didn’t enjoy this, but it felt fresh and he liked games.
“What’s your name, beautiful?”
“Oh, can’t we leave it at beautiful?”
She gave an ironic pout.
“At this party, we’ll have to put a number behind it.”
Her eyebrows arched, though she only played offended.
“Better be number one.”
“Of course.” He relented. He offered his hand for her to shake. “Malcolm.”
She placed hers daintily in his and he placed a gentle kiss atop her fingers.
“I know who you are. You’re the rich boy who plays with the two-bit dealer who calls himself Lucius. How cool.”
“What’s in a name? What’s the quote? By any other name?”
“He doesn’t smell so sweet to me.”
Her disdain gave her away.
“You’re a Dicaro.” Malcolm gave it more thought, running through his memory. “Yeah, I remember you. Joan, isn’t it? I hang with your cousins.”
“They tolerate you, but they know the company you keep.”
“That stupid family beef is skin deep.”
“So is your game, player.” She let the words, feeling out of place and stingingly direct, hang in the air just long enough for Malcolm to believe them before leaning in to plant her lips against his cheek and whispering breathily, “But it’s got potential.”
In the backyard, Lucius managed to find for himself some peace and quiet. He let it sink it until he noticed he was not entirely alone. She was still, which is why he didn’t notice her at first. She could have been a bush, but for the flowing brown hair dancing in the moonlight. She stood in the center of the backyard, neck craned to stare directly into the sky. She was alone. Lucius walked his way down from the backdoor through the grass to stand beside her, craning his own neck to try finding what held her attention.
“Aren’t they beautiful?”
Lucius turned his head to watch her as she pulled in a very deep breath of air and exhaled with a smile. She turned to stare up at him, her eyes aglow with the stars that captivated her. Her eyes captivated him.
“They certainly are.”
They held their stare. While Lucius began to feel the moment dragged awkwardly on, she seemed perfectly content to continue holding their eyes locked until the sun came up. While his focus remained on her eyes, his periphery took in the rest of her. Sand colored skin, unkempt, yet spectacular long brown hair, thick lips and a tiny frame. She raised her hands to rub the sides of them against his face. He jumped on contact, but as she softly shifted her hands against his cheeks, he fell into a great sense of ease and relaxation. He felt immediately what took months with every other woman, what never came with Vivian. Comfortable. Sensing she was impulsive, and fearing she could, at any moment, suddenly be given to flight, he asked, “What’s your name?”
She grabbed his shoulders tightly, raising herself up onto the tips of her toes, her breasts rubbing against his chest, telling him she wore no bra and also propelling his thoughts to another place. She slid her mouth into his, sucking on his upper lip sensually and thoroughly, her body falling more and more into his. When he placed his hands on her back and began to pull her in, her face pulled back, leaning her forehead against his, staring down at his mouth.
“Rose.”
“Lucius.”
She repeated his name with a grin. “I like that name.” Rose put her fingers on his lips, caressing them. “Do you trust me, Lucius?”
He nodded. He felt a small object pass from her palm into his mouth, and for a split second he felt like spitting it immediately out. Until he looked into her eyes and felt a wash of all angst.
He swallowed.
3.
Hello? What? No, I can’t—Listen, no, I’m telling you that’s Imada terri—Can you hear me? Hello? Hello?
“Hello?” Titus finally managed to speak after playing the conversation over in his head. The phone was pressed hard against his sweaty ear, pressed hard so the voice it transmitted would ring out loudest in his head.
“Titus, man, you gotta do a drop for us at Sixth Street.”
The voice was quiet, almost imperceptible.
Fuck you, Titus.
“What?”
“You have your volume up? I’m telling you to make a drop.”
“No, I can’t—”
“Titus.” The voice turned its congenial tone to a warning one.
“Listen, no, I’m telling you that’s Imada territory.”
Before he could finish, the voice continued, “I don’t give a flying fuck, shit bird, we have a deal, remember? Clear your debt for a few side deals off Uncle Ezekiel’s stash. You know the spot, same corner Lucius loves. My buddy’s gonna be there wearing a red hoodie at five thirty.”
Then it stopped.
“Hello?” Nothing. “Hello?” Titus repeated. Still nothing.
He pulled the phone away from his head to stare at its screen. The call had ended. Did I do that? Not intentionally. Shit. Titus was worried. He’d been given strict instruction he knew he couldn’t abdicate. He knew if he did, it would be hell to pay on top of his preexisting debt. Several thousand dollars, the final amount he’d forgotten. They were quiet men, lurking street corners and alleys in Verón, unsavory, yet always available. They were the underground, the black market, the roaming criminal nomads, without creed or banner. For Titus, they were the only ones he could seek when he fell on hard times. Money was tight, Titus could never keep a job, and Uncle Ezekiel had long since stopped paying his pity checks to his dead sister’s son. Ezekiel would have let the child starve on the streets, if he hadn’t built his empire in Verón on utilizing lost family members. Ezekiel was estranged as a boy, his parents’ families never getting along, and his parents themselves coming to a tragic end. Titus had heard the story hundreds of times. How his grandparents became at odds with one another. His grandfather’s family had mafia ties. Hers was made of lawyers. They both had their morals, but shared none with the other. When Titus’s grandfather, at the request of his family, sought legal partners in his wife’s family to lend legitimacy to their racket, their marriage plummeted. Harmless secrets, the thoughts of their families, kept hidden in whispers from each other, made their activities all the more mysterious to each other. Plots grew in their imaginations, assuming murderous intentions in the other. They shot one other. She first, then him. By the will of their families, they perished, and all for pursuit of the same thing. Prosperity.
“Choose family wisely. Whether by blood, by romance, by friendship. Invest wisely,” Ezekiel would always finish. Though Titus hadn’t heard it in a while, hadn’t seen his powerful uncle in months. He’d resorted to squatting in an abandoned garden apartment in the slums of the city. Its state reflected that of his mind, ever declining in hygiene and order. Still, Titus remained diligent about his ambition, constantly seeking a way up and out of his situation. So he took in with the shadow men, who survive off the scraps that slipped through the cracks of Ezekiel Dicaro’s empire. And in Titus, they had secured for themselves a very wide crack. Titus began siphoning off little baggies here and there of his uncle’s supply, selling them to buyers set by the shadow men, whose faces he rarely saw, but whose grasp he was well within. A dingy apartment in downtown was such an easy place for a tweaker like Titus to meet an untimely end at the hands of any who sought to end him, and he knew it. Th
e fear was looming always in the background of his mind. The fear was a voice he so desperately wanted to rid himself of. But it would not relent, and he would continue to appease it by playing their game.
After some pacing, some neck scratching, and a tear or two, Titus had wrung enough composure out of his mind to throw on his jacket with the drugs in pocket and take off for Sixth Street, on the other side of downtown. He walked it, taking the better part of a half hour, enjoying the sun on the backs of his ears for a moment of respite before reaching the corner where he knew the worry would flood back in. And soon as he had reached it, it swarmed, filling his thoughts and causing his eyes to dart endlessly over the streets. In overlapping voices, his mind spoke his concerns to him. Where will they come from? What if this is a set up? Does Ezekiel know? What if Lucius sees? What if the cops show? Is this a sting? No, this is a setup for murder. No, it’s too busy. What’s their angle? Who is it? Who is after me? They’re all after me. They’re all trying to kill me. Always speaking, the voices, for as long as he could recall.
“Excuse me.”
A gaunt looking teenager appeared at his side. Titus snapped his attention to the stranger. Was he there the entire time? Play it cool.
“Can I help you?”
“Yeah, my buddy and I are here for a package.”
The young man signaled to another boy across the street, watching from a warehouse parking lot. He seemed eager. Titus was glad he only had to deal with one.
“Who sent you?”
The boy looked up at Titus. Though he was meager in appearance, Titus was upwards of six feet tall. The boy squinted.
“Who sent you?”
Titus realized he couldn’t answer the question, even for himself. His eyes darted to the left and right, searching for an answer, and his voices chattered. The pause was long enough to cause impatience in the customer.
“Hey, we ain’t got all day, buddy.”
The kid presented a handful of cash.
Alright, that’s proof enough.
Titus pulled from his jacket a small baggie within which were somewhere between ten and thirty ecstasy pills. He didn’t count them, he didn’t count the money. He just shoved the drugs into the kid’s hands while the kid did the same with the cash. For a moment, while he watched the boy walk away across the street to his friend, Titus felt calm. He took a breath and slid the cash slowly into his front pants pocket. Before he could retract his hand, he was forced against the red brick wall of the warehouse behind him.
“What the fuck are you doing on Sixth Street, Titus? What are you doing here, you fuck?”
“Lucius, chill out!”
“Keep an eye out.”
“Nathaniel, keep an eye out.”
Three men descended on him, crowding in a semi-circle, and the shock of his back slamming against brick dizzied his recognition for a moment. Then it settled as he stared, nose to nose, with a furious Lucius Imada. His face was contorted into a mean snarl, and to his sides were Malcolm and his younger cousin, Nathaniel.
“Make him hurt,” Nathaniel urged.
Malcolm kept a continuous look of upset on his face.
“Just tell him to fuck off, Lucius.”
The voices in Titus’s head were whirling, whizzing past one another in his subconscious, shouting and exclaiming actions, but none of them agreeing, leaving Titus to fend for himself in the situation. He stared deep into the eyes of his aggressor, and a funny thing happened. Titus began to laugh. As he looked into the pupils, the voices fell softer in the background, and Titus had a clear thought. I was always going to be there, reflected in his eyes, fearful and helpless. The image of himself was what brought on the laughing spell. Mirrors never made sense to him, seeing the singular face of a man whose mind was so fractured. He never felt them accurate. However, staring into the eyes of Lucius, it all came together. Lucius made him make sense to himself. He was eternally tormented, and Lucius, despite being known for all the talk of love, was his greatest tormentor. Because Titus could never see himself, but he could see Lucius, and could see himself in Lucius. And watching Lucius’s story unfold before him was realizing that while all hope was out of reach, they would never stop reaching for it. They were tied to two opposing forces, who they were and who they wanted to be, moving away from one another daily, pulling them apart. Titus saw himself being pulled apart in pieces in his mind. He stopped laughing.
Lucius socked him in the gut and he went down.
“Shit,” Malcolm muttered.
Lucius didn’t stop. He started with his foot, swinging it back and forth, each time more intensely, colliding it into Titus’s bony frame. He went hard, exhausting himself. Before he stopped, however, he kicked one last time across his victim’s face. Titus’s world spun, and blood gushed from his nose. Everything became a tilted landscape and he was rolling atop it, unsure which way was up. In all the chaos of it, he made out a familiar voice. Deep and shouting, and it was soon accompanied by the blurry view of a threatening figure, though not threatening to him. It was Lane, come to the rescue, and as he dished out to Lucius some of what he gave Titus, the one who started the whole ordeal with what should have been a simple drop scurried off haphazardly from the scene, stumbling several times and completely ignoring the fountain of blood pouring from his nose.
4.
The door swung open and no sooner than it had did two bodies, one stumbling backwards, the other forwards, both entwined, break into the room, twist in its center, then collapse onto the couch. Joan gasped and she fell onto Malcolm. Malcolm laughed. And then they returned to passionately kissing one another. She was fierce, alternately biting both his upper and bottom lips, with brief interruptions for him to shove his tongue as deep into her mouth as he could. His hands pulled her in at her waist, flexing his muscles to grind her against his crotch. She wrapped her fingers around his biceps and felt heat swell in her lower body. She pushed her face hard into his and sucked his bottom lip. This drove him mad. With one quick motion, he drew up her tight black dress and her buttocks bounced as they were freed from the constricting fabric. A cool breeze from the window floated across the flesh of her behind and she gasped again. Malcolm brought both hands down hard on her cheeks, the sound of which bounced across each wall and only drove both of them deeper into one another. His fingers pulled up on the strings of her thong, lacey and red, which he had sought to unveil the entire night since he noticed its visibility through her sheer dress. His fingers dancing atop her buttocks drove her mad, and then they were both at the edge, looking to dive.
“Fuck me,” she whispered breathily, with her face pressed against the side of his head, her lips teasing his earlobe. With her head down like this, Malcolm was given perfect sight of the thong, two strips wrapping around her smooth, reddened waist, and a third venturing down into her crack and disappearing there. The whole sight rose and dropped slowly as she rubbed her torso against his.
“Stand up.”
The demand wasn’t what she expected, but nonetheless she obeyed, as she was curious what action he was going to take. She slid off his body, dress half slid up to reveal the front of her legs, which glistened with sweat. His eyes caressed them, ran upwards along the insides of her thighs and they felt warm as he did so. She began sliding her hands over her body before him, showing him her body craved touch. They found the edge of her dress and lifted, bringing the rest of it over her head and dropping to the floor beside her feet. Her hands came back down, riding over her breasts, gliding down her stomach as it quivered, and slipping into her thong to place her fingers between her moistened lips. She moaned and leaned a touch forward as the pleasure released. During this display, Malcolm only watched, bottom lip clenched beneath his teeth, sore from her intense sucking.
“Get naked.”
She raised a brow.
“What will you give me?”
Malcolm’s arms, poised behind his head in a way that accentuated his toned biceps, came down and his hands went to his pants zipp
er. He slowly undid the button and pulled the zipper down with thumb and forefinger to reveal a hefty bulge constricted by boxer briefs. He watched her reaction while he pulled down the waistband to show his large and attentive hard on.
“A night you won’t forget.”
She twisted an arm behind her back and unhooked her bra, which fell from her breasts, exposing her nipples to the cool touch of the breeze, hardening them. Then she slipped two fingers, one on each side, beneath the straps of her thong and bent down, pulling it out from between her lips and her cheeks to fall beneath her ankles around her heels. When she was completely naked, Malcolm stood, having enjoyed playing his game of control and now wanting to take her. He lifted his shirt over his head and tossed it back on the couch, exposing the rest of his physique, which he toned for just such an occasion. Joan knew he did so with such pride, and wanted to laugh, but in greater measure wanted to touch. He stepped into her, though she placed a hand against his chest.
“I’ve had plenty of nights I’ll never forget, cutie. Tonight, I’m going to show you one.”
She wrapped her hand around his member and pulled him forward, leading him as she walked backwards towards the bedroom. She stared into his eyes with a devilish grin, enjoying his complete surprise and mild fear.
Lying in the sand beneath the stars, Lucius caressed the body of Rose, having taken off to the beach and, on arrival, shedding their clothes to enjoy the moment more purely. He kept his hand suspended just above her body, grazing her skin with his palm as it hovered up and down over her breasts, stomach, and legs. She giggled, then moaned softly, and giggled again. It was sublime, thought Lucius, as he noticed she was the only thing occupying his mind in the moment. He did this for several minutes, what felt a whole night on its own, before retracting his hand to just look at her. She had a crooked smile, but it was brilliant in his eye, and her skin so soft, and her scent so floral. She was naturally tan and her hair dangled in the ocean breeze and Lucius felt the image of her nestle into his heart.