The Honey Well

by Gloria Mallette

  “James, would you mind massaging my neck and shoulders, I’m really not too good at massaging myself.”

  “Ah . . . sure.”

  Esther turned her back to James so that he could massage her better. Her butt was touching his thigh. James was having a hard time massaging Esther’s neck; she was too close, but he was also uncomfortable because his penis was pushing against his underwear. He wanted to adjust himself, but he couldn’t do it without being obvious. After a minute of massaging with Esther too close and his arms held up in an awkward position, James’s fingers began cramping. “Ah, Esther, if you’d—”

  “Oh, this isn’t a good position, is it? Maybe I should face you.” Esther started to get up.

  “No! Maybe I should stand on the side of the chair.” James started to get up, but Esther quickly pulled him back down.

  “James, why should you stand and be uncomfortable. Wait, I can make this comfortable for both of us.” Standing in front of James, Esther suddenly hiked the skirt of her dress above her thighs—startling James. His mouth dropped—Esther wasn’t wearing any panties—he looked straight at her hairy mound. His nostrils inhaled her perfumed essence and something more naturally fragranced. Esther sat quickly on James’s lap, straddling him, her knees on either side of his thighs. She shifted her hips so that her pubis was right on top of James’s erect penis.

  James stiffened. “Oh, my . . . my God. Esther . . . wait . . . wait a minute. You . . . we . . . I . . . I can’t—”

  “James, don’t get yourself so worked up,” Esther said innocently. She was quite aware that he wasn’t trying to get up. “You’re just going to massage my neck. That’s all. Here, put your hands on my shoulders and massage—here.”

  “But—”

  Esther took James’s hands and placed them on her shoulders. “You can do it better this way.” She arched her back, pressing herself into James’s penis.

  James was having a hard time breathing quietly. “Esther, what are you doing?”

  “Nothing, dear, I’m just making it easier for you to massage me.”

  “Esther, I can’t—”

  “James, you’re just massaging my neck. It’s such an innocent little thing. Please, I’m so tense.” She put her hands on top of her own thighs and, sitting straight, threw her head back and began to roll it from side to side. “Just for a minute, please.”

  Almost afraid to move, James sat frozen, staring at Esther’s breasts inches from his face and feeling the heat from her vagina through his pants. His penis was rock-hard. Beads of sweat popped out above his upper lip.

  “James, please, massage me.”

  Gingerly, James began to move his fingers. As he kneaded her neck, Esther began to slowly gyrate her hips, pressing herself more and more into James. “Oh, yes, that feels better. Ooo, yes, this is just what I needed.” And she meant that in more ways than one. She was throbbing. Despite the fabric between them, she could feel James’s penis hard and strong at the mouth of her vagina. With her eyes closed, she could hear him breathing and gasping softly. He was lightly but firmly pushing up on her. She began to ride him a little harder. His fingers were no longer moving on her shoulders. They were moving down the front of her dress onto her breasts where he palmed them. But he didn’t stay there, he dropped his hands onto her behind and squeezed her naked buttocks. He pulled her even tighter onto his groin.

  Esther needed to feel James’s flesh up inside her. She fell into James and started to kiss him deep and long. He was no slouch. He returned the kisses with as much fervor and passion as her. Working quickly, Esther unbuckled James’s belt, unsnapped and unzipped his pants, and reached in and pulled his hot, throbbing penis out of its cloth prison. In that same instant, she slipped it inside her and forgot that she even had a daughter, much less a daughter who was engaged to the man she was riding.

  Riiiing! It was James’s cell phone, but it was not going to be answered.

  Thirty

  Trena was hiding in her room, too afraid to venture out again to be with her family. She stood in front of her mirror in her bra and a pair of cotton panties, wondering if there was anything visibly different about her face, about her body, or even about the way she walked since she left home. If she wasn’t mistaken, her bra was fitting a bit tighter. She tried to adjust herself inside the not-quite-fitting-right B cup. She wondered if her mother or father could tell by looking at her that she had lost her virginity, that she had been having sex with men she didn’t even know. She could never let them find out she had prostituted her body and worse for money that she was never given—Queen Esther said that her money went toward the clothes she bought for her and for her room and board. When Trena’s mother hounded her about where she had been staying for almost four weeks, she lied and said that she stayed in a homeless shelter in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Then they wanted to know who Arnell was, and again Trena lied. She told them that Arnell was a social worker at the homeless shelter. Her parents didn’t question her further but told her those shelters were dangerous places.

  Before Trena escaped to the solitude of her bedroom, her mother said she forgave her for running away and that she had really missed her. That was all good, but Trena didn’t know if she could forgive herself for almost ruining her own life. She had missed the last three weeks of school and the first weeks of summer school, which she needed in order to qualify to take her finals. She had a lot of catching up to do. The tears came. This wasn’t what Trena had planned for her summer, but she didn’t want to cry anymore. She was too tired. She had been crying since she got home, and had only stopped crying long enough to blow her nose. Her mother had cried along with her while begging her to never scare her like that again, yet, her mother wasn’t so heartbroken that she didn’t bitch.

  “Young lady, you still will not run wild in this house. You will still live by the rules or you will pay the consequences.”

  Her father, Joe, had held her close while telling her, “Trena, there are bad people out there who will take advantage of a pretty young girl like you. You were lucky this time that no one bothered you, but I wouldn’t try my luck again, if I were you. Now, I got to get back on the road. You make me miss another run, you’re going to wish you ran all the way to Timbuktu.” Tomorrow, he was flying to Dallas where he’d left his truck.

  Knock . . . knock . . . knock.

  “Who is—”

  The door opened before Trena could finish her question. In walked Cheryl.

  Trena quickly grabbed her oversize T-shirt and covered her breasts.

  “Little sister. So, you’ve gone out and seen the world. Did you have any fun?”

  Cheryl hadn’t said much of anything the whole evening. At times Trena only knew that Cheryl was close by, listening, when she’d hear her clear her throat. Whether Cheryl’s clearing of her throat was intentional or not, it made Trena nervous. She had the feeling that Cheryl wasn’t being fooled by anything she said.

  Trying her best to avoid an argument, Trena climbed into her bed and turned her back to Cheryl.

  “Fine, you don’t wanna talk to me? That’s okay, I understand. We hadn’t been getting along for a very long time before you left. Anyway, I came to tell you that I’m glad you’re home.” Cheryl started out of the room. “Oh, by the way, I’m getting married.”

  Trena sat up. “For real?”

  Cheryl smiled. “Alex and I are back together. We’re getting married in December.”

  “What happened to the other girl?”

  “He said it was a mistake.”

  “Wow,” was all Trena could say.

  “There’s a spot open for a maid of honor, if you want it.”

  Again, those darn tears threatened. “But I was so mean to you.”

  Cheryl’s own eyes watered. “That’s behind us, isn’t it?”

  Trena nodded.

  Cheryl pulled the door closed, leaving Trena alone to think about what was behind her and what might be ahead of her. Lying down again, she stuck her head und
er her pillow and cried. She was happy for Cheryl, but she had a dirty little secret that would spoil Cheryl’s wedding and hurt her parents deeply. It was a secret she could never tell anyone, not even Alyson and Bebe. They knew that she was staying at the mansion, but she never told them about the sex. No one could ever know about that. When Arnell dropped her off, she had offered her telephone number, “In case you ever need to talk to someone.” Trena didn’t think she’d ever have to call on Arnell again, but Arnell was the only person that might understand how she was feeling. Yes, she would call Arnell tomorrow when she was alone at home.

  Thirty-One

  Long after Arnell dropped Trena off and late into the evening Sunday night, Arnell tried, several times, to get in touch with James. She’d left messages for him to call her on his home answering machine and on his cell phone voice mail. She even called his office on the off chance that he might be there. He wasn’t. The more time passed, the more worried Arnell became. It had never been this difficult to reach James. How cruel a joke was that? Of all the times for James to come up missing, this was not the optimum. After facing off with Esther, after rescuing Trena from the mansion, Arnell was determined to move on with her life with no ball and chain holding her down. And that meant telling James the truth. But where in the world was he? When she told him that she was going away to the spa for ten days, he never mentioned that he was going anywhere.

  Arnell didn’t dare call James’s parents’ home—she wasn’t comfortable speaking with his mother or his father. Mrs. Stanton was such a pompous phony. At their first meeting, Mrs. Stanton remarked, “James comes from a long, distinguished line of ministers. We were hoping that he’d enter the ministry also, but he had a more worldly calling—he wanted to be a businessman.”

  James had, in fact, become a nonprofit fundraiser. He had worked as the director of development at the Brooklyn Museum for three years and was now working part-time as the capital campaign director for the United Negro College Fund while he pursued his interest in politics. To Mrs. Stanton, Arnell had said what she thought was safe—“He could change his mind one day.” That’s when Mrs. Stanton asked, “What do you do for a living? What does your mother do?”

  Arnell had said she was a freelance copy editor, which she was when she felt like it, and that her mother had retired early from teaching. That was almost the truth. Esther had retired from servicing the clients herself, but she was still teaching girls how to satisfy men.

  But it was when Mrs. Stanton asked, “Who were your people?” that Arnell knew for sure she wasn’t going to be sitting tea with her. Damn, the woman was only a minister’s wife, and a minister, as quiet as it was kept, who wasn’t very righteous. Mrs. Stanton was not the wife of some blue blood who boasted ancestors who came over on some boat. James said his parents were from Mississippi, which meant that the boat their ancestors came over on was a far cry from the QE II. If Esther was ever right about anything, she was right when she said that a lot of church folk who, supposedly, claimed a personal relationship with God, were the biggest hypocrites in the world. What Mrs. Stanton didn’t know that Arnell knew, was that James had told her that before his mother met his father, she had worked in a chicken plant pulling the innards out of assholes in South Carolina before moving to New York. As far as Arnell was concerned, there was nothing wrong with the work Mrs. Stanton had done—it was an honest living—but there was definitely something wrong with Mrs. Stanton forgetting where she came from and who her people were.

  That’s why Arnell’s answer to that stupid-ass question, “Who were your people?” was, “Slaves.”

  Of course, the dead silence told Arnell that she had been a bit too insolent but she wasn’t regretful. “Perhaps I’ve gone too far back,” she said. “Actually, my family were just typical working Americans.” Mrs. Stanton never asked Arnell another thing about her family.

  Now, Reverand Stanton, the Right Reverend, as Esther liked to call him, was no different from his wife in church, but he was a hell of a lot different from her outside of church and away from his congregation. Before Arnell had even met James, she had met the Right Reverend and didn’t connect the two when, five years later, she started editing for James. For five years, the Right Reverend was one of The Honey Well’s most ardent clients and for a long time Arnell had pondered how Reverend Stanton had come to know about The Honey Well and finally got up the nerve to ask him.

  He replied, “All things good or bad that happen in the world come to be known by word of mouth. One of my deacons told me.”

  The only thing Arnell could say behind that was, “Oh.” Wasn’t anyone righteous? Certainly not the Right Reverend or his deacon. With his starched collars and his hearty laugh, the Right Reverend’s passionate delivery of his sermons were no match for his passion for hot and heavy sex. That’s something James didn’t know about his father, or if he did, he never mentioned it. The Right Reverend, this so-called man of God, spent plenty of his congregation’s tithes and offerings satisfying his lustful appetite for women who, if they stepped inside the church, might catch fire and burn. The one and only time Arnell went to the Right Reverend’s church with James, she cowered inside. Her faltering footfalls were obvious as James escorted her into the church.

  “What’s wrong?” James asked.

  She shook her head and forced her feet to move. She knew that God was glaring fire and brimstone at her and at any minute she expected to spontaneously combust. When she didn’t, she remembered Esther’s words, “The church is full of hypocrites.” Looking up at the Right Reverend sitting pompously in his pulpit looking down upon his congregation, Arnell figured if he was not on fire, then she wouldn’t catch fire either. When the Right Reverend looked down and saw her sitting next to James, his mocha complexion ashened before Arnell’s eyes, and once he got over the shock, a look of pure lividity shot from his eyes. After church, she didn’t wait around to shake his hand. She rushed James out of there with the excuse that she had to go to the bathroom in the worst way.

  The very next morning, the Right Reverend stormed into the mansion. “Stop seeing my son or I will tell him what you are.”

  Arnell had been about to respond when Esther stepped in. “Well, tell me Reverend. What is she?”

  “She’s a . . . she’s an unclean woman of ill repute. I raised my son to marry a clean woman of the highest caliber.”

  “That’s all well and good, Reverend,” Esther said, “because the highest caliber is what Arnell is. Now, if you’re saying that she’s not, and I think that’s what you’re trying to say, and that you intend to tell your son that she’s not, then I think I will march every girl you have fucked in the name of the Holy Ghost into your church, and we will all stand before your congregation, your wife, your son, and God Almighty and testify to the great whore that you are.”

  The Right Reverend then pointed at Esther. “You will reap the evil that you sow. You’re both lowly women, Jezebels, that are beneath—”

  “Hold the fuck up!” Esther shouted. “You arrogant, pompous, son of a bitch! You’ve been coming in here for five years sticking your holy rod in any and every female in the house, including me. How dare you call us names and point your finger of damnation and indignation—which has been up inside the holes of many so-called righteous and unrighteous women, in and out of your church—in our faces when you’re the greatest hypocrite in the eyes of your God there is. You brazen bastard! What do you think your God is saying to Jesus about your extracurricular activities, Right Reverend Stanton?”

  The Right Reverend hauled ass out of The Honey Well as if a castrating lioness was on his tail. He never stepped inside the mansion again, not even to attend his son’s engagement party—he was away on “church” business. A likely excuse, but one that Arnell applauded. She didn’t know if she would have been able to enjoy her own party with him around. The few times she and the Right Reverend had been in each other’s company since, their eyes never met and words were never exchanged.

&n
bsp; Despite what she knew about James’s father and the unforgivable deeds that she herself had done, Arnell had recklessly planned on marrying James, but she had been fooling herself. It would never work. There were too many secrets.

  Again, Arnell dialed James. She had to tell him and soon.

  Thirty-Two

  Esther was feeling absolutely divine. While drying herself off with an oversize fluffy white towel after a cool, invigorating shower, she hummed the theme from Love Story, that’s how good she was feeling. As much as she missed Tony, even he had never made love to her the way James did. Lord, he rocked her world and if she must say so herself, she had done the same for him. She had left James snoring, on his back with his arms spread out and his face pointing straight up at the ceiling. That was the only thing pointing up at the ceiling—the man was plumb tuckered out. It was well past midnight. James had been insatiable once he and Esther sparked that first fire in the front room, and moved back to the bedroom to set the fire ablaze in the fireplace. As warm as it was, they had laid out butt-naked in front of the fireplace and made mad passionate love until they were drained from sweating, and exhausted from going at it nonstop like they were teenagers just discovering that sex could clear up their acne and give them the best high in the world. The air in Esther’s bedroom was prime for an atmospheric collision of hot air from the fireplace and cold air from the air conditioner, but the air conditioner did very little to cool her and James down; they were making more heat than the flames in the fireplace.

  Esther slipped on her robe and was about to wrap it around her body when she looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. She opened the robe. Since Tony died, she had lost five pounds from not eating. That would not have been the way she would have chosen to lose weight, but she was glad all the same. Even without the five pound weight loss, the years had been kind to her, and what James had filled her with time and again was akin to the sweet nectar of youth. She felt like she was twenty years old, and indeed, she had made love to James like she wasn’t a day over twenty. Esther smiled to herself. Not bad for an old girl. She slipped the robe off and sauntered into the bedroom, dragging the bathrobe behind her and wearing only a seductive smile. James was still snoring. Curious, Esther gingerly lifted the sheet off him and peeked. Oh, yes, he was ready for more. Again, she climbed on top of him. He fit inside her like a hand inside a lambskin leather glove. She didn’t need James awake to get what she needed from him. She dug her knees into the mattress, closed her eyes and, taking her own sweet time, began her sensual ride in slow motion. After a few minutes, she felt James responding. When his hands gripped her buttocks, she knew that it was a matter of time before he would flip her over and take charge. She had no problem with that—she liked a man who took charge in bed. The flip was sudden. Esther lay back and was about to wrap her legs around James’s back when he suddenly uncorked her. Her eyes popped open.