Bi-Sensual

by Nikki- Michelle

  “Samona, don’t,” Elliot said.

  Demitri scowled at Elliot. Elliot shook his head. I had gone too far. Had probably said too much. Had revealed to Demitri that Elliot had shared more than enough of his secrets. I knew that probably bothered Demitri on some deeper level. To know the man he loved had been loose at the lips with his side lover had to be a slap in the face. I kept smiling, though. I wanted Demitri to know that I knew all the things Elliot hated about him.

  Demi said, “So I have a preference.”

  “Which is rooted in bullshit,” I snapped.

  “At least I admit to my bullshit, rather than hiding behind excuses. I don’t use the excuse that I don’t know my father to wallow in my bullshit. I don’t use the fact that my mother—”

  Elliot jumped in. “Demi, chill the fuck out. Stop,” he barked.

  I felt like a train had collided with my chest. My eyes watered, and I swallowed hard. I blinked rapidly as I turned to look at Elliot. I wasn’t the only one he had exposed to secrets. I mean, I hadn’t been foolish enough to think . . . Wait, no. I was lying. Foolish me had thought that because I was the side chick, there would be no way Elliot would even mention me to Demitri on that level. I’d been wrong.

  Demitri had been about to bring up my mother. He’d been about to bring up the one person I avoided outside of my father. The one sore spot that would stop me in my tracks in no time.

  Elliot had told him about my mother. My fists were balled up tight. For some reason, I felt betrayed. Yes, I felt betrayed. I was hurt. I wanted to cry. I wanted to run away and hide my face, but that would probably give Demitri too much pleasure. So I sat there. I picked up my fork, and I went back to eating my salad. I stabbed each piece of spinach the way I wanted to stab Demitri . . . and Elliot. Silence engulfed us.

  A few minutes later I finished eating and excused myself. I went to the desk in the bedroom, where my laptop was. Anytime I was angry, I typed some more of the story. I was in my feelings, deep in my thoughts. I could handle talking about my father, but talking about my mother was something else altogether.

  The battle lines had been drawn. Both Demitri and I had made it clear that whatever Elliot wanted to happen wasn’t going to happen. I heard them talking in the living area. Whatever they were speaking about, I drowned it out. I typed. I didn’t even know what character I had speaking in the story. I just kept writing until my eyes got tired. I didn’t know how long that was.

  Tears clouded my vision as I pushed away from the desk. Hadn’t seen my mother in a little over a year. I rarely spoke about my parents, and with good reason, but Elliot always made me comfortable enough to let my guard down. My mother had failed me. She had failed to protect me mentally, emotionally, and physically from two of her husbands. She’d let them talk to me and abuse me in any way they saw fit, and she’d assumed no accountability for her actions. I hated her for that, which was the reason I had finally stopped talking to her a year ago. I didn’t know if she was alive or dead. Nor did I care. She was dead to me. For her to tell me I was making everything up after I finally confronted her about it was the nail in our coffin.

  I took my clothes off, kept on my underwear, and crawled in bed. I turned to face the window. The sun was descending below the horizon, and the light of day was slowly fading. As was my mood. My eyes got lost in the reddish orange glow the sunset was creating. Elliot came in the bedroom to try to talk to me, but I ignored him. I was pissed, and he knew I was. But Elliot was not one to keep talking without a response. So pretty soon, he left me to myself.

  I heard the door of the hotel room open and close.. A few minutes later, I heard footsteps on the hardwood floor. I knew it wasn’t Elliot who had come to stand in the frame of the bedroom door. Demitri’s enticing scent betrayed him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  My defenses were up. Why would he apologize? For a man to have been so devil may care in his attitude toward me all weekend, I found it odd that he would want to apologize or be the first to.

  I didn’t turn around to face him, though. I kept my back to him. Kept that wall up so he couldn’t penetrate it again.

  He continued, “I shouldn’t have brought your parents into this.”

  I still didn’t turn around to face him. He was damn right. He shouldn’t have. It was a low blow. One I would have never thought to deliver to him. Although I could have. I probably could have mentioned his parents and broken him down to his child self. I could have mentioned his father and started a war. But I hadn’t. It was a sensitive topic that I would never broach with another person if I knew the pain behind what they’d had to endure.

  “Look,” he said. “Apparently, Elliot is going to keep this going until he gets what he wants. It’s clear that it’s not what either of us wants, but we both know how he is. In the end, he always gets what he wants. So, we can keep going at one another like jilted lovers, or we can try to make the best out of whatever this shit is.”

  I moved around on the Egyptian cotton sheets. I didn’t want to turn to look at him, but his voice, his scent, and what he was saying dictated otherwise. I turned over. Turned my back to the sunset and looked at him. The shadows in the room hid part of his face, creating a kind of erotic ambiance. Only part of his lips and one of his gray eyes could be seen.

  “Don’t mention my mother again,” I said.

  He nodded, then asked, “Are you crying?”

  “I might be, or I could have allergies.”

  He came farther into the room. The shadows seemed to be running behind him.

  “I didn’t mean to make you this . . . uncomfortable,” he said.

  I shrugged. “It’s whatever.”

  “Can we at least pretend to be cordial for the sake—”

  “Yeah, okay. Quite frankly, I’m tired of the back-and-forth with you already.”

  “Same,” he said.

  “I’m not a bad person.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “So you don’t have to be mean to me simply because Elliot and me . . .”

  “I’m not. But you can’t expect me to just accept all of this without being put off by him basically cheating on me with you.”

  “He doesn’t love me. He loves you and only you.”

  He gazed at me for a while, then nodded. Looked like he wanted to say something else, but the shadows engulfed him again as he walked out of the room. I turned back to the window. I didn’t remember falling asleep. Didn’t know when Elliot had crawled into bed with me. I assumed Demitri had left. Some kind of way, my head ended up on Elliot’s chest.

  Yes, I’d been angry with him earlier, but like Demitri had said, Elliot always got what he wanted. Elliot hadn’t left me to go home. He was there with me, so that calmed my anger some. I stretched out. Threw my leg over his waist. I ran my hand across his chest, then down his abs. On instinct, my hand traveled inside of his pants. I loved touching him or keeping my hand on his manhood as I slept.

  Then I stopped. I was statue still, and my spine was so straight, if someone pushed me down, I’d break. Elliot’s chest had silky straight hair. So was the minimal hair he had around his manhood. Elliot smelled like spice and sandalwood. There was no hair on the chest I’d caressed. And no hair around the thickness in those pants. African hemp was a distinctively different smell than sandalwood.

  I snatched my hand out of his pants. I looked up to find gray eyes gazing down at me. The intensity of his gaze was so strong, you would have thought I’d seen a monster given the way I yelped and jumped back. I jump back so hard that if the bed were not king size, I would have gone tumbling onto the floor. Instead, I leapt out of the bed like it was on fire.

  Elliot

  I chuckled. Couldn’t help it. Mona realizing it was Demi in the bed with her and then practically tumbling out of the bed was the funniest thing I’d seen in a long while. I’d been in the bed with them just moments before. After I’d come back into the hotel room and Demi had told me Mona had been crying, I
went back to check on her. Found her asleep, with tears drying on her face.

  I didn’t want to wake her, so I crawled in bed with her. Held her as she slept. I felt bad about what Demi had been about to say to her. Over the past few months, I’d revealed things about Mona to him. So just as Mona knew some things about him, he knew things about her.

  So I held her. I’d left Demi in the living area, but after a while, I called him into the bedroom. Asked him to lie with me as I lay with her. To my surprise, without much of a fuss, he climbed into bed. We talked as we lay in bed with Mona between us. He lay on his back, while I held her close to me.

  That was how it was until I got up to use the bathroom. Mona must have turned over and thought he was me. Now she stood in the corner of her bedroom, turning her glare from me to him, then back to me.

  “What are you doing?” she asked me.

  “Watching you act as if you’ve just seen a ghost,” I said.

  She looked at Demi. Her breasts were bare. The bikini-cut black underwear she had on outlined her hips and ass perfectly. Her long braids did little to hide her nipples and areolae. Demi’s eyes zoomed in on the very thing that mine were staring at. Like she had just remembered, she was naked on top, and so she covered her chest with her hands and rushed into the bathroom.

  I walked into the living area and came back with two shopping bags. Mona had put on a long shirt that boasted about her love of coffee. She sat at the desk, looking at her phone. Demi was in the bathroom. I handed Mona a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag with clothes.

  “Put that on,” I told her.

  She took the bag and looked inside it. Inside was a little black dress and black shoes that had a silver strap around the ankles.

  When Demi walked out of the bathroom, I handed him a shopping bag from Neiman Marcus. He took the bag, looked inside it. Went back in the bathroom. It took the three of us less than an hour to get dressed and be out the door. We all hopped in my truck. Mona sat in the back. Our eyes made contact in the rearview mirror a couple of times.

  There was no fire there. No spunk like there usually was. Something else was there. Something I didn’t recognize. The same could be said for Demi. The usual disdain he harbored for Mona was gone. I didn’t know what had happened between the spat they’d had earlier and now, but I was grateful for whatever kind of truce they had come to.

  I hadn’t brought them together so they could fight every day. I’d brought them together for one reason and one reason only: I wanted both of them in bed with me at the same time. I wanted us to enjoy one another sexually, but not necessarily intimately.

  I pulled into the parking lot of Club Noir Eden. The place was already packed, but I parked in valet, paid the fee. The club was small and intimate. The interior was no bigger than that of an Olive Garden, but it was always packed wall to wall. The place had two floors, and each floor had its own bar. The sunken dance floor was painted black. Fifty-inch TV screens had been mounted on the walls. The lower floor was a party room, and the top level was VIP only. To the right, the doorway opened up to a huge expanse. There were rows of scalloped booths down the wall closest to the door. A beautiful back-lit bar stood near the center of the space.

  The crowd was mixed. Hipsters, fans of hip-hop culture, the cosmopolitan types, the bougie, the ghetto, gay, straight, and whatever else were in the club. The ceilings were high, and even though the place was crowded, it was cool. We walked past the rectangular bar with a granite top. I held Mona’s hand simply because I knew Demitri could take care of himself. However, most dudes in Atlanta had no manners. Given how good that dress was hugging Mona’s hips, thighs, and ass, I knew a nigga would be stupid enough to grab at her. Not to mention, the heels she had on accentuated everything God had given her to the nth degree.

  We made it to the back, near the dance floor, but on the other side, where the lounge area was. The floor itself sported a huge painting of the Eye of Horus. The walls were painted to look like the Garden of Eden. I found us a spot in the corner. I let Mona sit on the elongated sectional first. Only a few other people were in the area, and their eyes were planted firmly on us.

  When Demi sat to the left of me, it put me in between him and Mona. The server for the area walked over to us so we could order drinks then moved on to other patrons.. She was damn near naked in boy shorts that halfway disappeared into her ass cheeks and with only pasties on her breasts. She had the perfect video-girl body, and she was racially ambiguous. I looked at Mona. She was looking at the server, same as Demi. The hunger in his eyes matched hers.

  “Like what you see?” I asked her.

  Mona turned her attention to me. “Not sure what you mean,” she said.

  “You’re staring at her like you do,” I said.

  She shrugged, then laid her clutch in her lap. “I was just wondering why they had her walking around half naked.”

  “This place is called Noir Eden,” I said.

  “Also, I can appreciate the female body without sexual connotations.”

  “So, you’re admitting to admiring her body, though?”

  She didn’t say anything. Glanced at Demi but kept her words to herself.

  We tried to make the best of what was left of the night. Mona got up and danced after a while. No, not with me. She danced with Demi, which completely caught me off guard but had my attention all the same.

  I was also impressed with the fact she was dancing the Kizomba. The dance itself was mesmerizing to watch. There was an unavoidable sensuality to it that made it hard for anyone watching to turn away. Mona was allowing Demi to lead her effortlessly. There were two people dancing, but they moved as one. The way she was rocking her hips in front of Demi wasn’t lost on the other people in the room, either. It looked as if they were making love standing up. For Demi to be as big and tall as he was, he was graceful on his feet. Moved his hips as sensually as Mona did hers, all the while keeping the dance exactly as it was supposed to be. Sensual and sexy.

  He was gentle with her. Took extra care in the way he placed his hand just above that dangerous dip in her back. With the way they moved, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think they were lovers and I was on the outside, looking in.

  Some woman was singing about fixing a man a sandwich and soda. Didn’t know who it was, but the sound was sultry and inviting. Demi could actually dance, and that put a slow and easy smile on Mona’s face. I sat there, watched them like a voyeur. I glanced away a few times, fighting the tinge of jealousy I felt at watching them be so at ease with one another without me in the middle of them or near them.

  Then I got up and eased behind Mona. I put my hands on her hips. Brought her ass back to me. Joined in on the dance. Now three people moved as one. Mona smiled as she melted into me. Demi stepped back. I was surprised when Mona reached out for him and pulled him closer. She placed his hands back on her waist, then laid her head on his shoulder. That extreme arch in her back made her ass press into my groin like we were two magnets.

  We were well aware of the people watching us, but we didn’t care. We got lost in the moment. Danced like all was well. Like we were a well-oiled machine.

  After a while, the music slowly faded and hand claps greeted us. Demi excused himself and headed to the restroom. Mona and I sat down to rest. She took a long sip of her drink.

  “What do you think of him?” I asked her. “And be honest.”

  “He can be an asshole at times, but I sense there is something more to the man than the persona I met,” she said.

  I nodded while taking a swallow of my rum and Coke. “There is. So are you going to do what I want?”

  Sipping from the straw in her amaretto sour, she looked over at me. “What’s in it for me?”

  I leaned over. Slowly slid my hand up her thigh until I got to her promised land. I kissed her neck, then told her, “Me.” I nipped her ear. “More of me. Satisfaction. Mine and yours. More fodder for your books.” I chuckled, then rubbed her pussy through the fabric of her thong.
“Most importantly, it’ll make me happy.”

  It didn’t bother me that we were in a crowded club. After the dance, most people had gone back to minding their business. I let my lips graze her jaw until I made it to her lips. I kept rubbing until I felt her clit harden. Her sex got hotter. She snapped her thighs closed, my hand still between them. While she squirmed, I tongued her down. Kept it up until I felt as if someone was watching me.

  I looked over toward the bar to find Demi standing there. I had to keep in mind that he’d never seen me acting intimately in any way with Mona. Not a kiss. Not a hug. Not a touch, really. Only when we lay in bed earlier had he seen me display any kind of affection for her. He stood with his hands in his pockets. Shoulders squared. Back straight. His gray eyes not telling what he was thinking.

  I moved my hand from between Mona’s thighs. Picked my drink back up and took a sip. Mona moved around in her seat. She took her drink to her lips. Swallowed the whole drink down like she needed it to cool her off.

  I told her, “Go kiss him.”

  The look she gave me was stolid and unblinking. I couldn’t tell what was running through her mind. I expected her to fight me, but she stood instead. Fixed her dress and ran a hand through her braids. With a walk that would shame Naomi, she walked over to Demi. For a few seconds, they did that awkward thing where she stood in front of him, looking up at him like she was trying to figure him out.

  The people in the room who had just seen me touching and kissing her looked on with interest. She tried to touch his face, but he moved his head, glowered at me. She said something to him. It made him frown down at her. She put her a hand on her hip and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Her body was so ridiculous, a couple of fools in the room with me let out whistles.

  Whatever she was saying to Demitri softened his features a bit. He took one hand from his pocket, placed it on her waist to pull her closer. He took his other hand and tilted her head up. Just before he kissed her, his eyes found mine, as if to ask if I was happy. I nodded once. Watched them. He kissed her slow at first, a peck on the lips, then gave her a full-on kiss that had his tongue down her throat.