Rising to his full height, he eyed his work as he stepped back from the vehicle. He could easily see her cruising down a highway in the bright red car with her golden hair blowing in the wind. “I’m done, Pogo,” he said, his voice as deep as the trouble his parents constantly warned him about.
He removed the cotton band holding his chin-length ebony dreads off his square, handsome face and looked up at the August summer sun causing sweat to soak his blue uniform. The sky wouldn’t even begin to tint with darkness until eight or nine, and his boss always took full advantage with extended hours until the start of fall.
There were already four other cars washed and awaiting detailing. Shit. Scratching his scalp, Graham doubled the band and tied it around the ends of his thin dreads as he walked inside the building to the employee break room. Like the rest of the odd mix of old furniture, the refrigerator had long since seen its better days, but Graham was happy it worked just fine to keep an icy chill on the bottled water inside it.
Bzzzzzz.
With his head still tilted back to empty the bottle, he reached for his cell phone from his back pocket and flipped it open before looking down at the picture of Lola and Kezia kissing. The tattoo artist and hairdresser still liked messing with him because they knew he wanted a threesome with them bad. They wouldn’t give in no matter how many times he asked them for a fair shot to fuck them and make them love dick again or even flashed his big dick at them. Nothing. Lola did his tattoos and Kezia made sure his dreads were always fresh.
“You still coming through tomorrow?” he read the text aloud as he walked out of the break room.
Using his thumbs, he replied. NAH. NO ENDS THIS WEEK. NEXT FRIDAY?
Graham had just stepped back out into the sun and the heat immediately pressed against his body. He was surprised to see the red convertible still there with Ms. Everything patiently sitting in the driver’s seat.
“She’s waiting on you.”
Looking away from the car, he glanced over his broad shoulder at Pogo vacuuming floor mats atop the large table in the corner. His heart swelled with surprise as he licked his bottom lip and made his way over to stand by her car. She glanced up at him from behind oversized shades and then held up a finger instructing him to wait, with annoyance lining her pretty face.
Graham frowned in displeasure. The hell . . . ?
Blowing dismissive air between his teeth, Graham turned and headed toward the white Range Rover Pogo was already working on.
“Hey!”
Graham heard her call out to him but he kept it moving. He figured the most she could have for him was a tip and he’d live without it.
“Six footer,” she called out.
Her voice sounded closer and he looked back just as she pulled her car up beside him. Coming to a stop with a heavy breath, Graham looked down at her. “That’s six foot nine,” he told her, crossing his sculptured arms over his chest and causing his tattoos to stretch across his muscles.
She leaned back in the leather passenger seat as she eyed him from behind her shades. “Come ride with me,” she ordered him, her voice soft but cocky. Sure. Demanding.
“What?” Graham asked, making a face.
She leaned forward. “Get in.”
Graham looked left and then right. Everywhere but at her.
“I don’t have all day, Six Foot Nine,” she said.
His eyes shifted. He quietly assessed her. “For what?”
She smirked. “You scared?” she asked.
“Oh, I ain’t never scared,” he assured her with a boldness he felt building. In his eyes, their levels were equalizing. She stepped to him.
With one eyebrow arched, she reached to hit the power button to unlock the passenger door. A dare.
Graham felt a thrill of excitement from his mundane life. He walked around the front of her car and opened the passenger door. “Yo, Pogo,” he called over to his elderly coworker. “Tell the boss man I went home sick.”
Pogo smiled broadly, displaying every tooth of his ill-fitting dentures. “You a baaaaaad boy,” he joked.
Graham winked at him before he bent his tall frame to slide onto the smooth leather passenger seat.
“You ready?” she asked as she shifted the car into drive.
Leaning back against the door, he locked his eyes with hers. “Are you?” he countered.
She laughed as she accelerated across the expanse of the parking lot.
“Graham . . . Graham . . . wake up. Wake. Up.”
He stirred at the feel of warm, petite hands pressed against the muscles of his chest. With each slow blink of his eyes, the sight of the all-white bedroom became clearer until he was looking through the sheer curtains surrounding the four-poster bed to the bright sun glaring through the bay windows of her bedroom.
It’s morning.
That’s all he knew for sure.
Graham turned his head on the pillow as he felt her straddle his hips. He smiled at the sight of her tousled blond hair barely covering the heart-shaped tattoos on the tips of her breasts and the weed she was placing inside a split blunt.
“I have to go to work today,” she said, reaching down to pick up something on the bed beside him.
He frowned in disappointment. “I thought you were on vacation?” he asked, suddenly aware of his mouth and tongue tasting like a horrible mix of bad breath, old food, and stale cigarettes.
Joy set the open blunt on his chest and then opened the tiny glass vial she held. “It’s Monday. Vacation over,” she said, glancing up at him briefly with her slanted eyes as she sprinkled the weed with coke.
Seven days had passed.
Damn.
Graham could hardly piece together anything more than snippets of wild sex, getting high, and occasional breaks for food—all while in the bedroom of her Harlem apartment. It was the best seven days of his life. Two thumbs in a bucket, fuck it.
Pressing his hands to her hips, he felt his dick stir from both the feel of her moist pussy snuggled against it and the anticipation of the weed-and-coke blend. He’d never laced his blunts before, but after some gentle urging from her his mind was blown and he wanted more. More of her. More of the powder. More of the rush.
“Don’t go,” he said, easing his hand around her wide hips to grip her buttocks and then continue down to slide one long finger inside her from behind.
Joy carelessly tossed the now-empty vial onto the hardwood floor before rolling the blunt as she wet it with the tip of her tongue. “I have to. We’re prepping for a big murder case coming up in two weeks,” she said with the blunt now pressed between her lips as she lit it. “If I want the lead paralegal spot for Mr. Warren, then I have to be on my A game. So my vacay is so over... and yours as well.”
Graham pulled her up onto her knees and used his hand to guide his hardness inside her. She held the blunt with her lips as she leaned back and placed her arms behind herself to grip his legs as she enjoyed the roll of his hips and the thrust of his dick. “You sure?” he asked her, enjoying the sight of her clean-shaven mound as his dick slid between her lips.
She sat back up straight to blow a stream of smoke directly down into his face as she took over the ride and worked her hips in fast and furious pumps that quickly drove him to an explosive nut that made him holler from his gut. “I’m very sure,” she said, standing up on the bed and leaving his dick blowing in the wind before she hopped down off the bed with the blunt still in her hand.
“Shit,” Graham swore, closing his eyes as the last of his nut left him in a jolt that was draining.
“I cannot have too much of this,” she said, leaving the lit blunt in the ashtray atop her ornate wooden nightstand before turning to walk away.
Moments later, he heard the shower in her adjoining bathroom start with an echoing blast. Just the thought of the water hitting against her body almost—almost—made his desire for her kick into second gear. Sitting up, he pushed a few of the many pillows on the bed behind his head and shoulders as he
reached for the remote and the blunt. Bending one leg and pressing his size thirteen foot into the plush pillow-top of the bed, he smoked the blunt and flipped through the channels of the plasma television on the opposite wall.
As he watched a rerun of Sanford and Son, he blazed through half of the blunt easily, glad that the laced weed didn’t affect him the way it had when Joy introduced it to him a week ago. His tongue and his extremities had gone numb and the back of his head tingled as his heart pounded like crazy. He chuckled at how the high coupled with the fear nearly blew his mind.
Graham was carefully putting out the embers of the tip of the blunt when Joy strolled back into the bedroom with a plush pink towel wrapped around her honey-toned body with her blond hair up in a loose topknot. She stopped and looked at him in amazement.
“What’s your plans for the day besides thinking you gone lay in my bed all day?” she asked, releasing the towel from her glorious body and quickly patting away the dampness from her skin.
Graham’s focus was on the slight jiggle of her breasts and thighs as she moved. “So you kicking me out?” he asked. “Shee-it, I was ’bout to make me a sandwich.”
Joy balled up the massive towel and fired it at him.
Graham caught it easily in one large hand.
“Listen, there are many things I’m open to doing, but taking care of a grown man is not one of them,” she said, as she removed a pale peach bra-and-thong set from one of the drawers of her dresser.
“I took care of you all week, though,” he said, briefly flipping back the sheet and looking pointedly down at his now lifeless and spent dick.
Joy quickly pulled on the lingerie and walked into her closet. “Sex don’t pay the bills, Six-Nine,” she called out.
Bills? She charging me for the drugs and sex now? The hell . . . ?
Frowning, Graham simultaneously wiped his face with his hands and elongated his frame, causing his feet to dangle off the edge of the queen-sized bed.
“Go to work,” Joy said, leaving the closet and hanging the outfit she held on the ladies’ valet by the framed full-length mirror leaning against the wall.
Using the well-developed muscles of his stomach, he sat up in the middle of the bed as he raked his fingers through his slender dreads. His broad shoulders were already feeling the fatigue of the weed and the nut . . . until the coke would kick in and give him new life. “Work ain’t a part of my plan right about now,” he admitted.
Joy paused in spraying her pulse points with the perfume he had come to love to smell on her skin. “I hope laying up in my apartment isn’t either,” she said before disappearing into the bathroom again.
“Fuck it, then.” Graham kicked away the crisp cotton sheets entangled in his legs before shifting to sit on the edge. “It was fun while it lasted.”
His dreads lightly swung back and forth across his chiseled cheeks as he stood and made his way across the hardwood floors to the bathroom. Her shower still had the room hot and steamy. It immediately clung to his nakedness and filled his nostrils. Joy was standing before the mirror above the pedestal sink, applying makeup she didn’t need in a circled area she’d cleared on the mirror. She barely spared him a glance with eyes even more hooded by the effects of the weed.
“I got time to shower before you boot me out this bitch?” he asked, already walking past her in the spacious and stylish bathroom to turn on the jet spray.
She paused in lining her lid with a brown eye shadow to look at his reflection. “Are you mad about having to go to work?” she asked, her voice condescending.
Graham paused in his move to step inside the shower stall. “My ass was working when you scooped me up,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”
“So what’s all the drama about going back to that shit?” she asked with a rare use of profanity as she pressed one hand against the edge of the sink and the other against her hip as she faced him.
He ignored her and stepped under the spray, avoiding wetting his dreads as he soaped the contours of his body so vigorously that his elbow kept jabbing into the slate-tiled wall. He ignored that as well.
His anger at feeling discarded like food that had spoiled rose in him with more heat and intensity than the spray of water against his form. Man, to hell with this.
He leaned his upper body out to eye her. “Look Miss High and Mighty, you should’ve let me know you just rent a dick for a week,” he said, hating that even in the midst of his anger, he felt drawn in by her exotic beauty. He wanted nothing more than to grab her face and kiss every bit of the gloss from her plump, heart-shaped mouth.
“Renting?” she said snidely, closing her makeup bag sharply and not sparing him a glance. “Humph. I’m not even renting this apartment. I don’t rent, I own.”
Fueled by the weed, the coke, and his fiery emotions, Graham stepped out of the shower. He had to correct his large body as he slipped and slid across the floor until he stood towering over her petite frame by nearly two entire feet. He grabbed her wrist to stop her retreat.
Joy looked down at his hand and then up to lock her glazed-over eyes on him. “Release me, Six-Nine,” she ordered in a quiet voice that contradicted the strength underlying it. “Release me. Wash your ass. Go to work. I will see you when I get home.”
Both his stance and his grip on her wrist relaxed. “Home?” he asked, his eyes filled with perplexity.
She freed herself from his loosened grasp before she left the bathroom. She returned almost as quickly holding a key and another glass vial in her hand. Joy handed him the key and opened the vial just long enough to tap a small amount of the powder on the back of her hand to snort before capping it.
His brows dipped in surprise. He knew she laced her weed with it. He didn’t know she snorted.
“Fabulous pick-me-up,” she said, pressing it into his hand as well before licking any residue from the back of her hand. “It’ll get you through the day.”
As she walked back out of the bathroom, Graham looked down at the key and cocaine—both were new additions to his life. He closed the lid of the commode and sat both things atop it before climbing back in the shower. Even as he washed, and through the steam swirling around him, his eyes kept shifting to the top of the commode. He slowly began to recognize a desire for both. A want. A hunger.
Rinsing away the suds, he turned off the shower and didn’t even bother with a towel as he stepped out, nude and wet, onto the heated tile floor to pick up the vial. Smoking it. Snorting it. What’s the difference?
Mimicking what he’d seen Joy do, Graham took his first sniff of cocaine.
Chapter 8
Joy
Six Months Later
“You a’ight, dude?”
Graham looked up over his shoulder. Pogo stood beside where he sat on one of the battered sofas of their break room. He saw the older man’s face fill with concern.
He dropped his head and looked away. “I’m a’ight. Just got a cold,” he lied as he felt his nose run. He sniffed and swiped at it with the back of his hand.
When the older man didn’t move, Graham looked up at him in question.
Pogo walked over to the door but he did not walk through it. Instead, he closed it and came over to sit down on the sofa next to Graham. “Let me talk to you, son,” he said, reaching over to pat his fist against Graham’s knee.
Graham laughed. “Yo, Pogo. I don’t get down like that,” he joked, hoping to lighten the mood because he could already see the serious light in the other man’s eyes.
“I’ve seen and done a lot in my sixty-five years,” he said with a sad smile. “A lot of shit I wish hindsight could change.”
Graham sniffed again and swallowed, fighting the urge to wipe his runny nose again. Fighting even harder to fight his crave to sniff the bag of powder hidden in his sock... again.
“I can already see that it’s getting to you, boy,” Pogo said. “I can see it all in your eyes and in the way you act ’round here. That shit ain’t nothing to play with. Trust
me. If you need help, I know a place. I’m still tryin’ to recover from twenty years of chasing that shit.”
Graham rose to his feet. “What shit?” he asked, playing crazy but far from it.
Pogo rose to his feet with effort and walked past Graham to the door. He opened it but paused in the doorway. “Get off that shit, boy,” he said, locking eyes that were graying with age on him.
Laughing nervously, Graham walked over to the door leading into the bathroom that was nothing more than dingy walls with an even dingier toilet and sink. “Nah, you better get off that shit, Pogo, if you think I’m messing with drugs,” he said, his heart already pounding in anticipation at the thought of getting to the package in his sock.
He closed the door and the stench of urine flooded his nostrils. Graham didn’t care. Relieving his bladder was the furthest thing from his mind. Bending down he used his forefinger to pull the small baggie up the length of his ankle and free from his sock beneath his blue uniform pants. He barely took the time to stand up fully before he dug his pinkie nail inside the bag of coke and sniffed it with one nostril and then the other.
The bathroom door jerked open and Graham whirled to find Pogo standing in the doorway. “Damn. What the fuck is wrong with you?” he snapped, turning his back on his coworker and coming face-to-face with his reflection in the fading mirror. In one millisecond, he took in his red and tired eyes and the cocaine residue still around his nostrils.
His shame and anger came in a rush. Turning from the sink, he crossed the dingy floor in three long strides and grabbed the front of Pogo’s uniform, lifting his slight figure into the air with ease until their eyes were leveled.
The fear Graham thought he would see in the old man’s depths was not there, but sadness reigned. Sadness and pity.
The rage lining Graham’s face softened as Pogo reached up to pat him as if he were a child. “This ain’t even the worst of it,” he said in a knowing voice. “That white bitch ain’t nothing to love, boy.”
Graham shook. He did love it. He loved it hard and fast. He’d gone from taking a hit once or twice a week to every day in just weeks, and in just a few more weeks he was snorting small amounts damn near all day.
The Pleasure Trap Page 8