“Mr. Demarcus Lancastor?” the young white man said. His name was Joe, and he didn’t look to be more than twenty and had a clean bowl haircut. His face was riddled with acne, but he had a nice smile and cleaned up well in his work uniform. He checked the computer again when I confirmed that we were talking about the same person. “They just got back and headed up to the room.”
“OK, great. I just need the room number so I can head on up too,” I told him.
“Um,” Joe hesitated, “is he expecting you?”
“No. I’m here to surprise him on his business trip. He’s only here for one more day before he comes back home, so I figured, when in Rome, right? Might as well come see what my baby is up to!”
That poor child looked so confused, and I swear I saw him swallow his spit, but I didn’t care. I was too anxious to make Marco happy. Joe checked in his system, and then looked back at me.
“May I have your name again, please?”
“I’m Jackie Stewart,” I told him setting my small overnight bag down to get my ID out of my purse. “It says it right there, plain as day.”
“OK,” he said taking my ID and matching it with a name on the screen. “Yup, umm. There you are. I see your name on the reservation. Let me get a key ready for you.”
It took Joe all of thirty seconds to hand me the key in a hotel envelope and send me on my way. He had almost gotten on my bad side, but I let it ride. He was probably new and just getting a hand on the job. My experience with him washed away quickly when I got to the floor Marco’s room was on. The smile on my face when I got off the elevator said it all, and I almost ran to his room. I didn’t realize until then that I missed him so much and I just wanted things to be the way they used to be.
I put the key in the door and entered the luxurious suite. It was set up like a one-bedroom apartment except that there was a hot tub in the living room. On the ledge of the hot tub were candles that needed to be lit and an unopened bottle of champagne. I smiled when I saw the rose petals that went from the front door to the hot tub and floated peacefully on top of the already-run water.
He knew I was coming, I thought to myself. I knew I shouldn’t have used the card to our main account to book this flight!
Well, so much for the element of surprise. I threw my overnight bag on the couch of the suite and made my way to the closed bedroom door where I was sure to find him passed out asleep. I wrapped my hand around the doorknob to make my presence known, but what I heard next made my blood run cold.
“Marco, you said you were going to leave her and move me out to Houston with you!”
I was so thrown off guard by the woman’s whiny voice I froze with my mouth open slightly. I had never heard that voice in my life, but it was apparent that she knew my Marco. So many thoughts were rushing through my head at once that I couldn’t grasp even one of them. He was there with a woman? He told her he was going to leave me and move her to our home? How long had this been going on? Is this what he did whenever he came to California?
“You have to be patient with me, baby,” Marco’s voice replied. His tone was low, sexy, and sure of himself. It was the tone he’d used to get me, and also the tone I hadn’t heard in a long time. “But I promise you’ll be my queen soon.”
“How soon? We’ve been doing this for months now! I love when we’re here because I can have you all to myself, but I hate that when you take me to Houston we have to hide like we’re a secret! Why is it so hard for you to let that bitch go? It’s not like she’s your wife!”
“It’s not as easy as you think, ma,” Marco told her.
“Do you love her?”
“No. I love you, Brina.”
I felt my heart drop to the pit of my stomach at how quickly he responded to her. He didn’t love me? Since when? Did he ever love me? Tears welled up in my eyes as many emotions surged through me. What was I going to do? I didn’t have a penny to my name. I never thought Marco and I would end, especially not so soon.
“Then leave her! I know her pussy ain’t better than mine. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be jumping on red eyes to come get this ooey gooey. Stop playin’ with me, Marco.” Her voice was demanding, and I heard Marco’s laugh.
“This is why I’ll always choose you, ma,” he said, and I heard a sound like he kissed her. “You aren’t submissive like that bitch. I like the fire in you. I like this too.” I don’t know what he did to her, but her moan let me know it was sexual. “Give me a week to kill ties. She just knows more about my business dealings than I would like her to. But I promise I’ll move you in with me as soon as all this is deaded. With this good pussy, you deserve to be the queen of Houston.”
“Okay!” she moaned loudly. “Okay, Daddy! Ohhh, Marco, I love you!”
I’d heard enough. I let the doorknob go and turned to walk out the same way I came. Just like that, my world had come crashing down at my feet. No wonder why he’d been treating me the way he was. He didn’t want me anymore. No wonder why he was never home, and no wonder why he never had the energy to make love to me. I felt like the greenest of all shits, and all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cry. Where would I go? Would he really just throw me out on the streets, knowing I didn’t have a penny to my name? I could empty his accounts, but his reach went around the world. He would just find me and kill me. I was only twenty, so I was still young and vibrant, but I never started college. How would I find a good enough job to live the way that I was used to? My heart was heavy as I passed through the room and all of our memories flooded back to me. Lies, they were all lies. Marco had taken the last two years of our lives together and wiped them away for a bitch named Brina.
Soon, the sadness was overcome by anger. I knew what he did to those who crossed him, but deadly or not, how dare that nigga do me bad like that when I did everything I could to make his home a home and keep him happy! How dare he plot to have another bitch lay her head on the silk, thousand-dollar pillows I picked out for our bed? No. Just no.
Before I left the suite, I felt my feet make a detour in the kitchen. Beside the refrigerator was a set of knives in their wooden holder. From it, I grabbed the biggest one and headed back toward the room. Brina’s screams of pleasure had gotten louder, and I heard the sound of Marco’s balls slapping her ass cheeks.
“You greasy motherfucker!” I shouted and entered the room.
Marco looked like a deer caught in a set of bright lights when he saw me standing in the doorway holding the knife. He was sitting upright with his knees on the bed with a woman my age bent over in front of him. I turned my nose up at her. She was cute, but nowhere near as fine as me. The only thing she had on me was a bigger butt. Other than that, homegirl was trash. She was short and had skin a little darker than my brown complexion. Her eyes were too close together, and the weave on top of her head didn’t blend well with her leave out. I could tell that she was shorter than me and slightly on the plump side; however, my beef wasn’t with her. It was with the piece of shit with his dick still in her pussy.
“So this is what you’ve been doing when you aren’t home?”
“Jackie, I can explain,” Marco said finally removing himself from inside of Brina. He pulled his boxers back up around his waist and put his hands out like he was trying to calm me down. “Put the knife down.”
“What? Mr. Gunplay is scared of a knife,” I taunted him with a scowl. “Fuck you! How could you do this to me?”
“Jackie, it’s not what it looks like.”
“Oh, it’s not?” Sabrina sat up on the bed exposing her naked body. There was no shame in her game. She didn’t even attempt to cover up as she gloated in my direction. “Marco is in this pussy almost every weekend. He even bought me my own crib, and it’s his name on my car note. Ain’t that right, baby?”
Marco’s eyes were still on the knife that I was holding on to for dear life. His eyes shifted to where his pile of clothes were near me, and I already knew what he was trying to get to. I hurried up and kicked them out of the room,
not daring to give him a chance to get to the gun.
“Is that true, Marco?” I shouted trying to sound tough, but my voice betrayed me and cracked. “After everything, you cheat on me with a bitch with a bad weave? Do you love me?”
I expected him to console me. I thought that since he was caught in the act, he would do like the niggas in the movies did and kick Brina out so that I could yell at him, and then forgive him. He should have, he really should have. He walked up on me slowly with his arms out.
“Jackie, I’m so sorry, baby,” the expression on his face was regretful, and the arm holding the knife waivered slightly. When he got to me, I thought he was going to wrap me in a tight hug to comfort me. Instead, the regretful expression changed to one of disgust, and he put a hand around my neck. “I never loved you.”
His right hand squeezed my neck, choking the life out of me, while the other held the arm with the knife, keeping it at my side.
“Mar-Marco. I can’t bre—ckkk! Ckkk!” I tried to beg him to stop choking me, but my airway was cut off.
“How did you get here, bitch? Did you use the money in my account to pop up on me?” Marco sneered in my ear. “Guessing by your outfit, you probably thought I would be happy to see you. But now since you wanna come in here on some rah-rah bullshit, let me tell you how I really feel about you. You were just supposed to be a bitch to pass my time. It was never supposed to go this far, but I felt sorry for you. You didn’t have shit, so I gave you everything. But now? You gotta go. I thought it would be nice having some live-in pussy, but you can’t even do that right. I’m a king, baby girl, and you were always just a peasant to me.”
He released my neck right before I passed out and punched me to the floor. The blow was so hard that my lip busted and my nose leaked with blood. I didn’t have time to get my wits together before Brina jumped from the bed, using me on the floor as her chance to attack me. She riddled my body with her fists and hard kicks to my stomach. The bitch even dragged me around the room by my long hair. Now, don’t get me wrong. I could fight, but I was too weak from oxygen loss to defend myself. Every time I tried to, Marco would come to her aid with another blow of his own. It was at that moment, as the two of them were beating me, that I truly believed him. He didn’t love me. Not if he could do me that bad behind a girl he’d only been screwing for a few months.
“Grab my gun,” Marco huffed. “I was gon’ just put the bitch on the streets, but now I’ma put her underneath them.”
I lay on the ground, bloody and in pain while Brina stepped over me and went to where I’d kicked Marco’s clothes. From where I was, I could see underneath the king-sized bed in the room, and my eyes fell on a black square plate. The lines of coke there let me know why both of them were so hostile, and it also made me realize that Marco was only partly in his right state of mind. He was ruthless sober, so high, I had no doubt in my mind that he would really kill me. The knife had fallen out of my hand, but it wasn’t too far from me. I grabbed it when Marco wasn’t looking and put it under my stomach. While Brina was still out of the room, Marco grabbed me by my hair, pulling me up from the ground into a standing position. I hurried to put the knife behind my back and stared into his eyes using the one eye of mine that wasn’t swollen shut.
“It didn’t have to be like this,” he told me and spat in my face.
“I know,” I said weakly. “I really loved you.”
With that, I used the last of my strength to shove the knife in his stomach and watched the look of shock ripple over his handsome face. I pulled the knife out of him, and he released my hair to clutch his stomach.
“Oh my God! What did you do?” Brina had come back in the room, and there was a loud thud.
I gathered my wits and saw that she had dropped the gun he’d sent her to get. Instead of waiting around to see what would happen next, I limped out of the room with my purse and overnight bag in tow. You all probably think I went out pretty gangster, huh? You probably think I went back home, emptied his accounts, and kept it pushing. I could tell that lie, but then this wouldn’t be a very interesting story. I didn’t do any of that. I didn’t even make it back to the airport. Turns out that Joe the bellhop had a feeling that something was about to go down since he’d seen Marco enter the hotel with another chick. Not only did he send the hotel security, but California police met me right at the entrance of the hotel. But get this . . . They didn’t believe a word I said. They didn’t care that I was beaten to a pulp and had blood running down the front of my dress. All they cared about was that there was a man with a stab wound to his stomach.
Magically, the drugs and gun disappeared from the suite, and I was painted to be a monster who had premeditated the murder of my ex-boyfriend. They didn’t look at the fact that my name was on the reservation. When money talked, money won. Marco didn’t put me underneath the earth like he had wanted to. What was done to me was way worse. Using Brina as a witness, he got me locked away for fifteen years for attempted murder and use of a deadly weapon. But that was the past, and if prison taught me anything, it was to never dwell on that. Let’s bring y’all back to the present so you can see how I made this nigga pay . . .
Chapter 2
The Present . . .
“What makes you qualified for this position?”
The voice caught me by surprise, and I forgot where I was for a second. Glancing down at the grandma-looking, two-piece pantsuit given to me by my halfway house coordinator, Trudy, I remembered where I was.
“I’m sorry, can you repeat the question?” I asked, and the woman giving me my interview, Linda, furrowed her brow.
“I said, what makes you qualified for this position, Miss Stewart?”
I couldn’t help it. I looked at her old white Betty White-looking self like she had poo all over her face.
“I thought I was interviewing for a janitorial position, not to be the CEO of this Fortune 500 company. What do you mean, what makes me qualified? Can’t everybody clean toilets and take out the trash?”
Apparently, that was not the answer she was looking for because she pushed my résumé to the side and made a motion with her hand toward the door.
“Maybe this is not the job for you, Miss Stewart, or maybe you just don’t need the money bad enough. Have a nice day. I have three other people interviewing today.”
I should have asked her for another chance because she was wrong. I definitely needed the money. However, I wasn’t about to grovel at her feet and beg her to hand me the plunger so I could clean up somebody else’s shit either. I grabbed my résumé from her big desk and walked out of her nice big office with my head held high. If you didn’t know any better, you would have thought I got the job, or maybe even owned the whole building. I glanced down at the tattered black flats I wore on my feet and shook my head. OK, maybe not the whole building, but perhaps a corner of it. I didn’t want to wait inside the building for my ride, so I stood outside the tall building in downtown Houston and called Trudy to come pick me up. I knew she wasn’t going to be happy if I told her I was coming home jobless yet again, but I had been out all day, and it was obvious that nobody was looking to hire an ex-con.
“Hello?” Trudy’s high-pitched voice came through the other end of the phone.
“Hey, Tru, I’m ready to be picked up. I’m at Advanced Marketing, that place downtown.”
“All right, Jackie,” she said, and I thought that she was just going to disconnect the telephone without saying anything further, but, of course, that was too much like right. “Did you find a job today?” My deep sigh answered the question. “Jackie! You know one of the requirements of your release is for you to find employment within sixty days. You know you are on probation for the next year! I don’t want them to come and take you away.”
“I know,” I said into the gray flip phone. “And I have been trying every day, you know this! Nobody wants to hire me because of my background.”
“I know you’re trying, but maybe you aren’t trying hard enou
gh. Maybe you need to tone down your attitude, just for the interview, to secure a spot.”
I opened my mouth to snap at her, but I bit my tongue just in time. She was right. Things weren’t the same as they were before I went to prison. There was no man to foot all of my bills and provide me a lavish home. And even if there was, I was sure to not trust them again.
“I know, Tru,” I said. “But I’m tired and done for the day. Will you please come get me, and I will try again tomorrow.”
“Fine,” Trudy surprisingly gave in. “But the only reason I’m agreeing is because your aunt Patricia came by the house lookin’ for you.”
“My aunt Patricia?” I asked, wanting Trudy to confirm what she’d just said.
“Yes! That’s what I said, ain’t it? She’s still here in the front room waiting for you to come on home. She said she ain’t leaving until she talks to you. I’m on my way now. Be waiting on the street!”
“O-okay,” I replied before Trudy hung up the phone.
It had been a good seventeen years since I’d seen my aunt Patricia. She was my father’s sister but was significantly younger than him. She was like a mother figure to me when my parents were always out partying and doing God knows what else. It was Aunt Patricia who was the one who helped me with my homework. Aunt Patricia was the person who wiped my tears and made me feel better when I felt alone in the world. I never understood why she abruptly stopped coming around when I was sixteen. All I knew is that she and my father, Orlando Stewart, got into it pretty bad, and after that, I just never saw her again. It was a year before I’d gotten kicked out of the house, and sometimes I wondered if Aunt Patricia would have been around, would things have played out differently?
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