“Stop,” I said, pushing him away from me. He stood up and pulled his long dick out his pants. I wanted that shit real bad, but I knew better.
“What?”
“I can’t do this.” I jumped into my panties and pulled down my dress. “Sorry, I just can’t. I’m G’s woman and this is his Spot.”
“Motherfuck G,” he said, but at least he didn’t try to stop me. I opened the door and peeked out to make sure nobody was in the hall, then I ran out and pulled it closed behind me.
Back at the bar I sat on my stool and tried to look normal. My pussy was thumping in a delicious afterglow and I kept replaying the act over and over in my mind, feeling his tongue swirling around inside me, rolling over my clit, stabbing up into me. Moonie was standing down at the other end of the bar, so I asked Cooter to go get me a bottle of cold water. Moonie saw me sitting there and came up to the top of the bar. I could feel his eyes studying me, trying to read me like a book.
“Did you get your wings?”
I shook my head and took a swig of water. “Nah. They were frying up a fresh batch and I didn’t feel like waiting.” I don’t know why I lied, but I did. Moonie just looked at me for a minute, then he nodded. “Be right back,” I told him, grabbing my purse. “I’ma hit the bathroom right quick.” I could feel his eyes on my back as I walked away.
At the entrance to the hall that lead to G’s office and the ladies room, I turned and looked back. Moonie had left the bar, and was heading toward the kitchen, moving fast.
I went in the bathroom and washed my face. I wet a paper towel in the sink then took it into a stall and did my best to wash myself down there. Then I stood in the mirror and combed my hair and put on some fresh lipstick. G hated to see women who had eaten off all of their lip color. He said it made them look busted.
When I went back out to the bar, there was something on my stool. It was my hot wing. Half-eaten with the crown bit off. I frowned and looked up and saw Moonie standing behind the bar and staring dead in my face. I didn’t miss a beat.
“Damn,” I said and poked out my lip. “Greco needs to check his cleaning crew.” I took a napkin from the bar and picked up the wing, holding it out like it was a used tampon. “Some people are so damn trifling.” I switched my ass around to the end of the bar and flung the wing in the trash, then got another napkin and wiped the sauce off the seat real daintylike before sitting down one stool over.
Moonie was still grilling me with his eyes, but so what? Fuck him. He hadn’t been in that coatroom holding no light so he couldn’t tell shit he didn’t know. Besides, I was just getting started. I had finally gotten my pussy licked, and G or no G, I wanted it licked some more.
Chapter Ten
F
letcher Boykin was a kid who grew up with me and Jimmy on 136th Street. His mother had actually ran with our moms for a while until she went down south and got religion. Miss Boykin was too busy preaching and ministering to the sinful souls at tent revivals to come back to Harlem and raise Fletcher, so just like a lot of us he lived with his grandmother and got raised the best he could.
Fletcher was a snotty-nosed kid with buckteeth and thick glasses. He followed Jimmy around like crazy, and all he ever talked about was how one day he was gonna make it rich and buy himself a Cadillac and a diamond ring.
I ignored Fletcher most of the time. He was always in our apartment trying to eat up our little bit of food, and he swore to my grandmother that one day I was gonna be his wifey and he was gonna take care of me like a queen. I was two years older than Fletcher and a whole foot taller. He was more of a nuisance than anything, but Jimmy loved him to death so I tolerated him for my brother’s sake.
When I was in the eighth grade and Fletcher was in the sixth, something happened to him that neither me nor Jimmy ever truly figured out. There was a guy named Macaroni who lived in a building a few doors down from ours, but liked to hang out on the roof of our building. Macaroni was in his twenties and still lived with his mother and grandmother, who both dressed in all white and stood on the corner praying for winos and hoes who passed by. Macaroni was in and out of jail all the time, and Grandmother had warned me and Jimmy to stay away from him because he was crazy and didn’t like little kids, so whenever we saw him lurking around our building we hurried up and booked up, running into the house.
One afternoon Jimmy and Fletcher were playing skelly in the hallway outside of our apartment. Grandmother was taking a nap, and I was laying on the pullout couch in the living room doing some math homework. Jimmy and Fletcher were loud talking each other and plucking caps right outside the door, and with all that hollering and carrying on I couldn’t concentrate. I kept getting up and going to the door to yell at them, but they were both hardheaded as hell and didn’t pay me much mind. I got mad and decided to make Jimmy’s little ass come inside.
“It’s your turn to clean the bathroom,” I went to the door and reminded him. “and you better get it done before Grandmother wakes up.” Now Jimmy was lazy and didn’t care nothing about cleaning nobody’s bathroom. Grandmother had already been cutting his ass left and right about showing out in school and forgetting to do his homework, but he wasn’t scared of her the way I was so my threat didn’t mean much to him. That is, until I said, “Besides. Grandmother got a letter about James Joseph today. I bet he can probably have visitors now, but she sure ain’t gonna take you to see him if you don’t start listening and doing like she says. She’s probably so tired of telling you over and over to do stuff she hopes Bellevue will just gone and give you a bed right next to him.”
Yeah, it was a low-down lie, but so what? Jimmy was still hyped about our father, who was just as crazy as they came. James Joseph hadn’t even tied his own shoelaces since me and Jimmy were babies. Our father swore up and down he was Jesus in the flesh, and was forever talking cash mess out of his schizophrenic head, but Jimmy was blind to his shortcomings and still held out hope that one day he’d get better and Grandmother would take us to see him.
“I’ll be right back, man,” Jimmy told Fletcher, and ran to get the ajax and the sponge to clean the bathroom. I hurried up and closed the door in Fletcher’s face, just in case he had any ideas about coming inside and waiting until Jimmy was done.
I went back to my homework and forgot all about Jimmy in the bathroom and Fletcher out there by himself in the hallway. The sound of a woman’s scream and running feet on the stairs sent me flying over to our peephole, and then running to look out the window.
“Jimmy!” I yelled as I leaned out the window and stared at the crowd of people running out of the building and others running toward my stoop. Jimmy squeezed in next to me and when we realized just what we were looking at all I could say was, “Oh, shit. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!”
“Oh, what?” Grandmother came up behind me. “I know you ain’t grown enough to be cussing up in my house like you paying the damn rent.”
I didn’t even turn around to answer her. I couldn’t. My eyes were fixed on the scene below. Macaroni was laying on the concrete just to the right of the stoop. He was on his back with his eyes open, and a puddle of blood was leaking from the back of his head.
Grandmother looked out the window on the other side of the chair and I heard her catch her breath. “Lord have mercy! That fool done finally fell his ass off that damn roof. He shoulda kept his crazy behind from up there in the first place. Now poor Mother Leland gone have to pray up some money to put his no-good ass in the ground.”
But less than an hour later we were all back at the window again. This time it was the police car we were staring at. The morgue hadn’t even come for Macaroni’s body yet, although somebody had thrown a white sheet over him, and when Jimmy hollered for me and Grandmother to come look again, it was little Fletcher being led out in handcuffs that bucked our eyes this time.
We never did find out what happened to make Fletcher push Macaroni off that roof, but of course we made up all kinds of stories. Whatever it was that Macaroni had done to Fletcher when I made Jimmy leave him out in the hallway by himself, it was enough to make Fletcher kill him.
And he ’fessed right up to it, too. Went right in his apartment and told his grandmother what he had done, and stayed there waiting while she prayed over him and called the police.
A few years went by before we saw Fletcher again. We’d heard he got sent to some boy’s home upstate, but by the time I was a senior in high school Fletcher was back in Harlem again. By then his grandmother had died and some Puerto Ricans had moved into her old apartment, but Fletcher said he wasn’t looking to stay there no way. He never did tell us where he lived, but Jimmy heard he was staying with somebody on the Lower east Side, even though he ran the streets of Harlem every day.
I had cut school and was hanging out with my girl Brittany down in Taft projects when I found out that Fletcher was scrambling for G.
“Whassup, Fletcher,” I said as me and Brittany waited for the elevator. He was playing handball against the mailboxes on one wall, slamming killers like he was outside on a court.
“Flex,” he said catching the ball and looking me up and down. “It’s Flex now. How you doin, Juicy?”
“I’m good,” I said, looking at him for signs of a killer. Fletcher’s glasses were gone and his teeth were almost fitting in his mouth. He had gotten a little taller and put on a few pounds, but he still had that same grin and hopeful look in his eyes that he did when he was a kid.
“You looking good, too,” he said, and I remembered the crush he had had on me all those years ago. “Know what?” he asked.
“What?”
“Remember when we was little and I used to like you?”
I nodded and laughed. “Yeah. You was a pain in the ass back in the day.”
“Well, I still like you.”
I shook my head and threw my hand in the air like I wasn’t trying to hear it.
“Naw, naw,” he said, grinning and bouncing his ball. “I know you G’s woman now, and I respect that. I ain’t stupid enough to step on my boss’s dick. I’m just saying you was always real nice, Juicy. I still think you nice.”
“You was a cool kid, Fletch—I mean Flex. We missed you when you left the building. I’m glad you’re back in the city.” I was hoping the elevator would hurry up and come so we could get this convo over with.
He nodded. “I missed y’all too. You and Jimmy was like the only real family I had.” The elevator finally came and Flex waved as I waited to get on. “Later, Juicy. Do your thing. But remember what I told your grandmother that time. I still mean that shit.”
I waved at Flex and got on the elevator. When he was ten he’d told Grandmother that one day I was gonna be his. That one day he was gonna marry me and buy me mad gold jewelry and set me up in a big phat house with cooks and servants and the whole nine. It was a trip that all the things Flex had promised my grandmother he was gonna do for me were exactly the things that G was doing for me now.
Chapter eleven
N
ew York City was hot as hell. Sisters strutted the streets wearing shorts so tiny they showed the black of their asses, and I planned to be dressed just like them in a minute. Before long I’d be down in Brooklyn starring in a ghetto version of a wet T-shirt contest. I’d be hitting the streets with my titties busting out of a tank top and jumping in front of a Johnny pump to get sprayed with cold city water.
For now all I could do was hold back my excitement and count down the days. G was heading to the West Coast and he was taking Jimmy with him. They were going to his son Gino’s graduation and would be gone for five whole days. I couldn’t wait until they got on that plane. Me and Rita had all kinds of stuff planned. House parties in the BK, a Thug-a-Licious concert at the Garden, talent night at the apollo, shopping till the stores closed down, you name it I was gonna do it, and do it all in five days.
G had asked me if I wanted to go and I almost screamed out hell no. Instead I ran him some line about how this would be a good time for Gino and Jimmy to get to know each other and how they didn’t needed a girl hanging around stepping all over that. The truth was I wanted some down time, some time away from G and his damn Spot. I wanted to put on a pair of cut off shorts and let my hair hang down to my ass. I wanted to stroll up and down 125th Street, and maybe even Fordham Road, and eat slices of pizza with extra cheese and fried shrimp with hot sauce straight from a paper bag.
I also wanted to steal some time away from Jimmy, who was sho’ nuff smelling his ass these days.
Every time I turned around he was running his mouth about the jobs G had lined up for him and how much bank he was gonna be slinging.
And he’d been right about Gino, too. He was coming back to Harlem with G, which was totally crazy if you asked me. Why would G spend all that money to send his son to college if he was gonna bring him back to Harlem and put him in charge of a bunch of crackheads and hoes? You didn’t need no college degree to do that. The streets held class 24/7 and G was living proof of it.
That’s why I knew I had to confront G. I didn’t wanna risk him getting mad and putting me on lockdown while he was gone, so I decided to wait until he came back. But we were gonna talk, that much was for damn sure. Grandmother hadn’t worked like a dog to raise us right just to have Jimmy hustling up in no Spot. It was bad enough that I had to put up with G’s shit just to get my education, but have Jimmy miss out completely on his? No. Just like Gino went to college, Jimmy needed the chance to go too. G didn’t love his son no more than I loved my brother.
I rode with Pacho and Moonie to take G and Jimmy to La Guardia airport in Queens. Inside the terminal I held on to Jimmy’s arm trying to cuddle with him like we used to do when we were kids. He’d gotten so tall, so damned muscular it was almost like he wasn’t my baby brother no more. Dressed like one of them bad-ass thugged-out playas/rappers/dealers who hung on the streets of Harlem, you couldn’t even tell he was the same kid who used to sleep next to me on a pissy, bug-infested mattress.
I took his hand and made him hold mine tight. I could tell he was embarrassed to have me hanging all over him, but at least he kept grinning and squeezing my fingers so I could feel his love. I clung to G a little bit too. Truth was, it was the first time Jimmy would be out of New York City, and I was scared the damn plane would crash and I’d find myself alone without my soul or my source of income. I kept telling myself that nothing bad was gonna happen, that people had to get where they were going and planes flew back and forth safely every day.
Moonie said we couldn’t go all the way with them to the gate because of airline security, so we said our good-byes as they got into a long line of people waiting to go through the checkpoint. Despite my self-talk and all the stuff I was looking forward to doing for five days, I was still scared to see them go. Jimmy looked happier than I’d ever seen him before. He was all up on G’s dick, laughing and joking like he climbed on a damn airplane and left me every day.
G came over and looked down at me. His clothes fit him to a tee and even a fool could see how expensive they were. I stared into his eyes. He was so damn fine. He hugged me to his chest and his arms felt strong and warm around my waist. Why couldn’t he make me feel like this all the time?
“Be good, Juicy,” he said. “If you need anything, see Moonie.” He squeezed me tight. “You know you my girl.”
I raised myself up on my toes and waited, begging him from my heart.
Kiss me, G. Please. Put your mouth on mine and let me feel your tongue inside of me. I’ll be a good girl, G. I’ll make you feel so good. Just help me a little bit, G. Please kiss me.
I was dying to feel his lips, let him taste mine. Whatever issues I had with G, he was everything to me and Jimmy. He put a roof over our heads when we didn’t have nobody else and even though he’d beat me, I knew he didn’t really mean it. Things could get better, I just knew they could. If we could start with a kiss then maybe we could work our way to a point where G wasn’t turned off and disgusted by having good sex and I wasn’t afraid to show him how much I needed it. But I was waiting in vain. G was old and set in his ways. I was young and busting loose. He pressed two fingers to his lips then touched my forehead. That was it. That was my good-bye kiss.
I sighed and stepped back. “You know you my man, G.” I said it but in my heart I didn’t mean it. I loved the things G did for me, loved what being his woman provided for me and my brother. But love him as my man? Uh-uh. I wasn’t seventeen and cheddar-strung anymore. I was in college now. Meeting people and doing things. True, I’d gone from being the daughter of a crack-ho who slept on a pull-out bed in a rat-infested hole in the wall on 136th Street, to being chosen by the infamous Granite McKay and living so lovely I dripped mad jewelry and never had to play the same outfit twice, but just because I was raised poor didn’t mean I was raised stupid. Yeah, poor sucked and rich was definitely the bomb, but a sister still had her bedroom needs, and the last time I checked a brick of hundred-dollar bills didn’t do much to keep me lubricated at night.
I grabbed Moonie’s arm and waved as they walked toward the security checkpoint. G never looked back, but Jimmy did. He looked just like a little boy again as he turned and waved, a gold hoop earring in his left ear and a pair of expensive headphones hanging around his neck. I wanted to run over to him and snatch him back, to tell him he couldn’t go. But then he grinned, so excited. “You my heart, Juicy-Mo,” he told me, just like he used to.
“And you, Jimmy-Jo,” I said, loving him more than I ever had, “you my soul.”
F
ive days was gonna seem like five minutes. Pacho and Moonie dropped me back at the apartment. “Make sure you call me before you make any moves,” Moonie said. “If you need a ride over to the Spot, Pacho will pick you up. G said you supposed to stay close to the apartment and just chill until he gets back, so I’ll give you a buzz a few times every day just to check. Okay?”
I nodded a few times and tried not to look like I was in a rush. As soon as they pulled off I ran upstairs to the apartment, changed into my hooch gear, and threw a bunch of stuff in a Coach bag and then called Rita.
All the shit I packed was raggedy in comparison to the way I dressed when G was around. Yeah, I still had diamonds and designer labels hanging everywhere, but I was done with all those high heels and slinky-ass dresses G liked to see me in. For the next five days it was gonna be short-shorts, halters, jeans, and tank tops.
And no damned makeup either. I wasn’t putting nothing on my face except a little bit of lipstick and nothing hot was gonna touch my hair. It would get washed in the shower and brushed out with a little Pink Oil Moisturizer, then thrown back in a long curly-ass ponytail. That was about as much trouble as I was willing to go through since G wasn’t gonna be around to make me get all dolled up for nothing.
G had told me to see Moonie if I needed anything, but that was the last thing I wanted to do. He didn’t leave me no money and I’d been scared to ask for any because he would have gotten suspicious and probably ordered me to stay my ass inside the apartment.
As it was, his boys had been ordered to keep their eyes on me, but they were gonna have to get up just a little bit earlier because I was outtie.
I watched from the window as Rita pulled up with her cousin Cat and gave the valet her keys. She was pushing her aunt’s Range Rover, and hitting the FDR Drive and then sliding over the Brooklyn Bridge was our ultimate goal. But first we had some shopping to do. Thank God Rita had my back with the dollars. She and Cat took me to Delancey Street and showed me how they hustled the merchants down. Then we went to Chinatown and me and Rita looked at all those naked chickens and pigs hanging in the windows while Cat boosted stuff she planned to sell in Brooklyn later on.
I had been born and raised in New York, but I was taking stuff in like a tourist. I hardly ever got to travel to Brooklyn and I’d never stepped foot on Staten Island. My eyes were wide and excited and whenever I saw a sister my age who seemed like she was out doing her own thang I felt sad because that would never be me as long as I was trapped with G.
Rita had a friend who lived in Lambert projects in the Bronx, and we hung out there for a minute. We played handball in the park across the street, and then decided to take her cousin’s two kids to the Bronx Zoo, which was another place I’d never been.
“Not even on a school trip?” Rita asked. I knew it was hard for her to understand that I’d been so sheltered, and I tried to explain that I’d gone directly from my grandmother’s house to G’s house, with nothing at all in between.
And with Jimmy acting all crazy half the time there was never money for school trips or stuff like that, so on those days I just stayed at home and helped Grandmother clean house.
There was something about the zoo that bothered me though. All those damn animals locked up and stuck behind bars.
All they could do was look out at the people every single day and I recognized the look in a lot of their eyes. They were bored and pissed. Pissed and bored. I’d seen that look in my own eyes on many days.
The Bronx Zoo was really big, and Rita made sure we marched our asses from one end of it to the other. I had just followed her and the kids into the stink-ass monkey house when I thought I saw a familiar face. I didn’t know how everybody else was standing that doo-doo smell, but it felt like it was getting into my mouth and skin and even in my hair.
I was trying to push my nose down into the low neck of my shirt when I saw him. He had on a white T-shirt and a beat-up-looking New York Yankees baseball cap, but it was him.
A little girl was riding on his shoulders who looked to be about six. He was holding hands with a dark-skinned woman who had thick black locks down to her ass, and she had another little girl by the hand, this one slightly older.
Damn, I thought, messing around and breathing in that monkey air without even realizing it. Moonie looked just like a regular brother out chilling with his woman and his kids. He was such a small man that there was no sign of a killer in him, and the way he patted and stroked that sister and them kids almost made me jealous that he had a regular life outside of the Spot while that one building was just about my whole world.
His girl was slim but had a nice body, even if she did dress like an old woman. My shorts were ten times tighter than her jeans, even though we were about the same size, and compared to the Million Man March shirt she was playing, I felt real slutty with my titties hanging out of my tiny T-shirt that said S
WeeT
P
OTaTOeS
on the front.
I couldn’t stop looking at them. Grandmother had sworn you could stare somebody into looking at you, and I guess that’s exactly what I did.
All of a sudden Moonie’s head swung around and his eyes jumped dead on me. Scared that he’d bust me out to G, I tried to step behind a fat white man but I wasn’t fast enough. For the briefest second we stared at each other and what I saw in his eyes looked a lot like disgust. When I blinked again he was walking away, pulling his woman quickly through the crowd. I followed him with my eyes as far as I could. Gone were the fine clothes and the jewelry and the playa-daddy image. The pants he wore looked like some white-boy Levi’s and his sneaks were dirty and run over on the sides. It was like Moonie had completely shed his G-Spot persona for the day, and the sight of him with his family stayed with me for a good long while.
Five days went by in a big fat blur. I barely slept at all we were so busy running all over New York trying to see and do every damn thing we could. Rita liked showing me around. She had been on her own for so long that it was hard for her to believe that I had never gone to the Statue of Liberty or ridden the Staten Island ferry. She was real generous with me, too, offering to buy me outfits and sandals when we shopped, but I kept reminding her that I had more clothes than I knew what to do with and I promised she could come upstairs and raid my closet and pick out anything she wanted when she took me back home.
Day five snuck up on me when I wasn’t looking. It was almost time to head back to the boring routine that was my life, and I had my lip poked out in resentment. It was my last night out, so I got loose. I put on my tightest booty-chokers and Rita took me to east New York to a house party where I slow-grinded for the very first time with some guy I didn’t even know! I didn’t wanna know him either, and when we pushed our way into the crowd and he asked me my name I just smiled and shook my ass. He was on the short side but he had a nice smile and that cologne he was wearing had cost over two hundred dollars a bottle. Best of all, he was a black man with a dick, and tonight that was my only requirement.
We started out dancing to a fast song, and even though I hadn’t danced in so long that I probably looked crazy and off beat, the way dude was running his hands all over me told me he didn’t care. He got that look on his face real quick. You know, the one where his tongue gets stuck between his teeth and he breathes real hard. Then the DJ changed the mix and threw on a slow jam, and as Maxwell’s voice surrounded us I got bold and stepped straight into his body. He grabbed my ass and grinded, tearing me up, and I let him, too. Swaying to the music, I closed my eyes and let him rub his hard dick between my legs until my panties were soaked.