Chapter 13

Nelson

I’m sitting here in the District Attorney’s office waiting to find out why I’m here and they give me ginger tea. I’m shocked they have it. Usually, you come into any office and they give you chamomile, English breakfast, some kind of bland mild leaf collection that needs all the lemon and honey in the break room. But ginger? Impressive.  And given how I did them the last time, I’m thinking this might be like a last meal. 

              But first they send the investigators in and right away I’m starting all over again with what I do for a living and how.  These clowns don’t get it because they didn’t take the time to do the homework beyond the case, if they even looked at it beyond social media.  These two, like the others, aren’t as worldly and intuitive as the job requires because they think I’m really spacious in the head.  I always find the best way to handle these moments is to let them think that.

“So you saw the entire thing?” the woman says.

“Yes, as I said before,” I say.   “I saw it out of the corner of my eye.  Not enough to be traumatized, but enough to know what happened.  I saw him do it.”

“And why couldn’t you do anything to help out?”

“Because I was instructed not to move or speak for the duration of the event.”

“Because you are a submissive,” the guy says. “This sounds like bullshit. Is this really a thing dude?”

Typical.

 I was bored out of my mind, wondering why they were here interviewing me in the DA’s office versus at their station or something, where this kind of basic shit normally gets done.  How unoriginal to not believe a truth you don’t understand.  Nowhere during the pandemic did this loaf of nothing figure out that he should maybe be curious about the things and follow up with a sensible Google search.   And then there is the obvious part; he should be able to infer from his context clues that if I’m a submissive, I’m probably submitting to some lack of agency that would restrict me from acting on my own accord.  You know, as part of the gig.

“It’s real, man,” I said. “I am a submissive and my job is to follow the orders to the best of my abilities, which are substantial.”

The stare I gave punked him a little and he backed back.

              Sure, it’s hard to wrap a mind around, I know, I know.  

              But even in submission, there are the rules, boundaries. I don’t do animals or knives for example. Also, anything that sends me to the hospital gets to be covered in full by the client, although I have my own insurance. I make motherfuckers sign agreements to this end, and if they’re not willing to, they’re not serious. This is not something I do for the money only. 

              Name calling, verbal abuse, spit, pee, cuffs, stockade all of it is included in the price. It’s painful at times but I manage well. When my client allows me to wear pants, I duct tape a little cotton pad on my knees just in case I’m there a long time.  But it’s never unbearable.  I mean, this all started because I was in a method class, which my acting friends warned me not to do. The teacher assigned us an exercise that involved me following me scene partner’s lead to the nth.  It required a level of subservience, of yielding so-to-speak. I never experienced that before. And when it was time for us to switch, I had a harder time being the master.  Yes, it was a master/slave setup of course, and even though my black self had a hard time with the verbiage, I enjoyed being the slave far more.

The seeds were there mind you.  My biological mother was making an unprotected left turn and didn’t see the woman in the crosswalk until it was too late.  Everyone hesitated except the driver of the car coming through the intersection. I’m told the woman in the crosswalk rode in the ambulance, held me and prayed that my mother made it through alive. 

She didn’t. 

When the good Samaritan realized I didn’t have a bunch of family to take over, she decided the least she could do was raise me.

              “Your job is to continue to bring me joy,” she used to tell me. “I’m not going to ever get past this tragedy so you have to help me survive it.”

              And I was fine with that.  The family was good. I never felt displaced or anything.  So I was, you know, joyous, helping everybody in the household in every way I could.  When I was a kid, I was always being yelled instructions from my mother, helping take care of my younger siblings and it made me feel like a slave and I don’t think I was crazy about it then. But this acting exercise years later made me feel the shift for the first time, get into a different place with it.  I know this is going to sound cliché as fuck but I felt empowered finally.  And I  liked the zen space of it.  I wish I had been able to find some zen in taking care of my siblings too,  especially since one of them is on the spectrum.

              Anyway, I gave up on the acting because I couldn’t with all the lines and memorization. Too much anxiety. But the submission, that was good therapy for me.

              That turned into what I call “small gigs.”   One day it was drinking a gallon of water and pissing my clothes all day, since my master wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom.  Then it was me moving someone into their apartment while naked, which was something for the residents of [some place] to watch.  I had one guy make me file all of his paperwork, which doesn’t seem strange until you add the ball gag and handcuffs. 

              The gigs got larger, longer.  My invoices got larger, longer.  I had to start adding things to the menu. Devices, toys, eventually an LLC because now I was making money. 

Then it happened. I had a client that I left in the dust. He was newer to the whole game and was  doing  pretty good at the start.   Tall, dark, beefcake of a man who looked way too good for his age. What was he, sixty?   Usually if you were around for the Cuban missile crisis, you’re more conservative, but this guy was for the okey doke at first.   When I was visiting my folks and pushed back on flying in from Ohio to  see him, he was firm. 

“What did I say. Get  on the motherfucking plane.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

Six hours later I was at his house.

“Put your things over there by the bedroom. Don’t say shit.”

I obeyed. It’s good to not have too many thoughts when you’re in this zone.

“Stand there,” he said. “Don’t move until I tell you to.”

He made dinner, ate, had a phone conversation with his friend[JS1] .  I think I heard him say that he had a sub standing totally still over in the corner waiting for him to give more instructions.  Two hours later, he said, “Now come get on your knees and suck my dick.”

The standing there was meditative. Deep breaths.  I walked over to him.

`             “Wait.  Grab your ass and pull your cheeks open.”

I put a healthy amount of ass meat in each palm and pulled my cheeks open.

“Turn around, let me see you. Turn around slowly.”

I did the promenade.  Then he told me to get on my knees.

“Keep those cheeks open. Slob the knob. Pretend like it’s going in your ass right now.”

I started sucking on the dick. 

“More slob. I want my dick wet.”

I sucked more, succeeding.  This was getting hotter to me.

“Open your mouth wide and let me fuck that throat.”

Not even a whole minute I pulled open my jaw something happened. There in that openness, with my ass open and my mouth open, I felt him surrender.  It was like pushing the button on the surge protector to turn it on; I was engulfed by power. 

And my mind went blank.  The vision of a little black boy[JS2]  in a bright blue shirt running, holding hands with his sister showed up clear as day.  She was in a solid red [JS3] shirt, and she was a bit younger. They were having a good old time, sliding down the slide in the park being pushed by their mother on the swings.  She was having a hard time with all that energy but the kids were happy.

This was transcendental as fuck and I needed more.  

But a bitch was careful. Most of these clients, especially the white ones, were way too liberal with their imagination about what they wanted to command me to do.   No, I’m not cutting my tongue up with your toenails.  And no, I’m not letting you shove an ice sculpture up my ass.  I had to remind these clowns that as is the case with athletes, dancers and martial artists, my body is the commodity.  If you didn’t understand that, I couldn’t engage, let alone trust you to explore the next level of my superpowers.

This is the reason I went back to my young baby boomer client.

“Put me in a cage,” I asked him.

“I can’t do it. You’re another black man.” 

But the good news is that he was a personal trainer and one of his clients was willing.  My baby boomer vouched for him, so I felt safe.

The three days I spent in the cage were epic.   I had visions. I started seeing more things that were happening in other places and I would find out later on that they happened when I was seeing them.  It was weird and crazy and addictive, but that’s a whole other story. The point is that this new client became my consistent gig.  He had more torturous things to ask, one of which was to go to a few sex parties.  This was a sophisticated client, or at least his asks were sophisticated.  In one scenario, I needed to just sit and eventually be fucked by a random dude in a small sex party.   The goal of my assignment was to “perform” my joy so much that it was distracting to everyone in the room. I needed to pull focus.

              Ironically, because the space we were in had so much emotional energy, I was cathartic anyway. Fuck a performance; my whole breakdown was real. The room came equipped with a corner area to cry in and an elevated stockade, so that I could be on all fours elevated from the floor while I was getting fucked. No necessity for holding myself up because there was a little ledge on each side for my hips, you see. I threw a few stryofoam pads on there for comfort, black ones I keep in my bag at all times. And the whole thing was cathartic.  I mean it really was a spiritual event and I can’t quite place why. The new guy who didn’t even know about this room was so overwhelmed he opened his chest and then sent jizz to my face and I’m sure we were six feet apart.

              And because I was there working for the same client and later at a series of other events, some of them not so Pornhubbish at all, the assistant A.D. is looking at me thinking I may have potentially witnessed a crime.  All while denying my career. Fuck him.  Fuck her too.

              “I make more money than you,” I told them.  The taste of his irritation was chalky but satisfying nevertheless.   Regrettably, the lady jumped in before I could inspire full fisticuffs.

              “What did you see?”

              “Very little,” I told her. “But from my post out of my periphery I could see where Dade pushed them down.”

              “Them? We’re talking about one person here.”

              “I’m using the victim’s preferred pronouns. Are you familiar with pronouns at all, parts of speech?”

              The dude slammed his hands on the table. 

              I rolled my eyes.

              The woman to the rescue again.

              “So Dade pushed them down and left the there.”

              “Yes.”

              “And when did you exit?”

              “I didn’t exit until after they came with the stretcher to pick them up.”

              “Would you be willing to testify to that end?”

              “Yes, but I need a cup of ginger tea to go,” I said. “And I have a few small favors to ask. Nothing your office can’t handle.”

              The idiot had left the room already, but the lady was still around.  And Lord knows I would have a list of things for her to help with for sure.

Chapter 12

Shaw

That boy pulled me off my game. Not the sports figure that I was on a mission to rescue, but the one who showed up on my doorstep needing some other ancillary help. It also helped me none that his ancillary need was also ancillary to my actual mission.

              The mission walked into the office [JS1] one day barely able to hold himself up without my friend, Keith, helping.   A sports guy from the ruggedness of the body, which was either hood or footballed or both. I could smell the mixture of cleats and socks and assumed Keith was trying to rehabilitate this boy’s injury.  When the sports dude slumped down in the chair, I saw that this was something else.

              “I can’t fix this one,” Keith told me. “This is your department.”

              “I did not rape that girl.”  These were the sports dude’s first words.

              I leaned forward with my elbows on the table and my hands clasped low enough for the bracelet to make a sound. 

              “Can you look into my eyes and tell me if they’re really green?”

              “They not,” the baller said.

              “Not today,” I said.  I leaned back understanding that the dude was telling the truth.  I looked up at Keith.  “He’s telling the truth.”

              “Yeah, I know. Not just any white girl either,” Keith said, “but McRowe’s daughter.”

              That’s when I recognized him. Dade Thomas, star running back, college football.

“You couldn’t pick any other white girl to piss off than your coach’s daughter?”

              “She wanted to smash and I wasn’t bout it.  I ain’t go near that white girl.”

              “Then you don’t need my help.”  I retreated back to my side of the table. “Heard through the grapevine they dropped charges. You’re in the clear unless the State comes after you.”

              “He’s still after me.”

              I knew right away what he meant.  If a man as powerful as the head coach of a prestigious university decided not to pursue conviction, he had something much worse in mind.  My imagination is too wild and so I worried about this boy right away. Something about the tidiness of his locks helped me see how naivete and stupidity probably collide in him probably often. 

              Keith’s ass knew too.

              “He needed someone to help him get ahead of this so I dropped him off.  Bye.”

              Muscles in my neck got pulled from trying to swing it around.  “He’s already behind it!”

              “I know Dr. Davenport,” Dade said, “but I need this so bad. If he messes me up, I can’t help support my sister. She’s special needs.”

              I was so irritated at Dade being at all compelling and I knew where this story went.  He probably didn’t know how to buy a cashier’s check, so managing the leftover money after the ruin would send that child’s poor sister to the county orphanage annex holding room waiting with more special needs than the ones she started with.

              Fine.

              “Just Shaw,” I told him. “I don’t need to tell you the rules, right? Don’t talk to the press, lay low, tell me not one lie ever, etc.”

              “Yes sir.  For real though. I’ll do it. I watched Scandal.”  

              He started laughing.

              “Not funny. And I don’t do what she does.”

              Not quite, anyway.  The kind of people I work for have far less money or aren’t willing to spend the far more that they have. So I do a little of this and a little of that.  I kind of jack all the trades doing gigs like this one. And wouldn’t you know, even in the high-stakes world of ruin, a sex tape is still the ticket?   The coach produced a video of Dade fucking the NFL commissioner’s wife.   By produced, I mean he produced  it. He hired a dude to executive produce it by putting together the pieces of it – some hooker over here some fuckboy stripper over there, a set designed to look like the home office and [JS2] a little deep fake technology in post and voila, you have my new charge in a video that would get him everything but the mercy of murder.  It would have taken me only enough time to eat a biscotti and drink a latte to find this out.

              But I waited. Because I got caught up with Curits. It wreaked havoc on all the nerves in my nervous system.  Helping Dade out was getting me back on track somehow, which I attributed to God rewarding me for my celibacy.   A detour and emotional headache got me to the information, but I was so late to the party.  The video was already being storyboarded, cast, prepped.  I can’t stand Colby, another all-in-one like me, good as fuck at what he does but always working for a terrorist of some kind, usually on the hot sticky money side of things.  I scheduled some time between production meetings to brainstorm a way to squash it and put things on the fan blades.

But Curtis had showed up on my doorstep and screwed with my sensibilities[JS3] . 

              It all came back and I needed the recovery time from the memories.   It took so much out of me resisting, trying not snatch those clothes off of myself and choke his dick with every orifice it would fit into.  To look at him was to reminisce.  That time he fucked me, came into his hand, rubbed it all over my stomach, fucked me some more until I came some more.  The time he sucked on my underwear with his head in my neck cry-moaning how good it was.  The time he—

              By the time I realized I had spent too much time remembering, I discovered I was too late because now the video was already being filmed.  My scramble became a sprint.  The nuances were delicate. I tracked down a friend of the actresses and found out she wanted it to be seen by the masses even if she never saw a penny of it. I thought this was decidedly unfeminist and countercultural in some Handmaid’s Tale way, but you know, her prerogative. I decided to intercept the editor and get a different video made, this one to get distributed everywhere with the real faces of the two porn B-listers in it. This way when the deep fake did come out, no one would believe it. 

For good measure, I got the commissioner to agree to let me stage a kidnapping.  We told his wife it was because there was a threat level to his job and a compassionate audience would be great for whatever scandals his enemies had in mind.  She complied, and we only needed enough activity for the LA Times editor I know to assign and run the story.

              All of this was shoddy work, mind you, because of the haphazard rush. Because of dick recaps.   Thwarting the crisis for my newly targeted baby boy client was quick.

              Getting my psyche past Curtis was not.  It would require a round robin of sorts.

              First, concrete love.

              I called Dad.

              “How is the Hyacinth doing?”

              “You coming after her first thing huh?” he said.  “Must be either love or money got you upset right now for you to go for the gut.”

              I don’t know. Going for the gut might have been to say that she’s cheaper than a rose and, like hyacinths, she can’t be justified by anybody including Dad.

              “I’m not mad at Rose.” I settled.

              “I know that son. Who are you mad at? I’m gone be up all night.”

              “It’s fine. I’ll behave.”

              Dad sighs about as loud as he says anything, which is not very.  But I could still hear it all over the phone.  “You know I know that could mean anything. Sometimes I wonder why I taught you all that stuff.”

              “Mother was worried about me being able to defend myself when I bought that Vera Wang knockoff,” I say, as if he doesn’t remember.  “I was 14 and slight.”

              “Still,” he said. Then the pause.  “Have you talked to him lately?”

              “No, different old flame.”

              “Not as bright as that first one, judging by your voice.”

              “Yeah this one is fine. I can dispose of him if it gets ugly.  I won’t feel as conflicted about it—”

              “Shaw!”

              There are times when it appropriate to insert a hearty laugh.  This was one, unless I wanted Dad to get on a plane.

              “I’m kidding,” I told him. “I won’t hurt anybody.”

              “Yeah, you include yourself in there. I love you, whatever that’s worth.”

              “I love you too.”

              “And this new old flame is on your mind harder than you want to tell me, but that’s okay.”

              He wasn’t wrong about either, not the love, not Curtis.

Then there was Andre, sort of brotherly agape love with the walk in the park, the protective vibe  with notes of Negro Modelo bromance, good conversation at his apartment, this time about villains.  Anime and everything drawn is his love language, so flirting comes in YouTube videos he wants me to watch. Lately, it’s been WonderWoman vs Black Widow, ____ vs ____, contrived ideas on who would prevail. 

              “Who is your favorite villain?”

              “I have several.  Cruella, Maleficent, Joker.” I say it into the palm of his hand, which is holding up my head. I bite it with my lips.

              “Joker. You liked that movie?”

              “I know, I know. Sure, you look at this white man in such fragility behind not having a father in his life, when that was half of your sixth grade class, you wonder how he can be so impacted. He’s mad at his mother for doing the best she could but it still didn’t involve her pulling credit out in his name, so what’s really going on?”

              Andre has now scooted me further up into his spoon on the sofa.   “Go on.”

              “But when I look at it as a treatise on what happens when health care bureaucracy meets our fucked up mental health system, the creation of Joker by our status quo gets kind of compelling. Sure he’s fragile as fuck but that’s all part of the mental health thing, and why it puts blame where it should be for the creation of a villain.  I bought the narrative and I like that part of the messaging. You?”

              He breathed into my neck. 

              “You know how Russian dolls are several deep?” he said. “I think that what you said is like the base one, the one that everything else is built around. But three dolls sizes up is this thing about the way white people rallied around Joker as if they all were disenfranchised people looking for someone to be the avatar for their plight.   It also came out right after Black Panther. And it felt like the media frenzy of it was about the idea that Joker was necessary for the esteem of these white folks who understood the dude.”

              I wanted to throw myself like [superhero woman in Street Fighter[JS4] ] into his face, girth of goodies first.

              But I decided to wait. This was only the long walk in the park, after all.  

              Oliver wanted to mess around. No words. No talking. Just groping and heavy petting, the way we would have as adolescents.  It’s about the rolling around, the feeling of each other’s bodies. Mouths everywhere opening and closing like fish feeding.  We pour olive oil on our bodies until they are shiny and then rub them against each other.

              He likes his hole rubbed on, touched. I put more olive oil on my fingertips, happy that my nails are too short to overtake them.  Probing is what I like to call it, massaging the small circle of his hole, opening it up with my fingers, rubbing the prostate with it.  We rub against each other like sea eels until we sort of blend into the same seething collection of feelgood. Until he cums. I hold on to mine.

              Then I go to the fixer, Jason. He says few words to me.  I say a few words carried over from the spirit of the walk in the park.  He indicates the bed as if it is a spa promise.   He rolls me with care on to my stomach and puts his head on my behind. He rubs his face and huge beard in it. He is tall and stocky and solid.  Love, yes he made love to my ass with his face, rubbed his beard across the valley of my cheeks.  Then he pulled everything off of me and breathed weed into my asshole.  His tongue chased the smoke that I could almost imagine running up into me.  

This was a niggah. Like a hard core, I-don’t-want-to-use-the-words-that-describe-him kind of niggah.  But because he reads Tahnehisi Coates and can quote scripture from the Bhagavad Gita, I come to him last, the ultimate lay. Because his brain, hyper-agile like those of indigenous people that white people call primitive, can’t disappear all the way even in an instinct state.  So he is smart all the time.  

Like an animal whose instincts and gene memory have made the task exact, this man creates a small sea around my asshole and runs his tongue through the new wetness.   I can smell the weed and workday in his hair and we fuck. He calls it a pussy when he fucks, and although these kinds of gender pronouncements seem so primitive, I let it go on because primitive is all I want.  Stroke after stroke, variation after variation of dick put in me, because he’s trying to find the position of my parts that makes it feel the best. That makes it feel the best to both of us.

He hits a spot on my insides and then manages the stroke there. He takes care of all the parts of that one part of my insides, his dick growing into the walls there.  My body cavity opens up. He hugs my back with arms. He hugs my ass with his palms and pulls me closer. He pulls my dick into the skin on his stomach, skin he swears is healthy because of some concoction of butters he makes. I know it’s the Somali DNA on the swole D in me. I know. 

He is fucking me in two places at once, his stomach moving, ushering my shaft to explosion while his dick pushes from the other side.   The place in the middle is some esoteric shit only Shaolin priests and drug addicts know.

Right around here is when I get scared every time, start to resist.   I get nervous because I know that if I want to really feel it all, I need to let go.   The father love, the mind rub, the brotherhood—none of it matters if I don’t allow all the love to come together and hold me while I come apart in this mess of exposed truth.   Truth.  That this is what I like. That him making me feel this good is what I like and it’s totally okay to not control it.   I am afraid of that kind of letting go, and I’m still nervous about trusting the love underneath me.

But I let go. I do. I trust. I trust the truth, and all of the me between his arms and stomach cums.  It is the safest place I’ve been in my life.

              Except for with Curthis, which is why this is all so necessary.

              And none of it has anything on the one who got away.

Chapter 11 - Season 2 Opener

Fucking is such a big deal, and I mean a production. My friends don’t get it, because they are professional THOTS. But this casual tricking is hard as fuck.  You have to stretch, like do a Warrior 1 and a Sun Salutation and downward dog because the positions niggas want you in hurt.  Bent over, your knee pushed into your throat, folded in half, ankles crisscrossed. Or on your stomach with your cheek pressed against the headboard and your crotch pushed down to hell from the pounding.  Or on your side in some kind of cobra.

It’s some bullshit.

Then there’s the cleaning. The fucking hose.  I mean, you haven’t inserted anything bigger than toilet tissue in there for six months, so you’re tight as a wall outlet. And the checking and testing and the timed eating for optimal ease with the cleaning so that it doesn’t take longer than the actual sex you’re trying to have. And God forbid you’re out of town, which is where you’re more likely to do some random whoring so as not to run into any of these assholes at the supermarket or a site visit.  And you have to go to the Walgreens to get the enema because you’re not THOTful enough about sex to travel with one.  But thank God you’re home this time, you tell yourself, debating on whether to tell your best friend your plans to drag your libido out of the garage.

Nope, you don’t want to hear it.  

Instead you just move on to the enema, which is still a struggle because it requires you to pour the saline out and fill it back with water if you don’t want your piping to feel like someone lit a match to it.  Then you have to make it work and hope that you didn’t make things too sensitive because you can never get out all the saline when you’re rinsing the bottle in a hotel bathroom and the asshole is not designed for this. Well, it’s not designed for penis either. It’s a mess. All a mess.

And you would have done the top thing because you’re really versatile and understand this about yourself. And you’re older than he is, whoever he is, for sure. But the trouble of putting up the shot framed to make you look like trade makes you feel like you’re stooping to some early elementary version of puberty reserved for men who have to feel like men and want to check your voice to make sure it’s not too high. Then they need you to be Fifty Cent and have a giant forearm of a dick to stretch them this way and that and the extra work you have to put in while they lay there is just too much energy for your old ass at this point. So you opt for the fucking Equate bottle instead.

Because it’s easier.

And that’s before we get into the whole back and forth.  You open up the profile and your ass or shape or something is splattered in your profile pic and you try not to look at it as you shake your head, embarrassed you bothered to make a profile in the first place only to wait to see if there were maybe two new people in the city that might find you.  And then just when you think this is a bad fucking idea and throw your phone on the floor it beeps with a “Whassup” or some other non-greeting non-sentence from a person you would never talk to if you met at the Starbucks but are desperate enough in the moment to entertain after all that cleaning you did. And you fend off repeat offenders and say no to the people you regretted showing a picture to but are too sympathetic to block.

Then there are the one word answers and questions and texts that go something like:

Sup

Yo man  - Because “Hey man” is too, you know, gay. Or so some negro said.

Wyd

At home

Horny af frfr 

And this is when you pull out my urban ghetto inner project dictionary to find out what this shit means. It’s not in there. And you’re mad at Alonzo Westbrook who is gay and black and had the nerve to start something with his Hip Hop Dictionary but didn’t bother coming out with a second edition with this new millennial acronym in it. You refuse to call your bestie because he already complains that you don’t keep up and won’t let you live down guessing Megan was a Kentucky Derby winner.

Oh me too fr fr

Wyd

Now you have to call your bestie and ask his ass what frfr stands for to confirm that it’s what you think it is so that you can contextualize wyd. Only so that he can bludgeon you with his frustration with why you bother taking yourself through the motions pretending you’re going to actually fuck this time, which makes you have to convince him that you agree that you really need to end the drought after your ex.  This admission giving him full reign to now be invested in what the hell you’re doing, excited that you’re going to finally do a booty call but irritated that you are so far removed from the world that you don’t know standard text abbreviations.

So this time you send, “That is what’s up.”

“But you didn’t spell it out like that did you?,” your friend tells you, gravel in his tone. “‘That is what’s up’ is not actually what you wrote, right?”

“I mean, those are the words in the language he understands, no?”

“Bitch, what is wrong with you? Sound it out and write that. Contractions. Phonetics. That’s whassup.”

Because really if you’re just trying to have sex you should not be interested at all in sounding like you have an absolutely irrelevant degree. And if you’re old enough to remember Hooked on Phonics and Ebonics, it really may not be worth it to adapt.

Then you’re mad that you didn’t use the lexicon right because you switched codes just fine two years ago when you walked in on your boyfriend fucking your TA on your office desk in your house, so you actually know how to switch.   Now you just wished you could get to the pictures, which is confusing because you complain daily about Instagram culture and the resistance people have to reading and having full conversations. But right now, you need pictures.  Which means you have to go to your pictures on the app and then select one to send, which means looking at it briefly and being reminded how hard it was to even selfie that bitch.  You had to make sure the lighting was right, that your entire asshole isn’t visible because then they’ll think you’re a basic THOT whose ass can just be beat up like this is Taggaz or Tim Tales.  

He likes it and sends his dick, which is, as usual, two inches bigger than it needs to be in some direction, girth, length, something.  And you relent and go to his house, which is a shame because really you think to yourself that if you’re giving up ass he should at least get up off of his and come get it.  But you also want the option for him to not know where you live. So you get in your car and drive yourself like some cheap useless slut to his house.

You text your good judy the address and his profile handle so that someone knows the last place you’ve been in case you get stabbed with something other than a penis.

And all you do on the way there is curse yourself out for bothering at all when you know you have to get up and go to work tomorrow while these other negroes stay horizontal in their non-jobs. And you’re angry with yourself that you spent extra time after the shower sorting through all of your casual wear options trying to figure out which one didn’t have some logo or school emblem or something that might invite a guess at who you are or where you graduated or where you invest.

              And  you expect that when you get to his house, you will do the weird  thing where each of you  tries to posture and be hood and masculine enough to not turn off the other, which is also some racial post traumatic stress shit that you wish you could just acknowledge out loud and hug and cry cathartically about before exhaling. Except that if you find out he doesn’t understand all of those words, all attraction to his phyne ass will deflate. So you will say less and then take off your own clothes because taking off each other’s is hot and sexy but awkward if you’re strangers and you’re not really a professional THOT. He just wants to cum anyway and his apparatus is so fucking beautiful that everyone is going to let him have it his way.

He doesn’t even have to eat ass for it.  But you hope he does. Because you went out of your way to make sure it was edible.

              And you feel slightly ashamed for that, not because you judge it but because you might have been able to get away with less manscaping work with the clippers, and then maybe your neck wouldn’t hurt so much from trying to turn it around 160 degrees to see.

              Except that this time, you get to his loft and try not to be too freaked out that it’s all white walls, stone, chrome and modern lamps, not a one of them on.  You note the television splaying images of architectural feats, one of the shows on TLC about engineering. It is the source of all the light. The sound is low though, and you wonder if he knew that this is exactly what you’d be watching at home if you weren’t whoring around right now.

              He is all kinds of things at one time.  Generic muscle body, not too ripped, soft toffee skin over those muscles. He looks like the pictures he sent, which is also a mercy.

              “Do you want something to drink?” 

              He says this and you only have enough time to think a full response in your head, which is no, you don’t want to drink a thing because you’re too old for your bladder to fill up and complicate this already delicate casual fuck thing since your nerves are bad.  Then he adds:

              “The answer is no but manners and decorum make you comfortable, so I asked.”

              You are thunderstruck by this. You get actual chills at the accuracy. Then you get self-conscious because you’re trying to figure out how you are so seen so fast.

              “No, thank you.”

              Then he stands there looking at you, getting larger in front of you like a shadow growing. He stops looking at you and then takes his clothes off like he just came home from work.  It’s so sexy and all you can think is that your friend has figured out a way to torture your black ass with a cruel joke.  He has hired this negro for sure, you’ve decided.

              This strange fuckable dude is naked with a penis so pretty it looks like God took some time out to sculpt that shit Himself. There’s a lost book of the Bible somewhere about this man’s dick, you swear.   Your mouth opens and then you close it back because suddenly don’t want him to think you’re a slut even as stupid as that seems since you’re at his house with your plumbing ready at this hour.

              And you beg yourself to get out of your head.

              “You think it’s unfair that I’m naked and you still have all of your clothes on.  So what are you afraid of that you won’t take them off?”

              Okay that’s it. This negro is clairvoyant or some shit and you can’t have it.  Before he can read or anticipate you anymore, you start taking off your clothes very mundanely, like you’re in your house.   All the while you’re trying to concentrate on something conceptual so that nothing else shows up on your face, if that’s where he is reading you.   In fact you concentrate on the real origin of that word as you’d use it in homosexual slang, which is spelled “rede” and means “to counsel,” which is ultimately what you’re doing when you let somebody have it.

              By the time you complete the thought you are naked.  He takes you and guides you down to the bed, from standing to moving back to seated, to reclined, to horizontal. It feels choreographed and so damn spooky that you relax.  He starts kissing things. He studies your breathing and listens to what you like. He adjusts the pressure of his lips and figures out what sends you and then he does more of that all over your stomach. 

You are a limp mess.

              He draws these lines on your body with his fingertips and you are panic-stricken when he stops at areas that make you weak, that make your whole soul light up like Vegas and open up from your inside down your entire rectal column.   He sticks around in these places of weakness and continues this with the lips and the fingertips.  He keeps the lips in the general collar area while the hands probe down at least to your knee.

              Then when he’s done messing you up, he goes down every one of those weird places you didn’t know feel good, except he does it with his tongue.  This negro’s tongue is its own organism.  You’re now scared to death, thinking this is beyond God’s endorsement of you having a tryst from time to time (or sex at all for that matter).  You start to let go finally, clear that you should just go on ahead and be okay.

              You give up. Surrender to him.  Let go. You sink into the sheet and stop worrying about your friend, or getting murdered Gone Girl style, or places that might get soft if you start breathing deeply. You don’t think about your love handles, nor worry about whether he can still see that your stomach is really flat like the picture.  You just fucking let it go and feel him decode every erogenous zone you never knew you had. 

              That thing he did with his lips, exploring to find out what felt good? He does the same thing with his magical perfect penis.  He pushes it in, the way eighteen wheelers pull into a parking spot.  The head of his dick is like a sci-fi scope. As insane as it sounds, you feel him probe your entire canal and record the parts that are going to sell you to him, like some discount floozy.  He stops at every place of ecstasy.

              You’re mad that you feel like there is ecstasy.  You have closed your eyes and just gotten into it. Then his dick grows sideways inside pushing up against your walls and hitting that one spot with fury.  You’re fighting not to cum. He must see you open up your mouth to try to say to stop making the feeling so good. The struggle goes on as you search the backs of your eyelids to find some self-control.  There is none to find, so you open your eyes and watch him make decisions.  

              You’re mad at his detachment, that he is doing this to you with the regularity of ballers dribbling or nail techs filing.  

You look down toward his shoulders and see a thin, twinkish black man standing on his knees.  Obviously, the man on top of you is a magician; he has you seeing shit now.  The twink is cute with cat eyes and thick eyebrows, looking like something out of a Netflix sci-fi soft porn, or maybe some anime.    You close your eyes again and try not to figure anything out. You’re sure there are drugs on your body-pleaser’s fingertips and it’s okay at this point. 

              “Thank you. Walk out now.”

              Did you hear him just talk to someone? No, no, because that would mean there is a real person in the room other than you and that’s not true at all.  Right?  You open your eyes just to check and see that this is not magic.  There is an actual young man walking away from the bed with a black jock strap framing his ass.  He has more ass than your entire staff, which you know isn’t saying a lot because of the waifish girls in public relations, but the two white guys have black back you’re admittedly angry about.  

              More than this though, you’re horrified, indignant and afraid.  Before you can protest about all of it, your captor parks his dick right on the cum button as if he knows it’s GPS coordinates, and grows.  Truly, he grows. He makes his shit get bigger while you dig your fingers into his arms. You pull him in as you also try to push him away.  You don’t want the experience to end for him.

              You don’t want the experience to end for you.

              “Wait.”

              He does not wait. He digs a bit harder in that spot and you start to cum.  “Start to cum” because it was only the beginning.  You feel that spot on the inside swell like a fiesta is happening.  The party carries itself along your whole asshole and moves all the way toward the base of his dick before it doubles back, having grabbed more festivity.  You have grabbed his ass and pulled him further in. The party makes its way along his growing dick to the place he’s pushed it and grabs the pleasure before it can make it out of your open mouth. 

              This is all before your cum floods the crease between your stomachs. Without even moving the dick holding you hostage, he undulates to move more cum out of you.

              It seems like three whole minutes of straight ecstasy.

              “Would you like to keep going?”

              You can’t speak.

              He picks you up and puts you on top of him.  You are open in every way and you are vulnerable when he opens you up from below that you start to worry. You think about how much you’re going to think about this all week, how much you’re going to want to be back here tomorrow and then the next day having him open up your insides from below.  Against your will, you accept that you will be cleaning out your asshole again.

              You close your eyes because now they are making actual tears.  Less than an hour after arriving at the house of this dude, who could be a psychopath for all you know, you are actively rescheduling entire evenings in your head so that you can come back and do this. You will have to summon whatever ounce of self-respect you have not to beg if he is unavailable.  Because right now you are doing everything you said you wouldn’t, starting with allowing this man to continue fucking you after you’ve cum.

              Then you realize he probably flipped you over because he knew your dick would be too sensitive to touch right away. 

              Tears. Real fucking tears. You blink them away.

              You start to reference the contact lenses you don’t have on until you notice that twink reflected in the mirror over his headboard. He’s back, his body facing the wall, slowly lowering himself as if sitting on a penis himself.  Because you actually don’t have on your lenses you can’t quite make out for sure if you’re seeing this black boy for real.

              Your ass conqueror slaps your ass cheeks with fervor as if urging them on and your body beams. It can’t help itself. You are startled as the twink you think you see drops from the mirror field of view all the way.  You’re now sure that this magician under you is behind it all.

              And then you cum again.

              When this is all over, you’re ecstatic, embarrassed, doomed.  He has not cum and you feel obligated, whorish, greedy.

              “You may come back. Unless you want me to visit you.”

              You are undone.  Maybe drugged by the new serotonin he pushed in you with his dick. 

              “Yes,” you say.   “I mean, sure. I—”

              He nods, understanding that you have no no’s for him.  Then he does a soft whistle.

              The light in the hallway turns on. You wonder if there is a whistle-oriented Alexa.  You glance over to the hallways and see the dark, smooth, thin arm slither away from the doorframe.  It was so quick that you almost don’t believe it.  Maybe you imagined the twink completely.  Maybe it was that good.

              It is good enough that you have to call your judy right away.

              “You came twice?? Yes bitch! I’m so proud of you!” your friend is saying on the drive home.

              “I felt bad that he didn’t.”

              “Don’t. He’ll be alright. Probably one of those dudes who thinks he loses brain cells every time he has an orgasm. Dumbasses. He’ll be fine.”

              But he is smart as fuck for sure.  Because over the next three days you have no fewer than two dozen thoughts about some aspect of this night. You don’t even realize that you’ve refilled the Equate bottle and started eating dinner a bit earlier.  By the fourth day, when your pride has run to Elephant Graveyard, you go back on the app to ask him for seconds.

              Except that he’s nowhere to be found.  You panic like a karen around a black girl in a catsuit.  Then it occurs to you, Did he block me?

              You break on down and call your good judy to search for the guru that made your asshole woke.

              “He ain’t on here,” he tells you. “It’s not just you. I mean the dude vanished from the app. Looks like we’re going to have to keep this plumbing going with an alternative pipe. Let me get my drink and start looking!”

Chapter 10 - Season Finale

Rafelo

10:10 p.m.

              I wake up and my wife is screaming at me.  Marc is there. He pull her back before she get to me, but she still screaming.  I guess she should be mad. Is okay.  I love her so much, but I did not told her the whole truth.

              My cousin in the Bronx was helping getting me the sperm samples. We had a good business going.  She is much smarter than me, very, very intelligent.  So she pay for samples from men in the Dominican Republic, good looking men. She pay $100 a piece and then I sell them to women for $500, sometimes $700. 

              I’m good with people.  The women I deal with like how I understand them.  They have difficult time getting pregnant and people charge them ridiculous money for sperm. Is very expensive, the procedure.  The companies who make this procedure for them overcharge by so much money.  They also overcharge for the donor sperm.

              I show them photos of the guys, friend and relative in the Dominican Republic who need help.  One hundred dollars goes a long way for them. And they always make sperm. Jaja. Some move back to the island because is so hard here in the States.   They want to make money to feed family same as me.  No papers means no work.   Dick Dancing at the gay bar, this is the only place you can make money.  Cash.  So we do it.

              The competition is so much, so many people, so many Dominican people with no papers, there are more of us than patrons.   We smile at them, flirt, make them believe we want to fuck them.   Whatever you can to get them to go back to the booth with you for $20 per song.  And when I really needing the money, I would let them suck me, maybe even fuck them. They pay me $50 a song to suck my dick, and $100 to put my dick in them.   One day a guy ask to eat my ass. I charged him a $100 because I don’t really want to do it.  But he had it. A hundred dollars cash on him. 

              His tongue felt good on my ass.  I let him lick it for 20 minutes.  His breath smelling like baby oil and sweat when he talked to me after; this is how much he ate me. When I missed so much money, though I realized I needed to do it off work, so that I wouldn’t be distract from cash. 

              I asked a dude who worked at another club to play with my ass. As long as I fucked him, he would eat my ass. Is hard to watch and know a dude sucking back there, pero making it feel so good.  This happen only now and then, not all the time.  Still fucking women. This guy is the only one and he knew we had to keep it secret.

              We fuck for months.  In the bathroom at the club before it opened, once in the park after I got off work.  Fucking my wife still better than ass, but I love when he fuck me.   My boss at the Monster give me Dilaudid to make it easier to take it, and once I relax it feels really good.

              I love Martina. I love Martina very much. She knows that the money is to help for down payment for a new house. Martina did not know it was to help with prescription treatment for her mother and to buy a new house.   

She did not know it is also to buy her a ring. 

              Her brother say “Martina ain’t conventional.” He is telling the truth.  But she deserve a proper engagement and a good ring.

              I sell more sperm. The money collected in a Dominican Republic account mi padre back home manage.  Then my mi madre, she goes to heaven.  Mi hermano dies visiting his son in Haiti during the earthquake some years ago, and mi madre cannot cope.   She dies of sadness.

              A while ago, a beautiful woman, 32 years old ask me for my sperm. I meet her at the gym and help her work out one day.  We talk for a long time and she says she her boyfriend sperm does not survive.  Also, she has four miscarriages.  When I offer to help with other sperm, she says she want to know the person.

              “You have good energy and I like you. And your dimples,” she say.  “I want your sperm. Not from a bank, not from a random person abroad. Yours.   You’re good-hearted. A bit too flirty but that’s okay too.  Gorgeous eyes, older than you look—”

              “You make me blush,” I tease her.

              “I’ll pay you $250 thousand dollars if you agree to provide sperm until I successfully have a child.”

              How can I say no?

              Is why I get so angry when that dude fuck me today with no rubber.   

Horny, so horny and I got the room at the Salvia to fuck all day.  The first guy is good.  Nice dick, fuck really passionate.  He pretend not to enjoy too much, but I see it, feel it.  But I don’t need to really look at the guy for this, only when I’m fucking, so my dick stays big.   My dick gets hard from what I look at, more attractive guy makes me fuck more.  This is why the next guy I don’t look at. I see his two apples tattoo on his neck and that’s it.

I was so angry. He disrespect me and it risk everything because if I have infection I cannot give my sperm.  I would never risk her child coming out malformed.

“You didn’t ask to fucking cum in me, bitch.”

I remember I say this because I was so angry, angry with him for being so fucked up. After the seizure, when the other guy come, I realize that I was talking to the wrong person. The other guy, the guy who I didn’t see because I was in the closet.  But then the seizure—maybe too much poppers with the Dilaudid.  

              Before they let Martina into my room, the agent I mess around with comes alone.  I see his face and know that I need to tell him. 

              “I will never share what happened at the hotel anything,” I say.

              “What do you want?” he say.

              “For you to have your privacy. I will never share that.”

              I see his face and I know he understands.  He sees my face and he knows I understand how important to keep this secret from everyone. 

              “What’s your name,” I ask him. He sees in my face I like him.

              “Adam.”

              He motion to the other officer and he comes in with my wife.  Marc comes in too. He grab my wife when she start screaming at me.

Marc

10:15 p.m.

              Marc cannot believe any of what his older sister is yelling at her husband. 

              “You fucking kept it! From all of us! We’re struggling to make shit happen, my sister is driving fucking Uber and my mother needs a house with more than one bathroom and you’ve been sitting on help!  Sitting on it in the Dominican Republic? Really vato? Really?...”

              She is relentless.  Marc works hard to contain Martina and advises Rafelo to say nothing.

              “You’re only gonna make her madder,” Marc says.  “We’re glad you’re still alive. Let’s go.”

              “It was all for you Martina,” Rafelo says nevertheless.

              “Oh yeah? Did you at least get paid for fucking the boys at the Salvia?”

              Marc freezes. He puts it together, his proximity to the crime of almost fucking his brother-in-law.   There is an exchange between Rafelo and the agent closest to him, Adam, that suggests Adam did not share this news with his wife. But the glance fails to distract Marc from the bigger initial shock. He almost fucked his brother-in-law.  

              Marc neglected to help him when he was…bound in a closet?

              And what did the other dude do to put him in the hospital?

              The shock will not let him get to these questions.  Wishing Davia had not been banned from the hospital, wishing she were inside and not in the car waiting for this fiasco to end, Marc concentrates on the agents instead.

              “Are you going to arrest my brother-in-law?” he says.  “Are we all going to jail?”

              The agent farther away steps closer.

              “No,” he says. “We won’t bring you in this time, and we will have to deal with the money. But you have to stop doing this.”

              Marc softens as Martina yanks herself from his grip, determined she is fine. 

              “Thanks, okay let’s all go. Martina come with me. Marc stay here with him and make sure the release with the doctor goes okay.”

              Marc nods, understanding that he needs to get the family out of the hospital before the agents changed their minds.  But he could not believe an app built on GPS still could not help him avoid almost fucking his sister’s husband.  His sister’s straight husband.

Davia

11:45 p.m.

              People with ulterior motives always get nervous and start to fidget, even when they are Tom-Hardy-looking characters with 007 skill and expertise.  Ole boy looked as if his watch might take out a whole freeway if need be. And even at this late hour, he had that skill and charisma that nobody should be able to have getting off a return flight the same day he left.

              And there I was at elevator lobby of the 8th floor of the Intercontinental on Avenue of the Stars thinking to myself how I was nervous about not meeting in the lobby.   But you know, sensitive material, front desk staff eyes, random people who can be nosey, and God knows I know about that.

              “Say, thanks so much for doing me this favor.”

              “No worries,” I said.  “I guess it was the least I could do.”

              “How was everything at the hospital?”

              “It’s all good.”  This is where the facial conversation started.  He must have seen me look a bit furrow-browed because I was still trying to figure out why the Feds let Fel off the hook, completely.   Because Colby asked me:

              “What’s wrong?”

              “Black people usually don’t get pardoned the way he did.  My brother-in-law was running an entire jizz donor scheme in a state where it’s illegal to charge donors for cum. And yet he’s on his way home now.”

              “Oh.” But Colby smiled, the small comfortably smile of someone self-satisfied with a job well done.   I decided right away it was him.

              “What? Spill it.”

              “I just think, I mean, isn’t your brother-in-law Cuban or Dominican…”

              “This was you, wasn’t it?  Are you the reason that my Rafelo Torres is not in handcuffs right now?”  He had that dazed and confused look on his face that would have appeared as bad acting if he weren’t so charismatic. But like I said before, 007.   It only made me mad.  “Oh and now this is the part where I’m supposed to thank you profusely for saving the day, for being the white guy who rescued all the black people?  My brother-in-law counts as black in this case before you open your mouth to say something offensive that will get you cussed the fuck out in this nice ass hotel—”

              He had already been walking carefully toward me.  “Davia, I expect no thanks at all. I just want to thank you for coming here and giving me this.”

              His hands were on my shoulders and somehow it felt good. Really, the hormones were raging out of control like some teenage boy and I couldn’t stand it.

              The trouble with being honest and outspoken and the middle sibling by 12 minutes is that I am a novice liar. Maybe even a terrible liar.   But what I lack in deceit I make up for in instinct.  I could anticipate his next question and it freaked me out.

              “Did you look at—”

              Of course I looked at it. And he would have seen through any improvisation of No I came up with. So I kissed him. Okay maybe he was a little hot for vanilla crunch and maybe I was a little horny. But I promise I kissed him because I needed to figure this out. 

              He kissed me back.

Really? Shit. The one time you’re hoping that a white man will discriminate so that you can make a quick dash.

              He kissed me all the way into his room and on to the bed, and dammit if my hormones didn’t get in the way of me thinking of some way out of this.  That mouth, that tongue and lip combo was all over me the way they are in the desperate, mess-up-each-others-anglo-hair scenes.  But I was enjoying it. Something about his mouth coordination…  See, this was what the fuck I got for being horny and messing around with Johnathan all day.  Couldn’t leave well enough alone.

              The creamy body was lovely under that shirt.   Rome ripples I didn’t expect, although it was more a swimmer’s build with more back back there than I expected. Wings AND pushing power.  This man was like 007 for real.

              But if I was going to shag the white dude, even to save my ass, I needed to do it on my terms.  When he tried to mount me in the bed, I rolled him over, getting on top.

              “Nope,” I said. “You don’t get to do anything.  Tonight, since I made the trip, you are going to be my bitch.”

              He gave me that look that asks for confirmation of seriousness.  I was dead ass.   I put his hand on my wet cooch.

              “I’m not playing,” I said.

              He grinned for a minute first, but he put his hands down in surrender.  

              The goal was to assault him with my pussy.  He was going to get fucked tonight, not me.  After I got out of my clothes, I took my weapon and rubbed it up and down his entire body.   His jaw dropped so by the time I made it back to the point of origin, I put my pussy right in his mouth. 

              The eating was good, dear God in heaven.  I wanted to melt and cum right then, but I still had to maintain the upper hand.  I slid on to his nice thick meat, happy as a drunk with Nyquil, that it was worth sitting on but not going to puncture my lung.  

              “Tell me you like this shit,” I said.  “Tell me you like this shit!”

              “Yeah. Yeah oooooh fuck…”

              I start to moan a little. It came out of me softly but it was there.

              The hands he put on my shoulders earlier were on my ass. I grab his wrists and push them on to the bed.

              “Nah player, this my game,” I said, and rode him harder.   Activities happen: I smack his chest. I lick his face, I smack his chest harder. 

“Thinking you can fuck me. You can’t fuck me. I’m gonna fuck you.”

It did not matter in the least that I had not inhaled a penis in over two years.  In order to feel the power in this occasion, I had to run it the whole time. Like a carousel, I rotate on his dick to face his legs. 

“Thinking I care what’s on your toys. I don’t care about a mothafucking flash drive, just this pussy, my pussy, punk.”

              Now he was ready to cum. I dismounted and landed on his face, my ass to him.

              And I came when he did.

              You’ve never seen a sister more anxious to get out of somewhere. The post-cum men’s shake was still in the vibrating stage when I was putting on clothes. It was like leaving early from the concert to beat everybody to the parking lot.

              “Thank you,” he said, handsome as fuck.

              “Don’t call me. I’ll hit you when I’m ready.” I said, and left.

              As soon as I got out of there and in my car it sank in that on some levels, I had been sleeping with the enemy.  There I was, over weeks denying the smiley black hunk any proximity of penis to pussy but letting him service mine, and with no hazing, I was giving Colby full squeeze.  Granted, I needed to also save my life, but still. Johnathan deserved better.

              So I called him to the car when I got to his house. I told him to bring a condom.  Yes, unthinkably, I gave Johnathan some partially handled cooch.  All this because of black guilt. 

              And I gave it to him in my car.

Shaw

Thursday (two months later)

              It had taken a long time for him to wake up, but I was willing to wait.  There were small pleasures to be had in watching his eyes bulge when he realized he was chained to a beam above him and that the bind on his mouth made it impossible for him to beg.  He knew right away when he saw me sitting there with the paper cup of to-go coffee that not only would begging be futile, I was uninterested in the effort. 

              I made it a point to wear a tighter pair of jeans, brighter in color and skinny fit in the most stereotypically gay way ever.  He still managed to protest a lot, enough for me to discern the pleas.  He looked around, no doubt trying to sort out where he was, and then saw the television and VCR and got mad.   The writhing to get out cut his wrist a bit—I added a few barbs for decoration.

              It’s funny, I always loathed the moment in movies when there were speeches and small talk during the execution of a punishment.  Nobody needs all that. He knows why he’s here. I know he knows why he’s here.   Talk is sort of extraneous.  And he had already done enough talking, words to bash gays, slurs chanted on ogre spit.  All that.

              And yet he is smart enough to know that none of this was the reason he is here, bound, naked, his knees on the seat of a chair.

              He figures out that it’s better to stand on your knees than sit when you need relief from the tug at the wrists. At the arms, for the matter.

              I grab a small white trash can that was on sale at Bed Bath and Beyond and I move it right under his dick. He thinks its to pee.  The television and VCR are on wheels and easy to roll in front of him.

              From my pocketbook I retrieve a small razor blade.  He protests, screams beneath the tape, begs for mercy. He thinks I will remove his dick.

              I pick up his heavy dick and point it to the sky.  With the edge of the blade I make a shallow incision an inch wide.

              I check to see that the blood is dripping into the trash.

              I walk over to the television, push the cassette in and press play.

              He is screaming beneath the gag as I leave.

Chapter 9

Davia

7:45 p.m.

              As much as it sounds like bullshit, I really did start driving in the evening to distract myself from what had been going on.  I mean, it was like a second day, a mini-groundhog shuffle that made me feel like I had a first chance at pretending this day did not happen so far.   A body had been piled in my trunk, a tongue had been plunged into my pussy, and my little brother stepped to the closet door frame and put his hip out of it.           

And it was still Wednesday. Still Wednesday dammit. Still. Wednesday.  My friends who do shows used to always tell me that matinees are separate pay days from evening shows. I get that shit now. 

              Speaking of performing artists, the Tom Hardy character worried me.  I mean, as Kwanzaa and Agape as I mean to be, I don’t do yogurt.  And Colby is like the Anderson Cooper of white patriarchy:  he doesn’t look his age. Lots going on Tom, Anderson, Dorian Gray, it’s concerning.  That or he’s the person that The Devil’s Advocate is based on. I don’t mean that he’s Satan’s son necessarily, just that he signed something with somebody in hell. 

              This white man has a nice stature all the time in all of these pictures on Google I found of him.  You can see the body through the clothes.   I don’t know, the more I thought about it, more I wanted to see him naked, which only made me madder.

              And horny as hell.  I maintain that the reason I called Johnathan at all is that I needed to deal with a black man to undo the affliction of white-lusting.  Couldn’t go out like that.

              After five passengers, Johnny comes to me, reclines his seat, pulls out his dick and starts stroking.  I try to resist grabbing it and stroking too. Until he gets those fingers going.  Yes, I wore a pair of old daisy dukes that are too big and airy so that this negro could have easy access.

              I’m still not giving him any pussy though, at least this is the plan. 

              But this boy still has tricks to break my face and make my crotch a slave to his.  He told me to recline my seat, a command that made sense. But then he flipped me around so that my head was under the steering column and my crotch was near the head rest.  I have one of those cars that let’s you remove the headrest and I don’t know, maybe he Googled the instruction manual for my car, but he knows how to get that shit off martial arts fast.

              Then he squats in the back seat, pulls my coochie right to his mouth and eats it like it’s a full course meal. Talk about vulnerable. My hair and wrap are so far from the action of this, and my booty creates a tray that just puts the coochie right where he needed it.   This man has figured out how to actually elevate the pussy in every way. 

              I’m just about to cum for the third time and reconsider giving this boy some dick when I see Colby’s number flash across my screen. COLBY WHITE RESCUER ?  is how I have him listed and he’s saving the day again.

              “Gotta take this call.”

              “Okay.”  But Johnathan keeps his head game going. 

              I answer the phone as best I can, trying to ignore that of the 8,000 nerve endings I have in my clitoris, Johnny is licking at least half of them.

              “Hi Davia, how’s it going today?”

              “Great, you?”

              “I’m good.  Listen, I may have left something in your car that day and I really need it back.”

              “Oh okay…” It becomes hard to concentrate because now Johnathan is busier trying steal my snatch with his tongue, like it can come out of my body and go home with him. And I feel like Sin sunning in the Bahamas.   “What did you need? Um, this is a…what did you lose?”

              At this point, I hope Colby will understand that this is a bad time and change his whole game.

              “It’s a small black flash drive,” he says, oblivious. Or maybe in the know but giving zero fucks. “Are you in your car right now?”

              “Um, no but if you give me a second to get to it, I’ll call you right back.”

              “I’ll be right here waiting.”

              I hang up and make sure that I’m hung up.  Right when I’m about to tell Johnathan that I need his help looking for a flash drive, he makes me cum. 

              Now understand that when I say cum, I mean the shaking, seismic, fish-mad-at-the-hook kind of writhing cum.  It was now officially criminal for me not to sit on this man’s dick and I told him so.

              “…but first we have to find this flash drive.”

              “What?”

              He’s dazed and confused, looking like he came as hard as I did and I hope to hell he didn’t.  Then I move my head around the side of the seat to see that he’s just short on oxygen at present.

              “Help me find this flash drive.”

              I’m upside down already so I start looking near the floor, near the mats.  I turn myself over and bisect the car looking around the passenger side, deciding that at least this hook up moment in my current place of business, which has throngs of wrong as far as sanitation violations, ethics issues and general unfairness, at least this hook up has positioned me (literally) to help this Lyft rider find missing property. 

              “This it?”

              Johnathan locates it and I pull myself upright to sit up on island between the seats. 

              “I’m guessing it is.”

              It dawns on me that I need to check the contents. Not because I’m nosey, which I am, but because how else was I going to verify that the flash drive belonged to this man and not someone else?  Friends, this is when I realize that I am on a roll with solid justifications for my actions:  getting my pussy eaten inverted on a grade so I can be a good Samaritan; spying someone’s flash drive to prevent potentially sensitive material from going to the wrong person.

              I can’t finish the shift fast enough.  Johnathan is put out right away with thanks and kisses and promises of pussy promotion later.  Maybe a solid hour is all I get through before I’m back at the house, yanking out my laptop to check this flash drive.

              My mother is doing the most, asking every question she can about everything, completely clueless about the day so far.

              “Hi baby, how was the driving today?”

              “It was good Mama.” I neglect to say that my clitoris was refreshed.

              “Have you seen Rafelo and Davia?”

              “You mean Rafelo and Martina. I’m Davia, Mom.”

              “Oh baby, you sure are. I’m sorry. You know I don’t have my glasses on…”

              She’s also dealing with early onset dementia, but I have no time to address it at the moment.  The flash drive has way too much shit on it to figure out where to start. So inconvenient for a nosey person.

              My mother goes on.  “A man called you today, says he’s a lawyer.”

              “Uh huh.”   I get to a set of files that look encrypted.  Then the subfolder with mp4’s.

              “Said something about a Cody who referred him…are you in some kind of trouble.”

              “No, Mama.  Wait—Colby?”

              “Now were you listening at all baby?  Cody is not the person who called, just the person who passed on your number.”

              The house phone number, which I did not give Colby.

              “Colby, Mama. The name is Colby. But who did he have call here?”

              “Chile, I can’t remember that part, let me think about it…”

              I look back at the screen and there is the file.  A video of a man arguing with what looks like a woman, sandy hair, athletic, in baggy clothes. It’s grainy, but clear enough to see it escalate.  The guy is also athletic. Right when it looks like it’s ending, he smacks her across the face. She goes back at him and he assaults her again.  His face turns toward the direction of the camera, and even though he’s not looking at it, I can see that he resembles Ace, a prominent UCLA football player and top NFL draft pick. 

              “Oh, I remember now, baby!  Colby!  The man’s name Colby who called!”

              And sometimes the dementia is worse than I think it’s going to be.  Somebody called for Colby and my mother has no idea what his name is.

              “Thanks Mama, I’ll get his number from you and call him back.”

              “He didn’t leave one, said he’ll call you back.”

              This was all getting too weird.  For protection, I needed to copy the video, but this would require some help; of course drag-and-drop fails epically.

              And of course, Colby can never know I’ve seen this video.

              On cue, as if this agent of Shield heard me, he calls me right then.

              “Hi Davia. Say, were you able to find that flash drive for me.”

              “Yes, I have it right here in the car with me. Should I bring it to you somewhere?”

              “No, no. Would you do me a favor and hold on to it? I’ll call and come get pick it up from you tomorrow.”

              “Sounds perfect.”  As afraid as I was to ask, I had to do it. “Hey, did your lawyer call already?”

              “Not that I know of, but I’ll check with her.”

              Her? Shit. It just gets worse and worse.

Colby

7:45 p.m.

              She was lying of course.  She was not in her car and she had probably seen the video, which means I would need to get involved in her situation with the police and the body for leverage.  She’s a nice gal and I really had no interest in harm coming to her, especially since this fix was so costly already.  It could all wait—a woman driving Uber and Lyft to get out of debt and stay out of the drama of production for reality television was not interested enough in drama to be a worry.

              The porn worker in front of me, on the other hand, she was a different story.  Tara had put on her clothes and looked at me with desperation that I pretended not to see. I was out of time and needed to get back to LA.

              “Say, great job, good work,” I told her, “I know this isn’t for distribution but it was sexy as hell.”

              “And that’s the thing, I would love for it to be released, if possible—”

              “This is for a private client only, so sorry about that.”

              “I get that, and I know our faces will be replaced, but I’m wondering if there is any way it can be released in its original form later. Sweetened, edited.”

              Five minutes ago, I made every effort not to overhear the phone call she got with her test results, which explained why she confirmed her real name, Judy.   Positive for something irrevocable, probably HIV, a negative for her career.  It fascinated me how porn movie studios worked like old MGM and Warner Brothers, contracting talent for years at a time exclusively; but a communicable disease nullifies the contract.

              Not my gig.

              “I wish I could help, but this is not my call.”

              “Please. Please just consider it.  Can we revisit this later?”

              She was so far out of her league as far as information.

              “Before or after he’s incarcerated?”

              If I had the power to turn my eyes into knives I would have used them to slit Rich’s throat.  Even that joke was way too much security breach for my client. He knew enough to leave my sight right away.

              I turned back to Judy. “You can feel free to contact me in a few months, but the handling of the film still won’t be in my purview.”

              The truth is, after the deep fake editing was done, and we were able to place Ace’s mug on Topaz and superimpose the NFL Commissioner’s wife over Judy’s body, Ace would be compelled to settle out of court.  He picked the wrong girl to rape for sure, a girl with a wealthy enough family to hire a fixer.

              Best gig I’ve had in years.  

              When I pitched the deep fake solution, it meant showing the video of Barack Obama being digitized on camera to say things written and spoken by Jordan Peele as an example.  I could produce this video in a hurry and threaten extortion that would not only keep Ace out of the NFL forever, but also put him at the mercy of angry, wealthy white men. Rich could make it happen, although one more crack and he wouldn’t make it to the editing suite.

              “Please don’t forget me,” she asked.

              “No worries.”

              The truth is, my cock was hard most of the time I was there.  I would jack it every night to this video. The original version.

Martina

9:15 p.m.

              It’s amazing how quickly you can make it from scared to death to ready to cause it. When I came to, I was horizontal on a sofa looking at two strangers. 

“You’re fine Martina. Relax.  We’re FBI,” the better-looking one said.  “We know your husband  has been trafficking sperm samples from unspecified donors. We just want to know who he’s working for. Any ideas?”

I sat up slowly and my head hurt insanely.

“Any answers? Take your time,” the other one said.

“Answers?” I asked.

“Is he working for you? Are you the mastermind?”

“Who are you?”

They flashed FBI badges.  Splendid. Fucking splendid.

              “He’s working for himself,” I said. “That’s it.”

              “Did you know about his operations?”

              “Some, but not a lot. He kept most of it from me so that if this shit ever happened I could not be held responsible.”

              “So you did not know about the $300,000 he moved in the past three months?”

              Like I said, from scared to death to ready to cause it.  I was fine with the women; the average Dominican man has a wife, a mistress and a girlfriend, and the last two are not to be confused with each other.   And I was fine with the scam. But he had made $300,000??? And nobody in our household had seen a penny????  I thought that he had hadn’t gotten paid yet for most of the samples he sold. 

              “The number I know is the one in the account:  $4,522. That’s all I know. Where are you getting the other $295,478?”

              The cute one chuckled. “Somebody is good at math.”

              “The rest of it, some $290k or so is in a bank account in the Dominican Republic that he has access to here.  The rest he spent on family.  I agree with him, you’re good at math.”

              Good at math. I lost my mind.  Total black out, complete with cursing him out in tongues.  Here we were in the house struggling, my entire family struggling to take care of him while he supposedly worked out this scheme to help us back, and he was holding on to money? What the fuck!?!?

              “I think we should go to the hospital. I need to whip his ass.”

              They looked each other.

              The cute one was first up. “I don’t think he’s conscious yet but I’m confident enough that you are willing to help us out.”    

              “Conscious?”  I know it was crazy, but I got nervous for him suddenly.  Maybe I just needed him to be alive so that I could kill him. Not sure, but the shiver went up my back anyway.

              “He’s in the hospital.”

              “But his phone—”

              Again, the cute one, this time raising his phone.  They led me right to them. I rolled my eyes.

              “How do you know he’s still there?”

              “We put a tracker in him. On him.”

              Now I was irritated. After all he was still my family to track, snoop, protect and hurt badly if necessary.  But at the end of this Wednesday, there was very little reason to hide—we were busted.

              “I’ll cooperate 100% as long as you help me with my situation with my family and make sure I have enough time to get what I need out of this exchange we’re about to have with my husband.”

              They agreed to take me to Presbyterian and let me see him.  

Chapter 8

Teju

5:43 p.m.

It had been a whole hour and he was already horny again.  He knew the problem but worked himself through the denial about it:  his hand was not enough. Jacking his dick every day, sometimes several times a day, sometimes with the assistance of Juan, was not enough.  Teju needed physical contact, a hand other than his, a hole to slide his plump dick into, a tongue to lick his navel, a wet ass to smother his face for a spell.

              He pulled out his phone and opened up Scruff.  He scrolled through the app trying to find the thread he had been enjoying, the one with a very hot, older guy with a gray goatee, brown skin the same color all over with no deviation and a solid body.   They had been talking for a while.  Great conversation, everything from lack of racial equality to the corrosive way celebrity worship allowed Cosby and R. Kelly to go unchecked for so long.

              Then they got to sex talk.  This dude liked long lick downs with lots of physical chest to chest contact, off center a bit so that they could feel each other’s hearts beating. He wanted soft lighting and heat to make the sweat and cum glisten better. He wanted to lay around naked in afterglow and rub around in each other’s juices. 

              Teju liked all this talk. 

              He also liked the fact that this dude loved having safe sex. And was fine with Teju’s positive HIV status. After all, this was the reason Teju was loathe to meet anyone and do anything to begin with:  he had never quite gotten over the shame.  In fact, he had not even told anyone his status to experience the shame in front of another human being, so Teju was over himself for not having the courage to face shame.

              Maybe he would meet this dude. Maybe he would experience the candlelight, the lubricating body juices, everything.  

              There is one favor I need to ask you

              Sure thing.   Teju felt safe now. Anything was probably going to be okay.

              Will you go on me?

              Go on you? What do you mean?

              Will you just sit above me and let it all go.

              Teju was dumbfounded.  He couldn’t even type the word shit in the Scruff window.

              You mean defecate?

              😊

              Teju was crushed. Finally, a guy he had invested in, a guy who had a brain and stimulating conversation, and was open, too open maybe. And he wanted him to add poop to the experience. It didn’t even go with the other stuff.  The guy must have known that these thoughts were happening, or maybe he just judged that they might be based on the time it took Teju to think them.

              Come on man. Its totally natural

              Natural? Yeah but it’s not sexy. A placenta is natural too, but nobody wants to be bothered with it after the baby gets here, Teju thought. He still had not responded.

              I never get the issues with you guys / All I’m asking is for you to wait to do the same thing you would do anyway / its no big deal

              I gotta run. Let me think about it and get back to you

              Teju slid the phone across the table. It landed near the samples, vials.  This is when he noticed that he had left a few vials open, the last two that he had been working on.  

              He panicked. He stared in horror, wondering if any of his jizz made it anywhere in the area. Even a fraction of a drop would contaminate the results.  Teju’s eyes widened as he thought of all the protocols he had broken just to have video sex with “Juan,” not even considering the ones he broke in his actual job.  It shouldn’t have even been possible for him to expose the sample in the plate, or any of the liquid moved from pipette to tube because of the way it should be done. 

              He rushed over to investigate the samples, as if looking at them thoroughly could give him any answers.  Running the tests to look for HIV would not necessarily tell him whether a positive result would show his specific strain, or if the virus was simply there already. There were at least two samples that could have been ruined – one belonged to Judy Williamson, and the other to Rafelo Torres.

              Teju sighed. A feeling of complete failure came over him.  He wished he did not have the smarts to understand the irony: he was so adamant about not having sex so as not to endanger taking anyone through the pain of hearing they’re positive, only so that he could end up potentially creating that same result anyway.  He wondered if it was worse to hear it and then find out it’s not true than to find out that it is.   

              To tell a superior or even a colleague about this mix up would cost him his job, his entire career pursuit.

              He would have to get in touch with Judy Williamson somehow and urge her on the DL to take another test.  He also needed to figure out when Rafelo Torres was going to wake up. And he needed to be around to have this conversation.

Adam

9:45 a.m.

              It was a pretty straightforward gig. I just had to get the RFID tracker on the guy so that we could figure out who he was working for.

              This was becoming too big to chase and I have a full plate at the Bureau.  I figured I’d follow him one time and get the tracker in there so I could multi-task a bit, keep an eye on him remotely.

              After he got checked into the Salvia, I waited a while and tried to find him on Jack’d—that’s his favorite. I know gays have lots of options but that seems to be his go-to.  Good thing about GPS tracking is that he came up pretty fast because there wasn’t another punk closer to target him.

              The tricky part was that Jack’d takes longer.  Intel is that guys on Grindr, mostly white guys, they don’t take too much time. They mean business.  The bros on Jack’d don’t always hook up, barely talk, sometimes only talk.  But Torres must have be an exception, because I started the talk and he went for it.

              Hey bro

              Pics?

              Yep

              Nice dick. White?

              Yeah. Croatian

              You close.

              Same hotel.  

              Into?

              Scanned my mind for the shorthand:  JO = jack off, BJ = blow job, PNP = party and play.

              Jo, bj, finger bang, no pnp

              You giving the bj

              Taking one.  

              There was a breather there that made me think I would have to up my game.  People think fucking for work is always good when you’re an agent.  It’s not. I didn’t want to do any of this.  But sometimes it’s the best way to get the tracker on the target.  Started to come up with more bait but he came around before I had to.

              Travel?

              Yeah what room

              315.

              After he opened the door a crack to let me in, he closed it fast and backed up.  He was standing there naked with a bigger cock than mine, and that’s saying something.   

              “Take your pants off.”

              I pulled my pants off, not saying a word if I didn’t have to.  He looked at my cock and nodded.  Then he walked over to the bed, sat down and motioned for me to stand in front of him.  What happened next was some crazy shit.  He kind of fucked my cock with his mouth.   At first it was slow and thorough, and I gotta admit, it was right up there with some of the best blows I’ve ever had. But when he started raking me in with his face, it was top five for sure. Top three. I had to stop myself from coming.

              I grabbed my cock back, put it in my hands, motioned with the other one for him to turn over. My first thought was to find some lotion to use for fingering him, but after getting two in there he started lubricating himself. It was some crazy shit.  Kind of hot.   

But I hoped it wouldn’t make it hard for the tracker to stick.

My guy at the shop added more adhesive to make it bond with the inside flesh more, but I wasn’t sure it would even get up there.

“Oy papi.”

              Using my other hand with the tracker, I wedged it between two fingers, I slid it up in all that wetness, wetter than any cunt I’d had lately.  Almost lost the tracker too soon—it’s the size of a grain of rice.

              “Fuck that shit, my dude.”

              The job was done really, and I could have gotten out of there right then. But his command made sense for me too; if I fucked him, I could make sure to push the tracker up high enough. It would eventually run out of him, but not before the 24 hours I needed to find out the location of his donor pimp.

              I didn’t even have to ask for a jimmy.  Torres passed it to me before I could ask.

              Yeah, yeah, I kind of wanted to know what an ass wet as a cunt felt like too. This was as good an excuse as any. My dick wasn’t going down without fucking him.  Nobody would know about this anyway—no camera at the Salvia. And even though I’m not gay, just committed to the job, my co-workers would have given me a hard time about it if they knew.

              Best fuck I’ve had all year.  Had to unbutton my shirt so that I could grab him from behind and keep pounding.  He relaxed more and more and the hole opened up for me and started gushing. I angled my cock up and my chest hair rubbed up on his back. My thighs were tired but it felt like butter.

              I came in a few minutes. Didn’t expect that but it was good because I was still working and had a whole bunch of shit to do.

              When I pulled out, I took the condom off.  Tracker must have been up deep, lodged. It would take at least a day and half of meals for it to work its way down.  He gave a half-smile, showing some dimples that probably helped him get his wife to marry him.

              This all went tits up later when after some other Bureau odds and ends, I checked the tracker and learned he was at Presbyterian, in a coma on top of it all.   I got in there to grab his phone and delete our conversation, but I knew there was no evidence by way of text message or phone call.  We had tapped his phone for weeks and could not figure out how he was moving dozens of thousands of dollars so quickly from selling sperm on the black market to desperate couples, some single women. 

              His wife Martina, who called him Fel for short, came lurking around later and my partner on this investigation figured it might be good to detain her, see if she knew how Torres was doing it.  See if she knew it was illegal to sell sperm in California, and if she knew who was giving it and how much was being paid for it.  We knew that vetting wasn’t part of the racket, but we couldn’t even throw out bait without understanding the pipeline.

              It was a soft blow to the head. And we did not tie her up.  She came to, cozy on the sofa, thrown by two big ass blowhards looking at her.

              “You’re fine Martina. Relax.  We’re FBI,” I told her.  “We know your husband is has been trafficking sperm samples from unspecified donors. We just want to know who he’s working for. Any ideas?”

Chapter 7

Shaw

8:12 p.m.

              Shaw knew from the shaky tone that Curtis failed to get the cell phone.

              He took matters into his own hands, still feeling Curtis’ hands cradling his ass. Reminiscing.

              His assistant Janine called back.

              “I got access to the security feed,” she said.  “Just let me know when you’re in and I’ll block the time and replace it when you leave.”

              “Thanks.”

              “You need anything else? I can always get somebody else to handle this for you. I know you’re not in it no more.”

              “No, I got this. My hands won’t get dirty.”

              “They never do.”

              It had been a while, but Shaw still had the same pair of black gloves he used back in the day.  He still had a black leotard to put under the black polo, a skinny jean with room near the calf, and the same charcoal scarf from back in the day. He had the same fan that his grandmother gave him in high school, which opened into a beautiful image of a geisha in her okiya, but looked like a black shiny baton when closed shut.  He even had the brown contact lenses he wore to remind him about how hard people teased him for looking too pretty with his natural hazels.

What he didn’t have was the same narrative motivation.  Before the leotard helped him channel all the rage from names he was called when he wore it in junior high.  

              But he didn’t want to kill people today.

              He walked into the ER lobby and spied the girl at the desk.

              “May I help you?”          

              “I’m here to see Rafaelo Torres.”

              “Are you a family member?” she said, looking him up and down.

              “I am.”

              Shaw stood still as a statue and stared at her.   His face didn’t change.

              “I need you to sign in,” she said. Shaw was clear right away that this was a lie.  It should have been the protocol, but since he noticed no sign-in clipboard or pad from the sliding doors when he walked in, she was making it up now.  Good riff.

              He ignored her and walked toward the locked door.

              “Sir, I really need you to sign this.”

              “I really need you to open this door.”

              The even tone and taut jaw were enough to punk her.  She buzzed him in, but Shaw knew that he would have to contend with whatever security guard she alerted after.

              After walking around for only a few minutes, Shaw understood that Rafaelo Torres was probably in ICU.  On the way up the stairs, he saw the security guard coming his way and realized homegirl at reception worked faster than he thought she would.

              “Sir, I need identification.”

              Big dude, strong and black.

              “I have none on me.”

              “Then you can’t be back here, man.”

              Shaw was amused at how fast he went from being “sir” to “man.”  Respect levels dropped fast in these parts.

              “I can.  It’s a public space.”

              “Did you hear what I said, man?”

              Shaw continued up the stairs toward the cop.

              “Don’t let me have to ask you again.”

              And when Shaw heard the whip-ass in his tone, he knew he would have to help this cop understand.  He waited for the cop to check him, assuming correctly that it would be an arm to shoulder.  

              Shaw thought of Curtis’ lips on his shoulder while he fucked him against the slippery shower glass.

              One chop to break the arm.

              Palm to T-zone above the nose.

              Heel to Achilles to send the man tumbling down the stairs.

              Two seconds.

              Shaw’s dick thickened a bit.

              He made it up the stairs and realized that he needed to check the security room with cameras and live feed just in case.  Janine would take care of things for the long run, but the short run could get messy if this errand took too much time, or if ol’ boy in stairwell came to and called friends.  Shaw hoped he would be too mad about getting slain by a svelte, pretty dude who was never supposed to win in a fight.

              The security guard in the room was even more standard, white and out of shape from sitting too much, Krispy Kremes at that.

              “You are not authorized to be in here.”

              Curtis’s dick stretched up in him deep enough to pass the second chamber of his insides…glory. He pulled his dick out and Shaw felt it thumping his face, hard with plea.

              Closed fan whipped out.

              Swat to thorax, broken floating rib.

              Spin around swing.

              Fan to occiput.

              Three seconds.

              The man slumped over the desk.

              Shaw was irritated about the blood on the back of the head, where the fade would have been if this was a black man who went to black barbers.  Shaw liked his work to be free of bodily fluids. He did not like mess. But he was rusty, and forgot to avoid the part of the fan with the clip and it must have scratched the guard.

              He would have to do better.

              The hospital needed to do better too. Shaw studied the security screens and saw that there were big holes, lot of places where damage could be done in this hospital.

              He left the security guard slumped over the desk. Janine would take care of the feed. And he would grab the phone and be out in ten minutes.

              Shaw found Rafelo Torres in an ICU room still out. But he needed to be sure that he would stay out – for him to wake up and see him would be disastrous. Shaw looked Torres in the face. You like when I fuck the sweat out of you don’t you Shaw.   Without taking his eyes away, he held the fan in his right hand over Torres’ head and used his left to run his hand to Torres’ dick. He fondled the balls between his fingers and palmed the shaft. 

Some blood ran there.

Shaw was ready to deliver the correct end of the fan to Torres’ head if consciousness came back. But nothing happened.

Instead unconscious Torres showed off what felt like a beautiful, long, hooded dick. The body around it indicated that at his best, he was probably swimsuit model sexy.  And at least eight plump inches.

And this isn’t even the part Curtis was dealing with when he read “brb” as “bareback” instead of “be right back.”   Under different circumstances, if Curtis had used a condom like he was supposed to, the man wouldn’t have flipped out and maybe both of them together would have been a nice option…

              But if Curtis hadn’t fucked up, Shaw would not be here at the hospital meeting Torres, stroking his dick.

              He put it down and searched the room for the phone.  It was nowhere to be found.

              He went through Torres’ pants. They had a wallet and keys, but no phone.

              It meant that they were on to Torres. The FBI had made it here already. They would use the phone to build a case to put him jail for his little side operation.

              Or just deport him.

              On the move out of the hospital, Shaw made a mental note to follow up on this just to make sure that the Feds had no reason to comb through Torres’ Jack’d conquests. If they had enough with just phone records, things would be fine. 

              Shaw texted Janine that he was on his way out the back door. Before he hit SEND, he saw the first security guard, the brother, angry outside, swollen in the face.

              “No friends?” Shaw said.

              “Naw, I wanted to teach you this lesson all by myself, you fucking punk.”

              Shaw smiled a bit, careful not to get upset; the man would not survive it.

“Mind your business. No worries. Nobody’s trying to be your punk.”

              The dude swung.

              He licked the sweat off Shaw’s neck and fed it to him with his tongue.

Shaw dodged under.

Fan to skull.

The cop was back, hands checking Shaw’s shoulders.

              Say you like it. I’m gonna keep fucking you this hard until you say you like it.

              Heel to shin.  Compound fracture.

              Fan to right hand.  Three carpals broken.

              The cop could not make a fist but tried. He grabbed Shaw’s head with both hands.

              Say you like it.

              Shaw saw the head butt coming.

Jump. Knee to the chest.

              Heel of hand to cheekbone.

              You’re gonna make me cum in this ass boy. Damn tell me you want this cum.

Shaw didn’t have time. And he did not want to sweat. He unleashed five or six perfectly executed strikes on the diesel security officer and took him down.  

Three minutes.

Shaw returned the fan to his coat, leaned over the cop and said:

“If you ever meet a guy named Curtis, you should thank him. He and his dick are the reason you’re alive right now.”

He pulled out his phone, walked away and pressed SEND.  Without stopping, he said, “Be kinder to the gays, or the people you think are gay.  Or weak.”

Martina

7:46 p.m.

              “Has anybody seen my husband?”

              At this point I was worried sick. 

              “Is he your husband, I mean I don’t remember a wedding.”

              “Don’t start Davia, I’m worried and I’m on the rag.”

              “Thank God.”

              “I heard that,” I yelled from the other room.  “You think you’re mumbling but you’re not. Girl, I hear you. And I am lethal right now so lay low. Do you know where he is?”

              “No, I don’t know where he is. And Negro Newsflash, you ain’t the only one with real deep ish going on today.”

              Davia driving Uber after quitting a really good job as a production coordinator, which was after quitting an even better job as a stage manager, she couldn’t even get close to deep troubles.  She knows all the reasons, which is why her smart mouth makes me want to punch her in her ear.  The only reason we are all crammed into this three-bedroom house is that the city pushed our mother out of the old one to build the damn Expo Line and didn’t give her enough money to get something better.  My little brother is sleeping in the fucking living room and we are all struggling to make it with this one and a half bathroom situation. 

              Meanwhile my husband is missing, and Marc and Davia still got their arms folded. Resentful motherfuckers.

              It’s partly my fault.

              I met my husband a few years ago at a gay bar in New York called The Monster. I was there with my girlfriends celebrating my 24th  birthday, mainly because one of them knew that the best place to see hot dudes naked on a Thursday night was at the gay bar. It was lit. There were so many of them that they were competing for our attention. More of them working than there were patrons in that basement. And whatever you liked, they had it – short and musclebound, tall and strapping, big dicks, medium dicks, dicks curved to the right, dicks hard all night with rings to keep them that way.  And the trip was, most of them were Dominican.

              Made sense.  If you didn’t have papers and you lived in New York, could certainly make cash at The Monster.  One stripper in particular was sexy as hell, rippling as fuck and had a beautiful smile.  He pretended not to speak good English, which I also thought was hot, and he kept trying to get me to hire him for a lap dance.  It was textbook:  I resisted, my friends insisted, I fought them more, they fed me more liquor and then they threw him a few twenties.

              “Wait,” I said when we got back to the private room.  “Are you straight?”

              He slid off his thong, as if this was some kind of hint.

              “Whatever dude, this is a gay club.”

              “Mira,” he said.  Then he slung his dick from side to side.

              “Prove it.”

              “You really want me to prove?”

              Now mind you, I was two sheets to the wind and this club might as well have been a tornado. None of this was smart.

              Then he put his tongue in my mouth. When he got in a handstand, he put his dick in my mouth. I was so impressed that, well, the alcohol recommended that I couldn’t not sit on his penis for a while.

              By a while, I mean three songs. 

              The $40 only covered two, and we were on number five or six by now.  

              One of my friends came back there and he felt bad that he kept me from them. So he gave them the money back and told them to have a lap dance of two while he took me to get some water.

              He promised to meet us for breakfast and nobody believed him. When he showed up, we were floored.   I had to sober up very fast.

              That’s when he told us the situation. That he’d only been in the States for a year, and that he was making money to send home to his parents and siblings.  Couldn’t get a green card.  I felt for him and figured the least I could do was allow him to make me cum on my birthday.   This was a design-on-a-dime (or a nickel) birthday so the ladies did Groupon on top of miles on top of credit card points. We were sharing a suite.   I wasn’t sharing this dick any more than I was going to the Bronx by myself with some strapping stranger I didn’t know.

              I mean, I had never been to Central Park. This way I could kill two birds with one fat orgasm.  He sat on a tree stump and I rode his dick in public with a view of the sky and buildings. And I came for as long as it takes to walk across that park. 

              I went back home with no Empire State Building romantic bullshit ideas in my head.  My college days brought about thongs or wrong, but I was always level headed about the shit. 

That said, I kept in touch with him over the next three months and we got to be tight.  We were friends and none of my girlfriends believed I was okay.  They thought the dickmitization demon had snuck on the plane in my carry-on.

              They didn’t believe that I actually loved this guy, but it’s my fault. I downplayed it. They thought he was using me when he moved to LA, meanwhile it was my idea. The thing is, he was hard and sexy in a way I had never done hard and sexy.   He was sort of dark under that beautiful smile.  He liked to grunt when he was fucking me.  He liked to grab my hair and pull it back when he had me on my stomach.  He liked it rough.   He choked me a little when I came the first time with him behind closed doors.

              You know sisters, we sisters don’t like this kind of shit.

              Physical pain with our pleasure.

              Choking.

              Getting fucked in the ass.

              I would rather let these hookers believe that I was a silly ass chickenhead.  People are fine when you on some old Waiting to Exhale, Being Mary Jane bullshit.  But the 50 Shades of Deadpool is not for cocoa butter users.  I liked his darkness.  And the only person who would get that is my brother.

              And true fucking twin that he is, Marc got it. He didn’t like it, but he got it.

              Marc and Davia were pissed.

              Davia is still pissed, apparently.

              After the wedding—we got married very fast one day downtown—things were better for everybody, until he couldn’t get an apartment and moved in with us. My mother loves him because he damn near moved us out of the old house by himself when we lost it.

              Now, I’m not a fool. I know he’s busy fucking every bitch who looks twice at him. But I’m fine with it as long as he keeps our hustles tight.   Save some dick for me and keep the hustle right so that we can get out of this slump quickly and I could retire from the plantation sooner, and I would be alright.  This was something that I had known through the grapevine, that the average Dominican man has a wife, a mistress and a girlfriend, the last two being totally different things. So I knew this negro had bitches back home too.

              I just didn’t know that the brothers and sister in the story were in truth his three kids. Details he said I got confused because I was drunk.  The baby’s mama, which in this equation is the girlfriend, brought her trifling ass to LA with the three kids thinking it would be easier for him to take care of them here than in the DR.  Trifling ass ho.

              They end up at my house every now and then and I remind his ass that she can’t come into my Mama’s house.  This baby mama and any of the other bitches he messed with had to stay away from where I sleep.

              But Davia was mad that she was sure he was out fucking.

              Marc wasn’t mad about it, but it’s because he was too busy out there trying to do his own fucking.

              Really he was out working out this hustle. And the fact that he wasn’t back yet scared me.

              “When is the last time you saw him Davia?”

              “You mean vertical?”

              “You know what, I’m going to find him. I haven’t heard from him since yesterday.”

              “He didn’t come home last night? Can’t believe it.”

              I ignored my sister because I love her, but I can’t win with her.

              And I needed to figure out what was going on.

              Like all others, his phone is trackable with GPS. And since he’s not as phone savvy as he thinks, he doesn’t know that when I was using Maps one day, I was able to invite myself to his Location Sharing feature.  

              Without bothering to say anything else to Davia, I headed north following the tracker. It seemed I was on my way to he hospital and that’s when I started to think the worst.

              I started blaming myself for going along with this hustle.

              I knew in my gut it was dangerous.

              I wondered if it was worth the effort to get a house, because that’s what this was all about anyway.  All my mother’s kids were trying to figure out how to make enough money to pay her medical bills from the Lupus treatments and get her in a better living situation.

              I worried that now my husband was in the hospital behind this damn hustle.

              But the tracker had me passing Presbyterian.

              Now I had different concerns.

              Heading up toward Silverlake in that quiet area made me nervous. The tracker took me to a very residential, sort of eerie community with dark houses. I didn’t see a lot of lights.   At the end of the block, I parked underneath a light within 20 feet of where the GPS showed my husband’s phone to be.

              Good judgment, I know, I know, good judgment says to keep ass in the car and wait until something happens. Case the joint for a while to see what pops off. But this lasted for about 10 minutes before the quiet and eeriness got the best of me. Besides, I was here already.  Couldn’t go to the police.  And what if my husband was in one of these houses bound and gagged, bleeding out?  I couldn’t save him myself, but I could at least find out exactly where he is and get friends on Crenshaw to take care of it for me.

              Fuck it, I thought, and got out of the car. I took out my phone, as if it was gonna Moneypenny me into defensive gadget wear.  Somehow, I felt safe walking a few steps in every direction until the GPS showed me I was getting closer. 

              Ten feet.

              This was the right direction.

              The thud on the top of my head, that was the last thing I remembered.

Chapter 6

Marc

7:10 p.m.

              At least her arms weren’t folded.  Marc expected Davia to give him all kinds of ‘tude, as she did any of the other times he had something to tell her.

              But he could see that she had been through something.

              “You first,” he said.

              He thought his day had been crazy:  a body had been in her trunk and in a twisted, fantasy movie way, the cops did not arrest her, and all because a random white passenger knew what to say to get her out of even being questioned. To  Marc, nothing sounded stranger.    

              “Now, maybe I’ve watched Get Out too many times and my paranoia is thick,” she said, “but I’m bugging.  I started doing a lot of digging.  I mean, I didn’t even try to make my quota today, and when have you ever known me to stop driving before my ends are right? When is the last time I did that?”

              “Yeah.  Scary.”

              She turned her head to the side and looked at him like she was trying to see my problem, like his problem could be seen on his skin.

              “What is going on Marc? We’ll get back to me later. Start talking about what’s going on with you.”

              To tell her, to even say it felt too generic to him. Marc got sick to his stomach instantly because he didn’t want to feel like those men who came out and had “coming out” stories.  He wanted to feel like it was his business and that he was sharing it because he wanted to, not because he needed to or had to. He felt some tears somewhere deep, but they had to stay there.

              “I been meaning to tell you something for a long time.”

              It must have been a long time that she was waiting for him to tell her. Her arms were folded when he looked up.

              “Exactly how long do you want me to wait sir?”

              One of the tears he’d been pushing down reached his face.

              “I’ve been messing around with dudes.”

              Davia walked over and sat down next to him.

              “One bathroom,” she said.

              “What?”

              “One full bathroom. Five grown assed people. Sometimes a child. Sometimes two. One full bathroom.”

              “What are you talking—did you just hear what I said?”

              “Did you hear what I said?”

              Marc stared at her.

              “Let me try again,” she said. “One full bathroom. Nobody cares where you put your dick or how many times you messed with somebody else’s.  Stop hogging the bathroom. It is not the closet.”

              Somewhere between relieved and shocked, that’s where Marc sat.

              “You knew?”

              “Negro I worked in the entertainment industry at one point. Don’t you think I know what closet behavior looks like? If you had come to me sooner I could have told you to stop doing some of it. Dead giveaway.”

              “You not…bothered?”

              “There was a not-so-dead body naked in my trunk earlier,” she said.  “Do you think I’m currently bothered by your sexuality? You’re my brother. I don’t want to think about you fucking, well, anything really.  Lana is my sister. I don’t want to think about her fucking anything, including that damn Fel. Has anyone seen him, by the way?”

              Marc should his head.

              “Anyway, I’m not judging you,” she said getting up. “I got my pussy ate out in the car. So…”

“Who the fuck did it?” Marc jumped up, angry.

“Boy sit down. Stop trying to protect my cootchie from goodness!  Anyway, I need you to go

back to the hospital and find out who this guy is.”

              “He wasn’t awake,” Marc said, more ashamed about punking out at the hospital than being in the closet. He felt suddenly stupid about trying to come out at all, or trying to hide in. “But I think he was the guy I tried to hook up with.”

              Davia’s eyes widened.  She sat back down. “Go on.”

              March told all, explained the run to the hotel, how he met the guy that would have been a catfish except that he was better looking, how he thought the guy was in the closet and it irritated him because he couldn’t get past it—“That is ironic,” David quipped—and how he heard the guy in an actual closet.  He mentioned that  he ran into the same would-be-catfish guy at the hospital.

              “Did he see you?”

              “No, I don’t think so,” he said.

              “Good. Did you see the guy in the closet? Wait, which hotel was this?”

              “The Salvia.”

              “This might be the same dude. The Salvia is where I picked up my passenger who put the body in my trunk.”

              Marc squinted and started to wonder.

              “Don’t even ask, we don’t have time. Just know that I didn’t know it was happening, okay? The thing is, if any of these dudes find out you’re involved, you could be in deep shit too.  Please, if you love me and value your life, go back in a few hours and see what you can find out about this guy. With any luck he didn’t make it.”

No Bourne, Marvel, Bond or mobster movie made Marc as nervous as this conversation.

“What are you going to do?”

Davia got up to leave.   

“It turns out that Colby, you know, the guy who helped me?  He’s an ‘advisor’ with a client base that includes a few high level politicians.  Don’t ask me how I know. I’m going to do some more asking around to see if I can find out anything about him. Keep our enemies close.”

              “I thought he helped.”

              “That doesn’t mean he always will.”  She got to the door and turned around. “And could you please use a different hook up app? It obviously drowns your battery too much, which is why your ass is always using the bathroom outlet.”

Teju

5:15 p.m.

Tejumola didn’t have a lot of time.

              The receptionist at the front desk of the ER had access to the cameras and sent him a text:  “Curtis is on the move.”

              Teju was addicted to a young Mexican guy with thick eyebrows, a long Native American nose, a nice smile and a smooth, hairless, perfectly manicured ass named Juan.  The ass was named Juan. Teju still did not know the guy’s actual name.

              Nor had he ever met him in person.

              But it did not matter.  For the last two weeks, Teju had been calling the boy to watch him do amazing things via Facetime.   Every time Teju had anything to say, the boy would stop.  When he said too much, the boy would begin putting on his clothes.   The thick but solid Nigerian got the hint right away. 

              Because he still lived at home with his extremely Christian family, family currently paying for his medical school residency, Teju could not afford to make any mistakes.  They could not find out that he wanted to eat ass and breed Juan, crimes that would earn him life imprisonment in his home country.

              At work was the only way. And the lab was the only place in the building with a broken surveillance camera and cell phone service (the staff bathrooms in the ER wing were all dead zones).

              Even the receptionist at the ER did not know who he was sexting, that Juan’s ass was addictive even via Facetime.  Teju told her that he was working really hard to get this chick and that she had a weakness for dark dicks.

              “Yours is probably cast iron skillet colored. She’s gonna fall in love,” the receptionist said one day, laughing. “No worries bro, I got you.”

              She sent him text messages regularly.  Curtis was known for taking breaks longer than he should, and going on errands that ran over, which meant bliss for Teju.   The first day, Teju’s learning curve with the rules of silent engagement cost him a lot of time he could have spent cumming, and he never got the chance too.  But every day after, Juan turned him out.

              One day it was “Juan” in the camera, perfectly lit, being finger-fucked by its Latino owner, whip cream as lube.

              The next is was olive oil smeared all over the ass and rubbed on the phone lens to brilliant effect.

              Then there was the time that the boy looked at Teju’s dick, thick as a television remote, and added more fingers.

              Teju had dropped the phone and broken the screen.

              He happily replaced it, thinking that this and more were worth the days of depression he dealt with after all the dead ends and stalling negroes he encountered on Jack’d, the guys who either weren’t interested or apathetic or interested in gym bodies or too high to commit to even sex.  And it was exhausting that a sideview of him in briefs invited so many conversations that he felt rude not answering.

              Hours were spent being polite.

              Today the boy had a coke bottle.  The minute Teju called and turned on the camera, he opened there was the boy, waving into the camera.  He backed up a bit and sat on the sofa, his legs open, Juan staring at the camera. 

              Teju could hardly contain his dick. It hurt as his erection climbed past the band of his underwear.

              The boy put his hands out in question.

              Teju replied by pulling his dick out. There was no time to find a stand for his phone, so he propped it on the stack of samples Curtis had left out.  It didn’t matter to Teju that this was bad procedure—samples and orders should never be left out, even for a moment.  It ordinarily would have bothered him. But not today, while his dick was screaming to cum and stress could go away temporarily. His name Tejumola, “one who looks forward to better days,” had been a curse.

              Teju lay horizontally on the table, his dick even with the phone, and propped his head up to see the boy better. 

              Now the boy was smiling.  He unscrewed the top of the Coke bottle and poured it all over his body, drinking some, licking the tip of the bottle, running the tongue around it.

              Then he took the neck of the bottle into his mouth.  He put two fingers into Juan. His moan filled the bottle.

              Teju imagined his dick in both places at once and stroked.

              He looked at his dick, then at the back of his closed eyelids, then back at the screen.  In it, the Latino boy was putting the tip of the Coke bottle into Juan. Soon the opening was there inside.  He aggressively pulled the labeling off the bottle and moved. With his free hand, the Latino boy grabbed the camera and put it closer to the bottle.

              Slowly, Juan began to drink the neck of the bottle.  He moaned louder.

              Teju stroked with more vigor than ever before, wanting to be bottle. 

              The Latino boy propped his ass higher on the sofa for a better view.  Through the glass, it looked as if Teju Juan’s insides were visible.

              Teju grabbed the rest of his dick with the other hand.  Cum shot up all over him and the table. 

              His orgasm was a full minute, cum continuing to come out endlessly, some in globs, some in spurts. 

              When it was over, Teju ended the call. Guilt set in.  This was terrible behavior. It was inconsiderate and lacked integrity, violating his place of work this way. Unprofessional. 

He realized it had been too long. The guilt pushed him to move faster.  He was cutting it close.  He scurried to wipe of the table with disinfectant, to clean with hot water and soap.  Since he had a second pair of scrubs, he wasn’t worried about the ones he had on. But he needed to get rid of all the cum, any of his sweat from the stress of possibly getting caught, and not meeting his fitness goals by this point.   

Teju scrubbed with as much muscle as he stroked his dick. This was a lab after all.  And he needed to be responsible.  He would feel better soon.

              He got it all and exited moments before Curtis walked in.

              All except the cum that landed on Rafelo Torres’ packet.

Chapter 5

Marc

3:30 p.m.

              I get home and tried to shake off whatever the hell that was.  Dudes acting strange, negroes locked up in closets and shit. And I’d be lying if I try to act like it didn’t scare the shit out of me.  I was just glad I didn’t see anything I wasn’t supposed to see.

              First thought was to delete the fucking app. But I needed to make sure that ole boy couldn’t find me again.  When I hit the block button, it does that bullshit where an ad comes on and freezes the phone.  Makes it hard to just block a whole bunch of dudes at one time.  When Jack’d finally works, right away I get pulled back in, looking at profiles, bodies, dicks, asses…

              Then my sister calls.

              “Marc I need you to do me a favor.”

              “Yo, I’m in a zone right now,” I say, but I notice she sounds bothered too.

              “No, no, this is important Marc.  Really important.”

              Yeah, she’s shook from something.  And this distraction might be what I need anyway.

              “And I know you know how to keep shit to yourself since I can’t get you to tell me anything.”

              “What is it Davia? I already don’t want to do it so just come with it.”

              “Don’t get alarmed, but a rider left a dead body in the trunk of my car, only he wasn’t dead after all.”

              What the fuck? “Davia where are you? I’m coming now—”

              “No, no, no, honey I’m fine.  The police left me alone because this white dude who was the next customer—anyway I’m okay for now. But so that this doesn’t go sideways, I need you to go to the hospital and see if you can find out who the dude is. He would have been admitted to ER about an hour ago.”

              “How do I find out without a name. And which hospital?”

              “Hollywood Presbyterian. And I don’t know, negro, phone a friend. I know you have some hookups.”

              I just start laughing. I know this shit wasn’t funny in general.  But the reason she couldn’t go to the hospital herself, because she molly whopped a security guard with her purse when he tried to escort her out of the waiting room, that shit is still funny. I was there because my sister had been in a car accident and had a minor concussion. It’s Davia’s sister too and she was on 10 the whole time.

              “I hear you laughing, negro. I hear you. It won’t be funny when you’re running around the ER trying to find this fool. Good luck. And don’t leave until you get something.”

              Still laughing.

              It was all good though. When Davia hangs up, I call the receptionist working that day – she felt so bad back in the day about Davia not being allowed back that she gave me her number and she told me she would help in any way we needed. And give me some pussy if I wanted it.  I didn’t, but I didn’t want anybody to know that I was turning it down so I flirted back and gave her my number.

              When you hit up the ER, usually they ask you who you going to see. But my girl let the receptionist know my situation, and the dude directed me to Number 12. 

              The curtain ain’t even closed when I get there. Nobody was in Number 12.  I saw a nurse and started looking distraught.

              “Excuse me Miss, I’m sorry to bother you and I know you’re busy. But I was told at Reception that my cousin is here at Number 12 and, well, I just want to know where he was relocated. I’m a little beside myself right now so forgive me.”

              “Oh you’re fine, no worries.  I’ll check for you.”  She looked on an electronic pad.  Even the ER has gotten high tech. “Mr. Torres is in ICU.”

              Mr. Torres.  Now I know who to look for.  Although there could be three Torres’s right here at this hospital. It’s L.A.

              ICU is smaller, but with actual rooms instead of areas sectioned off with curtains.

              That’s cool. I knew how to snoop.  

              I start walking down the hall looking into the window of the doors to each room.  A few older folks in the first, a few people in the second. Two to a room with a curtain in the middle.  The corridor doesn’t go that much deeper so I’m thinking if it’s not the last room, I can start looking at the rooms on the way back.

              That’s when I see him.

              Him. 

              I freeze, feeling fear and remembering his mouth on my dick.  The dude from earlier. Except that I can’t see the two apples on his neck because of his lab coat and the fact that I’m too far away.

              Without saying shit, I turn around and start walking back toward the stairs.

              “Hey can I help you with something, sir?”

              The voice is the same and scares the shit out of me. It doesn’t sound like he saw my face, but I don’t take a chance. I walk faster to the stairs and get out.

              Second time in 24 hours I was running from the same dude like he was some boogeyman in my nightmare. 

              I was gonna have to tell Davia.

              I was gonna have to tell her everything.

Curtis

1:44 p.m.

              The first thing Shaw made me Curtis vow was to not touch him.  Shaw had been good, very busy in fact, and did not need the additional complication of whatever joy Curtis got from upsetting his stability.

              Curtis promised without hesitation. 

              He told Shaw everything, starting at fucking the dude from the app, to the fight, to the new guy coming through, to the old guy waking up, to the pulse being gone, to carting the body in an industrial laundry basket and dumping it into the trunk of a Lyft.  Shaw listened with very little change in his expression before asking questions.

              “Did you get any information from the guy’s phone?  A name?”

              “No.”

              “Does he know who you are?”

              “No,” Curtis said. Then he looked around nervously. “I’m not sure.”

              “Where did you get out of the Lyft?”

              “Around LaBrea and Pico.”

              “Do you work tonight?”

              “No, I’m off.”

              Shaw slumped back on his sofa, as much as somebody that pulled could slump. His skin glistened.

              “You need to pick up a shift at the lab at Presbyterian as soon as you can.  While you’re there, I’ll check the morgue and your Lyft history for evidence of a police report, if the driver filed one. This might help us find out who this DOA might have been.  But you need to be at work as a reason to go that direction in a Lyft other than to get home.”

              Curtis was stunned at how fast Shaw processed the information, even though there was no reason for him to.

              “I’ll find out everything else and get back to you with instructions.  These are instructions you’re going to follow to the letter, Curtis.”

              “Thank you.”

              “Curtis, we never had this conversation.”

              “Okay.”

              “And after I get you out of this jam, the return favor is that you never call me again.”

              Curtis felt it as a punch in the stomach, a punch so hard he considered the alternative of turning down this help and going to prison instead.

              “Please…”

              “Non negotiable.”

              Curtis could not say yes.  He got up and left, his dick hard, his heart soft.   To reclaim a bit of power he walked out and said, “I’ll call you.”

              Shaw beat him to it.  When Curtis made it to the lab at Hollywood Presbyterian, Shaw told him that the man whose body he had thrown in the trunk of a Lyft was alive. 

              Rafelo Torres.

              The collection of blood, urine and stool samples for analysis sat close. Curtis could have sworn he had seen that name in it, Torres.  He rummaged through the pack, found Rafelo Torres and ran the tests.

              He had been on Dilaudid.  Curtis remembered from years of school and training as a medical lab technician that hydromorphone and other narcotics prescribed for pain relief can lower the pulse so much that it can disappear for hours.  He must have presented as dead.

Adrenal insufficiency might account for the seizure.

              He was relieved that the man was alive, but nervous about it too.  Shaw had advised that Curtis at least steal the phone.

              Curtis waited until a sufficient stack of his workload got completed (the emergency room additions did not help) before he could hop on the staff elevator and get to the ICU.   The first room he made it to on the corridor was the one:  there was Rafelo Torres, unconscious, plugged into everything.  To make this theft not look suspicious, Curtis told himself to be quick. He stood for a minute and thought about how he could look around while taking an additional blood sample.  He prepared something to say just in case someone caught him and asked.  “A few of the samples were corrupt,” he would explain. And while he took two or three, he would look with his eyes only, searching the room for Torres’ belongings so that he could get the phone.

              Only none of his belongings were there. Curtis got in and out of the room with three more vials of unnecessary blood but didn’t find the phone.

              He walked out of the room and checked one ore time for maybe some place he missed, a corner of the room he forgot to visit with a glance.  Just when he had given up, he turned his attention to the right and saw a familiar body walking away, his back to Curtis.

              “Hey, can I help you with something, sir?” Curtis said.  And somehow, without seeing the man’s face, he knew it was the other guy from the Salvia Hotel. 

              The fact that the three of them were within 20 feet of each other freaked him out enough to abandon the mission.  The elevator could not get there fast enough. 

              Curtis made it back down to the lab and sat, and breathed until his heart slowed.  Then he called Shaw and asked who this guy was.  

  Colby

6:25 p.m.

              “We had to start without you,” Rich said holding the camera.

              Colby took his jacket off mid-step and flung it on a chair in the makeshift set.  The sound of moaning and screaming could be heard in little pieces, landing like the jacket. 

              “It doesn’t look like I missed anything, those two still have on underwear,” Colby said, pointing to the muscular caramel guy and the forty-something white woman on the sofa.  

              “We had to cast without you because they weren’t available too late and—”

              “It’s okay, shit happens. Had to catch a later flight. Not too ripped, which is good, easier to sell it.  She’s perfect although I guess few people have seen our girl naked since she’s never been that way on television.”

              “Yeah, they’re close enough looking that we may not have to do a lot in post.”

“Did they sign the paperwork, NDA’s, deeper documents?”

“All signed.”

              A few women in the other bedroom screamed ecstasy almost in unison.

              “Too much noise?” Rich said.

              “Nah, the editor can take care of that in post too.  Let’s get to it. Remember not to shoot their faces until I tell you too.  Can you fuck her on her back first, um…”

              “Topaz,” the caramel-colored man said.

              “Topaz, hi. Yeah could you fuck her on her back first.  And ma’am would you oblige us? This is so behind and I’m only allowed to use this space while they’re shooting the other stuff. A favor, you know.”

              “Yes,” the woman said. “We get it.  Tara.”

              “Nice to meet you too,” Colby said. “Can we start with it open first. We don’t need to see size, although that’s a weapon right there.”

              Topaz had slid his underwear off and let his thick dick curve down and right, as if aiming for the pussy on the sofa.  Without hesitation, he grabbed it and engulfed it in her mouth.  Although it wasn’t deep down her throat yet, Colby could see Tara working to open her jaws wide enough.

              Colby watched for a few seconds as the raucous sounds of fucking in other rooms offset Rich’s smooth handheld shooting.  But Colby was all business.

              “You know what this is nice, but fellatio is too hard to make work in post so let’s just skip it and get to the good stuff.”

              Following the instruction Topaz put his dick inside the Tara, who was moist as ever by now.  Rich was about to object when Colby touched his shoulder. “We don’t have the real dick shot, buddy, so we don’t need to see entry. Get close in though.”

              As Topaz fucked Tara, Rich moved his camera closer. Each time Topaz’s dick plunged into the bed of her pussy, Rich zoomed in further.  By the time Colby took a look, he could see her natural juices right at the tip of her hole whenever Topaz pulled back.

              Colby shifted his attention from the playback on screen to Topaz. Maybe instinctively, Topaz’ camera-side arm was behind his back.

              “Done this before buddy?” Colby asked. Then, before a response, “You don’t have to hide the arm like this is real porn. Remember our guy wouldn’t do that, and this has to look sort of homemade.”

              Tara started to moan, grab her boobs, roll her eyes back. 

              “Do you plan to add the friend with the camera in post too?” Rich asked.

              “Yeah a little sound editing to add a fraternity track. We have that one done already.”

              Oh, ohhhh, aaah, aaaiii! Fuck me!   Right in front of him.         

I’m gonna cum! Oh my fucking God. Yesssss! In back rooms.

              It all sounded believable as hell. Tara especially. Colby knew. He had more experience with getting off on just the sound of porn, even more than the look of it.  Tara’s lead vocals of enjoyment with some backup from women in other rooms was turning him on, making his pink wood start to push up in his slacks. 

              But this was business.

              “Good stuff,” he said. “Okay Rich no faces yet.  Get up underneath it, from behind. I just want to see his ass, her pussy and his balls slapping it hard.”

              Rich glided over so that the camera centered the meeting.  Without any cue, Topaz fucked harder.  Tara’s hands were everywhere grabbing him, pulling him deeper.  The camera zoomed in, catching her swollen lips whenever his dick retreated. His ass looked good - maybe he should consider doing this for a living if modeling did not work out.

Tara gave a show. Or was really feeling it.

              Yes! Yes!  Ooooooooooh!  Fuck me with that cock! Give me that big cock!

              Two minutes of this passed, and Colby needed less before getting to the main shot.  He trusted that Topaz had been debriefed that on Colby’s mark, Topaz was supposed to pick her up on his dick with his back on the sofa and slide her down.  He was supposed get her reverse cowgirl so that Rich could pan up from their fuck spot to her boobs to her face, and his peeking from around the side of her back. But just before Colby gave the cue, the doorbell rang.

              He was stunned.  Anybody who knew about this space would never come to the front door. It was supposed to be secure. 

              A naked woman in flip flops casually walked to the door and opened it in the middle of this living room scene.   Without prompting, Rich stood in front of Tara and Topaz and swung the camera toward the door.

              “Sofa personnel, do not move, stay facing where you are and don’t move,” Colby said. Then to the girl answering the door, “What the fuck?”

              She opened the door to a delivery man.

              “Anybody for Seamless?” he said.

              Colby could not believe this was happening.  The delivery man was as surprised, unsure what was going on but in awe of the naked woman at the door and aware of the pleasure noises wafting toward the door.

              “Sorry,” the naked woman said. “He couldn’t find this address so I had to give him specific directions.”

              “This address doesn’t exist!” Colby said. “For a reason!”

              She shrugged.  “We were hungry. We didn’t get a lunch break.”

              The guy was in no hurry to leave the doorway after she grabbed the food and went to the other room. Colby grabbed his arm.

              “Name?”

              “Sam.”

              Colby noted the Mexican joint where Sam worked. Colby looked at Rich, whose camera was pointed directly at Sam and waited for Rich to nod.

              “Great,” Colby said. “Listen Sam, make sure you never speak a word of this moment to anybody. Forget you were ever here and make sure the only address that gets to that restaurant’s files is whatever she gave you initially.  Capiche?”

              Sam nodded.

              Colby slammed the door.

              “I’m so sorry team,” he said.  “We’re going to have to shoot the whole thing again.  Topaz, if you can get that monster to stay up for it I’ll push to double your fee.”

              “No problem.”

              Colby sighed, regretting that he detoured earlier to play good Samaritan for the Lyft driver. Being on his earlier flight would have avoided him all this trouble.  But if he could still get and turn this footage into a deep fake by the next night, his work would be done.

Chapter 4

Davia

1:00 p.m.

              I mean I freaked the fuck out.   You’d have thought that me and Colby, the passenger I’d picked up, you’d have thought that we were close friends.

              “…what the fuck? Oh my God. Really? There’s a body in my trunk? What am I going to do about that?”  Yes, I said this to Colby, like we were tight.

              “Okay wait, calm down.  Let’s call the police right away…”

              “But what if they think it was me? They gonna want to investigate me.  I can’t have all that in my life. I have goals—”

              “I got this. Don’t worry.”

              Then I looked at Colby, this nicely dressed white guy…Latino guy?...white guy, tie in order, shirt fitted, thick legs underneath the slack, and I wondered, why are you so calm?

              He was picking up his phone calling the police for me.

              If I had finished collecting myself from the whole body-in-trunk thing, I might have protested this random man calling the PD on my behalf. But the freakout was still going.  All I could do was watch this man handle all of it.  I should have expected as much – he was white, or at least looked white, which is enough for them to take his story over mine. He waxed poetic, whitesplaining, mansplaining and corporatespeaking the whole story.

              Meanwhile he had good enough sense to get the paramedics over too. They were over there near the trunk and I was standing near a tree worried underneath the branches.  Thinking to myself, is this what God wants?  Is this immediate retribution for my Uber-orgasm?  Was then when I earned the 12 Years a Slave sentence?

              I was so caught up in this drama, no, real fear, that I missed the shocking part:  the paramedics put the man from the trunk on the gurney and started rushing.

              “He’s alive?” I shouted.

              But by the time I could make it to the vehicle, he was already in the back of the truck, full siren production. Now, I was mad. I’m nosey as fuck. I wanted to know who he was and I could have—would have looked at his face if I’d known he was alive. 

              The entire time, Tom Hardy was talking to the PD, nodding, saying things, laughing.

               The cops broke the full inquisition and came over to ask me for my license. I gave them all the licenses.  

Then I waited while they walked back to the car, all the while feeling bad about stereotyping him, especially as I was standing over near a tree scared to death looking like Erykah motherfucking Badu.

              Now when the officer came over and did not arrest me, I was dumbfounded.

              “We just want to as you some questions, Affidavia,” the officer said. “So we really need your cooperation when we reach you.”

              They were going to let me go and entrust me to come back?  They weren’t taking me in for questioning now?  Not even after they said my full government first name?  I looked at Colby/aka Tom hard in the face and stared.

              “Affi they just want you to chat with them later about the ride. All will be documented with Lyft,” Colby said in rapid fire like this stuff was normal.

              Affi? This colonizer just took my government name which he has not been authorized by me to use and remixed it into a nickname?  I couldn’t even speak, especially since now was not the time to be ungrateful.

              “We have your lawyer’s information so we’ll be in touch.”

              “My lawyer??”

              “Yeah, I just gave him John’s information, no worries, Affi,” he said coming toward me. “Thanks officers,” he said toward them.

              When we got back to the front of the car, I looked at him.

              “Um, what’s the story? What did you tell them? Will these people be at my house?”

              “Wait Af—”

              “Do not use that ever again. My name is Davia, hi I’m Davia, nice to meet you, that’s Davia, uh huh, no worries, yes, Davia.”

              He backed up and apologized. I mean he physically backed up, with swag even. At this point I was really worried about who this cat might be.

              To keep it one hundred, he couldn’t possibly know how angry the whole subject of my name makes me. My mother had a Poppies-from-The-Wiz period between my sister and older brother when she had me. When she named me Malfeasance, the thought cells were in rebellion, but at some point she realized her mistake. She got the affidavit to correct it. 

The problem is when she filled it out there was too much alcohol involved so she put the name of the document on the line where my new name should have been. And she misspelled it too.   Thus I became Affidavia Malfeasance Zirconoia James.

              Or just Davia, please and thank you, mercy Jesus.

              “Davia,” Colby said, “I have worked some things out, just consider it a favor. I just need for you to be sure to show up to whatever John needs.”   

              “This discount law is still law. So what else might John need?”

              “No, no, no, it’s nothing like that. I just mean cooperate with them helping you, that’s all.”

              I thanked him, wondered what the hell I had just gotten into and then decided to take the rest of the day figuring out what was going on. What my rights were.   

              The learning curve was hurtful.  But I finally got enough information to know that I needed to check on the guy who was somehow not dead but didn’t have a pulse a while ago.  I needed to find out what the hell happened and if my last rider put him in the car by himself or with help, and why, mainly because I was not trying to get killed by some random negro trying to make sure I can’t identify him when the police ask me about it.

              But the problem is that I could not go to the hospital myself, because he was taken to Hollywood Presbyterian on Sunset and Vermont.  Hm.  I was 86’ed from that hospital a few years back. I know, I know, it begs the question about how somebody could be banned from a hospital. But it was for assaulting a security guard. They had me on everything—it’s a long story; the point is that if I ever get seriously injured and need to go to the hospital, the ambulance has to take me to the other one, whatever that is.

              It’s fine. Marc would have to go for me and find out everything about this cat. He is in to me for so many favors anyway so he doesn’t have any currency for No. 

Shaw

1:25 p.m.

              I had to leave my fiancé. 

              To be honest, I wasn’t sure I was ready to get married even though it’s everything I’ve always wanted.   Obama got the words right – the audacity of hope.  That’s the kind of hope I had that I would be absolutely sure about a man.

              I was sure the others weren’t right.  One ended with prepositions no matter the code and would not keep a job.  Another punched a saleswoman at Macy’s and would not take his lithium.  My inaugural boyfriend could not keep his hands off my friends.

              But this current and fourth one I said yes too because I knew that to marry him would be to marry a beautiful man with a good heart, good benefits, a Morgan Stanley Active Assets account, a condo in Bulgaria, a Liebowitz over the sofa in the study, a Lawyer of the Year award from the National Bar Association, a lake house in Wales and a lake in Korea. Granted, the lake is part of one of the properties that holds offices of a his globally branded nonprofit.  We would argue deliciously about mass incarceration as it pertains to the capitalization of slave labor and then have beautiful, standard fare missionary lovemaking sessions. More of the arguments than the lovemaking.

              He never seemed that sexually driven.

              But as I leave a client earlier than planned to drive to my house unexpectedly, I remember that my ex-fiance bought me a Mickalene Thomas portrait for my birthday.

              I’m in a cubic zirconium ankh with a diamond in the center that he got me for my birthday. Although it’s over between us I kept it, because it reminds me that I’m equal parts salt-of-the-earth real and high couture opulent.  And for another reason.

              My illusions about this got twisted up when I met a guy at a Starbucks who zeroed in on me like a heat-seeking, challenge-seeking missile. He knew I was the type of man whom no one had ever witnessed passing gas, who glared at belchers and refused to allow anyone to see the sweat.  

              Ten minutes later, it was me in the bathroom scene of Unfaithful.  This man tore open my shorts. He pulled down his pants.  He picked me up by my behind. He pinned me against the bathroom stall side panel. And then he did an hours worth of fucking in five minutes. Not one person entered that bathroom. Only my ass was entered.    He knew instinctively that I’m high maintenance.  He saw my effort to not get disheveled, protecting the Eton linen shirt from ripping, making sure the Dolce tank top wasn’t damaged.  He guided my chin to the side, choosing ear over eyes and whispered, “You like it tidy.  I’m gonna teach you messy.”

              I had never cum so hard.

              Nor so undone.

              I had to tie the underwear back together and wear them out by themselves, rock them with the sunglasses, tank and linen.  As a look – of course I turned it.

              I told myself not to call him, but I called.

              Every time I went to his unkempt place, the routine was the same.  I looked for a place to sit, found nothing suitable. He promised to make me sweat, made good on it and then used that sweat to slide me up and down the wall.  It was a mission. An obsession.  He didn’t even cum most of the time.

              The dynamic didn’t seem possible. Same height, him denser, more muscle-y, and me long of torso and slight of waist. Snatched. He would mount me on his dick, lever my head to one side by my chin and use his strong thighs to push me up and down the wall.   

              He would grab my bronze ass cheeks and pull them away from each other as I slid down on his dick.   

              It got worse (better) every time. 

              The next time I saw him, six months later, because it took that long to get past all my guilt, he did all that and then some.

              Whispered, “Did you think I’d forget how much you love that messy cum I push out?”

              No, no, that wasn’t a question. Because then he fucked me against two or three walls of the house in alternation.

              By this time, and unlike any other time before, his penis grew further up me every time I came down on it. I neglected to understand the phenomenon. He even started out longer, as if his penis had more battery power than before, as if his goal was to send its tip to my throat.  

Defiant, I did less, working to not sweat, to not produce the one symbol of my weakness for him.

              I was sweating enough to lubricate my penis on his hard stomach and cum up to his chin.

              He wiped it off me and put it in his mouth.

              He wiped off more and tried to put it in mine.

I was horrified. This was base.  Beneath me. Disgusting. Unbecoming.

              He saw my expression, my repulsion. He grabbed my hips and pulled me down farther, my ass wearing his entire length.

He stayed there and stirred my insides slowly with his dick the stars arrived mid air inside his apartment.

              I came again, this time an internal tsunami.  And I sucked his fingers helplessly. Defeated.

              I returned to his house again two weeks later.

              Then a week later.

              Then the desperation of lunch times, lies to lover and commuter daydreams.  Unfaithful.

              But that did not end well and this had to.

              I went to his house one day and told him it was over.

              He laughed.

              “I’m not going to even let you take off that pricey ass polo.”  He inverted me, leveraged me against the spine of the front door frame, slid me down almost to my head and scrunched off my pants.   The tongue assaulted my anus as if to slay all its no’s.[JS1] 

              “Wait,” I said. “At least let me take off my jewelry.”

              The eyes rolled, but he allowed it.  Knowing I had planned to give him every exit paper, he conceded that if I changed my mind, he at least needed to respect that I could not have on my engagement ring, the Onyx bracelet, the opal stud in my ear, the sterling bands on wrist.   

              Clear of bling, he fucked me on the kitchen sink, the wall and the balcony, upside-down. He made sure to make me cum on my clothes.

              Something had to happen.

              And then one fine day, when I happened see him after work, he put me on the bed. He respectfully took off all of my jewelry and collected it on the floor.  He put me on the bed and kissed every part of my body and pounded me with a sensitivity that I did not know could exist from men to men.  This time I came all over the sweat covering my body.

              “Do not move.”

              I obeyed.

              When he arrived back to the room, he used my driver’s license to scoop the orgasm and sweat off of me. I had no idea he was scooping it into a jar, a jar which temporarily had my jewelry in it.  He later added his ejaculate

              That evening, when he was sure I was home and in sight of my fiancé, he texted me.

              Can he see you and me up on those bracelets? 

              That ring shining more with our cum on it? 😉

              This time, I called off the engagement first.  Because before the indignation at his gall set in, I got hot. My ass started to moisten.  My entire girth jumped.  Immediate responses to the audacity of him. Not of hope. Of him.  This man who has abused my sense of order in favor of his inner higher power.  I could not enter a marriage with this kind of complication, no matter how base.  I needed to learn something else about myself that I did not know and couldn’t not know on the way down an aisle.

              So I left my fiancé.

              And then I ended the affair the next day, over the phone of course.

              I’ve ignored his calls for six months. Until last week, when I had to listen to some of the voice mail to clear messages. He was in love.  I never considered it because I was too confused to imagine that his heart could overpower his mission.  There were teary messages of how much he missed me, how he’d followed every post, studied every post from every show I produced.  He had never called a man’s name like he called mine before he came. Shaaaawwww…

Now, I finger the ankh, the only thing I did not have on that day. 

I got a call early today from local law enforcement that there was a man who looked like an intruder on my property. There is an app on my phone that will show me camera feed and then work like Waze to show the quickest path to my house.  When I saw the feed, I told the police to stand down because I knew the assumed perpetrator.

              He must have done something desperate to warrant something this dangerous and extreme to get my attention.  

              I make it to the house and pull into the driveway and see him sitting there on my porch, hugging his knees, just as he was in the feed.

              “What Curtis?” I say.  “What do you want?”        

Chapter 3

Curtis

 9:45 a.m.

He swore last year he would never look for ass while he was high.

This time he had smoked a joint and a half and couldn’t think straight he was so horny.

Just one good fuck.  A quick one, no conversation, no chat.

But bouncing from thread to thread was harder than he thought, had asked much of his concentration.  The clear winner was a narrow-waisted soccer player with thighs and ass so bright they almost shone orange.   Past chats always ended when the cherub-mouthed cutie asked a personal question – place of work, kind of work, political party.

Curtis was having none of this, his irritation at filters on the app blazing more than his blunt. “Interests,” “Music,” “Movies,” an “Intro” section—who gives a shit about this when the goal is to get off?   Pretending to be interested in these answers was a straight man’s burden, and tonight he wasn’t trying to be one.

The other window had an older cat with fewer words than a headline in his profile    

 DL, big pipe to the front of the line, if I’m on I’m lookin right now

 It took Curtis two minutes to ignite his dilemma.

 Pics?

Yeah.

The ass shot dominated the phone screen, canceled everything around it.  The geometry of the ass was so perfect, a roundness reserved only for planets.  To Curtis the hole was mesmerizing, maybe because the high had slid deeper under his cheekbones, or maybe because it was somehow shaped like the small, short-branched crucifix hung always on his Pastor’s neck.  Curtis dove in.

 Damn. wya?  

Salvia hotel

You take dick?

How big

9

Come thru

 He tried to look up the address on Maps, but it took him so long to make out the tricks the phone played on him. Saliva Hotel. Saliva Hotel, he asked himself.  Saliva? What the fuck…  Then the buzz sound, like a sci-fi stun wand taking somebody down.  The app made it several times, and the messages were all from the first guy:  You busy working / what you watching on tv / how you like Kanye. / Are you coming this time? Come on man    

Too many questions.

Curtis pulled down the Maps window and tried Salvia Hotel again.  Three miles. Not far.  

Then the younger dude surprised him.  He sent,

 You can just come by and let me have it. Fuck me until you cum and just leave whenever. I won’t say a word. I promise.

 Now Curtis had dropped like a hard beat into his dilemma. He had been wanting the young shiny-assed boy for so long, wanted to choke his waist and pull the ass hard into his dick. He had ghosted on way too many questions and read way too many words, some he didn’t want to know: marginalization, diaspora, cisgender.  He deserved to fuck this boy for way too long.

But the full stop ease of the older dude made Curtis feel free. He texted.

 Yo ass ready now

Yep.  I’ll leave the door propped. You come in and fuck and leave.

Word?

Yeah. Brb

               Curtis was good with this. Bareback was cool because his dick was invincible. But he opened the pic again and stared at the ass. It had power that could stand up to his dick. He needed to see nothing else.  He stared and studied the ass in detail, imagined what it might feel like, pushed his erection toward it on the phone. This went on for four minutes that felt like marathons.

              He needed to send another text to the wordy guy, postpone it. Hold him off a little longer.

           Yo you know what dude

              Not back yet.

Not back where? / Where /  Yo?  

 Why was this boy tripping? Didn’t he just invite him over with no strings or words?  The ghosting didn’t add up.  He had been waiting another eternity, he was sure

 Sorry about that. Salvia Hotel.

 Curtis froze.  He was clear. He had not changed the window of the app once.  All of this was the older dude.

 You still comin

Yeah Salvia hotel here I come

When you get here let me know and I’ll give room number

 The high did not stop him from driving.  L.A. looked alive and well, as detailed as an animated film noir.  He was tripping. Then he wondered if this dude was masculine. Bass in the voice. Etc.  He tried to pull the phone out and realized texting was too much to handle. 

 Curtis pulled the car over on La Cienega and put the hazards on.

              Can I call you man?

 He waited, the high dragging everything out like a caution tape.  The reply came thirty seconds later, but Curtis felt it as five minutes and was just trying to figure out how to turn the car around on this hill.

              Yeah. Give me your number since you driving.

 Curtis did and the phone rang. 

               “Yo.”

              “Hey bro whassup. You on your way?” The voice came at Curtis with a lot of baritone, depth he could feel past his ear and through his skull.

              “Yeah man. I just wanted—”  Curtis stopped talking when he realized he didn’t know how to say that he wanted to make sure that the guy wasn’t “gay.”

              “You sound alright.”

              “Huh?” Wait, was the guy speaking Curtis’s mind?

              “Your voice. I only deal with dudes,” the guy said. “Not down with that faggoty shit. You sound right.”

              “Oh.”

              “Text when you get here.”

The guy hung up the phone.

Curtis’ dick pushed on his jeans so fast he had to drive with it out.  When he made it to the Salvia Hotel, he parked on the unlit back side of the hotel.

               What room

              312 The door is open. Come in.

The door was resting on the chain. Curtis pushed it open with caution with a whiff of sobriety, long enough to take in the room. He hurried in, closed the door and locked it.  This third world hotel had a foyer entrance big enough to stand in without being in the actual room.  He could not see the bed right away, only the bit of light coming from the nightstand.

              He walked in and saw that ass. The dude was standing near the bed, the silhouette of it.  Curtis sank back into his high, while the curves came at him. It wasn’t until he started to smell must of the dude that he realized he had walked over to him. Handsome dude, black and something else he could not place in the low light.

              Before Curtis could touch him, the dude walked around him with careful steps, climbed on to the bed and bent over on all fours.  It was the picture from the app having come to life.  It too rushed at him somehow and Curtis fell to his knees like a person ordered by an executioner.  With no idea how it got there, Curtis felt the taste of ass on his tongue, on his lips.  He slid it in, trying to push the moan out of the dude. 

              There wasn’t one. But he felt the smooth hair around the hole, tasted the must the dude’s cheeks made from being cozied up.

He grabbed the lube sitting on the night stand and oiled his whole dick.

The dude on the bed was still.

Was he alive? 

Curtis tried not to laugh, a weed tangent. Somehow that thought was funny as hell. Then he pushed his dick in like a truck entering a station.

The dude exhaled slow.

He pulled back, then pushed back in, two feet an hour.

Curtis felt extra wet heat on his dick, juice.  It made him dig further in. The dude told his pleasure to the pillow, some deep exclamation in some other language.

This made Curtis’ dick harden, grow bigger, push open the walls.

Another slow stroke from halfway out to further in.

He heard more baritone into the pillow.

He felt extra wet heat on his dick. When he pulled it out he saw the white foam.

Now the asshole was slippery. Curtis shoved his dick all the way back in it. Again and again. He heard the messy kiss of his thighs on these perfect cheeks and when he closed his eyes it sounded loud.

Thwack… Thwack…

The dude shook beneath him. Curtis plowed faster.

Now the dude was moaning louder, higher.  Foam cream crept to the edge of his asshole and Curtis got harder. The dude was bigger in stature, and Curtis guessed his dick matched it. Curtis reached around and grabbed the dude’s dick. He was right.  He felt the hood on it and stroked it.

The thick dick became a joystick—Curtis used it to pull the dude’s ass further back.

All the way back.  

Curtis felt his dick crawl deeper into the dude he was sure came from some island. They stayed locked like this for a few seconds that Curtis’ high dragged into ten minutes of profound feelgood.

Then Curtis banged him.

Thwack, thwack, thwack.

The dude’s head bobbed around like he was drugged, going with the bang, enjoying it.

Curtis’ balls and the tops of his thighs kept kissing the dudes ass, pulling more foam to it every time.

Thwack, thwack.

Now foam was spurting everywhere, creamy white foam coming out around the Curtis’s dick every time he pulled it from the juicy asshole.

Curtis closed his eyes and felt like a hand made of warm gooey cream had grabbed his dick to yank the cum from it.

Thwack, thwack, thw-

Curtis came. He came forever. He came hard into the dude’s ass. 

For a moment everything was still except the heavy breathing of two men.  Curtis felt the cum on his fingers and knew he jacked the guy right.  They were quiet except for the breathing.  Deep breathing. Curtis’s knees relaxed, his hand still on the dude’s dick, his own still locked deep inside.

He started to ease it out.  But the dude pull himself away and stood beside the bed.  He opened his phone and looked at something, put the phone down and looked at Curtis’s resting dick.

Handsome dude. Very handsome.  Brown paper bag eyes.

“Wait where is it?”

“What?” The dudes voice was jarring and Curtis tried to focus.

“The condom. Where is it?”

Was he loud or were his ears just sensitive with the weed?  Curtis did not understand the question about the condom, even when he saw the dude look at the bed where the lube and condoms were.  Through the haze of after cum, Curtis started to understand that the horror on the dude’s face was about the fact the condom sitting there, unused.

“I thought you said, I thought—”

The sentence did not get out before he felt himself falling into the wall, away from the bed, a sharp sting on his cheekbone.   The realization of being backhanded had not sunk in until after the dude connected his fist to Curtis’s stomach, which sent him to the floor.

“You didn’t ask to fucking cum in me, bitch.”

Now Curtis could see the massive size of the dude, his body towering, the light behind it casting shadow. He had just enough reflex to roll over and miss the foot coming toward him.  Curtis tried to stand, but tripped over pants he forgot were still at his ankles.

When he looked back, he saw that the attacker also tripped. Maybe he was high too.

Curtis fought to get alert so that he could fight to get clear.

The guy groaned for a second and then reached for Curtis leg, used it to climb, to pull himself.

They struggled on the ground.

Curtis used the cord of the landline to yank the hotel phone off the table.

The dude made his way further toward Curtis’s neck.

Curtis felt the weight of the dude’s upper body fall on him.

 Then the shaking.

 Violent seizure. The entire body on top of him shook, even as consciousness seemed gone.

No, no, no, no.  This is not going down like this.

              Curtis turned the guy’s head on his side, took the phone receiver off the base and put half of it in the dude’s mouth.

              He got up. He looked around for something, not sure what it was.

              He started to dial 911 but he could not explain this and did not want this out. He would lose his job if the police showed up. He had to contain this.

              Curtis squeezed his eyes shut and forced himself to focus.

              He ran back to the bed and grabbed the man’s phone.  It had not locked back yet, a miracle. He scrolled through the open windows and found the jack’d app right where the man left it, in a thread with somebody.  Curtis could not think straight. He could not get to a solution. He saw that the private picture did not look like the guy on the floor.

              The guy on the floor had stopped moving.  Except for a small rise and fall of his chest, he had stopped moving.

              Then the knock at the door.  Light, but there.

              In panic and sloth, he took his jacket and used it to tie the dude’s arms behind his back. He made a fishing knot that would be near impossible to escape, and then dragged the dude’s heavy body into the closet.

              Then he thought about the knock.

              He had to get it. If this dude was invited over here, it meant he wasn’t necessarily leaving.

              Curtis hurried to the dresser to see if the phone was still unlocked, if he could get the rest of the jack’d thread.

              It was locked.

              Knock. Knock.

              Curtis pulled his pants up and walked over to the door.

              He opened it to see a dark dude with smooth thick lips and almond eyes.

              “Yo,” was al Curtis could muster.

              “Hey.”

              This dude came in with authority and Curtis did not have the nerve or sobriety to react.

              “Don’t want people out there to hear, man. I keep it low.”

              And this is when Curtis realized that the brief increase of pace that helped him for the fight, the rescue effort and the body drag was adrenaline.   It was over. He was now caught in the muddy crawl of his high.

              He nodded, which was all he had.

              “You look better than that pic man,” the guy said.

              Curtis just stared.

              Then he remembered that he was supposed to do something with this man. He was impersonating a dead guy who had…forgotten to cancel on this dude?  

              He took two steps toward the stranger and touched his hip.

              Now he trembled, mostly because he worried. What if the dude wakes up before he can get this guy out of here?  Was that knot right?

“You alright man?”

              “Yeah, I just—”   Curtis tried to focus.  Horny, scared, high, he struggled to come up with a lie. “I never messed with a dude.” 

              He looked at the closet and then commanded his head to come back to the guy.   

              “Cool.”

 The feeling of tongue in his mouth helped.

The feeling of this man’s dick against his thigh let him know right away that he had to get it off. He was not prepared to take it, and he was too drained to give it.  

He would have to suck it.

Curtis shoved his hand down the guy’s pants and felt the dick.  Maybe he could jack him off and call it a day—the guy already felt hard enough to bust.

              When the new guy, the sexy guy, put his mouth on Curtis’s tattoo, he was surprised.  He did not know it was possible for this spot to feel good again – he got the two apples burned into his neck just to make sure nobody could ever gather his temptation the way those two negroes did for years.  No weak spots. None.

              Except now that these dark lips…is it the weed? Fuck that feels good…

              A noise came from the closet.

              Paranoia. The dude was out. 

Curtis still took no chances. Rather than fight the high, he used it to suck. He licked all the skin he could get to on his way down to the pipe, hard as a club.  When the dude backed away, for a second, Curtis worried about the shirt – was there something on it, like blood?

He took it off.

“Did you hear that?” the guy said.

Curtis hoped not.  He wasn’t sure what was real anymore.

He started blowing the new, dark dick in front of him.

              The moment it all went wrong was not clear to Curtis, except that the dude in the closet started to move around.   And that the new guy looked horrified.  Some weird instinct Curtis couldn’t place wanted the new guy to stick around to help, as if maybe the knot-bound dude in the closet would be more lethal now than he was before. Curtis was DDF but didn’t have the presence of mind to say it, nor the comfort to use it when it could have worked, nor the sobriety to know that it would not have mattered. But he felt some kind of comfort in this dark, warm guy who was fleeing the scene.

              He had to choose – keep the new guy or prepare to fight off the old one. Both was not an option.

              Or he could leave. He could leave and figure it out later, hope that the guy could never track him down.  If he got a head start, the guy would not be able to catch him.

              But the car keys were in his jacket pocket near the bed. And if he took off on foot, and the knot did not hold…

              Curtis needed more time for all these thoughts and for his high to go away.

              The dude continued to struggle to move out of the closet.  Curtis planned to knock him out cold, buy himself some time.

              A phone never felt so heavy. When the dude to get his head out, Curtis swung the phone down.  The dude turned his head side just in time for his temple to connect with the blow.

              He fell instantly in a slump, halfway out of the closet.

              But Curtis could not see any movement in the body. Not even the rise and fall of the chest.  

              Now he was very afraid.

              “Yo.” It was a plea, not a question.

              No response.

              “Hey. What the fuck?” 

              Curtis moved over to him and slowly reached his fingers to the throat. Pot paranoia replaced pot desire. He expected the guy to jump up and grab his 5’9 frame and throw him across the room.

              He kind of wanted him to.

              This was worse.

              There was no pulse.

              He searched again. He felt the wrist, the neck again, the other wrist. There was no sign of a pulse.

              He checked again.

              And then he checked one more time.

              No pulse.

              Curtis sat, almost catatonic, and tried to figure out what to do.  After 10 minutes, he had a loose, weed-soaked plan.

              He would use something to prop open the door.

              He would find a laundry bin.

              Then he would call a Lyft.

Chapter 2

DAVIA

11:15 a.m. Wednesday

“Marc!”

This Negro has lost his damn mind if he thinks he’s going to tie up this bathroom. He hears me banging on the door so I’m clear this is rebellion.  He keeps forgetting I’m the older sister with the keys to everything – the attic, the car, Mom’s safe deposit box, Pandora’s box, Jack in the Box, everything.    

 “I’m coming out in a minute. Stop tripping.”

              “I have to pee negro. Get out. I’m also trying to leave so I can go to work.”

              “You drive for Uber. You ain’t on no clock.”

              Now this little aspiring hood rat hiding his full anthropology degree and matching vocabulary under that Playstation hasn’t made ten whole dollars since Princess Diana died and that’s because his ass was in the single digits and the cute smile still worked. He sits around perpetrating some thug for reasons unknown. Unless he was gonna hop his funky ass in the shower, he could jack off in his room.

              And all the drugs my sister smuggles in for STD’s are in the freezer in the garage.

              “None of your business negro and it’s Lyft anyway. Get out.”

              And really I drive for both, I just prefer Lyft. But you know what, maybe I need to be in his business.  Figure out what his failure to launch is all about. I get that Dad dying was a big deal, and that they had just reconciled enough to do two Laker game dates.  But I don’t get the privacy.  He was a semester into his Masters before we knew about it…

              Whatever. I need to worry about me. That’s my thing lately. Worry about Davia.  Screw this little negro.

              I start banging on the door again. No answer.

              “Marc I will pee in your Nikes, negro. Get out!”  I can’t go as far as Haddish, because shitting is too private to share.  Which I would respect if he were actually shitting. But this asshole thinks the flush is confusing me when I know he ain’t doing shit. I mean literally he ain’t doing shit. Our door is too small. I would have been spraying Febreeze outside.  

              “I can still pee in your Nikes after I leave here. I have a lot of pee so don’t act new.”

              He finally comes tripping out of the bathroom.

“Here. Now you can pee like you civilized, in the toilet.”

The whole bathroom smells like a botanical garden he sprayed so much.

              “Lying negro, get out so I can slam this door.”

              I pull the hat over my head because my ends are shit and I don’t get the Uber money or my paycheck from the City soon enough to get my hair done properly.   Outside, Marc sounds like he’s looking for something.

              “Fel has Mom’s car if you looking for the keys,” I tell him.   “You could just wait and hire me and I can take you where you’re going.”

              He ain’t doing this because you know, he’s the Pentagon.

              “Nah, I’m good.”            

              When I come out of the bathroom, I have to step over all the items the people related to me have left strewn about.  Then, the other day, my sister’s trifling ass Dominican husband brought one of his three babies from previous girlfriends over to the house to babysit. Glad he’s being a daddy and all, even if it is once every two months or so. But that means you get to clean up after yourself and your kids.  I realize he’s fine and all. The skin, the dimples, whatever.  If this heifer has a baby by him I will fight her.

              It’s important to give yourself goals when you drive Uber or Lyft. They say go big or go home. I can only do the former because if I continue with the latter I might murder my family with glee. Glee. So I’m trying to figure out how I can make my own version of this app to sort out some of the issues with it that they haven’t worked out.  A whole paycheck bet on the fact that the creators probably didn’t do this shit themselves as drivers, only as passengers.

              Now this Tinder app is another story. My right thumb is experiencing carpal tunnel just from the heavy swiping to the right I’m doing for these tired fools on here.  Not sure that there is any fix other than going somewhere where there are better men.  They think a whole lot of themselves. They take GQ shots, floss shots, gold teeth shots, drink shots in the shots. You name it I swipe across it.

              This one cat called himself “the G who knows your G spot.”

              But there was one guy last year who was relatively close and fine as hell. Young, look like he just came out of the washing machine fresh.  Johnathan. Pretty teeth, nice wave-cap-made hair, at least a basic understanding of the English language and a body-ody-ody.

              I swiped Left.

              He swiped left too.

              When we talked and he said he could sing, I was interested.

              When he said he’s 24, that meant he could only make me cum because the cut off age for something serious is Marc’s and he’s 25. Not going down further than that. But maybe Johnathan could go down further than that.  To my nether regions.

              GPS is nice and all, but he doesn’t need to know even what area I live in.  So I took to meeting him in the same area he found me in on the app, not far from the airport.

              Mind you, today I’m in a long, heavy African print skirt with my locks up in a scarf, so that these passengers don’t mistake this affable smile for weakness. They need to assume I have something under my seat other than good hot cootchie (there’s a slit on the side of the skirt for easy access and I pull one leg out of the underwear to help).

              So I’m waiting over near Manhattan Beach, where I know there will be folks needing to go to LA soon.  Johnathan shows up and I act cool, like I don’t have time.  Mind you, this is the third time I’ve seen him and I’ve let him finger my snatch every time. Last time I let him taste it but ended that shit right away because it was feeling good and I was in no position to take the time. Plus I hadn’t made my quota that week, so I didn’t deserve the reward. Anyway, I put lots of time in between meetings so that Johnathan doesn’t think I’m thirsty or desperate.  A bitch has to find herself unavailable often, cause negroes have egos even when it ain’t serious.

              “Hey African goddess.”

              Really?

              “You have ten minutes, maybe less.”

              “You still a goddess.”

              I roll my eyes real hard.  “Look I have to work, in a second. I’m logging on in five minutes and if I get a ride, that’s it.”

              “I’ll give you a ride,” he says and starts grinning with all his teeth.

              “You know I can’t touch you and then do my job. I don’t have any hand sanitizer.”

              “Come on, man why you got to be like that?”

              He is right, to be fair. I could have at least given him a hand job one of these times at the very least.  But this is 2019 and we ladies spent all last year understanding our worth.

              “It’s just that I’m a little scarred. I had a bad experience, the last time I did it, this guy was rough, and my head, it was, you know, it was bad…”  I pour this shit on thick. “I mean I know you’re not like that, you’ve been great, but…”

              “I’m sorry. You know what, I’m sorry, my bad. I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

              I try to cry on cue but I’m too horny to be anywhere close to tears or even good bad acting.

              “Hey,” he said, “can I at least take it out?”

              Before I can answer, I look over from my dry tears and see his entire dick standing up like a volcano. With a palm tree coming out of it.  I swear it’s that big. It’s only 24 years old, so it doesn’t need a scaffold. 

              I roll my eyes again and pretend to be unbothered while juices run to my sweet parts like people on their way to a sale.

              “Fine,” I say and grab the top of the tree.  “You have five minutes and then I’m hitting that button to go on-line and take—oooh—shit.”

              His fingers are feathering my cootch and I closed my eyes. It was too good.   It is too good to be true.   Way too good.  I open my mouth and air comes out slowly. My eyes close.  His fingers move around.  My stuff opens up to him.  I grab his hand before he can circle my juice with his finger tips. He reaches the there anyway.  

              I moan.

              He breathes warm air on my neck.

              I moan.

              He calls more juices to his hand.

              I moan.

              He plays a song on my clit.

              I cum.

              A lot.

              I breathe heavy in recovery, and to get back to the matter at hand. Fiscal goals.

              But it takes me longer because this was his best work so far.  I’m still shaking. I don’t even realize I still have my hand on his tree of a dick.  He tries to talk and I take that hand and cover his mouth with two fingers that he pries apart with his tongue.  Now I have to be back to earth for real, before I let this little negro really get it.   

              Without hesitation, I sign on to the app to get rides.

              “Wait what you doing?”

              “Working.”

              “You gonna leave me like this.”

              I look at his dick and you know what, it seems unfair. Really it does. But then I think, this is 2019.  Men have left women sore and orgasm-free for entire marriages while they pursued great wealth and power.   This youngster, growing cuter by the minute, could definitely be a casualty.  He’ll take one for the team.

              “Yeah,” I say. “Oh look, there’s a pick up down the street at the Salvia Hotel. You got to go cutie.”

              “Wait, wait, where is that? Can I get a ride with you to there and then get out.”

              If I agreed to take him there, it would cancel the last little bit of guilt I have about leaving him high and dry. Fuck it.

              “Sure, but you have to get out of the car as soon as we stop.”

              That is, of course, not what happens. Right after I drive the four minutes to the hotel, Johnathan is in my crotch.  Mind you, he had tried to put his fingers back there a few times when I called the rider and was told to go to the back of the hotel.  As soon as I put the phone down, I told him to get out of there.

              But while I’m waiting for the passenger, this boy takes his seatbelt off, slides his head down into my seat and grabs my spot with his tongue.  I mean he folded up my entire clitoris with his tongue.  

              Then he starts to hum.

              Like a jazz standard. Into my crotch.

              I put my hands on his head with the intention of moving it away but all I can do his squeeze him further. Relenting is inevitable with the relentless.

              My eyes are closed now as he uses…something—ooooo damn, lips, tonsils, a second tongue (did this little negro have a second tongue???) to suck the flesh of my pussy toward him.  His tongue gets the meat of my thighs too all at one time and I shake.  

              I start out sounding like Toni Braxton. “Whew.” 

              But after a few minutes, when he finds that magic between his finger and tongue, I holler like Al Green.  I know I’ll be embarrassed later but I can’t help myself.  He has me on the cusp for what seems like two hours and I know it’s been two minutes.

              The knock on the window is so loud, probably because I am so deep in this near-orgasm. Fortunately, it’s on the back passenger window.  I fiddle around with the door and roll down the window a little.

              “Curtis?” I say, checking the phone.

              “Yeah can you pop the trunk?”

              Then he leaves the window very fast and I’m relieved.  I push the trunk release button and I see the lid fly up in the rearview mirror.

              “Johnathan you have to go.”  He just keeps melting my middle, fingers and tongue working at the same time.  I can’t tell if it’s just me or what’s going on, but it feels like a lot of weight in the back of the car, like dude is loading five suitcases. 

              “Johnathan, you have to goooooooooooo – oh fuck!”

              I cum with the energy of a hundred stars exploding. 

              Johnathan gets out of my lap just in time for Curtis to get in. And now that I’ve had an attack blow job, Johnathan has to get out.   

              Somehow, this mothafucker understands this and has a self-satisfied smirk on his face when he turns to Curtis and says, “She was sleep but she good now. You want the front.”

              “Nah, man. I’m good.”

              She good now? Smug bastard.  Now, I’m just mad that he’s right, that he made me cum like that with his ambidextrous mouth and volcano penis.  Well I guess he didn’t use the penis, but he had it, which helped his cause.              

              I just look at him and shake my head as he walks away from the car.             

              “We’re going to San Vicente and Hauser?” I ask Curtis.

              “Yeah.”

              “Just, um, on the corner? No address, right?”

              “On the corner.”

              Fine, he’s the mysterious type.  But to get out of the mindset of this colossal orgasm that I just had in my money-maker (and I mean the car, since my cootchie was actually losing me dollars), I try talking to him.

              “You’re my first ride of the day so far,” I say.

              “Cool.”

              “How is it going so far?”

              “Alright.”

              “I should be able to get you there soon. Not too much traffic on surface streets.”

              Crickets. 

              I look at him in the rearview mirror and he looks anxious, like he’s running from a crime scene.

              “There should be a water bottle back there if you need some,” I say. “I left the other vehicle with the backseat Keurig dispenser at home this time so you’re out of luck.”

              He does a flash of lightning smile and I realize he’s not as much rude as he is worried. He could have been traumatized by the cops. This is Los Angeles, the city that originated the televised unpunished law enforcement hate crime against black men.

              Now, I try not to be nosey, but I couldn’t help but notice the sweat on his cheek from what looks like anxiety. And then there’s some dripping down on his neck. And by the way, who puts a tattoo of two apples looking like Siamese twins on their neck area? Siamese apples?  You know these little hoodrats…

              And who am I to judge, smelling like open, freshly eaten cootchie.   I roll down the windows.  Old boy in the back doesn’t say anything else. And I struggle not to call and ask Johnathan what he’s doing later.

              “You okay?” I ask. “Seriously. Not to get up in your business but is there anything I can do?”

              “I’m good.”

              Ten minutes later I pull over.

              “Why you stopping?”

              “Another passenger,” I say. “You chose Uber share.”

              He checks his phone and sees that this shit is true, so he makes that face men make when they’re mad at themselves. 

              And then, and this is the part that made me feel like I was in Stranger Things, he hops out of the car and bounces.  I’m yelling out the window and I’m just about to get out of the car until I realize that whatever evidence of Johnathan’s cootchie conquer might be right there in the seat. That’s a bad look for this next passenger. 

              And by the way, the passenger, Coby is the name on my phone, he comes out with a small roller bag.

              “Hi, Davia right? Can I put this in the backseat or should I do the trunk?”

              The trunk!

              That’s when I realize that Curtis has left all his shit in the trunk. Who does that?  But you know what, it almost didn’t happen in my world because it was being shook at the time. I have to tame all my judgments.  Now, I pump the trunk and I get out of the car and try to pull myself together all at the same time.

              “I’m sorry sir,” I say, making my way around, “but the guy who was just here just ran out and left his stuff in my trunk and would you believe all this time driving for Uber and Lyft, I’ve never someone leave behind actual luggage.”

              I can’t figure out why Coby is looking shocked until I get to the back of the car and see that there is a grown man, still as rocks, stuffed in fetal position with his back to us.

              And then I run back to the side of the car, screaming.

Chapter 1

MARC

10:46 a.m. Wednesday

I needed to bust.  And with somebody.

It take two minutes to download the app and make a profile.  I never been on it but I seen my friends on it.  Used my dad’s old email addy, downloaded a pic that showed my stomach, my legs, my print. I put up my stats.  27, 5’8, 140, 8.5, single.

I start looking at profiles and they come at me like trains pulling in a station.

But it was taking forever to go through each one. Some of the profiles have blurry pics, pics of trees and skies, bad silhouettes and shit.  Convos slow as fuck cuz bros be in denial about wanting to fuck.  Even the dude that moved fast took a while.

Hey whasup

Whassup wit u man

Watching tv

What you get into?

Smoke and chill.

That’s whassup. 

I whip my shit out, stand up and take a shot of my dick. Too dark. I used the flash and the shit was right. Overhead shot, like a drone shot but close so the tip of my dick climbed up out the picture.

              I send it.

Sexy af. I want it

Send ass pic

Didn’t hear shit from him after that for a while.

Take me 30 minutes just to go through the messages.  Big dudes trying to hide the gut. Little dudes trying not to look short.   Dudes with $$$$ all over their shit looking for somebody “generous.”  Some chocolate chasers sending three and four ass shots at a time.  A few blank no-pic profiles who opened they private pics.   My friend always look at the ones with no pics cause usually those bros be DL and fine as fuck.  I open the first one. Dee / 23 years old / 5’2 / 110 lbs / black / looking for Deepthroats++++ to be on cam / sex cam, videos, pics.

Nah, even if I was trying to take dick, it ain’t going down my throat and I ain’t no porn star. Block.  I looked at profile after profile. Every other one keeps my shit on hard but some of these cats be so quick with the pics coming at me, it’s a turn off.  You got yo shit ready like that when you thirsty. I don’t need a thirsty one.

Then the first dude finally sends the ass shot, 10 minutes later. It had him on his side, leg bent, like he on a sofa. The twist in the waist area supposed to hide the gut – I’m hip to that trick. Best friend complains about it all the time. Block button.

The app drains your battery and mine was already on low. The outlet in my bedroom wasn’t working and I didn’t need the family up in my business so the living room outlet was out. Too many people living up in this house anyway.

I’m not out. My older sister is nosey as fuck and my twin sister’s trifling ass Dominican husband so busy judging people even though they live here in my mother’s house.  So I go to the bathroom and sit in there, charge my shit in the outlet near the sink.  

I keep scrolling through the profiles until I see the one I wanted. Sexy ass dude. Body on point.  Good stats, 6’0, 180. He hit me with “Sup.”

Chillin. You?

Just at the hotel watching tv

That’s whassup. You trying to fuck?

Yeah send me some pics.

Just for you right?

huh?

I can’t have my shit getting out. Too much to lose.

This is my shit. This is the guy. I didn’t need my business out in the street.

He sent me some pics. Banging body, looked like sweet potatoes, solid.

How freaky are you?

How freaky you need?

Anonymous shit.

Huh?

I want you to come to my hotel room and fuck me.  Don’t say shit. Don’t introduce yourself.  I’m gonna leave the door propped.

Dude it’s gonna take me a while to get there. You thirty minutes away.

You text me when you get here and then I’ll leave the door open. I’ll be ass up on my hands and knees. You just come in and fuck.  After you cum, I want you to kiss me and then leave.

He sent me a sexy profile pic.  Dude looks like Lebron but with a smaller face.

“Marc!”

My sister yelling at me through the door sounding like she in the bathroom with me, in the toilet or something.  Banging the side of her fist against the door.

“I’m coming out in a minute. Stop tripping.”

              “I have to pee negro. Get out. I’m also trying to leave so I can go to work.”

              “You drive for Uber. You ain’t on no clock.” Davia don’t keep a job.

              “None of your business negro and it’s Lyft anyway. Get out.”

              I had to hurry up cause she wasn’t gonna let up.

              Bring condoms. I only do safe sex. Come and fuck me until you bust. But only safe.

              Bet.  Address?

              Then I’m waiting and this dude taking forever.

              She banging on the door again. “Marc I will pee in your Nikes, negro. Get out!”

              I unplug the phone and flush the toilet to make her think I was using it. I spray  the Febreeze.

              Shoulders cross and she thinks I checked her.

              “I can still pee in your Nikes after I leave here. I have a lot of pee so don’t act new.”

              I come out of the bathroom. 

              “Here,” I say. “Now you can pee like you civilized, in the toilet.”

              “Lying negro, get out so I can slam this door.”

              I start looking for the keys to my mother’s car. I’m tearing up the front room trying to find those shits.

              “Fel has Mom’s car if you looking for the keys,” Davia yells from the bathroom.

              Fuck. If I have to wait for a uber, I have to go through trying to tell the driver where we live.  This part of Centinela is crazy for GPS.

              “You could just wait and hire me and I can take you where you’re going.”

              I don’t need Davia in my business.  She don’t know I fuck with dudes and if she did my whole family would know.  That fucking Dominican my older sister married to, we already almost come to blows.  I’d be fighting his ass all the time.

              “Nah, I’m good.”

              I leave, walk over to the store and then order the Lyft.

              I check the app to get room number to the hotel.  315.

              I take the stairs so I don’t have to wait in front of the front desk.

              I knock twice.

              It seem like it take him forever to get to the door.

              “Yo.”

              He probably can’t hear me though and I don’t want to say more cuz people might hear.

              I turn to leave and he opens the door.  Couldn’t see him.   

              When I walk back I get a good look.

He don’t look like the picture. 

              Better.

              Lighter than LeBron, more like McCollum. He shorter than me and I’m 5’10.  This dude sexy as hell. I don’t know why he so nervous.

              “Yo.”

              “Hey.”

              I hurry in.           

              “Don’t want people out there to hear, man. I keep it low.”

              He kind of nodded.

              “You look better than that pic man.

              We just standing there facing off.

              He take a few steps toward me.   

              He slide his hand along my hip.

              I touch his ass.

              His breathing on my neck makes my dick hard.  It pushes into his thigh.

              He put his tongue on my neck, my shoulder, my lips.

              We start dry humping standing up. He was shaking.

              “You alright man?”

              “Yeah, I just.  I never messed with a dude.” He look at the closet. That’s a played metaphor.  

              “Cool.”

              I rub up on him harder.

              He jams his hand down, grabs my nuts.

              I put my tongue in his mouth, like putting his handful in there.

              Start licking from his lip to his jaw to his shoulder. 

              He moans some.

              My dick is hard as hell.

              He squeezes. And then I know where this is going.

              Then he looks back at the closet. 

If I was a girl, that would have killed my mood.

I ignore that shit though and keep trying to lick his body.

              At first I’m ready to leave. He can’t get into it and I’m not sure what the fuck he afraid of. But we in the room. Alone. The door shuts.  I see his dick jumping. His ass looks ready to eat.  We can get this in and be good.   But he can’t let himself just go. 

              I back away from him. Then he takes his shirt off.   He takes my shirt off.

              He has a tattoo of two apples on his neck near the collarbone.  I sucked on the skin there.

              Whatever he was holding on to dropped with that shirt.  He licked my whole chest, ran his tongue around it. I hear a noise like something dropped and I start looking around to see where it is. 

              “Did you hear that?”

              Instead of answer, he put my dick in his mouth. Didn’t even see him get to one knee.

              My eyes roll back.  He doesn’t move back and forth, just keeps whole thing in, washing it with his tongue. I feel the roof of his mouth, the soft part, the throat. 

              I almost fall down it’s so good.

              He’s grabbing at my thighs to pull me deeper.

Then there’s a jam, something that sounds like a hard tap.

“What’s that?”

He stops and looks at the closet again.

This time I hear another kind of moan, a gut-punched, desperate kind of noise.  Someone is trying to talk, sounds like he’s gagged.

The dude looks at me with a gangster look and then shoves my dick back into his mouth.

Now I’m scared. And I can’t move.  The dude looks at me like he trying to dare me to move.

The sounds from the closet grow.  Struggle.

Then he gives up and pulls away to get to the closet.

I move back before dude can change his mind.  I didn’t finish pulling my pants up all the way before I fell back. 

I turn around and get the fuck up.  When I turn to see where this dude is, I see the only reason he can’t come after me is that the closet door is opening slowly from the bottom.

He chooses that instead.Whoever or whatever is in there starts making more noise and I run out of there with no shirt.My dick is still out when I run out of that hotel room.But I don’t stop running until I get out.