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.