Good afternoon folks. I posted a paragraph from this chapter earlier today all over social media and got a terrific response so I thought to myself, "Why not share the entire chapter?" Here's my way of saying thanks for your showing love and here's a bit more if you weren't fully convinced to read "Blood & Vengeance" in its entirety.
1
SWEET SASSY´S SUITE
The tiny bedroom reeked of marijuana mixed with
the faint odor of the perfumes she sprayed and the incense she burned to try to
mask the scent. She smoked weed way more than she ate which worked out
perfectly in her profession. It was almost a job requirement that she protect
her slender waistline at all times but she also needed to medicate herself to
keep her mind right, just to survive her shifts with her sanity intact. Sassy
needed the stranger’s faces and male parts that she was forced to get familiar
with to become a blur. That way, she could wash away the pain and stains of
their grimy touch when she showered. Otherwise, she feared that they would
leave the type of permanent scars that might not show on the surface but would
always mark her, just underneath her skin, tainting her soul.
At the moment, she remained fairly sober because
she didn’t mind the company of the guest that currently laid his head on her
bed. It was rare that she cared for any of her clients but Will Sampson
was special. Everyone on the street outside must have heard her moaning,
despite the fact that he wasn’t even close to being the most skilled lover that
she had been with. He made love to her clumsily like a schoolboy who was just
getting his beak wet. All the same, everything that she felt inside her body
while she was with him was so real that her heart ached sometimes. She had seen
all shapes, ages, races and sizes of men but she sexually connected with him
differently than she had with anyone else. That was probably because, if her
suspicions were correct, she had been his first. It turned her on and excited
her to know that she had been the first woman he had ever been inside. There
was also something deeper about him, something that she couldn’t quite explain
with words but whatever it was, she had never felt it in any other man. She had
even invited him back to her apartment on a few occasions but he seemed to
prefer spending time with her there in the room she rented above the Platinum
lady Gentlemen’s Club, probably so he had no chance of forgetting what it was
that she did for a living.
The evening air was stagnant and not much breeze
blew through the open window. The noisy ceiling fan really didn’t do much about
the sweltering heat as it spun weakly overhead and squeaked like a distressed
mouse caught on a sticky, glue trap. Her skin shined and glistened with fresh
perspiration but she didn’t mind the way it made her glow. She was sure that
her favorite lover liked it too.
Will’s nine-millimeter handgun sat in its holster,
slung over the metal folding chair in the corner. In the dark, she couldn’t see
his eyes clearly but she could sense him straining in the poor light to look at
it. He was always uptight, wound up and paranoid, no matter how intense or satisfying
the sex was. Whenever that gun wasn’t
firmly in his hand or safely secured near his left armpit, a few inches from
his heart, he would stare it at almost as if he expected it to grow wings and
fly away.
“Who do you love, me or her?” Sassy asked,
referring to the gun he kept staring at.
“Her,” Will answered dryly.
“All this ass, these luscious, firm, perky tits
and this pretty face but you love that and not me?”
“She’ll save my life...you’ll get me killed. One
day, I’ll probably have to use her to save me from you,” he answered.
“I would never hurt you. Have you ever considered
that maybe I love you?” she asked, realizing how ridiculous it was that she
felt like the mistress, second place to a cold, black, gun.
“I doubt that.”
“Why?”
“You don’t love men. You don’t love me. You don’t
even love yourself. You only love money...because you believe it can save you
from everything you hate.”
“That’s a cruel thing to say.”
“Not cruel...honest,” he answered coldly.
“Suppose I told you that I slept with three other
men today?”
“Then that’s what you did. You don’t belong to
anyone, especially not me.”
He climbed out of bed and walked over to the
folding chair to get dressed in the dark. He didn’t like when she started to
get emotional and sentimental with him. Those moments seriously threatened to
make him forget what she was and he knew that that was dangerous, for his life
and his heart. Sassy leaned over and flicked the black switch on the lamp on
the nightstand. The room was instantly filled with a tacky, rouge glow because
of the thin red scarf she had thrown over the shade to soften the light.
“Why’d you turn the lights on?” he asked.
“I like looking at you,” she answered, lustfully
studying his scars and tattoos.
Will looked back over his shoulder as she lay
naked in the bed and wished that he had left the lights on during their
high-spirited sexual romp. She really was something to behold. If her skin
wasn’t marred with tacky, poorly drawn tattoos, she would have looked almost
like a woman straight out of a painting, graceful, elegant and flawless. All
the same, her imperfections made her desirable in a way that inspired the
dirtiest thoughts in most men. He looked away from her before he was tempted to
turn his short stay into an all-nighter. He had things to do and
he had put them off for long enough. He really shouldn’t have stayed for as
long as he had but he believed that, if he might lose his life that night, he
wanted to die with the recent, sexually soothing memories of a woman’s thighs
fresh on his mind. He even started to think that Sassy might be a good luck charm
because, ever since he had been kissing her, he hadn’t been kissed by death
just yet.
“You really don’t care about me do you?” she
asked, pouting with her head on her white satin pillowcase that covered her
fluffy pillow. She saved her best linens for his visits.
“I do.”
“You have a funny way of showing it,” she said,
sounding as cliché as a line straight out of a romantic comedy.
“How am I supposed to show it?”
“I don’t know,” she answered then paused. “You
never say sweet things or do anything nice for me.”
Fully dressed with his gun securely strapped in
place, he walked over to the bed and sat down next to her. He looked into her
sad, brown eyes and carefully weighed what he would say next.
“You work in a house of lies. Thirsty men come
here and spend money to feel important and the women pretend to enjoy dancing
for their howling amusement, to boost these petty, unimportant men’s egos so
they can stomach going home to face their small, miserable lives with their
wives. Men come here to fool themselves into believing that they can afford the
part of you that their hands can never touch. You and I both know that you will
never give that to any of them. That game plays out over and over again, every
night, in all of these little back rooms. This...what me and you are doing
right now...is the only real truth.”
“You’re too complicated.”
“There’s nothing complicated about me. I’m just
speaking the truth. The truth is always simple, basic and easy. Fantasies and
lies get complicated because it’s hard to keep them believable.”
He leaned close to her face and, in a rare display
of tender affection, pressed his lips to her forehead. Sassy smiled and got
butterflies in her tummy like a school girl anticipating her first kiss. Despite
what she did to earn money, she still desperately wanted to be loved for more
than just being a master at making men cum. She might have been a prostitute
but she was also a human being and a woman with feelings. That delicate moment
didn’t last long and she felt foolish for thinking it would.
“Doesn’t that mean it’s time for you to go?” she
asked as his phone began to ring in his pocket.
“In a few more minutes. I want to spend a little
more time with you,” he answered.
For the next ten minutes, he ran his fingers along
the smooth curves of her face and played in her hair as if he believed that he
might be looking at her for the last time. Then, almost as if he had been
coldly calculating the time that had passed with clocklike precision, he
abruptly got up from her bed.
"Would you care if I got hurt or killed?” she
asked.
“I would shed tears at your funeral,” he answered
and Sassy couldn’t tell if he was being sincere or sarcastic.
Will counted out a thousand dollars and tossed it
on the pillow where his head had rested for the time he had spent with her. She
reached across lazily to pick up the knot of money but didn’t bother to count
it.
“You left way too much,” she said as he walked to
the door, certain that, as usual, he had overpaid for his stay in her land
of milk and honey.
“I didn’t. I left exactly what I owe you. The
extra is for the information you got for me,” he answered and walked out of her
room.
Copyright
© 2014 Keith Gaston & Keith Kareem Williams
All
rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment