Authors: Sherrod Story
“Heavy?” he rasped.
Fiona shook her head, preferring to conserve her breath for breathing. After a while Natty kissed her and rolled off onto his back. He took off the condom, tied it, and tossed it into a nearby trash can.
“I can’t believe it was that easy,” he whispered, turning his head to look at her.
She didn’t take offense. He was just being honest after all. They’d been friends for years, and had managed to remain friendly and professional for work in the past. Now they’d come together again and tumbled headlong into bed.
It was Daney’s fault
. He’d made her lonely.
For a long moment she said nothing. Then she turned to his nightstand and picked up the joint she’d spied sitting in an ashtray there. There was a bright red lighter with a long flame sitting next to it. She lit the joint efficiently and carefully inhaled. Fire. Nice. Trust Natty to have the best c
hillin’ in this spartan place.
“Sometimes,” Fiona said, smoke curling around her head into the silence, “The only choice is to choose all the options.” She smile
d. “You need to decorate.”
Natty stared at Fiona. He reached out slowly, curled his arm around her waist and pulled. She slid to a stop against his body and blew a few wobbly grey rings above his head. He took the joint from her, and they looked at each
other through the smoke.
“You gon’ be trouble.”
Fiona laughed as he pulled her on top of his body and again nudged her legs on either side of his body. He pulled her down to lie flat, her breasts delightfully smushed with hot hard pressure. He reached for a condom.
She licked the pul
se beating in his throat. “Me?”
Natty used their n
ew intimacy to bully Fiona unmercifully in the studio. He worked her so long and hard, he wrung her nearly dry some nights. She fell into bed and slept without so much as a dream. Other nights after they left the studio she was so tired emotionally, she burst out crying. Natty barely wanted her to leave to eat. When she let him he had food brought in rather than let her go out.
He nearly drove her crazy while they recorded ‘Journey’. He wrote the song after they slept
together that first time. She woke to find him hunched over his guitar, muttering and humming as he scratched out a rough composition of the music.
Fiona loved the richness of the
song, the subtlety of its layers. Natty was good for creating the most evocative images with the barest words. His lyrical palette only had primary colors, yet in four minutes he managed to show you chartreuse, azure and damp, moss green.
The song was simple. It was a story about a woman doing anything to get to her man, but it was shaped for Fiona’s voice and no other. Natty knew what it would sound like before she ever gave it life. He knew how her voice would dip and slip around the notes, that she would scat at a certain break and climb the scale on another. It was destined to be one of those rare songwriting triumphs, a hit
that took 20 minutes to make.
But Natty was workin’ her, and he was on her constantly about smoking. He was too clever to harangue her verbally, or lecture her with i
nformation she already knew. Natty was physical. He followed her into the back seat of the car, plucked pinners from her lips and tossed them out the window, oblivious to her shrieks. He came to her house unannounced and bust in, grabbing her hands and chasing her if that’s what it took to unwrap her fingers from something. And sometimes, that’s what it took.
“What the fuck
you want from me?” she’d yelled after one such episode. They were lying on the bed breathing hard from the tussle. Fiona had won that one, temporarily, by flashing him. While he was distracted by her bare breasts she managed to snatch a hit before he took it.
“I’m a single Black mother with a lot of fuckin’ responsibilities and no other vices. Can’t you leave me alone about th
is?”
“No,” h
e replied promptly. “Whatever your angst is over that stereotype bull shit, that’s your problem, though for the record, I say who gives a shit! However you got Flora, you got her. I ain’t gon’ let you fuck up your voice. And I know you care, so stop actin’ like you don’t.
“You don’t know
shit,” she said irritably.
He just laughed as she
watched him hit the joint he’d just taken from her.
“Cleo don’t know shit either.”
“Whatever,” he told her, and left the room to farm the joint out to someone else.
“Whatchu’ want from me?” she ask
ed him again, when he returned.
“Everything,” he answered insta
ntly.
He could have told her that he drove her so hard for so long because he liked having her around him all day. They had often worked this way in the past, in lengthy gorilla sessions that elicited the kind of songs fans remembered years after they faded fr
om the everyday radio rotation.
It was why Andrea had barely had to make a peep before the world started standing in line for her next CD. The songs she’d done so far had whet the public’s appetite just enough that strategically snapped pictur
es of her and Natty together created a buzz so loud it was near deafening.
Or so Natty said. Fiona
just rolled her eyes when he talked like that, though she wasn’t stupid and knew full well he was telling the truth. But her mind was something else. His new sneak attack sex strategy had her totally distracted. He’d grab her whenever they were alone and grind himself right between her legs. We’re talking a hand full of ass in one hand, full on mash against a hard dick press. It literally stole her breath, and then he’d be on the other side of the room talking as though nothing had happened.
He
teased her constantly. The engineers and musicians grew accustomed to unexplained absences where the two would either return freshly showered or charmingly disheveled.
If she went anywhere alone,
as soon as she returned he said, “We missed you,” or begin to recount an old story about a studio session from her last album.
Fiona was
surprised to learn that he remembered all the laughs they’d shared, that he’d experienced joy hugging her or tickling her in the booth to get what he wanted. They shared that again now, with the added pleasure he knew awaited him in her sweet, soft body.
He had to restrain himself from making jealous public displays when someone call
ed her attention away from him. He hid it well, using in-studio intensity to cover impatience until he had her alone. It worked because he was notoriously ruthless with all of the musicians.
B
ut ever since they started sleeping together, he seemed to have a special hard on for her. One night she told him, “If we weren’t getting so much done, I’d tell you to kiss my ass.”
Natty, the king of optimism as well as a slave driver, wanted to have the album done by the time pre-production for her movie was over. She’d have to cut back on studio time drastically once actual shooting began, and they both knew now that the first single had blown up the charts, if they didn’t want to screw up the album’s momentum before it began
they had to churn it out quick.
“I’m hoarse.”
He grinned sheepishly, and said he would make her some tea. He knew he was trippin’, but he made it up to her every night. Behind her bedroom door he was her pet. He liked to listen to her bitch, even about things he’d done to her during the day.
H
e’d encourage her to get worked up than watch her flounce around and shake her finger, grinning. He’d offer an apology in a deep, sweet tone of voice, deliberately seducing her with big hazel eyes and long sweeps of curly black lashes. He knew she couldn’t resist him as a supplicant.
Other times they were perfectly silent. Fiona wouldn’t talk much if her throat was playing up, and
she didn’t have to tell him when that was. He already knew her so he just watched to learn her new patterns. God knew he was able to anticipate her sexual needs almost without fail. And even if that wasn’t what she intended, he always managed to give her something she wanted more.
Fiona grinned when he told Cleo to go to hell with her diet bull shit. She kissed him when he told
her pissy-looking cousin, “You got her skinny as a fuckin’ stick.” Then he’d take her out to dinner and for drinks and they’d inadvertently end up in the tabloids.
She’d
actually gained three pounds since they began sleeping together.
“You tryna make me fall in love with you,” she told him once after they’d both climaxed. She rolled off him onto her back and
turned to accuse, “Ain’t you?”
He just laughed, and she knew she was right.
He knew sexually he was almost impossible for her to resist, and he was not above putting it in her face that he led her around by the tit, as he called it.
In retaliation she’d play
games with him. These weren’t physical, Daney type games. These were mind games where they learned about each other via the worst, the filthiest revelations they could remember or conjure. It was a contest of sorts, a competitive kind of psychological warfare.
Maybe warfare was too harsh a word. More like love fare, ‘cause at the end they had sex. He’d tell her about som
e girl from his past…
“I went out with an Asian girl once. A model. I met her at some industry party one of my friends was throwing for Atlantic for some rapper I can’t remember the
name of. She was gorgeous, poised and slinky in this silver dress dripping with sequins. Her legs looked like they started right underneath her tits.”
“Robin Lee,” Fiona said. “I remember her. She’s an acti
on star in Asia now isn’t she?”
Natty nodded.
“Did you fuck her that night?”
“No,” he frowned at her flippancy. “I didn’t. We left the party and went out to eat. We had drinks, danced
, and I took her to her hotel.”
“What was she doing in town?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I think she was dating that rapper y
ou can’t remember the name of.”
“Are you gon
na tell this story, or am I? We dated three times before we slept together.”
“You counted, huh? How was it?”
“I don’t remember,” he said thoughtfully. “Musta been okay, I kept doin’ it.”
“She had a fabulous figure.”
“Anyway,” he said. “I thought we were a couple after a few of months of her comin’ here and me goin’ to wherever she was.”
“I remember seeing pictures of you in Paris at some couture show during the height of the season.”
“Yeah. We had a lot of fun together. She fed me Asian food. I fed her soul food, when she ate,” he said, chuckling.
“Models gotta work,” Fiona smiled, understanding. She remembered starving in the name of perfection. It was a losing game and one more reason to love being a singer, though since she’d had Fl
ora she didn’t eat much either.
“We went on trips together, she met my family. I met hers. Then I hear she’s stepping out on me with this Asian cat.”
“The director.”
“Right. I see ‘em photographed together at some premie
re, and I’m like, what the fuck? She tells me she thinks it’s time. That she was gon’ be abroad working and sustaining a relationship is impossible under those conditions.”
“
She thinks it’s time for what?”
“Right! She thin
ks it’s time we call it quits.”
“Just l
ike that?”
He nodded.
“No warning?”
“None.”
“Damn.”
“Cold, right?”
Fiona made a face. “Icy.”
“So I’m like, were you cheatin’ on me? She says no. She hasn’t slept with him yet, but she might, and she doesn’t wanna hurt me so this is the best way she knows to
handle it.”
“Must be that Asi
an stoicism in her comin’ out.”
“Right. But I wasn’t exactly heartbroken. She hadn’t be
en around in a few weeks. We were talkin’ on the phone more than anything else.”
“The press made it sound like you were
fucked up.”
“That shit was annoying. And she played their ass too, and parlayed her way into
a very profitable new career.”
“She embarrassed you.”
“She hurt my feelings.”
Fiona looked skeptical.
“I liked her. It wasn’t like fireworks or anything, but she treated me nice. Then all of a sudden she’s like, okay. That’s enough. Thanks for playing. Goodbye. That shit blew me.”
She saw it then, the hurt he’d carefully layered over with a quiet nonchalance. He won that round, she told him. H
e’d made her heart ache a bit. In retaliation for his sweetness she tried to shock him.
“I knew this guy once for
five years. Met him when I was like 13. He was in the armed forces, total square. Didn’t smoke, but liked to drink. In great shape for his age. He was married, but he was stationed in another state and lived apart from his wife and kids.