SELFLESS (13 page)

“Yes,” I breathed, trying to decide how eager I should seem. It was hard to decide on a happy medium. I consoled myself with the fact that this was my first upstairs business transaction. Mr. Marshall was sweet enough that I could test several different personas on him before I settled on my final business model.

“I only want to make you happy,” he said before plunging into my body.

The gasp I gave wasn’t fake. His cock filled me up and then some, forcing my body to make hasty adjustments to accommodate him. Our limbs got tangled up as he withdrew almost completely out of me.

“Did I go too fast?” he asked, tracing the side of my face.

“No,” I said, shaking my head and kissing the palm of his hand. “I want all of you. Please.”

“You never have to beg with me,” he said, pushing in again. I saw stars, crying out at the sensations of the position and the feeling of something I had foregone for so long. If I was being honest with myself, I missed sex. It had been a while.

In one fluid motion, I kicked my leg out and turned, his cock still inside me. We were now in a spooning position, my ass pressed up against him, which Mr. Marshall apparently enjoyed very much. He grabbed my cheeks, spread them, and pushed them back together, thrusting mightily all the while.

“Tell me you like it,” he begged. “Tell me it feels good.”

“It feels so good, Mr. Marshall,” I moaned. “Please don’t stop. It feels so amazing, Mr. Marshall. Oh, oh please. Please.”

I squeezed my legs together, increasing the pressure on my clitoris, and enjoyed the sensations that tightening my pussy afforded me. Mr. Marshall gave a strangled gasp and clutched me to him, pumping raggedly into me.

“Yes!” I cried out, aware that he was coming. “Yes! Yes!” I wasn’t coming, but he didn’t have to know that. I hadn’t been quick enough to arrange for my own orgasm.

Mr. Marshall shuddered as he pulled out. I rolled back over to face him and planted a big kiss right on his lips.

“That was wonderful,” I said, hugging him and stroking his back as we waited for our breathing to slow. It took Mr. Marshall a lot longer than me, and I wondered just how old he was.

“Miss Pumpkin, the pleasure was mine,” he said, kissing me softly.

And it was as simple as that. With each subsequent upstairs business transaction, I got better and better at what I did, became more comfortable in playing a role that I found had the most success—demure, eager to please, honest, and, above all, a lady. A lady in spite of the reality of being a whore. The customers ate it up. They could pay for freaky any time they liked, but finding a girl they could actually envision taking home to meet their parents was somehow a turn-on. I didn’t analyze it too thoroughly.

With all the money I started making, Mama made it clear that my slow start had been well worth the wait. I didn’t like the idea that I wasn’t sure how much clients were paying to sleep with me, but I’d observed one thing very clearly from the very beginning: Don’t get between Mama and her money. She didn’t like to be questioned on it, and she didn’t like to discuss her business model.

As long as I was reasonably happy and secure in the nightclub and boarding house, though, I didn’t see a problem with Mama holding my money for me. She let me have whatever amount I wanted whenever I wanted.

As girls came on after me, I was obliged to vacate Cocoa’s room. My new roommate’s name was Daisy. She was nice and easy to live with, always keeping her things neat and put away. She seemed incredibly innocent to be working at the nightclub, decorating our shared door with magazine cutouts of puppies and kittens. If I was reading a magazine and came across a picture I thought she’d like, I tore the page out and put it aside for her.

I heard that Daisy actually had a Lolita thing going on—lots of customers requested her because she seemed so innocent. I never figured out if she did it on purpose or if it was just in her nature.

Life got comfortable and business got easy. I became more and more complacent with the new normal of Mama’s nightclub and found myself thinking less and less of East Harlem and what I’d left there. Months passed.

Then, everything changed.

One night, in the club, a customer beat Cocoa nearly half to death before the bouncers could pull him off of her. I was upstairs at the time, so I missed all of it. But Cocoa’s absence was felt and there was an electric, uneasy energy among all of us girls. Mama was furious, but I didn’t know why.

At one point, she locked herself in the office and the DJ spinning that night had to tell everyone that the nightclub was closed.

I sidled up to the bar to tip Blue out and noticed that her hands were shaking terribly.

“You okay?” I asked, watching her tremble.

“Only through the grace of God,” Blue said, downing a shot and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Only just barely, Pumpkin.”

“A lot of drama tonight,” I said carefully, watching Blue’s face.

“Understatement, baby.” She poured another shot and took it before capping the bottle. She held out her hand, which was shaking a little less. “That’s better.”

I counted out the bills and waited. That was a trick I’d been doing for years. If you lingered long enough around anyone who had something to say, they’d eventually say it. It took Blue all of ten seconds.

“Somebody called the cops after Cocoa got beat up,” Blue explained, wiping down the counter of the bar. “Mama can’t deal with street-level cops, especially if the media gets wind of drama here. It was tense.”

“Are we in trouble?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

Blue shook her head. “Nope. Not from the cops, anyway.”

I waited for a whole thirty seconds before the rest of it came pouring out.

“Cocoa’s gone,” Blue said. “She jumped from the window of her bedroom. Mama was shooting at her.”

“Christ,” I said, my hand fluttering to cover my heart. Drama had been an understatement. This was a crisis, a complete upheaval.

“Stay as far away as you can from Mama,” Blue said, her trademark grin notably absent from her face. All I saw in front of me was a pale, worried girl. I much preferred the jolly Blue.

Upstairs, in the boarding house, the bathroom was trashed, stall doors and mirrors broken. There was a scorched hole in the carpet just outside the bathroom door—a bullet hole. And Cocoa’s room was empty. All of the girls looked at it, trying to puzzle out what it meant.

We should have all realized it then—it was the beginning of the end.

Mama sank into something scary. Girls were too frightened to ask her for money and started doing without—or squirreling away cash instead of giving it to Mama to hang on to. She was drunk more often than she was sober, and Mama was a dangerous drunk.

Then, Blue got pregnant.

I found stoic Blue in the middle of a panic attack in that broken bathroom. Mama wanted her to get rid of the baby, but deep down, I knew Blue didn’t want to. She put it off and put it off until she finally got the chance to leave the nightclub. Blue did it during the day, when Mama was passed out from liquor, and all the fight went out of us when she left.

Both Cocoa and Blue had been strong women. They had banded us together, made us look out for each other

I knew how to stand up for myself, but I couldn’t put it all on the line for the rest of the girls. We simply avoided Mama and did our best when it was time to work. Some of the customers even began to notice that Mama was stinking drunk when the place was open. The bartenders were having a hard time keeping up with the bottles she blew through.

Something drastic had to have happened. Or maybe it wasn’t drastic at all. Maybe just one person had let slip to the wrong person just what we were. Maybe one of the city’s newspapers had sent an investigative reporter to the nightclub. And maybe one of Mama’s girls—maybe even me—had taken him upstairs.

I guessed it didn’t matter what had happened. But in the middle of the day, sirens filled the boarding house and we looked out our windows to see squad cars with their lights wheeling like some blue and red cop Christmas.

“Run!” Cream had yelled, and we scattered.

Nobody left the way Cocoa had—out the window—but as we tumbled down the stairs, it became apparent that we weren’t all going to make it.

Four cops had broken down the office door and were dragging a roaring Mama out of there. The rest were flooding in, and with several shouts, saw us.

“Stay where you are!”

“Hands up!”

Those commands only made us run faster. I grabbed the girl nearest to me and hauled ass. We held hands, sprinting out the alley and down the street. It wasn’t until five blocks later, panting, that we stopped. I looked down and realized I wasn’t wearing any shoes and only had a pair of lounge pants and a tank top to my name. I was grasping someone’s hand so tight that I’d lost feeling in my own. I looked up into Cream’s eyes, whose fear I was sure was mirrored in my own.

‘What the hell just happened?” she asked breathlessly.

“It was a raid,” I said.

We looked behind us, but there weren’t any uniforms chasing us. We were, however, getting a lot of strange looks from passers-by. Cream, at least, had on jeans and a T-shirt.

“Where are we going to go?” I asked.

Cream bit her full bottom lip and I could see her searching her mind.

“Let me try to call someone,” she said. “You see a payphone anywhere?”

We found one and celebrated the fact that it still functioned in a cell phone-dominated world. None of Mama’s girls had much use for cell phones since there was a landline in the hallway. It shocked me how dependent we’d become on living there. Now that the boarding house era was through, I felt lost. That had been my home more than any place. I didn’t feel like I had the basic skills to survive.

“Sir? Sir?” Cream said quickly, snagging the sleeve of a man hurrying by. “We’re having an emergency. Can you spare enough to make a call?”

“I don’t think so,” he said, pulling away.

“Shit!” Cream exploded, putting her hands on top of her head. “It’s 35 fucking cents.”

“Here,” said another man passing by, dropping a handful of change into my hands. “But only because you’re so pretty.”

“Thanks,” I said, giving Cream the right amount of change for the call.

I watched people walk by as she dialed, the phone receiver jammed against her face. I felt so lost and helpless. If only I’d thought to grab a pair of shoes. The bottoms of my feet were hopelessly black, and one of my toes hurt badly. I’d probably stubbed it on something or stepped on some glass during our mad dash to escape.

“Jason? Oh my God. Thank God you answered.”

I turned back to Cream to see her practically hug the payphone.

“It’s me, Cream, baby doll. From Mama’s nightclub.”

I swallowed as I saw a pair of cops jog out of an alleyway. Were they looking for us? Had they seen us come this way? Was it possible to blend in to the crowd, two pretty girls like us, when they’d just busted a nightclub full of about thirty of the same?

I tapped Cream’s shoulder and tried to convey with my eyes that our situation was growing more dire by the second.

“The thing is, baby, that I’m not doing so good,” she said. “They just raided the nightclub—yes, I’m serious—and another girl and me are on the run. Can we crash at your place, just for now? I’d make it up to you—you know I’d treat you right.”

The cops were looking around, peering into people’s faces. They were looking for something, but I didn’t know what.

At that point, I considered doing an ugly thing. I was ashamed about it, but my survival instincts kicked in. If I slipped off into the crowd, maybe I’d have a chance at getting away. I could go faster than Cream, especially since she was on the phone. Maybe the cops would find her, not me. I’d get back to East Harlem, somehow, and deal with the consequences. It would be good to be back with my sisters and
las primas
and I could figure out Jimmy when I had to.