by Mary Monroe
CHAPTER 5
Teri didn’t know that it had started to rain until she drove out of the enclosed garage beneath the building she lived in. But minutes after she’d pulled out onto the street, it stopped. She was glad she didn’t have to haul an umbrella around with her, too. She felt like she was dragging enough already. But it had been a productive year for her, and she had to admit that ending it at one of the most anticipated parties of the year, an invitation-only party at that, suited her just fine. She had already begun to perk up.
It had been a while since she had attended a party. And even longer since she’d attended one on her own. Well, she was not exactly going to the party alone. The engraved invitation that she had received by messenger a week ago had indicated that she could bring a guest. Other than her secretary, Nicole—or executive assistant as Nicole liked to be called (as the metal nameplate on her desk said)—she couldn’t think of anybody else whom she could tolerate socially to invite to another one of these music people parties.
Teri picked up Nicole about twenty minutes past eleven o’clock. When Teri saw Nicole exit her apartment building dressed in black from head to toe, she did a double take. The black turban wasn’t so bad. But the black woolen poncho, the black leather pants, and black boots were a little too much. Teri had on a simple green silk dress, matching green earrings shaped like four-leaf clovers, and a pair of low-heeled black pumps. A pale beige shawl lay across her shoulders.
“You spent hours on end trying to decide what to wear and that’s the best you could come up with?” Teri teased as Nicole climbed into the front passenger seat of her BMW. Nobody would have guessed that Teri was Nicole’s boss. The truth of the matter was, they’d been best friends for more than twenty years.
“What’s wrong with what I have on? A lot of people wear black all the time,” Nicole protested.
“Yeah, and that’s fine if your name is Johnny Cash. But we are going to a party, not a wake. Black is too depressing for a party.”
“But it goes with everything,” Nicole whined as she brushed lint off the front of her poncho.
“So does white.”
“Well, all my bedsheets were dirty.” Nicole gave Teri a playful tap alongside her head and laughed. “Let’s roll. I hope you didn’t forget to bring that contract to give to Rahim,” Nicole said, looking at Teri’s small black suede purse on the armrest.
“I didn’t. If I didn’t want to get this damn thing signed so badly, I’d be on my sofa with a glass of wine and a bowl of popcorn.”
“Well, I’m glad you decided to come out tonight, Grandma. I know I sure needed to get out tonight. Even if it is just with you…”
“Well, you don’t need to pout about it,” Teri said, glancing at Nicole. “You didn’t have to break your date with what’s his name. I didn’t beg you to come with me tonight.”
“It’s not that,” Nicole admitted.
“Oh. I forgot Greg was coming by to pick up Chris. Was he in a good mood?”
“Yes, if you can call acting like a rabid rottweiler being in a good mood. I tell you, Teri, men are such chameleons. Don’t you wish we had other options?”
“We do. But licking another woman’s pussy doesn’t quite appeal to me,” Teri said with a shiver.
It was a smooth twenty-five minute ride. The streets were wet and slick so Teri had to drive carefully and more slowly than she normally did when tooling around L.A.
She kept her eyes on the road and bobbed her head along with the music on a jazz radio station she had discovered by mistake one night.
Nicole was tired. It was hard for her to keep her eyes open. Dealing with her ex-husband had worn her out. But she was not about to let that stop her from enjoying herself tonight. She leaned back, glad that she had a turban on her head. It hid her hair, which was in desperate need of a touch-up and some tightening up assistance.
Teri’s silver BMW, a year old but still exuding that new car smell, moved through an intersection in the direction of an exclusive neighborhood near the Hollywood Hills. One that also happened to be predominantly white. Nicole could always tell a white neighborhood from a black or Hispanic neighborhood. White neighborhoods had yogurt shops and delicatessens and quaint little churches all over the place. The black and Hispanic neighborhoods had their share of churches, too, for all the good it did them. But the liquor stores, the overextended funeral parlors, and the pawn shops ruled the minority neighborhoods. Nicole glanced from one side of the street to the other, admiring the expensive homes.
“Now this is what I call my kind of neighborhood,” Nicole said in an eager tone of voice and a look of envy and awe on her face as she scanned the neighborhood.
“I am definitely hearing that, girl,” Teri agreed with a vigorous nod. “I wouldn’t mind living in this zip code myself.”
“Well, you’re a lot closer to it than I am,” Nicole reminded with a loud, exaggerated sigh. There was a bail bondsman’s office on the ground floor of her building with a steady stream of losers in and out every day. There was a garishly decorated Korean nail shop, the same one that Kim Loo was working in when she stole Greg from her, on one side of her building. There was an open-all-night, dollar-a-load Laundromat on the other. It also served as a makeshift motel for some of the homeless people who patrolled the block. A deserted school bus with no wheels squatted near the corner of a vacant lot across the street. Homeless people avoided the bus because it wasn’t as clean and warm as the Laundromat.
“Being close to it and being in it are two different things. But socially, these folks have their own ’hood problems. Did you see that derelict stretched out on the ground a couple of blocks back? Or those well-dressed white kids huddled in a corner in front of that office building sharing a joint?” Teri asked.
“No, I didn’t. I was too busy admiring all these gorgeous homes,” Nicole replied, still looking out the window with the wide-eyed awe of a child. “So what’s your point?”
“My point is, this is still a small world. No matter where we live, or who we are, we’ve all got some of the same problems on some level.”
The party was in full swing by the time Teri and Nicole arrived at the rapper’s house. Handsome young black and Hispanic valets were parking cars and greeting guests. They all wore stiff red jackets and sharply creased black pants. Fake smiles were plastered on their faces. They knew that the friendlier they were, or appeared to be, the bigger the tip. The scene outside was a media frenzy with ambitious reporters hopping around like rabbits and rude paparazzi waving cameras like weapons.
The only things missing from this frantic scene were a red carpet and Joan Rivers. Nicole took all this in with a stunned expression on her face. From her body language, you would have thought that she didn’t know which way to turn.
“Smile for the cameras and stop drooling. You’ve been to these things before,” Teri reminded Nicole, something she’d done on dozens of similar occasions.
“Yeah, but each time seems like the first time. I just saw two of the world’s biggest stars going inside!” Nicole stopped talking long enough to whip out her compact to check her makeup. “I don’t know if I will ever get used to all this,” she admitted.
“Well, you’d better. It is part of your job,” Teri warned Nicole in a low voice as they walked up onto the front porch of Young Rahim’s eighteen-room white mansion. It was as outlandish as it could be. A large Greek-looking statue of a naked woman holding a bowl of fruit stood on one side of the double doors. On the other side was a life-size ceramic lion with his mouth opened in a menacing yawn. The white draperies covering the front windows displayed large, green dollar signs. “People who can afford to live like this are no better than you or me,” Teri added.
A scowling, portly man dressed like a penguin opened the door and waved them in without a word. He ignored the invitation Teri held out to him. Shaking her head, she slid it back into her purse, wondering why Young Rahim’s assistant had advised to bring it in the first place.
“No better than you or me? That’s easy for you to say. But if I were you, I wouldn’t let them hear that,” Nicole replied, looking around the spacious living room, trying to price the expensive furnishings. On one wall there was a large cheesy painting of a man who looked like James Brown but was supposed to be an illustration of a black Jesus in dreadlocks and silver earrings. Nicole had a cheaper and much smaller version of the same picture on her living room wall that she had picked up at a flea market in San Jose when she visited her aunt Bertha last year. Who needed three couches in the same room? And they were the loudest colors in the spectrum: one red, one orange with green leaves jumping out, and one yellow. Each had clawlike feet and arms wide enough to hold a large baby. Had she not already known that this all belonged to a black man, she would have guessed it anyway. She had learned a long time ago that when black folks got their hands on some money, they made sure everybody in the world knew about it. Then they spent it as if it grew on vines in a backyard garden, buying ten or twelve of everything they didn’t need or appreciate. She gasped at an antique vase sitting in the middle of a brass leg glass-top coffee table. What did an ignoramus like Young Rahim know about antique vases? Other than his music, what did he know about anything else?
Young Rahim moved about the party room, strutting and looking more like a peacock than a rapper in his red suit jacket, yellow silk pants, and white Panama hat. He was not a bad-looking brother by anybody’s standards. As a matter of fact, except for the shoulder-length dreadlocks, he looked like a younger version of Denzel Washington. He had nice white teeth, capped no doubt. But at least there wasn’t a gold one among them. That pleased Teri and Nicole. In their business, they saw enough gold teeth to replenish Fort Knox. If nothing else, Teri found these glorified dog-and-pony shows entertaining, to say the least. She was glad she had come.
CHAPTER 6
Armed security guards with walkie-talkies patrolled the area inside and outside of the rapper’s house. Dressed in somber dark suits, dark hats, and dark glasses, they looked like an advertisement for that old John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd movie, The Blues Brothers.
Marcus Boggs was Rahim’s head of security and looked the part. He was built like an ox, had a face like an angry gargoyle, and a neck that looked like the trunk of a large oak tree. He towered over Young Rahim and most of the other guests.
The guests were a smorgasbord of ethnic diversity. White people were gadding about with their hair in dreadlocks, braids, and even afros. Some even had the nerve to wear African attire. Black folks, male and female, were prancing around with platinum blond hair. There were others present whose ethnicity, and gender in several cases, could not be determined.
Other guests included popular DJ Harrison Starr. He looked out of place in his dapper three-piece suit, but he was as cool and smooth as he looked. He was tall and solidly built, and he had the look of a man who liked to be pampered. His handsome coconut brown face was as smooth as the faces of some of the women present. He owed that to good genes, a balanced diet, and plain old luck. His slanted black eyes scanned the room and had been doing so from the minute he’d arrived—a few minutes before Teri and Nicole.
He was surprised but glad to see Teri in the mix. That’s when he stopped looking around the room, because he’d found what he’d been looking for. As far as he was concerned, they had some unfinished business to address. From the way he was smiling at her, and trying to steer her by the arm to a more private spot, it was obvious to some of the guests close by that he had a “thing” for her.
“I’d like to talk to you before you leave tonight,” Teri told him. They did have some unfinished business, and she had a thing for him, too. He was the last man she’d been with. Their relationship had ended before it even got off the ground. It had started with a chance meeting at a charity function, a few dinner dates followed by nights of passion she had not experienced before (or since), and then it was over. Sometimes it seemed like it had never happened.
Their hectic lives were complicated by work and many other interests. And even though they were both still fairly young, they were settled in their ways and unwilling to bend too far in another person’s direction. Harrison had wanted her to spend more time with him, stroke his ego, be his trophy, and be the woman behind him.
She had scoffed at the notion of being behind him, or any other man. “If I can’t be beside you, I won’t be with you,” she had told him, laughing as she said it. But he had taken it the wrong way. Harrison had sulked for days and ignored her repeated telephone messages. And by the time he’d come to his senses, it was too late. His telephone messages to her went unanswered, and twice when he was bold enough to ring the buzzer at her residence, she’d ignored him. He finally gave up when he attempted to visit her at her workplace and was brusquely turned away by the pit bull security guard, per Ms. Teri Stewart’s instructions.
“We can talk now,” Harrison told her with a nod, still holding on to her arm. They hadn’t encountered each other since their breakup.
Teri nodded. “I heard about you going around speaking to the kids at some of the inner-city schools. I admire you for doing that,” she told him, meaning every word.
“Did you also hear that I got robbed and beaten at the last school I spoke at?”
Teri gasped and shook her head. “I’m sorry to hear that. I hope that doesn’t discourage you from going back. Those kids need people like us, now more than ever. I visited the girls in juvenile hall last month. I didn’t think they’d want to hear anything I had to say about my work.”
“Did they?”
“They were more interested in who did my hair and what famous people I hung out with.” Teri laughed. “But I’m going back in a couple of months anyway.”
“So am I. And to one of the most violent schools in Crenshaw. As a matter of fact, the boys that jumped me turned themselves in and apologized. I got all of my shit back, too. They said it was my talk that had made them think about what they’d done once the excitement of robbing my ass wore off.”
“See? That just goes to show you that anybody can change,” Teri said hopefully.
“This is not what I want to talk about, Teri,” Harrison said, grinding his teeth. “What I meant was, I wanted to talk to you about me. It’s now or never.” His lips tightened and he gave her a defiant look, staring at her with his eyes narrowed into slits.
She didn’t like his brusque attitude and she let him know by giving him one of the harshest looks she could manage. It didn’t take her long to decide that since he had just acted so uppity, she would make him work his ass off to get more of her attention tonight. He would have to compete with all the other men at the party. “Excuse me,” she said bluntly, attempting to leave. He grabbed her wrist and held her in place. “Please don’t do that,” she ordered, removing his hand. Her attitude didn’t even faze him, though. He was glad to see that she was still a challenge. But he wanted what he wanted and he wanted it now.
Unlike Teri, Harrison had not been spending his days and nights alone. His bed and his arms were rarely empty. He and Teri had the same biological needs, but for different reasons. Knowing what a firecracker she was in the bedroom, he had assumed that she’d kept herself busy in that location, too. He would have been horrified and amused to hear that Teri had been on a self-imposed “pleasure strike” since their breakup.
Harrison Starr had never denied himself the pleasures of nature. As long as he could get it, he would. But he had high standards when it came to women. He wouldn’t fuck just anybody. Beauty was one of the main requirements that he looked for in a woman. That shit about looks not being important was hogwash and had to be something that an ugly person had come up with. In his position he couldn’t afford to be seen in public with a woman who looked like a frog princess. But even having all the physical requirements was not enough. He had to like the woman, not enough to take home to Mother or to give her his name, but just enough to keep the flame going until it burned itself out.
“Maybe later,” Teri replied, pulling away with a smug smile on her lips. A disappointed look slid across Harrison’s face. Teri Stewart had been and still was his biggest challenge. He offered her a smile and another nod. Even though he had not been with a woman in two days, he could wait another two days, or two weeks, for Teri.
One of the many things that Teri didn’t like to do was rush. And the unfinished business that she had with Harrison Starr was something that she wanted to resume in her own time. After all, it had been six months since she’d been with the man. Another six months wouldn’t kill her.
CHAPTER 7
Teri latched onto Nicole’s arm and guided her to a long table in the center of the living room. There was something on that table for everybody, from crispy, golden fried chicken wings and fried okra to bite-size quiche and caviar. Teri and Nicole ignored the feast on the table. But they each snatched a flute of champagne off a passing waiter’s tray.
“What was up with that?” Nicole wanted to know, an amused look on her face.
“What do you mean?” Teri took a long swallow of her champagne, then wiped her lips with the back of her hand.
“You know damn well what I mean, girl. That was Harrison Starr. He was looking and acting like he wanted to lick you up one side and down the other,” Nicole said with a leer and a hand on her hip. She wanted to do that “neck rolling” thing that black women had made so famous. But she didn’t because judging from all the gum chewing, blond-weave-wearing, loud-talking, scantily dressed sistahs already on the scene, the ghetto was being represented enough tonight.
Teri didn’t respond for a few moments. But a mysterious smile crossed her face. Her mind was on the thought of Harrison’s tongue on her body.
