by Noire
Being up under Gino had my pussy on fire. He was so damn smart and sexy I masturbated every chance I got, which was mostly at night in the shower. We hung out 24/7 doing things I’d never even imagined myself doing. Didn’t even know I had the heart to do. We swam and snorkeled at eighty-leven beaches and I even surprised myself by climbing on the back of a Jet Ski and letting Gino take me so far out on the ocean I was scared we’d run out of gas.
“Go back!” I was screaming, dragging my feet in the blue water and punching his hard back with one hand while hanging on for my life with the other. I just knew the damn engine on the thing was gonna sputter and die, then send us tumbling into the ocean waves. But then I had a really scary thought. Jaws. Sharks like a mother. I jerked my feet out of that water and wrapped my legs around Gino’s waist so tight we were like Siamese twins.
He called me a punk when I wouldn’t go parasailing the next day, so you know I had to swallow my fear and take the challenge. Getting strapped into a harness positioned between his strong thighs felt like heaven, but once that wind lifted us almost up to the clouds I couldn’t care less how fine he was—he didn’t have no wings. By the time we came down and made it back to shore I was so airsick and seasick I had to go into a bathroom and throw up.
I couldn’t believe I was having such a good time on a vacation I didn’t even want to come on, especially since I hadn’t been able to catch up with Jimmy. Gino had let me use his cell phone for the last two nights, but for some reason nobody picked up at the apartment. I’d broken down and called the Spot, and Cooter told me Jimmy had been in off and on, but spent most of his time upstairs supervising the workers in the cut room.
You should have seen how I was steaming as I hung up. I was mad as hell that Jimmy was working that close to drugs, and somebody was gonna have to explain that shit to me when I got back to Harlem.
Justin was taking us to a tourist spot called the Polynesian Cultural Center when I decided to call Jimmy again. We’d stopped at a roadside truck that had big shrimp painted on the sides, and Justin assured us that local gut trucks like these were the best-kept secrets on the island. Gino ordered fried shrimp and I ordered garlic prawns, and then sat down on an empty bench and Gino passed me his cell phone.
I dialed the Spot, but the line at the bar just rang, so I clicked over and dialed another number. A female voice answered the phone in the cut room. “Jimmy there?” I demanded before she could get her “hello” out good.
“Nah. He left.”
Too late, I recognized the voice. “Dicey?”
Click.
I pressed redial and the phone just rang and rang. But Dicey had answered that phone. Sure as hell, it had been her. I called the line at the bar again and this time Cooter picked up. I gave him a message for Jimmy saying he’d better call me at the hotel within twenty-four hours or his ass was gonna get kicked when I got back home.
I was so stressed when I hung up that I couldn’t eat my prawns.
“Worried about your brother?” Gino asked.
I nodded. I was fronting like I was mad, but worried was a lot more like it.
“Don’t be pressed. He’ll be okay.”
I shook my head and pushed my plate away. “I don’t know . . . it just doesn’t feel right to me. I don’t know why he had to stay back anyway. He should have came with us from the door.”
“G had other plans for him,” Gino said. He opened a pack of hot sauce and squirted it all over his shrimp. “But if I was you, I’d watch that shit. Limit all that control y’all done gave him. Motherfuckers like G don’t mean you no good.”
I stared at him. This was the first time he’d said anything negative about his father and I wanted to hear more. “Why you say that?”
“Come on, Juicy. Why do you think?”
“G’s been good to me. To Jimmy, too. I just have to convince him to keep Jimmy out of the Spot and let him go to college. Just like he did for you.”
Gino laughed like crazy. “Oh, so you think G let my ass go to college? Let? ‘Let’ didn’t have shit to do with it. I was going. One way or another, I was going.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Besides, he felt guilty behind the way he fucked up my life. If he didn’t pay my way through school my grandmother woulda worked some Santeria roots on his ass that would make his dick fall off.”
“Ain’t like he’s using it anyway,” I mumbled.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head.
Gino laughed again. “Aiiight, now. Don’t be putting the man’s business all out in the street. I don’t want to hear shit about what you do with him.”
“There’s not much to hear, so that shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Whatever, Juicy. Do you, sister. Just watch your back. You better watch Jimmy’s back, too.”
Now I was really worried. Gino sounded like he knew something I didn’t know.
“Can I ask you something and have it stay between us? You know, something you don’t go running your mouth off to G with?”
His face got real serious and he put his hand on my arm. “Dig, I don’t tell G shit. We don’t roll that way. Anything me and you toss back and forth is strictly between us. Word.”
Something in his eyes told me I could trust him. Besides, I needed some info and who better to put me down on G’s true nature than his son. “Okay.” I nodded. “I believe I can trust you, and even though you think I’m a chickenhead, you really can trust me, too. Tell me,” I said, looking so deep into his eyes I could see his heart. “Tell me what happened to your mother.”
Chapter Fifteen
Gino had some love in his heart for G, but judging by the things he told me, he had every right to hate him, too. Chills ran through me as I sat listening to him talk about the way G treated and controlled his mother. He had done her the exact same way he was doing me, only I didn’t have a child to worry about protecting the way Gino’s moms had. It always messed me up when I heard about foul stuff people did to their kids. It took me right back to that cold December night when a junkie ho tried to trade my life for hers.
“My mother was special,” Gino said. “Not only was Salida the finest Puerto Rican chick in Harlem, she was smart, too. Her father died young and her mother was poor, so she thought she’d hit the jackpot when my father took her in, but G is a crafty nigger and when she stepped out of line he broke her down, mentally and physically.”
I shivered and picked at my prawns even though the sun was roasting my back and neck. “I know what you mean. Whatever G wants, G gets.”
“That’s right. But what’s worse, Juicy, is, G’s truly cold. There’s no margin of error with him when it comes to shit like loyalty and respecting his word. When you fuck up with him, you fuck up. It’s all or nothing. He don’t even know what it means to forgive.”
I thought about all the people G had put down over the years, and a picture of that man’s head hitting the Dungeon’s door flashed through my mind. G ran his life the way he ran his business. Cut and dried. The game was his scripture and the gun was his bible.
Gino took a sip of my soda. “After my mother disappeared I heard all kinds of shit. I was only twelve, but her family put me down on everything that came through the streets. There were so many sightings of her you would have thought she was Tupac or Elvis. Her brothers and uncles looked for her for years. Even after it was obvious she had to be dead. I mean, if she could have come back home, she would have. Dig?”
“Didn’t you ask G what happened to her?”
“Yeah. I did, and it was the only time I ever saw my father cry. He came to me one night and swore up and down he didn’t know where she was. Fed me some shit about her running off with some dealer from Brooklyn. Said somebody told her he knew she was fucking around and dipping in the cut room, too, so she got scared and took off.”
I had to ask. “Did you believe him?”
“C’mon, Juicy. I was a twelve-year-old kid, but I wasn’t no fuckin sherm. I knew hi
s ass was grimy. G hates women. In his game they’re all either bitches or hoes, or training to be both. Whenever my mother tried to think for herself he would kick her ass to both ends of the house and back. Shoes, belts, brooms—even as young as seven I would hide in my closet just to keep from jumping in and killing his ass. But G was careful though. He could whip her ass all night long, but he never left a mark on her where me or anybody else could see it. That’s why I got scared one morning when I woke up to go to school and her eye had been dotted and her nose was broke. I knew what time it was then. Once my father fucked up Salida’s face, she could kiss it good-bye. I told you my mother was bad. She was G’s Cadillac. His Jaguar and his Rolls-Royce. G is all about status and appearance, and the minute he stopped giving a fuck about what she looked like, she might as well have been dead.”
Gino made G sound like a monster. I shivered again and was glad when Justin called us over to the car. I got in and turned my face toward the window as we drove. It shocked me when I felt Gino’s fingers on my arm, and then he was holding my hand.
“Don’t let me mess nothing up for you, Juicy. I’m sure you and G got a good thing going. All that stuff with my mother happened a long time ago. Every man can change. Even a man like G.”
I couldn’t say anything. There was still a big part of me that was loyal to G, even though I knew it didn’t make sense. G might have been Gino’s father, but he was my daddy. How could I explain that it was G who made it possible for me to take my first bath in truly hot water? That it was G who bought me my first tube of lipstick, my first pair of high-heeled shoes? That because of G me and Jimmy kept the cold off in the winters and the rats and roaches away all year round? Besides, G was one of the few links to my past. Grandmother had trusted him and respected him; they were practically family. What other sure thing did me and Jimmy have?
Maybe because he had opened up so completely to me, or maybe because I liked him and he was the first man to ever really talk to me, but I found myself telling Gino all about my mother and how the game she ran almost got me killed. I had made it a rule not to talk about her, not even to Jimmy, but for some reason I sat there and held Gino’s hand and shared that horrible part of my life with him. I told him how it felt as I hid under the blankets while her bed rocked and fuck sounds filled up the room And about the cold air coming from the kicked-in window. The boom boom boom, the trick dead, Aunt Ree shot, and then my mother begging for her pitiful-ass life. How her skanky ass was so fucking desperate to keep living and whoring she was willing to trade her seven-year-old daughter so she could live to fuck and get high another day.
I didn’t tell him about Jimmy and the gun, though. I just couldn’t bring myself to speak on that. It had taken years for Jimmy to stop having nightmares, and to this day he was scared shitless of guns. Grandmother had been worried that Jimmy would grow up hating women because of my mother, and maybe she was right because that’s how men like G were born.
Gino tried to lighten my mood. “Damn, there might really be eight million stories in this naked city, huh?”
I nodded. “Yep. And ours ain’t but two.”
“But we’re rolling, Juicy. We survived those days and now they’re over. The whole world is waiting out there. I got me a plan, sugar, and I hope like hell you’ve got one, too.”
It took us another thirty minutes to get to the Polynesian Cultural Center, and by the time we pulled up in the parking lot me and Gino had put our pasts behind us and were back to acting the fool. He was telling me about his friends on the West Coast and all the crazy stuff he’d done in his college dorm, and it reminded me of all the extra things I’d been missing in my college experience by going to school in the city and having to be chauffeured straight home like a prisoner after classes every day.
We stopped to listen to a group of Hawaiian singers before going through the gate, and even though I was down for learning about other people, I wasn’t really feeling Polynesia so I didn’t expect to have a good time.
Boy was I wrong. Them Hawaiian sisters were shaking their asses and doing the hula all night long! We were riding on a little water raft watching them get loose on the shore, and everybody was clapping and screaming as the brown-skinned heffahs with the silky hair flung their hips around like fish out of water.
“I bet you can throw your stuff around like that,” Gino leaned over and whispered and I almost fell out the boat. I knew we’d been vibing lately, but he hadn’t said a sexy word since the moment I met him and now just because some hot island freaks were doing the Hawaiian hoochie-coochie he wanted to get brand-new.
“Put your money on this,” I flirted with my hands on my hips, “and you’ll win every time.”
His eyes got all big and then he laughed. “Damn, girl. I bet you’re one dangerous sumpthin-sumpthin when you wanna be.”
“Damn straight,” I said. “When I wanna be, and with who I wanna be.”
Later that afternoon Justin took us to a resort where there were about five private lagoons. Gino had traveled some during his college years, but I had never seen anything so damn beautiful and peaceful in my life.
There were huge black rocks that formed a barrier between us and the open seas, so I knew there was no way Jaws could get me. We swam in the warm water, and even Justin took off his shirt and jumped in and helped me and Gino over to the rocks where we saw all kinds of colorful fish.
Still, I’m a Harlem girl, and I was paranoid as hell. The only place I like fish is either in a colorful tank or fried hard in cornmeal with ketchup and tartar sauce on my plate. Both Gino and Justin were laughing their asses off every time a fish swam near me and I tried to slap it away.
“Hold up,” Gino said when we finally got out the water. I was walking ahead of him, climbing through the sand toward a huge grass umbrella where we’d stashed our towels.
I turned around. “What?”
“C’mere, girl.” He motioned me toward him.
I gave him a look. “You meet me halfway.”
He laughed and jogged a few steps until he caught up to me.
“You sure got that New York attitude, don’t you?”
“Born with it. And what’s wrong with that?”
I couldn’t help but notice that his chest hair and the line of black fuzz that led down his stomach and into his shorts was slick with water and glistening under the sun.
“Nothing. I like it. Come here.”
Gino grabbed my hand and we walked the rest of the way to the umbrella with him massaging my fingers. His hands felt so good and so strong. I knew if he could make my fingers feel like that he could probably put a serious hurting on the rest of my body.
I waited as Gino got some sunblock from Justin, then stood there as he rubbed it all over my back and my shoulders. The pole of the grass umbrella was thick and rough like the trunk of a tree, and I leaned against it and just enjoyed feeling a man’s hands squeezing my muscles and smoothing cool cream all over my skin. He even put it on my lower back, my hips, and the back of my thighs.
It was only right that Gino should turn me around and do the front of me, too. By now my nipples were like missiles and even though my bikini bottoms were already wet, they were getting wetter.
“Gino,” I heard myself saying as I leaned toward him, wanting to press my nipples against his hard chest.
He held me away from him and kept right on squeezing sunblock into his hands, then running them up and down my body. I squinched sand between my toes and closed my eyes, dying to feel more than just his hands on me.
“Let me do you,” I whispered, opening my eyes and staring at his hard dick. It was so long and thick the head was flat against his belly and sticking out the waistband of his swimming trunks. “C’mon, boo. Let me do you.”
But he wouldn’t. Instead, he finally pulled me toward him, and when my body touched his I coulda sworn his skin was even hotter than the sun. There was no doubt we both wanted this, and I pressed myself against him feeling all that black dick poki
ng into my stomach. And then we were kissing, tonguing each other down. Gino’s style was perfect, too. Soft lips, sweet tongue, and not a whole lot of unnecessary spit.
Grandmother would have kicked my ass six ways to Sunday if she could see me getting felt up and kissing all out in the open like that, but fuck if I cared who saw us. All I knew was that both my body and my mind was digging the way this man made me feel, and judging by the way he was nibbling my lips, sucking my tongue, and palming both cheeks of my ass, he was digging me, too.
Chapter Sixteen
You know we had to do the do. There was just no way around it. The only thing we needed to figure out was when and where. I was game for going right to Gino’s room and handling our business there, but he said no, the time wasn’t right. We sat in the back of the car and he kissed me and sucked all over my neck and the tops of my titties all the way back to the Kahala Hotel. When we pulled up outside I hated that it was time to get out of the car. Hated that the ride and the thrills were over.
G was standing in the middle of the floor and looking evil when I walked into our room, and I was glad Gino had already let himself into his own room and closed the door.
“Hey,” I said, dropping my wet towel on the floor.
“Back atcha.”
I walked past him and pulled my shirt over my head as I went into the bathroom to take a shower. “You feeling better?” I yelled to him, trying to act as normal as possible when all the while my pussy was still throbbing courtesy of his son, and I could still feel Gino’s hands all over my body.
I didn’t realize G had followed me to the bathroom, and I had just reached out to turn on the water when I heard him behind me.
“Yeah,” G said, almost in my ear.
I checked the water temperature with my hand before turning around. I could feel G staring at me all funny, and when my eyes met my reflection in the mirror I thought I knew why.
