by Tyree, Omar
“Oh, well, I guess we’ll see you around then,” Darlene told him. Her plans were shaping up perfectly. Now all she needed to do was let Brittney know that Antonio was a cutey to allow them plenty of dancing time together at the club.
Vincent walked into a dark, smoky room up in Harlem an hour later.
“I see you finally got tired of hanging out with the high society class tonight, huh?” a male voice asked him.
Vincent sighed. “Cut the bullshit.” He took a whiff of the wide open apartment room. It seemed to have space for days, an old-fashioned, full family room with a high ceiling.
“I see you’ve been in here smoking again?” Vincent countered.
He fanned the marijuana fumes from his face and his suit.
His friend said, “It helps me to put everything in perspective,” and walked out from the kitchen. He was a tallish light brown man with low cut hair, wearing a pair of sagging blue jeans, a wide buckled belt, and a wife-beater t-shirt that freed his chiseled arms. He could easily pass for a professional football player, but he was not. A brown marijuana blunt was squeezed between the fingers of his right hand.
“You want some,” he offered.
“Hell no,” Vincent answered strongly. “I have to go back to work in the morning. That stuff only makes me paranoid.”
His friend nodded slowly and took another puff. “I laced it too.”
“Laced it with what?”
“Powder.” He meant raw cocaine.
“You’ve been doing that all day?”
“Of course not. I work too, stupid. What I look like going to work high as a dog?”
He walked over and casually ran his free hand along Vincent’s crotch and around to his ass, while he smoked the cocaine-laced blunt.
“I told you what paranoia is, right?” He walked behind him and began to palm Vincent’s ass, hard, while flexing his muscles.
“Yeah, I know, everything you already fear, coming out in the wash.”
He smacked Vincent’s ass and said, “You got a lot to fear, don’t you? You got a lot of different people counting on you.”
Vincent jerked forward, responding to the force of the smack. “Don’t remind me. I had a situation tonight at the party I had to deal with,” he alluded.
“From who?” his friend asked him with a squeeze. He leaned in close to Vincent’s ear to whisper too, just like he knew he liked it.
“Natalie.”
“Oh, that bitch again. Well, you need to just cut her.”
“She has one more book left on her contract.”
“And she’s gon’ make you go through hell for it, too. I would have been dropped that whore. Can’t you pass her on to another editor or something? Let somebody else deal with her stinky shit.”
Vincent smiled. He thought it was all comical, twisted, and sexy. His friend had a way with harsh words, just calling it how he saw it is.
“So, you came back home to get some in you, huh? You want me to take away the stress of your job again.”
“Please do,” Vincent told him.
The man unzipped his jeans calm, cool and collected and waited for his plaything to do the rest.
“Go on, you know what you want. Get it then. Go on and take it from me.”
He continued to smoke as the bulge in his jeans began to throb, noticeably.
Vincent grabbed him by the crotch in his right hand and pulled him over to the sofa to take a seat and please himself. All the while, is friend continued to smoke and allow it.
“Think about what you want, and you can get it all. You can have it all.”
Vincent’s eyes rolled to the back of his head as he reminisced to his childhood days of being bullied out in the school yard. All he had then were his brains, his books and his hope. But somehow he had survived it all and learned how to thrive under pressure. The pressure was what he expected now. The pressure was normal to him.
His new paranoia was not having any pressures to count on. So he had learned to create new pressures to maintain his drive and his sanity. No goal was too big now. How high could he go? How many successful books could he edit? How many new authors could he make or break? How long could he continue to manipulate the system around them?
Those were his daily challenges, and he loved them all. He had gone from victimization to empowerment, and then back to the victim so he could empower himself all over again. It was the balance of hunger to saturation, lust to satisfaction, loneliness to love, indifference to passion, poverty to wealth, single-mindedness to family, and individual to team. His team meant everything now. And he was the able coach to negotiate with the bosses. He would negotiate with the press and the media. We would negotiate with retail and the distributors. He would negotiate with the agents, the check writers, and the book jacket designers. It was all up in the mix, all a part of the pressure, all a part of the bliss.
Vincent Biddle was one of the last black men standing who could actually move anything in publishing, with hundreds of books from dozens of authors. What a throbbing of lust it was to conceive it all, to believe it all, to achieve it all. So he was unafraid now to take the pressure whole, after his introduction to it in middle school, and again in high school, and in college, and grad school, and then in the corporate world.
He would now focus to use the pressure as a force of energy, and his energy guided everything. He considered himself useless without it. But with it, his fearless control of pressure, and the rush of energy that he found from overcoming it, he could do anything.
“Calm down, you gon’ make me cum too fast. We got all night.”
Vincent quickly stood up and began to take off his clothes.
“No we don’t have all night. I got work to do in the morning.”
I got new money to get from Arnold. Darlene needs to be dealt with. Natalie. DeWayne. Jackson. I have three nonfiction titles to edit. I have athletes and celebrities to sign, a new boy toy to turn out with sexy Antonio. I got a bidding war to close out with Brittney. A bunch of shit! he mused.
He had it all in perspective and priority. And he was hard for it all, with no enhancements needed. He was excited to want what he wanted, and on his terms. It was always on his terms now. That’s what real empowerment was about. Even his friend complained about it.
“Look, you not just gon’ roll up in here and get me all hot and bothered and then leave like you always do. I was up in here minding my own business, relaxing.”
Vincent frowned while taking off his clothes.
“Dirty nigga, you don’t have this place to relax in if it wasn’t for me. I still pay the bills in this shit. So take your shit off so I can get what I came here for.”
His friend froze and stared at him. “Now you don’t even have to talk to me like that.”
“I do if you keep bullshitting. Now come on.”
His friend paused in his final delay before he decided to take his shirt off, displaying a weight-lifters abdomen.
“Now, what would happen if all these folks knew how you really were? Would they still let you up there in that office, controlling people’s careers? You a freak.”
Vincent smirked and thought about it. “There’s nobody in that building who don’t have their own secrets. And I know about most of them. They’re all freaks. So don’t you worry about me. You worry about your behind. I’ll be all right. Now come on.”
Read the next exciting, raw and unedited chapter
of CORRUPTED
a serial ebook by Omar Tyree
on Friday, July 29th
and the Friday after that
and the Friday after that . . .
Then leave your comments @ www.OmarTyree.com . . .
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