Jahleel

by S. Ann Cole

  How bloody apt.

  To think I wasn’t even paying attention to the music when I said that. But, of course, he thought differently.

  “You don’t like that I like to play?” he asked, mischievousness flashing in his eyes.

  “No,” I snapped. “That’s the point. You have too many curves and intricacies. I want you to be straight.”

  All that was a waste of breath, because he wasn’t even listening to me, as his hips were already moving to the music. He was wearing a white pocket-less sweatpants riding dangerously low on his hips, his defined V starting from his hipbone and disappearing down below the sweatpants.

  Hell and damnation, I wished he’d stop moving his hips to the rhythm like that so I could continue being irritated instead of distracted, and go get my smoke fix. I needed to forget about the ball of fire in front of me.

  Jesus, why did he continue to do this? Torture me?

  “JK,” I whispered, forcing my eyes away from his V. “You know how you look. You know how I feel. You know what I want. Stop fucking playing with me and this platonic thing will work out fine.”

  Still, he wasn’t listening, as he snagged the cigarettes and lighter from my hand and tossed them aside. They bounce off a wall and fell to the ground.

  Clasping my hips, he roughly yanked me up against him, urging my hips to move in sync with his. For a brief moment, I wondered if he forgot I couldn’t dance. Not even a little bit.

  A brief moment was all I was allowed to wonder, because before I knew what was happening, I was being lifted up off the floor quite effortlessly by my hips, and placed up on the kitchen island.

  To a sharp base drop of the music, he ripped my legs wide apart with a swift, yet smooth move, and next he was easing up on the island, moving in so that I had no choice but to lower back on the counter. He kept coming forward, slow, to the flow of the music, and I kept slithering further up on the island until we were in the centre.

  What was he going to do? Dance on top of me?

  Seizing my arms, he raised them above my head and left them there, slowly dragging the tips of his fingers down my inner arms, down my sides to settle on my hips again.

  There was a passionate expression on his face as he listened to the music and made his every movement match the rhythm. He wasn’t even looking at my face, he was watching my body and his hands on my body.

  In his mind, he was dancing. In my mind, I was being seduced.

  Non-platonically so.

  Lifting my Bob Marley tee up to my breasts, he touched the spot where the tee was bunched up with one finger and trailed it down my stomach, face intense, like a sculptor admiring his work of art.

  Next, his tongue touched said spot and followed the path of his finger, stopping at my navel, where it dipped inside and swirled.

  I moaned and sighed at the same time, as searing, aching heaviness settled within.

  Without lifting his head, Jahleel flicked his eyes up the length of my body to meet mine peering down at him. Eyes still on mine, he pushed my thighs far, far apart, all in tune with the music. Then moving his head to the left, he licked his tongue down my inner thigh, traveling down and around to the erogenous area behind my knee.

  “Hmmmnh,” I moaned again, as he switched over to the other thigh and did the same.

  Drawing up on his knees, he lifted my right leg up with him and, oh so gently, ran his fingertips along my sole.

  One would expect that to tickle, but with the gentleness of his touch in the right way, at the right spot, I was letting out another long-winded moan, frustratingly aroused.

  The song dimmed in volume, signalling its inevitable end, and I knew once Goapele stopped singing, Jahleel would stop dancing. That thought frustrated me even more.

  “Just fuck me already!”

  At that, three things happened: the music ended, the oven beeped, and Jahleel’s phone rang from somewhere in the house.

  End of.

  I wish he had just let me go smoke the damn cigarette.

  Crawling up over me, bottom lip caught between his teeth, he brought his mouth to my ear and said, “That was playing. I plead not guilty to any other alleged ‘playing’.”

  He shifted and hopped off the island, sauntering out of the kitchen just as Neyo’s Say It came over the speakers.

  Did he always put on these kind of music whenever he had women over and ‘played’ with them like he did me just now?

  With each touch of his hands on me, each press of his lips on mine, thinking about him with other women was starting to hurt. It never used to. I used to feel crazy jealous, yes, but not hurt.

  Being here, being with him, spending time creating memories to think back on, was downright stupid. A death-trap for my poor, piteous heart.

  Why was I doing this when I knew it would never be more than what it was? When I knew Jahleel would never be anyone different than who he was?

  Amanda’s right, I slid off the kitchen island and turned off the oven, I’m a frigging masochist.

  Finding my pack of cigarettes and lighter where he’d tossed them on the floor, I scooped them up and stormed through the front door, slamming it with a loud bang. I didn’t want to think about which slut he was talking to on the phone in the other room.

  More than ever now, I needed a smoke.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Oh, wipe that miserable look off your face. Another fifty frames and we’ll be out of your hair,” declared the photo shoot director, Derek.

  He stood behind my chair in the makeshift dressing room, watching me with queer fascination as Amanda dabbed my face with dramatic make-up. Extra-smoky eyes, long fake lashes, exaggerated eyebrows, ruby red lips, the works.

  “Hallelujah?” I wearily proclaimed.

  Having been at this acrobatic photo shoot in L.A for the past six hours, changing hairstyles, make-up and outfits, and being instructed to twist and contort my body into positions I didn’t know were possible. I was hungry, knackered and most of all, sexually repressed.

  For the past eight days, I’ve been stuck in L.A with events too close together for me to fly back and forth to SF. But the main reason behind my miserable temperament was, of course, him.

  The longer I was out of SF, the more distant I felt from him, and the more I missed something we didn’t have. Something we didn’t share.

  It was dumb, I know. But I liked keeping my imagination alive.

  Derek flashed me a wide grin that wrapped around his face, walking away as some distant voice called for him. He loved me, loved working with me, and always wore that broad grin whenever I was around.

  Truth be told, most people just inexplicably loved me. A warm, automatic love, just as most people would automatically love a precocious prodigy.

  Sometimes I thought it was because of Lion—the man was possibly the world’s most loved person—and sometimes I thought it was because he’d trained me well. My facial expressions, smiles and comments were, half the time, stark contradictions to what was truly going on inside my head: nasty, boorish, mocking thoughts. One could never tell based on my outer appearance.

  “So,” Amanda swept the blush brush over my cheeks as she opened up the conversation.

  She was transforming me into Cat Woman. My hair had been straightened and gelled back into a tight ponytail, my nails were painted black, and I was dressed in a butt-tight, faux leather onesie.

  “…you’ve been unusually tight-lipped since you spent those two nights with…you know…him.”

  Pulling at the faux leather sucked onto my thigh, I ignored her and that topic. Again. True, I hadn’t spoken of him at all and didn’t want to, but my thoughts were right there.

  “One would think you’d be in a better disposition after that dream-come-true sleepover, yeah?” She went on, digging. “What? Was he a disappointment? Was he awful in bed?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I mumbled.

  “W-what?” Amanda stopped working and shot me an incredulous stare in the mirror.
“You wouldn’t know?”

  “Right.”

  “So, you’re telling me you spent two nights in that debaucher’s bed and there was no sticking it in the poi-yoi?”

  As always, whenever she referred to sex as ‘sticking it in the poi-yoi’—which made no sense whatsoever—I snickered.

  “You know how a man would refer to a woman as ‘cock-tease’?” I asked.

  Amanda laughed in answer.

  “Well, JK’s a cunt-tease.”

  “God blind me,” she exclaimed, shaking her head, disbelieving. “That whore? Tease? Really?”

  “Really.”

  Resuming her work, she measured, “And here I was thinking he was bonking you in fifty-five different positions over there.”

  After Jahleel’s ‘playing’ that day, I tried making things as innocent and platonic as possible for the remainder of the evening. Whenever we sat down to eat, watch television or sleep, I made sure there was descent enough space between us.

  No fool, he realized what I was doing, and instead of giving me a hard time, he went along with it. But whenever I caught him watching me, he had this small, impish smile on his face, as he kept some private joke to himself.

  I ignored it, ignored him, and consequently got through the night without combusting from sexual frustration.

  The following morning I woke up before him at 6am, whipped up some breakfast and stuck it in the microwave for him. I wrote a note, left it on the kitchen counter and fled.

  Being in that house with him, receiving his touches, kisses and nothing more, was more than I could handle. And even though I could’ve altered my schedule to stay there with him until he was better, I didn’t.

  Because staying with Jahleel in that house amounted to self-torture.

  I wanted him too much, and the whole platonic thing was bullocks. Without hesitation, I’d have traded places with Tiara any day to have casual sex with Jahleel, taking the unfaithful A-hole that came with it.

  The more time I spent around him, short and clipped as they were, the deeper and harder I fell.

  “Ready for you, Saskia,” Derek’s voice broke through my reverie.

  Pushing all thoughts of Jahleel Kingston aside, I got up and went to be the superstar I was.

  Suspended upside down from the ceiling, the twisting belts created the illusion I was a pro at this acrobatic thing. I flexibly splayed my legs in positions I knew would look helluva sexy in the leather Catwoman outfit as I made fierce expressions for the camera.

  Somehow, in the midst of the camera flashes, the rapid-fire directions from Derek, and the flurry of movements beyond that, I managed to see him: Plain black tee, black jeans, red ball-cap and Timberlands. Standing with his legs apart, arms crossed, he watched me.

  This sod. How the hell did he…?

  Ferbie. It had to be.

  Shifting my gaze from the fucking perfect sight that was Jahleel Kingston and ignoring the immediate change in the pace of my heartbeat, I professionally—amping up the provocativeness—posed for the rest of the frames, disregarding Derek’s directions altogether and doing my own thing.

  No doubt, those last frames would be my best frames, as the presence of the man in the red ball-cap standing behind the director spurred me on.

  When the photographer was finished, and I was lowered from the ceiling for the belts to be removed, Derek rushed over and hugged me, kissing both my cheeks. “You, my dear, are awesome.”

  “Thanks,” I answered absently, peeping over his shoulder at Jahleel whose attention, by then, was directed at Derek’s petite assistant. He had one side of his lower lip caught between his teeth as the girl flicked a pen between her fingers over and over, flirtatiously talking in quiet tones to him about God knows what.

  It wasn’t the assistant’s flirting with him that ticked me off, it was that the doucheholecocknozzle seemed to be genuinely interested in her words.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Derek, nodding over his shoulder, pretending not to know who the steam-emanating, Timberland-wearing hot stuff in the red cap was.

  Derek turned halfway and glanced in the direction of Jahleel and his assistant. “Oh, JK? He rents the studio across the hall. He comes over sometimes when…” Trailing off, he turned back to me to examine my expression. “You don’t mind him being on the set, do you?”

  I didn’t mind in the least.

  His presence, in fact, made me perform better, knowing those gold eyes were watching me. But I had to pretend I did mind. I was trained well.

  “Of course I do,” I snapped. “Anyone can easily snap a pic and leak the photos.”

  Understanding, he nodded, and gestured to the side indicating the representative of Nixx Magazine. She and the photographers were engaged in animated conversation as they clicked through the photos on the monitor, fawning over what was usable and what wasn’t. “Gracie doesn’t mind. If anyone should worry about photos leaking before the magazine is out, it’s her. Besides, JK’s cool.”

  One eyebrow winged up at his choice of adjective. Other than Ferbie, he was the only person I’ve ever heard refer to Jahleel as ‘cool’ instead of ‘asshole’.

  As the crew disconnected the last belt from around me, I muttered, “So unprofessional,” and walked off.

  Out of the Catwoman outfit and back into my distressed jeans shorts and Batman T-shirt, I plopped down in the chair at the makeshift makeup station and let Amanda clean the makeup from my face, while I thought of all the things I could eat in my starved state, keeping my mind off Red Ball-Cap who was somewhere in the room chatting up a dumb tramp.

  Amanda gave me no hell about Jahleel’s presence on the set. She knew it wouldn’t help mentioning his name while I was: one, tired. Two, hungry. Three, sex-starved. And four, pointlessly, ridiculously, helplessly and hopelessly in love with him.

  I was only partially free of makeup when Amanda stopped cleaning and shoved the alcohol-scented cotton into my hand, ordering me in her ever dominant voice, “Clean.”

  As I started to tell her I was the one who paid her to work, not the other way around, she tilted her head to indicate Jahleel who, undetected by me, was now with us.

  Amanda moved off and Jahleel settled in the chair next to me, dangling his forearms over the flimsy chair arms.

  Leaning closer to the mirror, I resumed the task of removing layers of makeup from my face. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you’re stalking me.”

  In the mirror, I watched as his eyebrows shot up. Of course, that was a low blow, even for me. If anyone was doing any form of stalking here, it was me.

  “I rent the studio across—”

  “I know,” I clipped, choleric—the PMS kind of choleric.

  Even though I pretended to focus on removing my makeup, I was aware of his every move, blink, breath. My peripheral vision was sharp. As of recent, everything became sharper, keener, when it came to Jahleel.

  So, under his ball-cap visor, I didn’t miss his eyes as they swept swiftly over me, fast enough so a less acute person would miss it. Those eyes came back to me in the mirror, but he would never catch me watching him. Nuh uh.

  “Your eyes are blue,” he stated the obvious.

  “Contacts. Clearly.”

  “You were Catwoman.” He shifted unnecessarily in his seat. A ploy to garner my attention, but I continued to focus on my reflection. See? I was getting used to his games. “Grey or hazel would’ve portrayed it better. Your eyes are already grey. Cat grey.”

  “The director wanted a blue-eyed a Catwoman. Not my call.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Don’t buy the magazine.”

  Seriously? He was a dance choreographer. What the hell did he know about expressionistic portrayals of fucking cats?

  Jahleel kept quiet for a while, but I felt him drilling holes into me. Until the comment, “I see we have Bitchy Sassy today.”

  The last of my makeup removed, I threw down the messy cotton pads on the vanity and turned to face him.
“What do you want, JK?”

  He drew a breath as if to speak, but his eyes shifted to the cottons on the vanity. Blinking, he brought his gaze back to me, tried to speak again, but his attention moved back to the cotton pads. Helplessly, he shook his head and leaned forward, scooping up the messy cottons off the vanity and disposed them into a small waste-bin.

  Wow. OCD much?

  Sitting back, he sighed and looked at me full-on, no longer distracted by the heap of dirty makeup-stained cottons. “A note on the counter?”

  “Nine days later?”

  He brushed the back of his fingers against the shadowed scruff on his face. “I’ve been busy.”

  “Like you are now?” I questioned. “You don’t live in L.A, so you must be here for work. Yet, you’re on my set.”

  Eyes on mine, light-gold to artificial blue, he informed me, “I have no business in L.A.”

  Was he saying he came here to see me and not because he was working in his studio across the hall? He was here because of me?

  “You had a craving?”

  Pleading the fifth, he stood up and came over to me. I watched him, wondering what he was about. Cupping my face, he slightly tipped my head backwards and ordered, “Stay still.”

  Next, he used his index finger to gently stretch up my eyelid while using his other index finger to slide the contact off my eyeball. Resting the fragile thing on the back of his wrist, he switched over the other eye and did the same.

  Stepping back and turning to the vanity, he located the contacts case and set each one in its rightful place, poured solution inside and closed it.

  When he was done, he sat back down in his chair and looked at me with a satisfied smile. “There now. There’s my grey.”

  I didn’t even bother asking how he knew to remove contacts.

  “You’re crashed,” he pointed out.

  “Very.” I pensively looked down and studied my black desert Clarks for a moment then looked back at him. “You never called.”

  “Sorry,” he answered, unrepentant, “I was offended.”

  “Offended?”

  “‘Breakfast in the microwave. Raisins stocked. Never skip Vitamins. Rest for another twenty-four hours, at least. Get well soon. Sorry I couldn’t stay longer.’” He quoted the note I left on the counter.