Read Real Wifeys: Get Money Online
Authors: Meesha Mink
Real Wifeys: Get Money (16 page)
I felt sorry for my friend.
The dude started hawking up spit like he wanted to get rid of any of Michel’s DNA he took in when they kissed.
“If I was you, I wouldn’t tell anybody. The hood’s not going to understand that you didn’t know you was fucking with a dude,” I told him, my gun at my side but my finger still on the trigger.
He looked up at me and I could see in his eyes that he knew what I said was true. That shit would follow him. I knew he wasn’t going to say shit, just like I knew Michel didn’t want his secret told. I was glad when he shot Michel one last evil, hate-filled stare before he stalked over to his motorcycle and tore out the parking lot.
I released a heavy-ass breath as I stooped down to help Michel to his feet. He flinched and waved his hand at my gun. “You know I’m scared of those things,” he said, his usually soft voice hoarse from being choked out.
He stumbled on his heels and I tried my best to hold the gun from my body and help keep him on his feet. “From what I saw, you’re used to packing heat,” I said dryly.
Michel just sucked air between his teeth. “Not the time, Luscious.”
“Now I really want to know where you tuck
all
of that.”
“What part of ‘not the time’ do you
not
comprehend?” Michel snapped.
I just laughed until I remembered that Make$ was free.
Suddenly, wasn’t shit funny.
F
ear is an amazing thing.
That shit will have you on your toes, looking around corners before you turn them, and double-checking everything to make sure you’re safe. To make sure you’re not the latest victim. To make sure you’re alive to see another day. In life, especially in the hood, you either get or you get got. Period.
Fear will get you through.
And sometimes it will make a straight ass of you.
Knock-knock.
I screamed out loud as hell, like I was in a horror flick, and rammed my hand in my bag for my gun at the sudden knock on my car window. I relaxed as my mother’s face filled with alarm. I released my death grip on my .357. I’d gone from keeping my gun in its case in my trunk to keeping it in my purse—something against my gun permit. “Hey Mama,” I said, motioning for her to back up so that I could open the door.
“Did I scare you?” she asked, her eyes shifting all over my face.
Shit, scared been my middle name for two days.
“No, you just surprised me,” I said, sliding my bag onto my shoulder and finally climbing out the car. I arranged the peach silk halter jumpsuit I wore.
“You’ve been sitting out here so long,” she said, looking not much different from the woman she was when I was growing up. Average height, pear shape, short natural hair, skin as smooth and dark and flawless as a midnight sky, and eyes and teeth as white and clear as milk.
Naomi Jordan was a beautiful woman.
I got my deep chocolate complexion and sexy pear shape from my moms but my looks? My looks were all Kendrick Jordan.
“You’re afraid to come in?” she asked, the bright red wrap dress she wore looking brilliant as hell against her skin.
I hugged her close, hoping to stop all the dang questions. “I was on my phone,” I lied, allowing myself to inhale the familiar scent of her Trésor perfume.
Truth? I was sitting in my car trying to prepare myself for the all-out bougie bullshit that was my father’s side of the family. I didn’t fit . . . and they made sure I knew that shit. Everybody was a teacher, politician, attorney, or doctor. Professional shit. Me dropping out of college . . . to strip . . . and then to stop stripping to be the wifey of a rap star?
Pure shame for the Jordans.
They didn’t even like me hanging out with Eve—my mother’s own niece. Eve always worked as a cashier, a hotel maid, or some other job they looked down their nose at like she was selling drugs or stealing. My mama forgot that
she
was born and raised in the projects. I loved her to death, but her bougie ways wasn’t even authentic. That shit was as fake as counterfeit bags.
It was all those high expectations and bars that were set for me that made me want to be free, and that easy money on the pole was the key to the freedom to rebel against all their plans for me. . . .
2007
Nineteen. One year out of my parents’ house. Living on campus with nothing but a phone for them to really see what I was up to. Lying became my best friend. This was the fucking life. And my life was not wrapped up in my prelaw classes.
The shit that is so crazy is my parents keeping me sheltered for eighteen years and then just sending me off to college, where I learned shit neither my parents nor my professors wanted me to fuck with. Partying. Fake IDs. Clubs. Drinking. Popping Ecstasy. Boys. Lots of boys.
And my dorm mate, this cool-ass white girl named Erin, was my tour guide to the world of campus life. The more she showed me, the more I wanted to know. To learn. To do.
And when she said she knew how we could make money and threw a gold bikini in my lap as I sat on my Hello Kitty–covered twin bed, I was down . . . until I got on that stage.
J. Holiday’s “Bed” played around me and I stood there looking out at the owner, this sexy ex-stripper named Slick Rick, like a deer caught in headlights. Just standing there in my bikini, looking stuck on stupid.
“Yo, you gone dance or what?” Slick Rick asked, leaning his fine ass back in his chair with his muscled arms crossed over his chest like he was bored as fuck. Not a good sign for a stripper whose job it is to keep a man entertained.
I nodded, causing my synthetic wig to shift a little on my head. I fought the urge to scratch my itching scalp.
Pssst.
I turned and Erin was motioning her hips for me to dance. Copying her, I started to sway my hips and my ankle turned in, causing me to stumble across the stage in the heels Erin had loaned me. “Shit,” I swore, holding my hands out until I steadied myself.
Meanwhile, Slick Rick was laughing his ass off. I’m talking slapping the table, tears in his eyes, laughing his ass off.
I was
too
shamed.
Erin rushed out onstage and stood before me closely, placing her hands on my hips. “Just relax,” she mouthed to me.
My eyes widened and my body got stiff as Erin started dancing on me, her hands rubbing up and down my body. She danced around me and pressed a kiss to my neck before she brought her hands up to press against the sides of my breasts. She thrust one knee between my thighs.
“Grind on it,” she whispered up to me.
Okay, listen. I felt awkward as a motherfucker and my mind was spinning like “Erin is gay!”
“Grind!” she said again, raising my arms up to the sky.
I circled my hips as she pressed her fingers against my waist and then down into the front of my bikini.
I swallowed and fought not to make a face.
“Oh shit!” the owner said. He had stopped laughing.
And when I looked out the bartender and DJ were staring at us too.
The music ended and I went weak with relief when Erin stepped back away from me.
“A team? Huh?” the owner asked, rising to his feet slowly.
“That’s right,” Erin said, motioning with her eyes as she smiled.
Still shell-shocked, I gave him a stiff smile that I knew looked dumb as hell.
“Tomorrow. Noon,” he said over his broad shoulder before walking away.
“We’re in,” she said, giving me her fist to pound.
I eyed her. “Are you gay?” I asked.
Erin made a face. “Hell no. There is nothing a woman can do for me but introduce me to her brother or her man,” she said, strutting offstage in boy shorts and a bikini top.
I still stood there.
She stopped and turned, rolled her eyes, and pressed her hands to her thick hips. “You wanna make this money or not?” she asked, arching her brows.
I nodded, but on the real, I was more scared of Erin turning me into a dyke over stripping . . .
It took a while for me to realize that she didn’t want me and that everything we did onstage was an act. And we made money together. Slick Rick moved us to the night shift in no time, and the tips was damn good. Dudes was loving the combo of the thick white chick and the cute black girl. Ebony and Ivory. I can’t lie that plenty of alcohol and Ecstasy pills got me through pseudo-dyking with my friend onstage.
After a while, the stripping and partying caught up with me and my grades fell. I lost my scholarship and eventually fell out of school. Once my parents cut me off, I kept stripping, but then Erin got lost in a crazy meth addiction and quit. Then it was just me trying to keep going at it.
Humph.
Slick Rick put my ass right back on day shift. I was used to Erin doing all the work, and the best I could do was these ass tricks that were good but not good enough to go up against freaky bitches who was selling pussy on the side. I wasn’t even fucking around with that tricking shit. I was selling fantasies, not ass.
“I made a pan of my peach cobbler, just for you,” my momma was saying as I came back to the present.
“Thanks, Ma,” I said.
“Harriet, I haven’t seen you in a while. You’re all grown up.”
I turned just as my parents’ next door neighbor Mr. Alvarez came down the steps. He was tall and thin, with more gray hair than I remembered since the last time I saw him years ago.
“Hi Victor,” my mother said with a friendly smile.
He reached out to squeeze my shoulder and I fought the urge to flinch or box his hands away. I couldn’t stand a touchy-feely person and his hands looked like crow’s feet.
“How’s Sophie?” I asked, even though I truly didn’t give a fuck.
His daughter, Sophie, and I were best friends growing up. We even planned to go to the same college, but once we were on campus, Sophie kept up the good-girl routine and my ass was living
la vida loca.
Eventually we were passing each other in the dorm hallways and barely spoke.
“Here she comes,” he said, sliding them skeleton-looking hands in the front pockets of his slacks as he looked over his shoulder at his front porch.
Sure enough, there was Sophie, closing the front door and coming down the steps in a navy blue pant suit and a pair of shoes I remembered seeing in Gucci last week. She didn’t look very different from the pretty, long-haired Latina girl that I used to think of as a sister. She still had that whole J.Lo thing going and walked like her shit didn’t stink.
“Suga,” her father called out to her by her nickname as she continued right on to a pale gold convertible Volvo parked on the street in front of her father’s house.
Like she didn’t see us standing there.
She threw her hand up and waved briefly before opening her car door.
“Suga!” Mr. Alvarez said again sharply, before turning his head to give us a smile.
I thought I could smell liquor on him, and then I remembered from when we was little that he did used to drink. Once Sophie and I thought his brown liquor was tea and threw up the little bit we swallowed from our teacups.
I hadn’t seen him much in the year since I moved, and I hadn’t seen my old friend Sophie at all.
Sophie closed the car door and walked over to us. “
Sí,
Papi?”
“It’s Harriet, your childhood friend,” Mr. Alvarez said.
Sophie looked at me with eyes of a stranger. “That was a long time ago.”
I felt my mom stiffen beside me, and I knew I wasn’t imagining this bitch’s rudeness. “Maybe not long enough,” I said, eyeing her like,
Bitch, just blink at me too hard and I will drop-kick you in your throat.
My mother grasped my wrist hard and pulled me up the stairs behind her. “It was good seeing you, Victor,” she called over her shoulder.
In the few seconds just before my mother pulled me into the house and closed the front door, I turned to see Mr. Alvarez still standing in the street, watching us.
My Rick Ross ringtone sounded off as I drove my Jag toward the Twelve50. I glanced down at the caller ID. My insider.
“Hello,” I said.
“I got some info on your girl and for this you owe me big-time.”
I turned the car into the parking garage as I gripped my phone tight as hell. “Scale of one to ten?” I asked, my voice not filled with
any
hint of playing as I pulled into my reserved parking spot.
“Oh, this shit is a ten. Trust and believe that.”
“Give it to me,” I demanded, excited to finally have something to take Goldie’s ass down. The thought of that shit had my mouth watering and my clit throbbing like I was ’bout to bust a damn nut.
“Goldie booked me for a photo shoot in Puerto Rico with that rapper Big Gunnaz, and one of ’em came at me ’bout staying in Puerto Rico and spending the weekend with him—”