Beg Me (24 page)

Huh. I had tried my own charms on him, hoping to learn something useful. Maybe I wasn’t his taste, but his dismissal of Violet…

“He said his role was not to seduce me but to provide a model for my future husband,” said Violet. “He said I would learn what I need and what I truly want by being with the princes.”

My cruel streak got the better of me. “And how’s that working out for you?”

I instantly regretted it. The hurt on her face made me want to shrink down to the size of a sugar cube.

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry, darling. That was stupid, I didn’t mean it.”

She took both my hands in hers and tried to make it a joke. “Jealous much?”

“Okay, yeah. Yeah, I am. I
never
get jealous. This is really unlike me.”

“I spent the
entire
day thinking about you,” she confessed. “I don’t know what to do either.”

She let me go and collapsed onto her bed. “You know, the guys I hooked up with—there weren’t that many before I came here, okay, but, like, most of them were pretty intimidated by me.”

“I used to suffer the same thing,” I put in. “’Course, it would have been worse if I knew about Jupiter and the moon’s gravitation and stuff like you do.”

She smiled at me. Patiently.

“Okay, shut up, Teresa,” I mumbled.

“They were pretty intimidated,” she went on. “And, like, I thought, okay, just go for somebody who will care about you and treat you right. But I couldn’t find…” She burst out laughing. “This sounds so terrible! I get bored. I used to feel bad because I wanted to do my work and
then
come home to a guy, you know what I’m saying? Like have him there but not intruding, you know?”

“Yeah, I do. More than you think.”

“I think I came here as a kind of experiment with myself because I don’t feel what my girlfriends feel…? I’m not getting the vibe, you know? I don’t feel it. I can’t gush if they bring me flowers. It’s nice, it’s sweet, you know? But I won’t die if they don’t. I like submitting myself completely, having a man dominate me in bed, but all the talking stuff, doing things together with him—I never found any guy who measures up. I don’t think I’ve had a decent conversation with any man I’ve ever dated. And then you come along, and it’s…”

“Confusing,” I offered.

“Yeah,” she said, punctuating the air with a tap of her fingers. “Crazy thing is, I like it.”

I kissed her with a lover’s gratitude. She held me close, her forehead against mine as she whispered, “It’s very confusing.”

“Very confusing,” I whispered back.

“You want to kiss me, baby? It helps.”

I kissed her, my tongue finding hers, our arms wrapping around each other. I laughed soundlessly, asking, “So how does my mouth on yours help your brain exactly?”

“Oh,” she whispered, “I could give you, like, the whole explanation of synapses and electrochemical stuff, but it’s really complicated.”

“Well, you’re the science geek,” I said, “so I’ll just take your word for it for now.”

We turned off all the lights but one and slipped out of our robes, climbing into her bed. For minutes on end we simply kissed some more and held each other. She asked me what kind of guys I was involved with before, and I was too embarrassed to go through the list.

“I’m always on the go somewhere,” I tried to explain. I said all this slowly, thinking it was maybe high time I explained it to myself too. “When I come back, I…I get restless. I suppose I’ve never found anyone who’s been good enough for me to rush home to—who makes me want to stay put. A couple of high-ranking candidates, but…Pretty sad, right?”

Her fingers caressing my breast slid down, down, down along my belly, rounding my thigh and between my legs. Oh,
God,
I loved how she did that. Had to shut my eyes tight and float away a second.

“Mmmm…”

“I think I understand,” she said.

She gave me another deep kiss and tickled my spine.

“Tell me what you want,” I whispered playfully.

“Oh, I don’t know if you’ll want to,” she giggled.

“What do you mean? Come on, try me.”

“When you’re ready,” she said.

“Violet!”

She insisted on whispering it in my ear.

I let out a nervous laugh, saying, “Oh, my God!”

“See!”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t, not if you do it right.”

It took a bit of time. I kissed her and played with her breasts, teased her until she was thoroughly turned on, good and wet. Then she fetched a small container from somewhere deep in the bottom drawer of her night table and lubed up my hand to within an inch of its life, up to my wrist. Come on, she said, we’re pretty elastic. Babies come out of there, right? My fingers and thumb made a duckbill and penetrated her slowly.

As she rocked up against my hand, I could feel her pussy contracting on my fingers. I stared into her eyes, saw her mouth form a little
O
of astonished wonder, and then her vagina completely engulfed my hand.

She let out a long moan, and I balled my fist and slowed things down. I barely had to move an inch to elicit her whimpers of pleasure. I had penetrated a girl lover before, but never like this, with my whole hand, and the intimacy was so intense, this new jolt of power and ego gratification.

“Like that, baby, like that,” she whimpered.

“I am so fucking turned on,” I said, and I was. I leaned down to kiss her hungrily, and her fingers caressed my back again.

My fist made a slow corkscrew movement, which seemed to take her up to a higher peak, and she opened up so much for me that I could thrust in and out of her now, still remembering to be careful. But then she was coming violently, and she rode the wave for what must have been minutes on end, until I slowed it down for a moment and felt her pussy clamp down on my fist. Her eyes were slits, her mouth open, and God, she was beautiful, so beautiful as she came like that, and I felt my own orgasm take me over. I eased down by her side, knowing I’d have to work my way out of her slowly. She took my face in her hands and kissed me with sweet gratitude.

“Oh, baby,” she whispered.

There was a small vanity sink in each dorm room, and we cleaned ourselves up and slipped back into bed, holding each other tight.

In the early morning, I woke up when everything was bathed in a dark blue light, and I studied her exquisite body. She was perfect. One breast crushed against the mattress, one on my arm, her lovely leg splayed over mine, her hair wrapped up, and her smell…She smelled so good. My fingers stole a caress of her pubic fur, delighting in its tiny curls, and I felt the rise of her buttocks. She moaned and nestled closer to me. She called me baby, and I liked that a lot.

She was beautiful in a way that was familiar and freeing, if that makes any sense. I admit it was complicated in my own head. My last girl lover was Asian (even before Busaba), and there’s always that theory about the “other,” the exotic that you find attractive. I had neatly compartmentalized this part of my sexuality, thinking that maybe my tastes were narrow, and maybe I was trying to escape some of the bullshit I thought I’d encounter by self-identifying as a lesbian. I didn’t think I was one. In my head, I was—I still am—bisexual. A friend of a friend in a café called bisexuals cop-outs, and I thought: God, I don’t
need
this. Do I have to wear a badge? But now I saw the degree of cowardice on my part.

I never saw a future with my Asian lover. Some of that had to do with her hang-ups, her expectations, but I didn’t even
think
of introducing her to friends, family, parking things where they might get permanent. Never occurred to me. Now here was Violet. Little princess. And despite the outlandish world we had found each other in, what I felt for her was so head-over-heels
right
in a way that surpassed any love affair I’d ever had with a guy. Yeah, I could see bringing her back to London with me. I could see trying to make it work.

Maybe it was because our intimacy felt so detached from what we did with the guys in the mansion. Whatever need she fulfilled by coming here, I told myself, I could satisfy. She had outgrown this bullshit. It’s why she had turned to me.

I could rescue her.

Her eyes were open, watching me watch her.

“Hey,” I said. “I want you to have something.” I didn’t mention it was something I had bought originally for myself.

It sat carefully wrapped in tissue paper with the receipt at the bottom of my purse, one of my few indulgences and souvenirs from Nigeria. Probably spent too much, but who cared. I had bought it at the Lekki Market in the capital, and, boy, you would not
believe
how aggressive they can get, those traders, but I consider myself a veteran haggler.

Violet gasped as I lifted out the lovely coral-colored stones, the necklace made (I was assured) in Benin. Her expression was worth it, and she was a powerfully erotic vision lying there in nothing but my gift.

“Thank you, baby,” she said, and kissed me deeply.

“You’re welcome,” I whispered.

Yeah. We would be good for each other.

Chinatown in Manhattan. Bright neon calligraphy. Pop hits sung in Mandarin on portable stereos. Happy cats and smiling Buddhas, the fat jolly kind. Crabs scuttling in a big barrel—you could almost hear this cartoon squeal,
Freedom, freedom!
And flimsy stacked-up boxes by the curb for garbage pickup. So many smells. Noodles and pork, bean paste, vegetables and fish. I was here because of Ah Jo Lee.

Once I got safely on the Staten Island Ferry—no surveillance tails this time—I had phoned him on my cell. Anyway, Lee was glad that I was back in the States—even more pleased that I had infiltrated the group. Did he have any connections, I asked delicately, with the, uh…well, the Chinese underground economy on this side of the pond? Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact he did.

There was that contact he had offered me while I was taking my side trip to Nigeria. A major player in Chinatown named Shu.

“What’s going on, Teresa?”

“Not sure yet of all the angles,” I said. “It involves prescriptions.”

An easy enough code to decipher.

“Good,” snapped Lee, with grim relish. “The idiots.”

He loathed drug dealers. He thought drugs were the stupidest crime field one could go into.
They
always
get caught,
he once told me. And because of their choice, he reckoned, they exposed themselves one step closer to capture.

I often found it interesting how he distinguished himself from these “hard-core” types. I think he saw himself as a Robin Hood character, ripping off huge studios with his bootleg DVDs, the type of corporate victim who could afford it. Like my friend Helena, his call girls (and guys) got a healthy take and lived well—they weren’t streetwalkers on a razor-thin margin of survival. As for drugs, I could still remember him saying,
How can you sell anybody stuff that poisons? Fuck! Nobody reads anymore! It was the British who turned us onto that shit.

So I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at who his contact turned out to be.

I nearly missed this person altogether. The trouble was that Lee gave me the name and description of a shop but didn’t know the exact address. So there I was, African chick looking like every other foolish tourist with her NYC map out, passing the Confucius Plaza block, wandering past the fishmongers on Canal, making another circuit of Mott Street. It was a newsstand, Lee had said. Okay.

“Hating this,” I whined, as I went through a door and the little bell tinkled.

How do I explain what I’m doing in here? When every magazine, every book on the stands, is in Chinese. Not one thing in English.

“I’m…I’m looking for Shu,” I said to the clerk.

He looked at me with not unreasonable suspicion and then said something in Chinese, his hand up in a gesture of
wait here.
I watched him head to the back and tried to ignore the chatter of the two girls in the aisle who were clearly talking about me. The moment dragged on, and then, thank God, the clerk came out once more and waved at me to follow.

The back room led to a loading bay. It was larger than you’d expect in the crammed-for-space district, and waiting there was a circle of Chinese guys and girls smoking and hanging out. A couple of the guys wore bright outfits that looked like knockoffs of the latest gangsta fashions, some with gaudy gold bling on their fingers and around their necks, and I thought, jeez, get your own style.

More were in studded leather jackets, hair slick with gel, and the girls…The girls either went for the cutie-pie biker look or audition outfits for the Pussycat Dolls.

I saw weapons. Lots of weapons. Chains. Nunchakus—not the rubber kind but the illegal wooden article. Butterfly knives flashing in the light. And there were sure to be guns in the mix. Uh-oh.

“I’m Shu,” barked a mean-looking little wolf cub of a guy. “What the fuck you want?” The accent was thick but I could understand him.

“Information,” I said. “Just information.”

Now would be a good time, Teresa, to check the exits at the front and rear of the cabin on this bizarro flight. We were all in the store’s back loading bay, which meant I could dash, if I had to, past these guys to the alley for safety. If they let me.