Soul Siren (12 page)

“Fuck, no, Michelle,” he laughed. “You know what I wanted to be? I was going into politics. My high school in New Mexico had this big campaign over desert wildlife preservation, and I actually wanted to be a senator. You believe that?”

When it came to sex, I know he wanted Erica. He approached her as he approached everything else, plotting his moves, leaving little to chance, but his appetite was as raw as hers. On the night he invited her over, he was kissing her at the door, and they didn’t stop kissing and fondling each other until he had backed up all the way into his bedroom.

“I want this to be special,” he told her. He jumped on top of a footstool and hit a button on a strange box that had been specially attached to his ceiling with drill screws. “I couldn’t believe that shit when he hit that compartment,” Erica confided to me later. “I mean he was like some villain out of a James Bond picture or something!” Because she had discovered that her gorgeous white boy was into kink. Nothing heavy, pretty mild stuff, but perhaps when you go to bed with dozens of girls and can pick and choose, your attention turns to method, not frequency. I suppose I’m not the person to ask. And Erica always said that black men in her experience didn’t stray too far from regular lovemaking. “It’s always the WASPs who go in for the leather and bondage stuff, isn’t it?”

I told her I didn’t know.

Steven wasn’t into leather. What he pulled out of that special compartment was a set of
solid gold manacles
. By now, Erica’s jaw had dropped. It wasn’t just the escape artist’s expensive jewellery, either. Her boyfriend had a whole elaborate rig set up. Along with the handcuffs, he had pulled down a kind of swing suspended from heavy ropes. Erica told me she didn’t know whether to laugh or run for the door.

“And who do you expect to hold prisoner in that thing?” she demanded quietly. “Me?”

“Nope,” he said, flashing his patented naughty boy grin. He handed her a gold skeleton key.

She watched him unbutton his shirt and toss it in a ball in the corner. Then he clicked shut the first cuff around his left wrist, stretching out his right arm for her to help him do the rest.

“You say you want it to be special,” she reminded him. “But you had this gear all
built in
. Seems to me you’ve done this plenty of times.”

“Not with anybody else, no,” he quietly insisted. “I didn’t set this up to be with somebody, just for myself.”

She stared at him, hanging by his wrists, his toes just brushing the ground, and she didn’t understand. He wasn’t at all embarrassed by his helplessness but by what he was about to tell her.

“Non-tactile masturbation,” he explained in a whisper, smiling shyly. “I got this idea that…that I could bring myself off just mentally, not touching myself.”

Erica posed the obvious. “If you’re alone, how do you get out of this thing?”

“There’s a way,” he said coyly.

She folded her arms and looked at him. “I don’t believe you. You
must
have been fooling around with a girl with this set-up.”

“Swear to God.”

Erica laughed. “Let’s see you do it, then. Make yourself come for me.”

“I didn’t say I’d got it to work!” protested Steven.

And now she was roaring. “Well, this is a pricey way to test your theory, isn’t it, sweetheart?”

“I got the green, babe.”

“All right, then,” she said huskily. “Let’s see if you’re making any progress.”

He said she would have to finish undressing him. It would be the first time she would see him naked.

She stepped up to him slowly, savouring the moment, and she unbuttoned his fly, zipping it open just enough for his jeans to sag a bit down from his waist. Then her fingertips slid over the smooth skin of his hipbones, the almost feminine delicacy of them, circling around to his ass. She rubbed his cheeks, and the slight momentum made him sway a little in the manacles, all his weight going into his shoulders, and his breathing started to quicken. Erica told me she actually closed her eyes as she tugged down his trousers, drawing out the anticipation, her blind hands slipping off his boxer shorts and enjoying a two-second sensation of his balls and cock in the fabric.

She opened her eyes.

Still dressed, she unconsciously touched herself between her legs over seeing him like that. Muscles swelling from the exertion of his captivity, wrists above his head, and he was breathing hard through his mouth now, ribs flexed, and then the vision of his strong legs unable to find purchase on the floor, the way his feet dangled…All of him, his chest and even his legs so smooth right to his hard cock, pink and thick, the circumcised tip a vivid red. She had to fight the impulse to sink to her knees and gobble him up in her mouth. She wanted to trace her hands over his body and feel its strain. But more than this, more than all of this, she wanted him to make good on his promise. She wanted him to come through his own will and fantasies.

“You still got your clothes on,” he reminded her.

“Umm-hmm.”

He laughed, understanding, knowing what she wanted. He gazed into her eyes, and Erica read such lust in those sparkling blues, she swore she could see every play of their bodies in his imagination. He actually got harder in front of her. She looked at him chained like that, Steven almost going for a literal gilded cage, and it triggered something dormant and perhaps unrecognised until now. She told me later she didn’t even suspect how aggressive she was sexually until she had Steven Swann at her mercy, that what she was about to do was perhaps an extension of those quick fucks she went after with stagehands and dancers. “I fuck angry,” she joked about herself. And no man until Steven had challenged her by giving himself up so completely to her control.

She didn’t caress him. She didn’t masturbate him, not yet. She looked at that beautiful boyish skin, the smooth small buttocks, and she went around behind him and slapped his ass as hard as she could. At first, she burst out laughing. It was ridiculous. Even Steven laughed as he yelped. And then it wasn’t funny anymore, because she saw the strain in his shoulders, the way his wrists shook in muscle spasm, and she slapped his ass again until his cheeks were a bright red, and her palm actually hurt. And his penis was darker with the surge of blood, thrusting sky-ward. She came up close behind him, gripping his ball sack and feeling the tender fuzz of his testicles, and she sank her teeth cruelly into his shoulder blade. Steven yelled his pain through gritted teeth, asking her what are you doing, what are you doing? Erica replied by raking her nails down his chest.

“I’m going to make you cry,” she said. “Go on and cry for me—”

“No,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if he was being defiant or playing along.

She understood the swing on the ropes now. She came around to face him. Erica was a reasonably strong girl, about Steven’s height, and she could just grip him by the buttocks to ease him into the seat of the swing. Steven let out an almost sexual gasp of relief because some of the strain had been taken off his arms. But she wasn’t done with him, oh, no. She brought her lips to his and pushed her warm tongue into his mouth, and he didn’t suspect a thing as she took the long nail of her middle finger and drove it into the soft skin at the base of his cock. She could feel him like thick rope, feel the skin of his penis stir and be pulled even more taut. Amazing, she thought in that instant, because except for the kiss, she had given him no gesture of affection, no kindness in her hands at all. She kissed him again and pinched his nipples hard, and this time her cruelty summoned the tears. She didn’t want to mark his face in any way, still conscious that their looks were part of their bread and butter, but she grabbed a fistful of his blond hair and yanked hard.

“I’m going to bite your balls off,” she threatened.

Pleading with her. “No…no.”

In a rush, she stepped back from him and undid her trousers. Her wedge of black fur visible, her bra about to be unhooked, she says he was crying again, yanking hard on the gold chains as his cock swelled and ribbons of cum fired out of him. “Aw, shit, aw, God! Oh, Jesus…” Coming and coming as the tears ran down his cheeks. And she stepped back to him and wrapped her arms around his neck.

“Fuck, that was amazing,” he said. “I didn’t think I could…I thought we’d do this with me inside you.”

“No, that was cool,” she laughed. “And we’re not done, honey.”

She grabbed some tissues from the bathroom to clean him up, her index finger and thumb giving the head of his penis a mild squeeze to release the last bit of his essence. Steven was blushing fiercely, saying he had to get out of the cuffs now.

“Your arms tired?” she asked.

“No, no,” he groaned. “It’s just…I got to pee.”

“You don’t have to get out of the cuffs,” she informed him.

“Erica, I can’t do that in front of you.”

“Yes, you can. I’ll just get a glass or something.”

“Erica—”

“Hey, if you got to go, you got to go.”

His protests went on for a moment, but she kept ignoring him. I remember squealing a bit when she told me this part, asking her: Jesus, what do you want to help him pee for? And Erica lifted a hand and said: no, no, listen. It was
so
intimate. Her hand on his penis while he was bound like that, guiding him as he released himself this way, wiping him off again and having him completely vulnerable. Steven actually started to get erect again as he finished.

Time to play again, and this time she felt him all over. She wanted to wrap her arms around him from behind, feel his buttocks against her middle. She stood in front of him again, dropped to her knees to smell his musk, teasing his cock with her tongue, her helpless prisoner. His arms cuffed, there was a heightened eroticism to her guiding him into her pussy, penetrating her without an embrace. They laughed like children as she clumsily did her best to climb into the swing with him, but it was better without it, Erica coming around and doing it doggy style with him, relishing the suspense of whether he could hold out, arms taking his weight again, toes finding the carpet, and Erica pumping her hips like mad, her legs drenched in her own juices. These times were for her, and she felt like she was on a precipice, about to be swept into open air, orgasm after orgasm holding her aloft.

She heard a metal scraping, a clink of a mechanism, and before his hands were even pawing and squeezing her tits, she laughed at how, yes, just as he’d said, there was a safety device, an escape mechanism. She was down on the floor on her hands and knees, and it wasn’t so much how his cock slipped so easily into her yawning, juicy pussy that drove her over the edge as the final pay-off of his hands, his chest, the brush of his thighs behind her legs, the enveloping at last of his whole body so long denied by the manacles. Such
heat
from his belly and thighs. The tiny blond hairs on his legs. He flipped her over, and with her knees on his shoulders he buried his face in her hair, a sheltering cocoon of smooth white skin, pale flesh filling her up and surrounding her, and she liked the perfect eternal youth in that white boyish face, commas of blond hair that fell and tickled her forehead, the hollow in his pale neck and his delicate collarbone, and skin on skin, white against black in an obscene yin and yang, luminescent blond pubic hair, the softest down, meshing with her fine dark curls, and look at how those blond strands are getting slick with her lubrication, their bellies together. She felt she was screaming with each quake of her body, Jesus, Jesus, don’t stop, don’t stop because no one had ever got inside her like that before, his pubic hair
like soft down
and Steven exploding inside her, and, sweet Jesus, those shiny cuffs just setting us up for the main event, oh, yes, a fuck as good as gold….

Dogging It

S
aturday night,
and social life and business are mixed up again as we’re all gathered at Morgan’s. As I told you before, I liked Morgan. I liked the way you’d come up the freight elevator into his funky loft above 125th Street and smell his rice and peas in a big pot on the stove, cooked up the way his mother had made it. I liked his gravelly, world-weary voice, and the way you could talk to him about anything, and it was usually
good
talk that prompted you to challenge your assumptions, only with Morgan, you didn’t have to shell out for expensive latte at a Village café. I borrowed books from him often. A whole gang of us came bounding through his elevator that day, hiya, Morgan, hey, how you doing, man? Zen Master nodding to us and getting out his herbs from the kitchen cabinets. As I walked in, I patted the bust of Beethoven on its pillar, my regular salute, and then I heard Morgan say, “Mish, get your paws off my
Nation,
honey.”

I’d picked it up from the table and had immediately started flipping through it. “There’s a piece in here by Christopher Hitchens I want to—”

“Uh-uh. Wait your turn.”

“Busted,” laughed Luther.

Everybody was in a good mood, Odell along this time and playing bartender. I don’t think anyone happened to notice the open Scotch bottle and the glass on the table next to the magazine. It was five in the afternoon. Huh. Luther was saying something to me, trying to tease me over
The Nation
. Never realised you were one of them humour-less left-wingers, Michelle—

“Yeah, she’s also a lesbian,” piped up Odell with a toothy grin, thinking he was clever. “Trust me, I know.”

I shot him a look full of daggers. Thanks for announcing to the world I haven’t put out for you yet. Luther’s face offered me sympathy, and he picked up a Cassandra Wilson CD and went over to Morgan to say, hey, I didn’t know you had this.

It was one of life’s little coincidences that Luther was also one of Morgan’s protégés, both he and Erica treating him like a cross between the Grand Old Statesman of Jazz and a wise father. It wasn’t hard for me to pick up that for Erica, there was more to their relationship. Luther had come into the place, tapping Morgan gently on the shoulder in the kitchen with the rolled-up copy of
Downbeat
he had fetched for him. Morgan kept his eyes on the pot he was stirring and muttered a short, gruff “Thanks.” As Luther had gone to take off his jacket, Erica had leaned in and kissed Morgan on the cheek, and the old misanthrope deigned to give someone his attention. Her eyes holding his, and
click,
something else promised there.

Business first.

For the third album, Erica and Luther thought she was doing well enough now to take a couple of risks. “I don’t want to do self-indulgent shit,” Erica had complained to us. “People start to lose it and get sloppy. Or they go the exact opposite way because they feel the pressure to crank out hits, so they do really lightweight easy hooks. I don’t want to make something that sounds
dated
after two years.”

The answer, she thought, was jazz. But not covering old songs and tunes the way so many artists had done ever since Linda Ronstadt started the trend (with Natalie Cole, Bryan Ferry, and how many others following after all the way to the
Red, Hot & Blue
Cole Porter anthology and after
ad nauseam
). No, no, she said. She wanted a
clean,
sleek jazz sound, not swing orchestration but combo cool.
“Dream of the Blue Turtles,”
said Erica. “Classic stuff. No, really! Whatever you think of Sting, you got Branford Marsalis on that album, along with some kick-ass arrangements.”

When she confided this idea to Luther and me, both of us looked at each other with the same thought. Brown Skin Beats would not be happy. No label likes risks. They like sure things. They had a stellar R&B talent on their hands giving Alicia Keys, Jamelia, Missy Elliott,
et al.
a run for their money, and their artist was going to deliver something that might make the loyal fan base go
huh
? We delicately played Devil’s Advocate. Luther suggested the album better have lots of high-profile guests on it to create a buzz. He said there better be one sure-fire regular hit thrown in as insurance to open it right on the charts. No, no, said Erica, raising her hands, she didn’t want to play it safe. This would be her
Off the Wall,
her
Miseducation
and
Sgt. Pepper’s
and
Joshua Tree
all combined. She laughed at us in disbelief.

“Come on, guys! Just because our parents liked something doesn’t mean it’s shit. Think about stuff you can remember your Mom and Dad putting on that you still like. You like it for a reason.”

You could almost hear Morgan’s voice in that argument, and he was the obvious next step. So we visited him bearing gifts that night, bringing them out after dinner. Erica saying here you are, chief: an Alesis ADAT system. Not the most advanced one but good enough for Morgan’s purposes. He wasn’t a technophile anyway, and Luther had to show him how to work the board and the computer software. The man was thrilled. This was plenty sophisticated for him. People don’t know that while the ADAT was considered mostly for demos, Alanis Morissette had recorded all of
Jagged Little Pill
on it.

“This is really something,” said Morgan. As he rubbed his salt-and-pepper beard, I thought he looked genuinely touched.

“And it’ll come in handy,” said Luther, “when you’re helping us with arrangements.”

Morgan didn’t have to be asked twice. He played it cool, but he was secretly tired of scuffling along on piano bar gigs and doing occasional composition work for television. Jazz labels like Verve and Blue Note had long since stopped returning his calls. They wanted young artists with fresh sounds, and Morgan’s work was dismissed as either too “derivative” or “conservative.” If they wanted a sound like that, they had whole back catalogues of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. Here was Erica and Luther telling him: We are grateful. We haven’t forgotten you.

“I got to write my Ma and tell her I found work,” he joked. “Let’s open another bottle and talk about what you want.” And as Erica and I fetched glasses from his open-plan kitchen, we heard this rapid machine gun fire jazz playing on the keyboard.

Welcome to the blue house!
sang Luther. And he and Morgan had already adjusted the computer to give them an alto-sax accompaniment:
da-da, da-da, DA-da! Hello from the small mouse!

When they were done bowling us over, I asked, “What was that?”

“It’s the theme to
Bear in the Big Blue House,
” explained Luther.

“It’s on the Disney Channel,” supplied Morgan.

“You watch the Disney Channel?” asked Erica.

Morgan pouted his lip. “I
do
have grandchildren, you know.”

“And I have a son,” Luther said briskly, heading for the kitchen to fetch some ice.

Erica pressed him for more. “You have a son? I never knew that.”

Luther shrugged. “Trey. He’s about three now. I don’t get to see him much.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“So am I. It’s all right, it’s just…His mother didn’t—well, she didn’t like the feast or famine deal with my child support when I was, uh, trying to climb my way up in the biz,” he explained.

“I’m sorry, Luther,” whispered Erica.

“It’s okay. She moved him out of New York, so what are you going to do? My work’s here. Can’t chase them across the country because she decides to be somewhere else. I go down south when I can.”

“We gonna play music or talk music or what?” complained Morgan.

“Keep your pants on, old man,” said Luther, handing him a drink and a slap on the back in that order. “Here, we’ll give you something in neutral and see what you can do with it—” He tapped at a few keys on the computer, and we suddenly had a generic jazz bass and drums in four-four time ascending and falling
dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum…

“Please,” groaned Morgan, a cigarette dangling from his lips, “don’t insult me.”

Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum…

One relaxed brown hand came up, tapping out a staccato Morse code on the ivory keys:
Da
(Pause)
Da, da, da, DA.
Luther, Erica and I were all laughing now as we recognised Duke Ellington’s “C Jam Blues.” Luther went back to the computer, cackling that “Ah-ha! Dad wants to go to a higher level on the PlayStation.” He fooled around with the bass line, and Morgan kicked into a smooth rendition of “Now’s the Time,” a lot of his improvisation around the melody borrowed from Oscar Peterson. The tune blew Odell away, and Morgan said, “You never heard no Charlie Parker in your life, boy?”

“I know Charlie Parker. He’s old school, right?”

“
This
is Charlie Parker,” said Morgan, as if hushing him in church. Then he quit “Now’s the Time” to play a bit of a haunting bluesy number that sounded vaguely familiar to my ears. I couldn’t quite place it.

Luther was captivated as well. His brow furrowed, he smiled at his friend and said, “Who’s that? I don’t recognise that.” His voice was mildly teasing, as if perhaps it was one of Morgan’s own works.

“That,” said Erica, grinning at her jazz sage lover, “is Duane Jones.”

Her eyes met mine briefly, and she saw on my face how it came back to me, one of the pieces she had casually played on the family piano years ago in high school. Of course.

We were all respectfully silent as Morgan kept playing his old partner’s composition right to the end.

“To Duane Jones,” said Luther, raising his glass in a toast.

“To Duane Jones,” the rest of us echoed.

M
organ played a few more snatches of this or that jazz legend for Odell. Erica and I stood in the kitchen area, leaned against the counter by the sink, watching the men. I knew by now that I wasn’t destined to be one of the breeders, but Luther’s revised status as a parent endeared him even more to me. As bizarre as it sounds, considering how I felt about her, I actually considered him a good match for Erica. I wasn’t about to push them together, but I was curious why Erica hadn’t chased him as she had blatantly chased others. After all, Luther might “want her all to himself” but men will settle for having a taste of Erica before giving her up to rivals.

“He’s smart, he’s responsible—I mean he’s doing his best for that little boy of his,” I said, ticking it all off for her. “He’s mature—”

Erica downed her drink and gave me a patronising pat on the arm. “Mish, I know you mean well, but God save me from complicated men.”

So she was not about to be hung up on Luther Banks. Luther, however, was still very much interested in Erica. After all the analysis and talk about bringing in not just studio pros but real jazz session musicians who could record together instead of laying down individual tracks, we all said our good nights. Odell made his pitch again to see me home or better still why didn’t I have a nightcap at his place? What was the big deal? I told him I had to get up for a meeting. We were milling around, finishing our drinks, and Erica didn’t go for her jacket slung over her chair. She told me she’d see me back at the apartment. I shrugged and said fine, and it was Luther giving her a second curious glance. Watching and not at all happy as she stood next to Morgan, who was already pouring them both another drink.

As the wooden slat door closed the freight elevator, I glimpsed Erica’s hands sink under Morgan’s belt and pull out his shirttails. She was caressing the skin on the small of his back, Morgan smiling and keeping his eyes ahead, a flicker of pleasure there as if the entire evening had been a prelude for this sensual reunion.

He must have caught it just as I did. Luther.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he muttered, and as the freight slowly descended, his eyes gazed ahead, still burning on the image of them together.

I think he was disillusioned with Morgan as much as with her. He had this face…You could paste it on a boy of twelve who catches his father walking out of a hotel with a woman who’s not Mom. Morgan was a teacher, a mentor for him, so that there was always a deference no matter how casual the business conversations or just shooting the breeze. Involvement with Erica shrank the old master down to life-size and made every wrinkle, every mole and crack in that craggy bearded face abruptly visible. He would be touching Erica in a moment. He’d be kissing Erica. The idea of her with Steven Swann was unpleasant, but Luther carried around a private amused disdain for Steven. Erica and Morgan? Too much. All the other men he guessed that she’d been with were abstractions, but Erica and Morgan…It was a screwdriver twisting and burrowing in a knothole in the mind, driving him crazy, the way it could drive me crazy when I stopped to consider it.

“It’s fucking sad, really,” said Luther.

“What is?” asked Odell, casting his eyes warily at me. He had a glimmer of what was going on.

Luther sounded like he was talking to himself. “We’re supposed to be macho and think, wha-hey! Good for you, man, you get yourself a sweet young honey when you’re coughing away in your fifties or whatever. But it’s kind of pathetic. You still look like the girl’s Dad.”

“No one cares about age difference anymore,” I put in quietly. “And you can’t tell me you think that’s such a big deal to you.”

“As a matter of fact, Michelle, I do have strong opinions on it, yeah.” Luther clucked his tongue once more in disgust. “It’s not fucking dignified, man. It just ain’t.”