The Pleasure Trap (9 page)

“Ma, I just lost my job and wanted to hold something 'til I get back on my feet,” he admitted.

“And how many jobs have you lost over the years, Graham?” she asked, pausing in her pacing. “Correction: how many jobs have you taken to avoid using the smarts you have?”

Graham remained silent and stood up to walk into the kitchen to open the refrigerator. He sniffed and cleared his throat as he pulled a bottle of juice from the shelf.

“Why'd you lose this one?” she asked from behind him, sounding tired.

He closed his eyes as he drank the juice in large gulps. “The cold weather slowed up business,” he lied, turning to face her and avoiding her eyes.

Cara pushed up off the door frame where she had been leaning to walk down the hall.

Graham grabbed a piece of paper towel to blow his nose. He scowled at the blood soaking the material.
The fuck?

At the sound of his father's voice, Graham quickly jerked more paper towel from the roll by the sink and swiped at his nose as his heart pounded and raced erratically.

“We'll get to the bottom of it,” he heard his father say just outside the kitchen entrance.

Graham turned and ran water on the paper towel and quickly wiped his nose again just before they entered the kitchen. Pushing the damp paper towel into his pocket, he turned to face them. “Hey, Pops,” he said, taking in the small flecks of gray now lightening his father's closely shaven head.

Tylar sat a plastic Walgreens bag on the island. “Hey, stranger,” he said, removing the navy trench he wore over a sweater and jeans.

His father had become a supervisor at the sanitation department, and his days of wearing uniforms and picking up trash on one of the trucks had been over for the last year. Tylar hadn't put as much effort into the success of his relationships. He was just shy of a year of his second divorce... and living with the woman that helped ruin his marriage.

Graham leaned back against the sink and crossed his arms over his chest as his father took his turn assessing him.

“What are you on?” Tylar asked, his face grim.

Graham's face filled with surprise for a few seconds before he forced himself to look unmoved.

“What are you on?” his father asked again.

“Man, Dad, what are you talking about?” Graham said.

“Your mother cleaned out your old room a few weeks ago and found weed hidden in one of your shoes,” Tylar said, reaching in the bag to remove a box. “Since you weren't answering either of our calls, we're both glad you showed up.”

Graham felt relief until he spotted that it was an at-home drug test. His heart set off faster than a greyhound let loose on a racetrack.
Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom.

Tylar pushed the box across the smooth top of the island toward his son. “What are you on?” he asked again with concentrated eyes.

“Y'all not piss-testing me,” Graham said in reply, afraid that their search for weed would expose that his habits had advanced. “I just wanted to borrow money, not get treated like I'm on parole or some shit.”

Tylar pointed his finger at his son. “Watch your mouth.”

“It's bad enough you threw away your private school education and never went to college,” Cara said softly. “But we never raised you to smoke weed. Is that why your motivation to do better—be better—is shot to hell?”

He looked from his mother to his father. Her eyes filled with sadness and his with anger.
They tripping off weed? Humph. They don't know the half.

“I gotta go,” Graham said, pushing off the counter and circling the island to walk past them out of the kitchen.

He heard their footsteps as they followed him.

“Don't call me until you're willing to prove to me you ain't some pothead, boy,” his father said sternly.

Graham snatched up his jacket, just wanting to be free.

“Me either, Graham,” his mother added.

He paused before the door to look at them over his shoulder.

“We love you and we're here for you,” Cara said in the moment just before he walked out the door and closed it firmly.

Joy

 

 

A
s the water pulsed against the defined contours of his body, Graham stretched his arms above his head and deeply inhaled the steam rising out of the shower. Sometimes it felt like the only peace he got inside their apartment was his moments in the shower. It was inside the 36 inch by 42 inch tiled stall that Graham didn't have to deal...

With Joy's slick backhanded comments or stony silence.

With his parents' disappearance from his life... after his disappearance from theirs.

With having no job and no ends to tide him over until he found a job.

Graham rotated his head and squeezed his washcloth to free it of the water. He'd washed every possible spot on his body. Nevertheless, when he thought of Joy awaiting him outside the door, he grabbed the soap and started his shower over. He smoothed the soap over the thin and soft hairs covering his muscled chest and then his arms before he glided down to do the same to the deep grooves of his abdomen... the tight ebony curls surrounding the base of his thick and long dark chocolate shaft... and to his muscled thighs and square buttocks as well.

A draft suddenly blew across his nude suds-covered body and he whipped his head to find the bathroom door open and Joy's friend, Inzia, standing in the doorway boldly eyeing him.

Graham paused and made a face. “Excuse me?” he said with attitude.

Inzia eyed his dick with a bit of a smile curving one corner of her mouth before she glanced over her shoulder. “You're right, girl. He is hung like a horse,” she said, giving him one last look before she backed out of the frame and closed the door.

Graham was still standing there with his eyes on the door that caused another rush of goose bumps across his body.
What the hell was that all about?

Still covered with soap, he stepped out of the shower. He paused and puckered his brows at the sound of feminine laughter reaching him through the door.

“He's not bringing any cash to the table, the least he could do is fuck me well,” Joy said.

“I know that's right,” another woman said.

“So it's good?” another asked.

He didn't hear Joy's words but the giggles and laughter sounded off again and the echoing of slaps had to be high fives. Graham felt his entire body flush with embarrassment. Not only was Joy discussing his sex with her friends outside the bathroom where he showered, she belittled his worth to their household and sat by while her friend checked out his body.

He was a man, and most men would be flattered, but he felt small and unnecessary to her life. A sorry-ass burden.

It didn't help that he knew he made it his business to sex the hell out of Joy because he knew that was all he had to offer her at the moment and he wasn't ready to give up everything she provided him, including a ready and steady supply of cocaine.

Crossing the floor to step back into the shower, he finished rinsing off before stepping out. Still wet, still naked, and not caring, he opened the bathroom door and took a bold step into the bedroom. Joy and her friends were lounging on the bed with one of her antique mirrors in the center of them with cocaine already cut up and arranged into neat lines, waiting to be snorted with a rolled hundred-dollar bill.

Joy's eyes got wide while her two friends' mouths got even wider as he strolled right up to them with his dick swinging back and forth across the tops of his thighs. He bent over and picked up the rolled money to snort two lines—one for each nostril.

“Damn,” one of them whispered under her breath.

Graham gave Joy a hard stare as he rose to his full height and then stroked the length of his dick. He smirked when her lids lowered over her eyes a bit and she licked her bottom lip.

“Y'all travel home safely now, ya hear,” Joy said, rising to her knees on the bed as she began to pull the V-neck cashmere sweater over her head.

The friend Graham didn't know chuckled a bit as she rose to her feet and strolled out of the room without looking back. Inzia licked her finger and then dipped it into the coke before she rubbed it around the inside of her mouth and on her gums. “One for the road for those bad-ass kids I teach working my nerves
all
day today,” she said, smacking her lips.

Joy stood up on the bed and walked to the edge in her stiletto heels to press her hands against Graham's shoulders as she leaned in to suck his lips into her mouth with a moan.

Graham jerked his head back even though his dick was already hard in his hand. Doing coke made Joy horny, and everything was doable for her—and to her. It was during one of their coke binges that Joy sweetly convinced him of the thrills of anal sex. Lionel and his violation had never come to mind as he enjoyed one of his best nuts ever. In the hot moment as he fell back on the bed with his dick slipping out of Joy's ass, he wished he'd taken Geneva up on her offer years before instead of beasting out on her.

“I hate to miss the show,” Inzia said, picking up the tailored blazer of her pantsuit to slip on before she too left the room.

Joy flipped her waist-length blond tresses back from her face as she undid the front clasp of her bra and shimmied her pencil shirt and thong panties down over her hips. She lifted her arms high above her head and tilted her head back as she laughed softly. “So you don't want me,” she said, her words slurring.

Graham continued to massage the thick tip of his dick as he took in her bald pussy and the matching heart-shaped tattoo covering each nipple.
Sexy as shit.

Joy stumbled in her heels on the bed, her steps unsteady. “Whoops,” she said, laughing as her ankle gave way beneath her and she fell down, her ass landing on the center of the coke-covered mirror. She flung her head back and laughed.

“You cut yourself?” he asked, releasing his dick long enough to reach out for her.

“It didn't break. See,” she said, spreading her legs wide and leaning back to lift them up into the air. Cocaine clung to the backs of her thighs and her buttocks.

Graham dropped to his knees at the foot of the bed and pulled the mirror—with Joy's naked body still atop it—to the edge. “So you don't give a fuck about this dick, huh?” he asked her, tapping it against her inner thighs and then her clit.

“I'm just proud,” she said, arching her back as she brought her legs up to place her ankles on his shoulders with the grace and strength of a well-trained ballerina.

He brought his hands up to grasp her legs.

“Keep your horny-ass friends from ogling my dick,” Graham told her, his dreads now free of the band he had loosely placed around the ends before his shower. “I'm not a fucking stripper or some shit.”

“You could be,” she said, sitting up and reaching beyond her legs to wrap her slender fingers around his dick to stroke.

“Man, whatever, Joy, you heard me,” Graham said, his words coming slower as the effects of the drug hit him as well. The cocaine made the sting of his earlier humiliation dull. In that moment he didn't care about too much of anything, and that's why Graham
loved
that white bitch. She made him feel good. She made him forget.

He turned his face to kiss each of her ankles before flinging her legs open with a jerk and grabbing a handful of her dyed hair to pull her head down until her heart-shaped lips hovered just above the tip of his dick. He didn't have to ask. Just a moment later Joy's tongue was flickering against the tip, causing his thighs to quiver and his ass to clench as he winced in pleasure. Hoover vacuums had nothing on her sucking velocity.

Fuck her
.

It was obvious fucking her was all they really had.

“Oh shit, excuse us, y'all.”

Graham's head jerked around so hard his dreads swung around his face like a cape. He frowned at the sight of both Inzia and the friend he didn't know standing in the doorway. “What the . . .”

Joy stopped sucking to lean to the left of his body to eye them. She giggled. “What, y'all?” she said without a care in the world with her hand still wrapped around his dick.

The friend he did not know whispered something to Inzia before she spoke, her eyes locked on Graham's body even as she addressed Joy. “We wanted to talk about that . . . proposition you made us earlier,” she said, with a smile as she traced one finger down the length of her neck and to the top of her cleavage exposed by her prim-and-proper shirt.

“Right now?”

The quiet one nodded her head.

Joy gave his stomach a lick and his dick one final suck and blow of air. “Let me see what they want,” she whispered up to him before climbing off the bed.

Graham watched her walk over to them and his eyes took in the sight of the cocaine still on her ass and thighs. He shrugged and gently stroked his own dick to keep it hard.
Them chicks is wild
.

Cocaine was still on the mirror and he used his free hand to pick up the rolled bill and snort it up from wherever he saw on the mirror until nothing but residue of its former glory remained. Flinging his head back, he moaned in the back of his throat and sniffed as he pinched his nose and closed his eyes.

“Shit,” he swore, using one strong arm to knock the mirror off the bed before he rose just enough to let his body drop onto the middle of it.

Lying on his back, he placed his forearm over his eyes.

“Shit, shit, shit,” he said, smiling broadly before he chuckled.

He loved it.

Graham heard the bedroom door open and close. “Come get this dick, Joy,” he said. “Get. This. Dick.”

The bed dipped under her slight weight as she climbed onto it between his sprawled legs. Her hand stroked him before she guided his hardness into a standing position. Graham's eyes jerked open and he lifted his forearm at the feel of a condom rolled down the length of his dick. His eyes widened at the sight of Inzia and the friend he didn't know both naked and sitting on the bed sandwiching his legs.

He couldn't lie—the sight of their nudity both shocked and pleased him, especially when the quiet one moved behind Inzia to fondle her nipples and ease her hand down her stomach to play in the hairs of her pussy before she slipped one finger inside.

In a drug daze now heightened by the sight of his biggest sexual fantasy becoming a reality, Graham looked past them, half-expecting to see Joy join the mix. “Joy,” he called out.

The two women laughed.

“Trust me, she's good,” one of them said.

They laughed some more.

The bedroom door opened and Joy poked her head in, her hair now up in a messy topknot. “Give 'em what they want because they are paying very well,” she said, holding up an eight ball of cocaine. “No more lying around here for free.”

Graham lifted his head from the bed and opened his mouth to curse her, but she solidly closed the door before he could.
Ain't this a bitch?

His anger and indignation dissipated when Inzia straddled his legs as she stroked him. “I just had to test this dick out, Six-Nine,” she told him, using Joy's nickname for him. “I
had
to.”

“You did?” he asked thickly, bucking his hips as he brought his hands up to massage her full breasts and rub her hard nipples with his thumbs as she squatted and then eased down onto his hardness until she surrounded him tightly.

She hissed in pleasure.

The other woman knocked his hands away.

“I got that,” she said, climbing onto the bed to straddle his thighs behind Inzia.

“Oh shit,” he moaned, looking on as she wrapped her arms around Inzia from behind and hotly licked the length of her neck. She used one brown hand to massage her nipple while the other eased down her body to play with her clit as Inzia rode him like she was on the back of a mechanical bull.

Graham stuffed a pillow behind his head and sat back to enjoy both the ride and the show.

 

 

He and Joy had become strangers who lived in the same apartment. In the last few weeks, they hadn't even had sex. He didn't care if she was getting dicked down by someone else, and it was clear she didn't care since she sent a steady stream of her friends to the guest bedroom she'd moved him into. His days were a mix of sex, coke, and sleep, with barely time to eat or sometimes even wash in between.

Sitting up in the bed, he felt his head spin and he pressed his hand to it as he gingerly opened his eyes to keep the morning sun glaring through the windows from jarring him. But there was no sun. He pulled his legs up and propped his arms on his knees as he took in the darkness of night outside his window.

How many hours had passed?

Graham shook his head to clear it, but his orientation was screwed, especially when he finally noticed a curvy body in the bed beside him. He raised the sheet. She was white and as naked as he was. He looked down at her profile. He had no clue who she was or what exactly went down between them.

He looked around the room as he flung back the covers and climbed from the bed. A filled condom still clung around his limp dick and there was one more on the floor, obviously discarded.

The door opened and Joy walked in still dressed in her usual work garb, this time a fitted bright red dress that matched her lipstick and her nails. She slapped the wall to turn on the overhead light. Graham eyed her as she wordlessly strolled past him and began snatching up the woman's clothing.

He frowned.
So she cares now?

Joy held the clothes in a ball under one arm and used her free hand to yank the pillow from under the sleeping woman's head roughly before lifting it and bringing it down onto her head sharply. “You paid for two hours, not the all-day special. Don't play with me, Chelsea,” she snapped.