The Pleasure Trap (8 page)

Using the well-developed muscles of his stomach, he sat up in the middle of the bed as he raked his fingers through his slender dreads. His broad shoulders were already feeling the fatigue of the weed and the nut . . . until the coke would kick in and give him new life. “Work ain't a part of my plan right about now,” he admitted.

Joy paused in spraying her pulse points with the perfume he had come to love to smell on her skin. “I hope laying up in my apartment isn't either,” she said before disappearing into the bathroom again.

“Fuck it, then.” Graham kicked away the crisp cotton sheets entangled in his legs before shifting to sit on the edge. “It was fun while it lasted.”

His dreads lightly swung back and forth across his chiseled cheeks as he stood and made his way across the hardwood floors to the bathroom. Her shower still had the room hot and steamy. It immediately clung to his nakedness and filled his nostrils. Joy was standing before the mirror above the pedestal sink, applying makeup she didn't need in a circled area she'd cleared on the mirror. She barely spared him a glance with eyes even more hooded by the effects of the weed.

“I got time to shower before you boot me out this bitch?” he asked, already walking past her in the spacious and stylish bathroom to turn on the jet spray.

She paused in lining her lid with a brown eye shadow to look at his reflection. “Are you mad about having to go to work?” she asked, her voice condescending.

Graham paused in his move to step inside the shower stall. “My ass was working when
you
scooped
me
up,” he said. “Don't forget that.”

“So what's all the drama about going back to that shit?” she asked with a rare use of profanity as she pressed one hand against the edge of the sink and the other against her hip as she faced him.

He ignored her and stepped under the spray, avoiding wetting his dreads as he soaped the contours of his body so vigorously that his elbow kept jabbing into the slate-tiled wall. He ignored that as well.

His anger at feeling discarded like food that had spoiled rose in him with more heat and intensity than the spray of water against his form.
Man, to hell with this.

He leaned his upper body out to eye her. “Look Miss High and Mighty, you should've let me know you just rent a dick for a week,” he said, hating that even in the midst of his anger, he felt drawn in by her exotic beauty. He wanted nothing more than to grab her face and kiss every bit of the gloss from her plump, heart-shaped mouth.

“Renting?” she said snidely, closing her makeup bag sharply and not sparing him a glance. “Humph. I'm not even renting this apartment. I don't rent, I own.”

Fueled by the weed, the coke, and his fiery emotions, Graham stepped out of the shower. He had to correct his large body as he slipped and slid across the floor until he stood towering over her petite frame by nearly two entire feet. He grabbed her wrist to stop her retreat.

Joy looked down at his hand and then up to lock her glazed-over eyes on him. “Release me, Six-Nine,” she ordered in a quiet voice that contradicted the strength underlying it. “Release me. Wash your ass. Go to work. I will see you when I get home.”

Both his stance and his grip on her wrist relaxed. “Home?” he asked, his eyes filled with perplexity.

She freed herself from his loosened grasp before she left the bathroom. She returned almost as quickly holding a key and another glass vial in her hand. Joy handed him the key and opened the vial just long enough to tap a small amount of the powder on the back of her hand to snort before capping it.

His brows dipped in surprise. He knew she laced her weed with it. He didn't know she snorted.

“Fabulous pick-me-up,” she said, pressing it into his hand as well before licking any residue from the back of her hand. “It'll get you through the day.”

As she walked back out of the bathroom, Graham looked down at the key and cocaine—both were new additions to his life. He closed the lid of the commode and sat both things atop it before climbing back in the shower. Even as he washed, and through the steam swirling around him, his eyes kept shifting to the top of the commode. He slowly began to recognize a desire for both. A want. A hunger.

Rinsing away the suds, he turned off the shower and didn't even bother with a towel as he stepped out, nude and wet, onto the heated tile floor to pick up the vial.
Smoking it. Snorting it. What's the difference?

Mimicking what he'd seen Joy do, Graham took his first sniff of cocaine.

Joy

 

“Y
ou a'ight, dude?”

Graham looked up over his shoulder. Pogo stood beside where he sat on one of the battered sofas of their break room. He saw the older man's face fill with concern.

He dropped his head and looked away. “I'm a'ight. Just got a cold,” he lied as he felt his nose run. He sniffed and swiped at it with the back of his hand.

When the older man didn't move, Graham looked up at him in question.

Pogo walked over to the door but he did not walk through it. Instead, he closed it and came over to sit down on the sofa next to Graham. “Let me talk to you, son,” he said, reaching over to pat his fist against Graham's knee.

Graham laughed. “Yo, Pogo. I don't get down like that,” he joked, hoping to lighten the mood because he could already see the serious light in the other man's eyes.

“I've seen and done a lot in my sixty-five years,” he said with a sad smile. “A lot of shit I wish hindsight could change.”

Graham sniffed again and swallowed, fighting the urge to wipe his runny nose again. Fighting even harder to fight his crave to sniff the bag of powder hidden in his sock... again.

“I can already see that it's getting to you, boy,” Pogo said. “I can see it all in your eyes and in the way you act 'round here. That shit ain't nothing to play with. Trust me. If you need help, I know a place. I'm
still
tryin' to recover from twenty years of chasing that shit.”

Graham rose to his feet. “What shit?” he asked, playing crazy but far from it.

Pogo rose to his feet with effort and walked past Graham to the door. He opened it but paused in the doorway. “Get off that shit, boy,” he said, locking eyes that were graying with age on him.

Laughing nervously, Graham walked over to the door leading into the bathroom that was nothing more than dingy walls with an even dingier toilet and sink. “Nah, you better get off that shit, Pogo, if you think I'm messing with drugs,” he said, his heart already pounding in anticipation at the thought of getting to the package in his sock.

He closed the door and the stench of urine flooded his nostrils. Graham didn't care. Relieving his bladder was the furthest thing from his mind. Bending down he used his forefinger to pull the small baggie up the length of his ankle and free from his sock beneath his blue uniform pants. He barely took the time to stand up fully before he dug his pinkie nail inside the bag of coke and sniffed it with one nostril and then the other.

The bathroom door jerked open and Graham whirled to find Pogo standing in the doorway. “Damn. What the fuck is wrong with you?” he snapped, turning his back on his coworker and coming face-to-face with his reflection in the fading mirror. In one millisecond, he took in his red and tired eyes and the cocaine residue still around his nostrils.

His shame and anger came in a rush. Turning from the sink, he crossed the dingy floor in three long strides and grabbed the front of Pogo's uniform, lifting his slight figure into the air with ease until their eyes were leveled.

The fear Graham thought he would see in the old man's depths was not there, but sadness reigned. Sadness and pity.

The rage lining Graham's face softened as Pogo reached up to pat him as if he were a child. “This ain't even the worst of it,” he said in a knowing voice. “That white bitch ain't nothing to love, boy.”

Graham shook. He did love it. He loved it hard and fast. He'd gone from taking a hit once or twice a week to every day in just weeks, and in just a few more weeks he was snorting small amounts damn near all day.

Oh, he loved that white bitch so much. Moreover, he hated that Pogo had picked up on it. He hated that Pogo was minding his business and he hated that Pogo thought he wasn't in control.

His grip on Pogo's shirt tightened and he shook the man a little in frustration.

“What's going on here?”

Graham released Pogo to turn away from the sight of their boss, DiMarco, standing behind them. He swiped at the coke on his nose and heard Pogo fall to the floor and stumble against the door as he rose to his feet.

“Just a little misunderstanding, boss man,” Pogo said. “We good.”

Graham nodded and wiped at his nose again for good measure before turning to face them. “We was just playing around,” he said, leveling his eyes on the silver-haired short and rotund man eyeing them through the smoke rising from the fiery tip of the cigar clenched between his yellow teeth.

DiMarco's eyes shifted to the floor and widened, and his unkempt, bushy brows plunged downward as he frowned. “I know you mofos not in here fighting over drugs,” he roared, his Italian by way of Brooklyn accent thick and his voice booming as he pointed his cigar toward the floor.

Graham knew without looking that he had dropped his bag when Pogo startled him.

“Both of you get your asses outta here,” DiMarco said, pushing past both of them to scoop the bag up and then slam-dunked it into the commode with a splash. “And don't come back.”

“Boss man, it's not even like that,” Pogo tried to explain.

Graham looked on as DiMarco flushed the toilet.
All the powder gone to waste.

“This my last time telling you two to get outta here,” he said over his shoulder as he barreled through them again as he left the bathroom.

“Graham!” Pogo said sharply.

He looked away from the commode and swallowed down the panic he felt at the fifty dollars headed down to the sewer system. He forced himself to focus. “What?” he asked, his annoyance clear.

“What?” Pogo snapped in shock, his eyes fiery with his own emotions. “He just fired
us
over
your
shit.”

Fired?
The cocaine was starting to take effect and Graham wanted nothing more than to sit down and let it wash over him for the few moments before his adrenaline would shift and send him into overdrive.

“DiMarco,” Graham called out before easing past Pogo to leave the bathroom and cross the break room to the short hall.

“DiMarco, let me holler at you,” he said, stepping into an office dominated by a large-screen television and an even bigger desk that succeeded in making the portly man appear smaller in comparison.

“There ain't shit to talk about.”

Graham didn't want to lose his job. He didn't know how he was going to explain it to Joy or his parents, who stayed riding his back anyway about his career choices. However, he knew he couldn't let Pogo go down with him.

“That was my shit and I yoked Pogo up for minding my business about it,” he admitted, pushing his hands into his pockets as he looked down at his ex-boss.

DiMarco barely glanced up from the paperwork he was shuffling. “Then
you
get the fuck out,” he said without hesitation. “I don't do druggies. You won't steal nothing around here to support your habit.”

“You know I don't steal,” Graham said.

DiMarco finally locked his coal-black eyes on him. “And I thought I knew you didn't do drugs,” he said. “So don't show your face around here again.”

Graham opened his mouth ready to release a dozen different comebacks:

And many more, but he didn't say them. He swallowed back the retorts and just shrugged his broad shoulders as he walked out of the office. He took the opposite direction in the hall leading out of the building and into the crisp and chilly February air. He zipped up the winter coat he wore over his uniform and pulled out his skully to tug over his dreads as he moved wordlessly past the cars and his coworkers. He crossed the lot and kept on walking up the street even as he heard his name called. He never looked back. He never stopped.

 

 

Graham stood on the sidewalk outside his mother's house for twenty minutes.
What am I doing here?

He licked his lips, feeling the coolness of them against the warmth of his tongue, dug his hands deep into the pockets of his black puffy jacket, and released a breath that was visible in the coldness. And still he found no comfort.

Graham had been out of work for a week, pretending to Joy that he was at work when, instead, he spent most of his days looking for a new job, at the gym, hanging out with his friends, or sneaking back into the apartment and leaving again before she usually got home from work. That had been his life for the last seven days, but this day—this Friday—the games and lies had come to a head. It was payday, and his routine of cashing his weekly paycheck and handing Joy the majority of it toward bills was undoable.

A cold wind whipped through the cul-de-sac and Graham shivered as it seemed to touch his bones. Still, it was nothing close to the freeze on Joy's shoulders when nothing went her way. Graham wanted nothing more than to avoid that. Not because he loved her—he cared for her, but not deeply. And not because he was afraid of her—she was half his size and her bark was far worse than her bite. Moreover, not because he was worried about not playing his role as the man of the house—he was only twenty-two.

Living with Joy was nothing but fun times. Plenty of sex. Plenty of coke. And plenty of freedom. They never argued. She was laid back and chill about everything. Her favorite answer to almost any question was “Whatever.”

Who would want to ruin that?

All she asked for was help on the bills because she refused to take care of a grown man.

And that brought him to this moment standing outside his mother's house.
Shit.
Another woman he didn't want to disappoint.

Graham stiffened his spine and took off up the steps before he lost his nerve and walked back to the train station. He was just about to ring the bell when the door opened and his mother filled the doorway dressed in a shirt and slacks and a sweater that was two times too big for her.

“I wondered how long you were going to stand out there,” she said, all of her usual warmth missing as she turned to walk into the den.

As Graham shut the front door, he could smell the scent of his mother's perfume made stronger by the heating system warming the house. He paused and allowed the feeling of sadness that filled him. He hadn't seen his mother since he told her he was moving in with Joy. Not even for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Joy had surprised him with trips to the Poconos where they snorted enough coke to equal the snow outside their cabin.

“I'm waiting, Graham,” his mother called out to him.

Shaking his head, he fought the urge to take a bump of the coke snuggled in his wallet and forged ahead into the den to find his mother sitting on the sofa with both her legs and her arms crossed.

“How you been, Ma?” he asked, taking off his coat and dropping down onto the sofa beside her. He leaned in to hug her and she leaned back to continue to eye him.

“What do you want, Graham?” she asked again, her voice stiff, her eyes shifting to take in every aspect of his face.

He fought the urge to wipe his nose or sniff as she continued to assess him like only a mother could. When she began to shake her head slowly and released a heavy breath, he felt his nerves go on alert.
What she see?

“I wondered if you could let me hold something, Ma?” he asked, biting the bullet because he'd rather face a lengthy speech from his mother than go back to Joy's empty-handed.

“Where is
my
Graham?” she asked in a soft voice filled with an emotion that could be anger or pain.

He frowned in confusion and nervously laughed. “I'm right here, Ma.
You
a'ight?” he asked.

“I see you but I don't see my son . . . just whoever it is you have become,” she said. “Because see, my son would never go weeks without calling and months without seeing me. Barely taking a moment out of your life—and not a second more—to call me on the holidays. Really, Graham?”

“Ma, I was out of town—”

“No, you out your ass
and
your damn mind,” Cara snapped. “That's what the hell you're out of, son, especially if you're strolling in here treating me like a bank.”

Graham shifted his tall frame to sit on the edge of the sofa as he dropped his face into his hands. “Ma—”

“Let me hold something?” she said in a mocking voice.

Damn
. Graham flopped back against the sofa.

“I'll let you
hold
a belt before I take it back and whup your big grown ass,” she snapped. “I'll let you
hold
the Bible before I pray you find your mind that you lost.”

He bit the inside of his mouth to keep from responding as he looked at his mother.
Just sit, take it, and get the money when she done
. He knew his mother would not turn him down. He
knew
that.

“I called your father while you were out there trying to work up the nerve to come in. He's on the way,” she said, rising to her sock-covered feet and pacing back and forth before the lit fireplace.

Aw man. Shit just got drawn-out.
His parents hadn't joined together against him since he went to live with his father.