Читать книгу Who's Loving You - Mary B. Morrison - Страница 11

The morning was three hours away from noon. The sun was too bright to go back to sleep. The red potatoes were in the trash, my finger was aching, and I was still in the kitchen.

I texted Grant again. I give. You win. I stared at my phone until the time and date confirmed exactly when my message was sent. I waited five minutes, then an additional ten minutes, for his reply.

“Ughhh. Motherfucker! What or who are you doing that’s more important than me?” I yelled. Again, he had refused to answer. He was lucky I lived in Atlanta and not in D.C., or else…or else…What was his fucking problem? “Forget you, too, Grant. You’re too old for this childish bullshit. A real man would have the decency to give closure to his relationship.” Who was I fooling? I was angry because Grant was a real man. A real man with parents who loved him.

Lionel Richie’s voice resonating through the kitchen’s intercom created a much-welcomed distraction. One of the girls upstairs had decided to play songs, and since I insisted on the best, we had speakers in every room of the house, including the bathrooms. Softly, Lionel sang, “I do love you…still.”

As Lionel’s voice faded, I heard Luther singing, “Time rushes on. And it’s not fair. When someone you used to love, is no longer there…now you’re running back to me, to forgive you your mistake. Kinda makes me sad to say…it’s a little too late.”

Rushing into the spacious white-marbled foyer, I yelled up the U-shaped stairways. “Turn that shit off!”

Grant had helped me find this eight-thousand-square-foot home in Buckhead, which I’d paid cash for, so my escorts could quit fucking men for a living and for once be comfortable and focus on what they really wanted to do with their lives, and this was how they thanked me?

Whosoever had decided to play Luther Vandross at nine o’clock in the morning was lucky I hadn’t raced upstairs and slapped the hell out of ’em. They knew Grant and I had recently broken up. I didn’t need to hear that depressing-ass music right now. The feelings of rejection palpitating in my heart fluttered up to my throat, suffocating me. Fanning myself, I could hardly breathe.

“Damn,” I whispered, wishing I had the courage to hop a flight to D.C., show up unannounced at Grant’s front door, and make him talk to me. But I didn’t. What if a woman opened his door? I’d kill ’em both. For real.

Clenching my teeth, I scratched my neck. I was so frustrated, I felt like taking my damn iPhone, raising my arm high above my head, then slamming the iPhone on the ceramic floor and watching it shatter, like my heart, into tiny splintered pieces. What good was a communication device when I couldn’t get a response from the main person I wanted to hear from? Trembling, I exhaled heavily, then quietly sat my PDA on the counter and resumed cooking breakfast.

Flipping bacon in the frying pan, feeling lonely, I stood in my new home, inhaling the sweet aroma of thick strips of sizzling pork and watching grease specks splatter onto the stove. I hadn’t had a normal appetite in almost two weeks. The burning energy in the pit of my stomach had melted away ten pounds in the fourteen days that I hadn’t seen or spoken with Grant. I had gone from a size ten to an eight.

Outwardly, I struggled to appear calm so my girls wouldn’t think I was going crazy, but inside, I’d lost control of the hatred raging through my body, knowing I could easily slap or curse, for no rational reason, the first person that said, “Good morning.”

Onyx, my personal assistant, peeked her head inside the kitchen. When my eyes narrowed and shifted to the corners, I caught a glimpse of her disappearing into the foyer.

“Let me know when breakfast is ready,” she blurted, quickly trotting upstairs.

After my favorite escort, Sunny, Onyx, with her sweet black-cherry pussy, had earned me the most money when I was their madam. Men of every nationality had lost their fucking minds when they saw Onyx in my lineup of whores. I was glad I wasn’t exploiting women anymore.

I wasn’t proud of my past, but I was one of the few lucky ones that had got out of the escort business before it was too late. I was thankful that I hadn’t been arrested, like my ex-boss Valentino James, who was awaiting sentencing in a Nevada prison for thirteen counts of pimping and pandering, plus one count of first-degree murder. That could’ve easily been me sitting behind bars, facing the same charges.

There was such a thing called luck. With the help of a woman I barely knew, undercover police officer Sapphire Bleu, I’d escaped the prostitution arena in Las Vegas, and I’d avoided incarceration for the horrible things I’d done. Why she decided to help me, I wasn’t sure. But I’d learned never to question where my help came from. Sometimes the person I least expected to help me helped me the most.

Footsteps crept over my head, reminding me my girls were safe upstairs in the entertainment room. I prayed none of them would ever have to revert to prostitution. Girl Six was my only escort who’d remained in Las Vegas. She was reluctant to come live with me in Atlanta. Couldn’t say I blamed her, considering I’d kicked her in her stomach and fractured her ribs for showing up at work one day with a pimple on her ass.

Bam!

“Madam! Please stop! Don’t! I’m sorry! I won’t let this happen again,” Girl Six had cried. “Pleeeeaaaseeee, Madam, stop!”

Wham! Bam! Stomp! Kick!

Girl Six had balled up into a fetal position, holding what I had hoped was a few broken ribs.

“You are costing us fifty thousand dollars a night every time I have to send your ass home. You’ve got one more time to have a rash, a cold sore, or a pimple, and I will beat your ass into the ground, then fire you. Put your clothes on, and get the hell out,” I’d said, dismissing her.

Valentino had trusted me to run his multimillion dollar business, and the johns who paid ten grand an hour had demanded flawless women with beautiful bodies. At that time, my reputation meant more to me than sparing Girl Six’s life. Today I felt remorseful. In my heart, Girl Six was now family, and I’d given her a one-way airline ticket to Atlanta, the same as I’d done with all my girls. I wasn’t going to call her. She didn’t need another invitation when she already had a standing welcome to join us.

Thinking about my top-producing escort, Sunny Day, I whispered, “I couldn’t save them all.”