Aching For It (6 page)

Still, something inside me felt bad that this lie by
omission was being perpetrated on one who I loved so dearly. I decided to wait
until we got back to our room to tell him what was happening over at House of
John.

“It’s just one big ugly mess,” I said to him in the room
after explaining the freaky coincidence of the Frankie-Edgar hook-up.

“Why a mess?” he asked, sitting down next to me on the bed
where I had plopped. “Francesca is grown woman. Edgar is grown man. What
Francesca and Edgar do is no my business, is no your business,
Papi
.
Yes, I understand, for you, your feelings about your sister, because she is
your sister and you love her. But you knew she would be with men at House of
John. You settled with that. As for Edgar? I have no feelings for him. That is
why I have no feelings for what he do.”

“But what about Sylvester?”

“What about him?”

“He’s not the kind of person you want in your business.”

“He no be in our business.”

“He knows about you and Francesca being married.”

“He does?”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

“That kind of information could be very harmful to us in the
hands of a vicious queen like Sylvester Winfrey.”

“He be like that?”

“He’s Mata Hari with a dick.”

Trepidation and hope engulfed me like ill wind and sunshine.
I was glad Étie was unbothered by the activities of his ex, allowing us as much
undistracted bliss as possible under the circumstances. But Sylvester Winfrey
was never far from my mind.

I did call Frankie the next morning as promised, but early,
in defiance of her request.

“Hullo?” she answered groggily. I could hear the sound of a
drunken baritone snoring by her side. Edgar, I assumed, while forcing myself to
block the picture forming in my head of Edgar and my sister having sex. I mean,
I used to change her diapers, for Christ sakes!

“Frankie,” I said stiffly but quietly as I tiptoed out to
the balcony so as not to disturb Étie still asleep in our bed.

“Junie?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“What time is it?”

“Seven,” I said without checking my wristwatch. A
copper-toned housekeeping lady, smart and alert in her crisp morning uniform on
the walkway below, her arms filled with fresh towels and linen, smiled up at me
with a quizzical blush. That’s when I realized I was standing out there in
God’s great sunshine wearing only my Calvins. I returned her smile meekly then
scooted back in, hushing myself in my near clumsy stumble at the sudden sight
of my baby’s sweet slumber.

“Junie, I told you…” She yawned.

“I know, I know,” I whispered. “It’s early, I’m sorry, but I
really need to talk to you.”

“Not now, Junie. I have company.”

“It sounds like your company is asleep.”

“Okay, look,” she surrendered. “I’m getting up. I’ll give you
a few minutes and then I’m going back to bed.”

“Thank you. Now can you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Stay away from Sylvester Winfrey.”

“Oh come on, Junie. Are you back on that again?”

“Frankie, you don’t know this fool. He could blow the whole
marriage thing for us.”

“How? What do you think he’s going to do? Run down to the
embassy and turn us in?”

“I wouldn’t put it past him.”

“But why would he do a thing like that?”

“Because he’s Sylvester Winfrey!”

“Yeah, but I thought you guys were friends?”

“Acquaintances, Frankie. We’re just acquaintances.”

“Did you and Sylvester have a thing?”

“Excuse me?”

“Did you and Sylvester have a thing? The way you’re
tripping, it sounds like you and he had a thing.”

“Sylvester and I did
not
have a thing.”

“Then why are you tripping?”

How could I explain it to her? Sylvester Winfrey was the
last person on Earth who needed to know even the slightest details of our
immigration plans for Étie. And no! Sylvester Winfrey and Jesse Lee Templeton
III definitely did not have a thing! But that she, my sister, had married my
boyfriend in order to get him to America was way too much information to share
with
anyone
, let alone someone of Sylvester Winfrey’s vicious nature.

It was bad enough that Frankie had befriended Sylvester,
though I’m sure once Sylvester realized she was my sister, he oiled her for
everything she was worth, fishing for the slightest tidbit, a morsel here, a
breadcrumb there, that would give him an upper hand over the one who got away.
Well, sort of got away.

“Sorry, Junie. But Edgar just woke up and he’s got the most
exclamatory morning hard-on.”

“Frankie!” But she had already hung up.

I don’t know what repulsed me more, the idea of my sexually
gluttonous sibling getting her sugar walls glistened by my lover’s ex-boyfriend
or the idea of her, caught up in a mixture of gratitude, lip-loosening Cuba
Libres and the liberating island heat, sharing more than she needed.

Okay, okay. Full disclosure. Sylvester and I do have a bit
of history. I met Sylvester when I ran track for USC and he was on the
LSU-Shreveport team. We met during a national meet that pitted our respective
teams against each other. The fact that we were the fastest on our teams
created a special rivalry, admiration and kinship.

As the star of the host team, I gave Sylvester the grand
tour of my beloved Los Angeles once I had kicked his ass on the track. He
seemed a gracious enough loser and, just as graciously, accepted my
hospitality—Disneyland, a Lakers game, Universal Studios.

I wasn’t surprised when, after a fierce workout at Bally’s
in Hollywood, he asked me, “So where does ‘family’ hang out?” After all, I saw
how he was checking out the shower room trade and how he was checking me out as
I dutifully lotioned my naked body. The perusal was not mutual. I liked
Sylvester well enough, but not well enough to, well, explore any possibilities
beyond a polite friendship. Besides, although I was out, I wasn’t sexually
active yet and Sylvester was in no way, shape or form going to be my first
encounter.

Nevertheless, we hung out until it was time for him to
return to Shreveport. I introduced him to the local watering holes of LA’s
black gay male community of the day—The Catch One, The Study and The
Horizon—affectionately known as the Whore Zone. He was impressed and wanted to
show his gratitude for the tour and our friendship, and wanted to cap our
farewell with a bottle of Cristal back at his room at the Bonaventure Hotel.

It sounded cool enough to me, although the thought of such a
pricey champagne expenditure was a little rich for my student-stipend
existence.

The last thing I remembered was the popping of the champagne
cork.

It would be a long time before I realized that night marked
the popping of
more
than a champagne cork.

The next morning I woke up in Sylvester’s bed with a
pounding headache, cum stains crusted on my chest, a sore asshole and not a
clue as to what had happened, although one would have to be totally clueless
not to decipher the tea leaves strewn so blatantly about the room.

I don’t remember being drunk, but if I was, how could I
remember what a drunken stupor would not allow me to remember? But I know me. I
had never been a big drinker. I always did things in moderation—well, most
things. I did go rather buck wild the first time I went down to the DR, before
meeting Étie, before falling in love with him, which returned me to my
sensibility and my sanity. And I’ve never been big on drugs.

Now don’t get me wrong. Over the years, I have certainly
smoked more grass than Bill Clinton claimed he did and tooted about the same
amount of coke Obama copped to. But drugs really weren’t my thing.

So what happened? How did I lose a chunk of time and my
virginity to someone I had absolutely no sexual attraction to? Was I a closeted
ho or just an automatic one?

I was too embarrassed to ask Sylvester what had happened
though that Cheshire smile of satisfaction he sported spoke volumes.

Over the years, Sylvester and I kept in contact. We weren’t
great friends, but we were friendly enough. We often found ourselves running
into each other at various community political fundraisers, national pride
celebrations and events like the National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership
Forum’s annual conferences.

His dubious claims of being Oprah’s distant cousin didn’t
impress those in the community who were informed enough to know better, but it
did lure many a young unconnected boy-toy hunk or a
body-by-Fischer-brains-by-Mattel opportunist between his sheets, so I was told.
And it would be years before I realized he had other tools at his disposal.
Sylvester had been dealing drugs for years, as far back as his college days at
LSU, which explained why he was able to foot the bill for an expensive bottle
of Cristal in a suite at the Bonaventure Hotel where I lost my cherry to him.

“Watch out for Sylvester,” Will Champion warned me when I
realized Sylvester and I would both be on Will’s cruise to the Falklands.
“He’ll drop a roofie on you in a minute.”

“A roofie?” I asked incredulously.

“The date-rape drug.”

“Get the fuck outta here!”

“Serious, Jesse. Just watch your back…literally.”

Could that have been what had happened to me? Had Sylvester
Winfrey dropped a date-rape pill in my glass of Cristal? At first, it was
simply hard to believe that he was capable of such notorious malfeasance. But Will
had never been one for idle gossip and unfounded accusations. I wouldn’t even
know how to approach Sylvester with such an outrageous accusation.

The thought of being date-raped is as unthinkable as it is
possible and suddenly, after all those years, I finally allowed myself to wrap
my mind around such a ridiculously insidious idea. I was not a ho! I had been
date-raped by Sylvester Winfrey. And if he was capable of that, he was capable
of anything.

Sylvester’s hearty appetite for the rudely salacious was
well observed by not only Will Champion, but by many members of the black gay
community. The brother had a nasty rep. He delighted in destroying couples,
wrecking relationships and trampling on anything that even remotely suggested
romance. He was hell-bent on proving love wrong.

Okay. Maybe melodrama and paranoia, as Frankie so keenly
pointed out, had gotten the best or the worst of me. And being the hopeless
romantic I always believed myself to be, maybe I needed to just calm the fuck
down. I mean, if it’s true love that Étie and I shared, then no interloper, no
matter how hell-bent on destruction, could prevail.

But still, when it came to Sylvester Winfrey, vigilance and
caution were not to be dismissed.

* * * * *

Three days later Francesca and I flew back to Los Angeles
together, she with Edgar on her mind, me filled with thoughts of Étienne. We
both avoided any more Sylvester talk. We had said everything we needed to say
about him and had both decided to keep our distance from him and keep him out of
our business. We had come to a loving truce.

We also decided that the first thing we needed to do when we
got back home was to get all the paperwork and documentation to Attorney Wells
Caitlin.

We arrived in Los Angeles that evening at 6:35 p.m. I called
Caitlin the moment we landed and the flight attendant announced it was okay for
us to use our phones. Caitlin was still in his office and so we set up an
appointment for two o’clock the next day.

I then called Étie. I hadn’t talked to him since our layover
in Miami five hours earlier and it seemed like forever.

“
Papi
,” he said, a soothing smile resonant in his
voice.

“Hi, baby,” I answered, my voice smiling too.

“You are home now?”

“Yeah. Back in LA.”

“I miss you already.”

“I miss you too.”

“Tell him I said hi!” Frankie chimed in next to me.

“Did you hear her?”

“I did. Tell her I say hi too.”

“Baby says hi too,” I told Frankie then put the phone back
to my ear. “We’ll see the lawyer tomorrow, with the papers.”

“Oh good, baby. I so need be with you.”

“I need to be with you too. It’s going to happen,
sweetheart. We’re going to make it happen.”

“I know you will,” he purred in that low, lust-filled voice
of his. “I so hot for you. I jack off each day thinking about you when you not
here with me.”

“Oh baby, I do the same,” I responded in code, feeling my
dick hardening beneath the buckle of my seat belt. I crossed my legs to hide my
bulge from Sis.

“I need you fuck my ass good,
Papi
, like you always
do.”

“I want that,” I mumbled in a near whisper.

“I want that big black
pinga
of yours,
mi Papi
.I want you make me weak with your lovemaking. I so love how you love me. I
need your love always,
mi Papi
. I be aching for it, aching for your hot
love always.”

“Me too, baby,” I moaned in halting secrecy, discreetly
twisting and turning in my seat, trying to hide my ever-growing boner in quiet
desperation.

“I have my hand in pants now,” he panted. “My dick so hard
for you. I stick my two fingers in my ass, try and think it is you, but two
fingers too small. I need you fuck me, baby, with your
pinga grande
.”

I could feel the drip of jizzum from my throbbing boner
inside my pants. The panting in my chest, the beating of my heart threatened to
explode as sure as I feared my dick would explode with a flood of cum.

“I need my mouth and my ass to suck your big black
pinga
,
baby. I try put fist up my ass so it feel like you. Oh God,
Papi
, I love
you so much, I want you so much, I need you so much!”

What was I to do? I was panicked with desire as the
seat-belt light clicked off and the chime signaled passengers to disembark.

“Baby, I gotta go,” I begged in a whisper.

“Oh
Papi
, I’m coming! I’m coming!” he cried in
gushing ecstasy.

“Come on, Junie, let’s go,” Frankie fussed.

“Hand me my carry-on, Sis,” I half answered breathlessly,
“in the overhead.”

“Now you know I can’t get that thing.”

“Ahhh!” Étie shrieked, “Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!
Papi
,
Ahhh!”

“Baby, I gotta go,” I pleaded again.

“Just hearing your voice make my sex be for real,” he said
softly. The thought of him bathing in the afterglow of his ecstasy didn’t ease
the dilemma of wanting him, holding him, sexing him in the right here and now.
“I love you so much,
Papi
,” he said, overfilling my already overfilled
heart with animal lust and unquenchable desire. My dick was about to burst out
of my pants.

“I love you too, so much,” I moaned in a whisper as I
clicked off my phone then started searching around my seat, buying some time
for my dick to go down.

“What are you looking for?” Frankie, already standing,
asked.

“I…I…I just wanna make sure I didn’t leave anything.” I
began to panic as my dick stayed disobediently stiff. I had to take my mind off
Étie, a near impossibility.
Think of something else, anything else!