Between My Thighs: An Urban Erotic Tale (16 page)

Surely, this kid had the wrong room. I was baffled when Troy opened the door, stepped outside, and spoke to him.

“Trey, I told you to ring my cell. Why the fuck you knocking the door down?” Troy asked.

“Mama said she needed some more cash,” the boy replied.

I was in hysterics. Had this mofo invited his children and his baby mama on our trip? Turned out I was correct. All three of those little
knuckas
as I called them were staying a couple floors down from us.

Troy took his children on a family vacation every year. This time he decided they could join us. Joslyn, the breeder of his eldest child had family in Jamaica. Since she had a relationship with the other kids, she agreed to watch after them. Besides, it was a free trip for her. It was convenient, having all of us in the same place. I got on that airplane mad as hell.

Chapter 17|

Three weeks passed. Kapri and I booked a last-minute flight to Miami to sit on the set of a shoot for an upcoming urban film production. My firm managed two of the actors in the movie, and it was my aspiration to sign additional clientele. I didn’t have a chance to see Troy before I left. I left him a note at the house and a voice message that I’d be back in a couple of days.

Troy had downplayed what happened in Jamaica. He said he was going to surprise me and planned for us to exchange vows while on the island. He’d brought the kids to share the experience. That knowledge pissed me off even more because it never crossed his mind that I would want my family to be there.

When we arrived in Miami, the producers had cancelled the taping because the weather advisory indicated a storm was headed to the area. Kapri and I turned around, went back to the airport, and waited on standby for the next flight back to New York.

It was just after midnight when we landed at JFK. It was a good thing my car was parked at the airport because the lot was cheaper than a round-trip taxi ride. I offered to drop Kapri at home. The Brooklyn Queens Expressway was congested so I took the North Conduit instead, cutting through side streets, down Atlantic Avenue, and heading cross town, pulling in front of Kapri’s apartment just off Eastern Parkway.

I had tried calling Troy to let him know I would be home early, but he didn’t answer the phone. He was notorious for that. When I got home, his car wasn’t outside. I unloaded my garment bags, grabbed my Louis Vuitton, and unlocked my front door. The music was bumping. Troy must have been in the shower because that’s the only time he turned up the stereo—unless we were getting busy.

I placed my things in the foyer and proceeded to the living room. I had already begun unbuttoning my blouse when I heard water running. After sitting on that plane for three hours, a nice hot shower would be perfect.

I walked in my bedroom, hit the lights, all set to grab a piece of lingerie for later.

“Oh, shit,” I yelled. “What the fuck?”

“Troy, you said this bitch was out of town,” Dallas screamed out.

I reached for my glock without further thought as Troy ran from the bathroom.

“I can explain,” Troy said.

“You can’t explain this shit. Get the fuck out my bed, bitch,” I said to Dallas’s brazen ass. Apparently, neither of them realized the danger they were in. Troy rushed up on me, trying to explain, when I pulled my nine-millimeter up from my side, positioning it directly in his face. His ass backed up.

“Yo, it don’t need to be like this,” Troy said. “Where the fuck you get a gun from, ma?”

“Shut the fuck up, Troy. You made it like this. Got this bitch in my house, fucking her in my bed. Are you out of your goddamn mind? How long you been fucking her, Troy?”

Troy never looked so tense. He always controlled himself, his emotions, and his environment. He was treading unfamiliar territory, and Dallas, she must have been high when she jumped up and said, “We never stopped fucking,” and tried to knock the gun from my hand. I shot her ass. One shot to the temple, and she bounced back like a fucking Slinky.

“Ah, naw, baby. What the fuck? This shit is foul,” Troy yelled. He ran over to Dallas’s lifeless body.

“Get the fuck back where you were. Don’t try to comfort that bitch.”

Troy stopped in his tracks. “Let’s talk about this shit. We can fix this. I’m sorry,” he said.

Those were his last words.

• • •

Three days passed, and I didn’t leave my house. I’d been making arrangements, getting my story straight. It would be a matter of time before I answered to the shit that smelled in my bedroom.

My apartment was in disarray. I’d gone in the closet to grab the broom when I saw Troy’s partially open duffle bag on the floor. It was heavy when I tried to pick it up. I sat on the floor just outside the closet and went through it. I had already been crying from walking in on him and Dallas, but when I saw the bags of cocaine, it was as if my world ended twice.

I wasn’t into doing drugs, had dated dope dealers back in the day when the shit seemed cute, and my initial reaction was to flush the coke down the toilet, but Mama didn’t raise no fool. I grabbed the scale from the kitchen and weighed the dope. By the time I finished, I’d added up more than five hundred pounds of pure cocaine.

Needless to say, I was glad I didn’t flush it. My mother always told me to maintain separate bank accounts and my own money, a stash only I knew about. I opened my custom panel beneath the floor of my closet, home to my state-of-the-art safe with a triple locking system and finger print reader, placed the dope safely inside, and locked it.

I poured a glass of chardonnay and waited.

It was on the fourth day when the police finally arrived. The landlord let them into my unit. My mother had requested a patrol car pass by my place after she hadn’t spoken to me in several days. When she called the office and Kapri mentioned she hadn’t seen me, she grew concerned.

“What is that smell?” the landlord said.

I sat there, covered in blood, soiled in feces, and in a zone when the female officer walked in and found me.

“We have a problem,” she yelled to her partners who waited in the living room. “Ask the landlord to step out.”

“Sir, we need you to back out of the apartment,” the male officer said.

“What’s the predicament officer?” the landlord asked.

“I’m not sure yet, sir, but you need to step outside,” he told him.

“What happened here, miss?” she asked me.

I didn’t respond. I remained dazed, in a dreamlike state.

“We need someone from psych in here,” she told her partners. “Miss, can you hear me?”

I had faith in my ability as a psychologist and was on my own kâma-manasic level—a state when the mind operates under the direction of desire, stuck in an illusionary world. The officers were bewildered, trying to understand what happened.

I disassociated myself from reality. The scene, the world, the two dead bodies, none of it was real to me. I would never be able to make myself understood. I fell into a state of deranged mental euphoria.

The police officers sent me to the hospital for medical evaluation before releasing me to the psych ward. I was accustomed to being in the mental institution and blended in. To help pass the time, track the days, and escape to a surreal place, I kept a journal called
Hypnotic
.

Kevin, my psychiatrist, came to my rescue. I had sent him a brief e-mail explaining what happened before the police arrived. After a few phone calls, he was able to locate me, and I had never been happier to see my friend. I hadn’t said a word to anyone in the facility for the seventy-two hours that I’d been there. He arranged for us to have private, unmonitored sessions.

“How are you holding up, Raquel?” Kevin asked.

“I’m hanging,” I replied.

“I’m going to get you out of here.”

“It gets cold in here. They won’t give me any cover or sheets.”

“I’ll get that taken care of before I leave today. They think you’re suicidal,” he said.

“I’m not,” I murmured.

“I know you aren’t. What happened, love?”

“I’d gone out of town for a business trip, which turned out to be a flop. I came home early, walked in on Troy and Dallas. She was in my bed, Kevin. Getting ready to fuck my fiancé. My instinct told me to grab my gun. She got smart, tried to take it from my hand, and I shot her. Troy ran over to console her, and I realized at that moment that he had been lying to me all along. He told me my love was to die for. I believed him. I knew the only way out of the mess was to look like I was crazy, so I waited until the police found me, and when they did, I was soiled in shit, blood, and urine.”

“Damn, Raquel. What do you want me to do? Plead temporary insanity?”

“I don’t know if that’s the best option. Historically, it has always been difficult to prove temporary insanity, and it isn’t the most successful defense in courts. It’s going to be tough convincing a jury or judge that I was insane at the time the crime was committed, but suddenly am cured given my professional background.”

“The success rate varies by state, and you happen to live in an area where the plea has been presented approximately forty percent of the time with thirty percent success. Once I introduce your history of mental disease—seeing dead people, hearing voices, depression, anxiety over your miscarriage, and the abuse you suffered in your relationship with Troy—we should be able to argue irresistible impulse.”

The Irresistible Impulse Test was adopted in 1887 and encompassed not only whether a defendant knew right from wrong, but also whether he could control his impulses to commit wrongdoing. The test is often used as an appendage to the M’Naghten Rule, which essentially determines if the person who committed the crime can distinguish from right and wrong. I agreed with Kevin that it was the best path to take.

“I’m going to have to spend some time in here to make that plea work. Usually, people aren’t simply released. They typically are confined to a mental hospital,” I replied.

“Well, you have time. I say in three months or less you should be walking out of here. Let me work the outside for you. I know an excellent defense attorney who has experience in cases similar to yours.”

Kevin and I concluded our session. He agreed to bring in the legal team that would support my case during our next appointment.

• • •

Extreme dissociative disorder is what the specialists said I had. It’s a mental process that produces a lack of connection in a person’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. With me pretending to be disconnected, it seemed like an appropriate assessment.

Usually, individuals who displayed characteristics of the disorder experienced some sort of severe trauma growing up. As a child, I would often go away to imaginary places where I could escape the emotional pain from not having my father around. This defense mechanism improved after my brother was killed, and by the time I met Troy, I had mastered it. I never experienced physical abuse as a child. It was only after I became an adult that the abuse started, thanks to the trifling men with whom I dealt. It wasn’t physical abuse. I never bothered with a man who thought he was going to beat my ass. I managed to remain in abusive relationships of the other kind—those that were psychologically, verbally, and spiritually damaging.

My relationship with Troy was an overwhelmingly traumatic experience. I developed highly creative survival techniques within my head; it was the only way to deal with his bullshit.

The first night in the mental ward was the hardest. The place definitely wasn’t the Waldorf, and I felt like I was going through detox being away from my routine. I was on suicide watch the first seventy-two hours before Kevin fixed that. Finally, I had toiletries, blankets, and other bare necessities. I knew the people in the ward were watching me. I wasn’t sure what type of show they expected, but I gave them a performance, further supporting my diagnosis. I didn’t regret what happened to Troy, which alone classified me as a lunatic.

I fell asleep one morning only to be awakened for my first psychotherapy treatment with Dr. Monroe. She was assigned by the unit to rehabilitate me. Fully aware of my background, she never believed I was incognizant. That was evident in her brutal treatments.

“What really happened that night?” Dr. Monroe asked with an unusual grin during our first session.

I remained unresponsive. Her attempts to engage me in her talk therapy failed. Truth was, I didn’t respect Dr. Monroe, and she knew it. She’d attained her degree from an unaccredited university, often misdiagnosed her patients, and treated them poorly. The product of numerous malpractice suits, the best gig she could get was volunteering at a facility that was extremely short staffed, under-funded, and would allow her to exchange rudimentary services at low costs. In a payback effort, she dispensed a number of medications to teach me about fucking with her as she put it.

I didn’t have a chemical imbalance. My first night, I was given antidepressants because the staff feared I’d take my own life. They didn’t know how much I cherished my life. Essentially, that’s why I had to cleanse myself of the garbage that decomposed it, starting with Troy.

Dr. Monroe knew her prescription for antipsychotic drugs would only make matters worse, given that no chemical imbalance existed, which is why I tried to strangle her ass when she dispensed them. Suddenly, I hurled out of my chair, jumping right onto her. My weight knocked her over. I was sitting on top of her, hands clenched around her throat, banging her head against the leg of the stainless-steel table in the observation room.

Dr. Monroe had decided she didn’t need an observer during our sessions. Primarily, it was her safeguard to mistreat me. It was my opportunity to kick her ass without interruption. I may have been institutionalized, but I had many connections, including both colleagues and patients. Once the director of the facility was made aware of her attack against me, he removed Dr. Monroe from any further contact with me. Kevin later ordered my transfer to another facility.

I promoted my disorder. During one of my sessions, I started masturbating right in our group circle. It was funny. Johnny, the sex-addict schizophrenic joined in. He pulled out his dick, bent over, and started sucking his own love. Before the counselors knew what happened, the whole group was climaxing.