White Lines II: Sunny: A Novel (16 page)

Sunny’s gown glistened in the light of the hotel lobby and he had to take a deep breath to slow his heartbeat. He wanted her in the worst way.

He arrived at her side and took her by the hand. They walked together toward the elevator, neither of them speaking but their body language telling the story of their eagerness to be alone. The moment the elevator doors closed they came together again, locked in a kiss even deeper than the first. Sunny lost herself in Malcolm’s arms and hardly noticed when they reached her floor.

She led the way down the hall to her room and was happy that she’d had the foresight to put her cocaine away before she left. It wouldn’t have mattered, though. The moment the door shut behind them, Malcolm pulled her close and she didn’t protest. She kicked off her shoes as he scooped her into his arms and carried her toward the bedroom of her suite.

“You have a condom?” she asked, between kisses.

Happily, Malcolm nodded. “Yeah.”

He set her down beside the bed, and held her face gently in his hands as he kissed her. She stripped him out of his tuxedo jacket and loosened his tie, and he slowly zipped her out of her beautiful dress.

Discarding the remainder of their clothes, they lavished each other with kisses all over—and Sunny was thrilled to find that Malcolm was packing!

Malcolm scooped her up again and put her in the center of the bed. Her knees quivered as he parted them with his strong hands, stroking the inner part of her thighs, kissing them, and spreading apart the petals on her flower, lapping at her nectar. Sunny was in ecstasy. He seemed to be in no rush while he was down there, nibbling on her, sucking her, licking her. His hands roamed her body, sending chills. At first he touched her gently until her nipples were so hard that they hurt. Then his touch became firmer, squeezing her, kneading her until Sunny climaxed, her legs wrapped around his neck, his name slipping from her lips. Malcolm kissed her pussy afterward, kissed her toned belly and kissed her breasts, sucked them. He sucked her lips and held her close to him while he fumbled around until he finally found his pants, his wallet, the condom. He put it on and was eager to mount her, but Sunny pushed him back.

“Please,” she panted.

Malcolm smiled, happy to acquiesce. Sunny slipped Malcolm’s long, thick warrior inside her and slowly slid herself up and down the length of him, enjoying the feel of his girth. Her senses all came alive at the feel of him. She felt a head rush and Malcolm watched her responding to him. She was loving this, and he was, too. It felt like heaven.

Sunny wound her hips upon him, grinded on him, touching herself. All of her inhibitions were gone as she rode him. Malcolm was turning her on, as he was feasting on her breasts and biting her lightly, sucking on her. He didn’t moan like a bitch, instead he grunted, groaned his approval, guttural like an animal. He ravaged her, and she found herself creaming all over him, her walls pulsating and drawing him deeper.

Malcolm flipped her onto her back, never removing himself from within her. He groaned in her ear and she gripped his back, her nails digging into him. Malcolm was digging her back out and she wondered how his wife had let one like this get away!

Sunny tossed one leg up on his shoulder and grinded back at him, and Malcolm couldn’t hide his pleasure. He had intended to be a gentleman with her sexually since this was their first time together, but Sunny was tossing her pussy back at him with such intensity that he couldn’t help but match it.

She kicked at his chest until he moved off her and she turned over on all fours, arched her back and gripped the sheets. Malcolm’s warrior jumped at the sight of her that way and he slid inside her once more. The sound of his name as she said it over and over was making his temperature rise. He pulled her hair and she liked it, slapped her ass and she squealed in delight. He had never met a woman like this.

“Mmmm!” he moaned as she matched him thrust for thrust, until the last of his seed was spent and he collapsed beside her.

Sunny couldn’t believe her luck!

They could barely keep their hands off each other. Through the night, while they slept, Malcolm and Sunny lay entangled the way that lovers do. She woke up in the night and watched him as he slept, admiring his toned body, his handsome face. She nestled into the crook of his arm and drifted back asleep, reminding herself that there was no such thing as Prince Charming.

9

THE GREAT ESCAPE

They weren’t actually running away, but it sure felt like it. Born looked around at all the boxes stacked in the living room of what had been their home ever since their reconciliation. He had been staying with Jada most of the time and had become quite comfortable in her condo on Christopher Lane in Staten Island. Jada had argued that Sheldon needed a fresh start, that DJ’s career was about to accelerate and being closer to the city would afford him easier access to opportunities. But Born knew that Jada wanted off of Staten Island because of all the skeletons that had recently started reemerging from her scandalous closet.

Thanksgiving was days away, and they were supposed to be hosting dinner here, at her place. Born watched her pulling picture frames off the wall, wrapping them delicately in newspaper before packing them away. He cleared his throat, realizing that he had to speak up. It was now or never.

“Jada, come sit down for a minute,” he said.

She placed the picture in the box and then walked over to where Born sat on the sofa. She sat across from him on the chaise and noticed the look of concern on his face.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“You tell me.” Born held her gaze. “Why are you packing right now?”

Jada frowned. “I told you. It’s time for us to leave Staten Island. Time to move on.”

“People are coming over for Thanksgiving dinner—”

“Why can’t we cancel?” she asked.

Born sighed. “We can cancel it if you want. But then what? Where are we going, Jada?”

She shrugged. She hadn’t thought that far ahead. All she knew for sure was the she wanted off of Staten Island, and now.

“Baby, we can’t just pack up and leave just like that.”

“We can sell this condo, sell your place, too, and we can buy a house in Brooklyn or get a small apartment in Manhattan,” she offered.

Born owned several properties on Staten Island, including a duplex condo on Richmond Avenue, where he hardly stayed anymore and a one-family house on Bement Avenue, where his son Ethan lived with his mother, Anisa.

“Overnight?”

“No, but it won’t take us that long to find a place. Money talks.”

“And what about Ethan?” he asked. “I can’t just leave him behind. What about Sheldon going to school? You can’t just pull him away from his friends just like that.”

Jada looked Born in his eyes. “I can’t stay here anymore,” she said. “Seeing them…” She didn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t have to. Born understood exactly what was on her mind.

She had come home flustered after seeing Mr. Charlie and Shante in the supermarket. Visibly shaken, Jada had set about making dinner while Sheldon sat at the kitchen table doing his homework. But when Born had come in from a day of going over contracts with DJ, his uncles and their lawyers, Jada had taken one look at him and dissolved into tears right there at the stove. Confused, Sheldon had looked on in silence while Born had gone to her, pulling her into his arms and asking what was wrong. He had sent Sheldon to his room, turned off the stove and sat Jada down at the table, asking what was making her cry. She told him that she’d seen Charlie, that seeing him had taken her back down memory lane to places she had hoped to never visit again. She had gotten up from the table and started packing boxes she’d gotten from the neighborhood bodega. Born understood why she wanted to run, why she needed to get away from Staten Island now, but he had to make her understand that this couldn’t happen immediately.

“You can’t run from your past, Jada,” he said gently.

“I’m not running.” Jada rubbed her arms as if she was cold, despite the fact that the heat was on.

“Yes, you are.” Born sat back and looked at her dead-on. “But it don’t work that way. You can move to Japan if you want and you’ll still get reminders—”

“It’s not about
reminders
, Born. I deal with those every single day. When I look in the mirror at the scars on my body from where that bitch Kelly cut me, when I look at my son, who’s struggling to be normal because I smoked crack while I was pregnant with him—”

“Jada…”

“Reminders are one thing. I’m talking about seeing this nigga face-to-face, having him stare at me and tell me how good I look, seeing Shante and remembering…” Jada’s voice trailed off. She thought back on the things she had done;
all
the degrading things she had done for the sake of a high. It had been a high so good that she had risked and lost everything and was reduced to the lowest rung on the totem pole—a crackhead.

“It’s too much, Born.” She fought the tears, but they came anyway and she wiped them roughly, stubbornly from her face. “You said you liked Battery Park City. Let’s get an apartment there.”

“Stop doing that,” Born said to her. It wasn’t what he had said but how he said it that caught Jada’s attention. His voice was firm and strong and she detected anger in it.

“What?”

Born sat forward looked her straight in the eye. “Every time you talk about that shit you go somewhere else in your head and then you try to change the subject. How do you do that, actually?” Born was being sarcastic, and she knew it, but his expression seemed genuine. “How do you go from seeing your past flash in front of you to packing up and moving to Battery Park City?”

Born stared at the wall, fuming, for quite a while.

“This ain’t easy for me, Jada. All this talk about crack and Charlie, Shante … it’s taking me back, too.” Born tried to push the thoughts of Jada prostituting herself, sucking crack smoke out of a makeshift pipe, stealing from him—he tried to push those memories to the crevices of his mind. He had willed himself to forget that she had been the lowest possible fiend at one time. But, lately the past seemed determined to resurface. Though he tried not to show it, tried to be strong for Jada, all this talk of her crackhead days was turning him off, causing him to want to run also. But run
alone
; run to protect his heart.

Born watched Jada’s facial expression turn defensive and he felt torn inside. Part of him would be eternally angry about the lows to which crack cocaine had caused Jada to sink. His father, too. His affection for them was tainted by disappointment, shame and his inability to identify with a longing so intense that it could cause a person to abandon all decency and morals in exchange for a few minutes of tripped-out bliss. The recent reminders of how she had hurt him so deeply years ago were starting to turn his heart cold. Her refusal to address the issues head-on was only making it worse.

“We gotta talk about this shit and not pretend like there’s nothing wrong.”

Jada searched her mind for the words to convey what she was feeling. She was wound up inside as if there was a tightly clenched fist in her chest where her heart was. She was aware that she had been forgiven—by God, by Born, and by all the people who had watched her fall to horrible depths—but she had never fully forgiven herself. It was one of those wrongs that never got fully right again. Sometimes when she thought back on all of her transgressions she was flooded with shame and disbelief that she had allowed herself to be taken over by a narcotic.

“You’ve been clean for a long time, Jada. And you’ve seen Charlie on the street before. Shante, too. So what’s so different this time?”

Jada was rubbing her arms again. “That was different. I was driving past, saw them on the street. This time they were in my face, talking to me, reminding me of what I was.” She felt like there were literally ghosts all around her. Dead people in her dreams—Jamari, her mother, even Sunny’s man Dorian—all in scenes from her past. And her present didn’t differ much, with her running into Charlie and Shante and having to see Jamari’s face from time to time when she looked at her son. She didn’t know how to make Born understand that she literally couldn’t sleep at night, that she was wracked with guilt and shame. She would never get high again. She had promised herself that. Aside from what she owed Sheldon, Born and everyone else who loved her, Jada knew that she owed it to herself to stay clean and to love the life that had been given to her. Having been so close to death so many times, she knew that life was a delicate balancing act and it was only by the grace of God that she had survived at all.

Born watched her doing it again—drifting off. He was getting tired of this.

“So now what?” He shook his head, growing angry, and could no longer tell if his anger was toward Jada or toward the circumstances she was enduring. “I love you, and I know everything about you. I know all the shit you did. We don’t have to list it. And it doesn’t matter. The problem is you don’t talk about it, cuz that’s your way of handling it. But you’re really giving it power over you cuz that shit is eating you up inside. Every time Sheldon asks about his father, every time you see one of those fuckers on the street, you gonna run away? That’s your solution?”

Jada didn’t answer. She wiped her tears away, though it was pointless. They kept pouring forth. Finally she sat staring at her hands, letting Born’s words blanket the air.

Born looked around at all the boxes spread throughout the living room. “We can move if you want. We can cancel Thanksgiving and pack up everything we own, switch Sheldon’s school, and never look back.” He shrugged his shoulders. “If that’s what’s gonna make you happy, let’s do it. But Sheldon’s still gonna have questions about his father. And you might not see Charlie or Shante or any of the other idiots, but you’ll still be haunted by the memory of everything you went through. Running ain’t gonna change that.”

Jada toyed with the tissue in her hand. She loved this man, that much she knew for sure. He knew her and loved her anyway. Born was proof that there was such a thing as second chances. She knew he was right. Moving wouldn’t give her the peace she was searching for. Jada wasn’t even sure if she believed she’d ever find that.