Gino had some love in his heart for G, but judging by the things he told me, he had every right to hate him, too. Chills ran through me as I sat listening to him talk about the way G treated and controlled his mother. He had done her the exact same way he was doing me, only I didn’t have a child to worry about protecting the way Gino’s moms had. It always messed me up when I heard about foul stuff people did to their kids. It took me right back to that cold December night when a junkie ho tried to trade my life for hers.
“My mother was special,” Gino said. “Not only was Salida the finest Puerto Rican chick in Harlem, she was smart, too. Her father died young and her mother was poor, so she thought she’d hit the jackpot when my father took her in, but G is a crafty nigger and when she stepped out of line he broke her down, mentally and physically.”
I shivered and picked at my prawns even though the sun was roasting my back and neck. “I know what you mean. Whatever G wants, G gets.”
“That’s right. But what’s worse, Juicy, is, G’s truly cold. There’s no margin of error with him when it comes to shit like loyalty and respecting his word. When you fuck up with him, you fuck up. It’s all or nothing. He don’t even know what it means to forgive.”
I thought about all the people G had put down over the years, and a picture of that man’s head hitting the Dungeon’s door flashed through my mind. G ran his life the way he ran his business. Cut and dried. The game was his scripture and the gun was his bible.
Gino took a sip of my soda. “After my mother disappeared I heard all kinds of shit. I was only twelve, but her family put me down on everything that came through the streets. There were so many sightings of her you would have thought she was Tupac or Elvis. Her brothers and uncles looked for her for years. Even after it was obvious she had to be dead. I mean, if she could have come back home, she would have. Dig?”
“Didn’t you ask G what happened to her?”
“Yeah. I did, and it was the only time I ever saw my father cry. He came to me one night and swore up and down he didn’t know where she was. Fed me some shit about her running off with some dealer from Brooklyn. Said somebody told her he knew she was fucking around and dipping in the cut room, too, so she got scared and took off.”
I had to ask. “Did you believe him?”
“C’mon, Juicy. I was a twelve-year-old kid, but I wasn’t no fuckin sherm. I knew his ass was grimy. G hates women. In his game they’re all either bitches or hoes, or training to be both. Whenever my mother tried to think for herself he would kick her ass to both ends of the house and back. Shoes, belts, brooms-even as young as seven I would hide in my closet just to keep from jumping in and killing his ass. But G was careful though. He could whip her ass all night long, but he never left a mark on her where me or anybody else could see it. That’s why I got scared one morning when I woke up to go to school and her eye had been dotted and her nose was broke. I knew what time it was then. Once my father fucked up Salida’s face, she could kiss it good-bye. I told you my mother was bad. She was G’s Cadillac. His Jaguar and his Rolls-Royce. G is all about status and appearance, and the minute he stopped giving a fuck about what she looked like, she might as well have been dead.”
Gino made G sound like a monster. I shivered again and was glad when Justin called us over to the car. I got in and turned my face toward the window as we drove. It shocked me when I felt Gino’s fingers on my arm, and then he was holding my hand.
“Don’t let me mess nothing up for you, Juicy. I’m sure you and G got a good thing going. All that stuff with my mother happened a long time ago. Every man can change. Even a man like G.”
I couldn’t say anything. There was still a big part of me that was loyal to G, even though I knew it didn’t make sense. G might have been Gino’s father, but he was my daddy. How could I explain that it was G who made it possible for me to take my first bath in truly hot water? That it was G who bought me my first tube of lipstick, my first pair of high-heeled shoes? That because of G me and Jimmy kept the cold off in the winters and the rats and roaches away all year round? Besides, G was one of the few links to my past. Grandmother had trusted him and respected him; they were practically family. What other sure thing did me and Jimmy have?
Maybe because he had opened up so completely to me, or maybe because I liked him and he was the first man to ever really talk to me, but I found myself telling Gino all about my mother and how the game she ran almost got me killed. I had made it a rule not to talk about her, not even to Jimmy, but for some reason I sat there and held Gino’s hand and shared that horrible part of my life with him. I told him how it felt as I hid under the blankets while her bed rocked and fuck sounds filled up the room And about the cold air coming from the kicked-in window. The boom boom boom, the trick dead, Aunt Ree shot, and then my mother begging for her pitiful-ass life. How her skanky ass was so fucking desperate to keep living and whoring she was willing to trade her seven-year-old daughter so she could live to fuck and get high another day.
I didn’t tell him about Jimmy and the gun, though. I just couldn’t bring myself to speak on that. It had taken years for Jimmy to stop having nightmares, and to this day he was scared shitless of guns. Grandmother had been worried that Jimmy would grow up hating women because of my mother, and maybe she was right because that’s how men like G were born.
Gino tried to lighten my mood. “Damn, there might really be eight million stories in this naked city, huh?”
I nodded. “Yep. And ours ain’t but two.”
“But we’re rolling, Juicy. We survived those days and now they’re over. The whole world is waiting out there. I got me a plan, sugar, and I hope like hell you’ve got one, too.”
It took us another thirty minutes to get to the Polynesian Cultural Center, and by the time we pulled up in the parking lot me and Gino had put our pasts behind us and were back to acting the fool. He was telling me about his friends on the West Coast and all the crazy stuff he’d done in his college dorm, and it reminded me of all the extra things I’d been missing in my college experience by going to school in the city and having to be chauffeured straight home like a prisoner after classes every day.
We stopped to listen to a group of Hawaiian singers before going through the gate, and even though I was down for learning about other people, I wasn’t really feeling Polynesia so I didn’t expect to have a good time.
Boy was I wrong. Them Hawaiian sisters were shaking their asses and doing the hula all night long! We were riding on a little water raft watching them get loose on the shore, and everybody was clapping and screaming as the brown-skinned heffahs with the silky hair flung their hips around like fish out of water.
“I bet you can throw your stuff around like that,” Gino leaned over and whispered and I almost fell out the boat. I knew we’d been vibing lately, but he hadn’t said a sexy word since the moment I met him and now just because some hot island freaks were doing the Hawaiian hoochie-coochie he wanted to get brand-new.
“Put your money on this,” I flirted with my hands on my hips, “and you’ll win every time.”
His eyes got all big and then he laughed. “Damn, girl. I bet you’re one dangerous sumpthin-sumpthin when you wanna be.”
“Damn straight,” I said. “When I wanna be, and with who I wanna be.”
Later that afternoon Justin took us to a resort where there were about five private lagoons. Gino had traveled some during his college years, but I had never seen anything so damn beautiful and peaceful in my life.
There were huge black rocks that formed a barrier between us and the open seas, so I knew there was no way Jaws could get me. We swam in the warm water, and even Justin took off his shirt and jumped in and helped me and Gino over to the rocks where we saw all kinds of colorful fish.
Still, I’m a Harlem girl, and I was paranoid as hell. The only place I like fish is either in a colorful tank or fried hard in cornmeal with ketchup and tartar sauce on my plate. Both Gino and Justin were laughing their asses off every time a fish swam near me and I tried to slap it away.
“Hold up,” Gino said when we finally got out the water. I was walking ahead of him, climbing through the sand toward a huge grass umbrella where we’d stashed our towels.
I turned around. “What?”
“C’mere, girl.” He motioned me toward him.
I gave him a look. “You meet me halfway.”
He laughed and jogged a few steps until he caught up to me.
“You sure got that New York attitude, don’t you?”
“Born with it. And what’s wrong with that?”
I couldn’t help but notice that his chest hair and the line of black fuzz that led down his stomach and into his shorts was slick with water and glistening under the sun.
“Nothing. I like it. Come here.”
Gino grabbed my hand and we walked the rest of the way to the umbrella with him massaging my fingers. His hands felt so good and so strong. I knew if he could make my fingers feel like that he could probably put a serious hurting on the rest of my body.
I waited as Gino got some sunblock from Justin, then stood there as he rubbed it all over my back and my shoulders. The pole of the grass umbrella was thick and rough like the trunk of a tree, and I leaned against it and just enjoyed feeling a man’s hands squeezing my muscles and smoothing cool cream all over my skin. He even put it on my lower back, my hips, and the back of my thighs.
It was only right that Gino should turn me around and do the front of me, too. By now my nipples were like missiles and even though my bikini bottoms were already wet, they were getting wetter.
“Gino,” I heard myself saying as I leaned toward him, wanting to press my nipples against his hard chest.
He held me away from him and kept right on squeezing sunblock into his hands, then running them up and down my body. I squinched sand between my toes and closed my eyes, dying to feel more than just his hands on me.
“Let me do you,” I whispered, opening my eyes and staring at his hard dick. It was so long and thick the head was flat against his belly and sticking out the waistband of his swimming trunks. “C’mon, boo. Let me do you.”
But he wouldn’t. Instead, he finally pulled me toward him, and when my body touched his I coulda sworn his skin was even hotter than the sun. There was no doubt we both wanted this, and I pressed myself against him feeling all that black dick poking into my stomach. And then we were kissing, tonguing each other down. Gino’s style was perfect, too. Soft lips, sweet tongue, and not a whole lot of unnecessary spit.
Grandmother would have kicked my ass six ways to Sunday if she could see me getting felt up and kissing all out in the open like that, but fuck if I cared who saw us. All I knew was that both my body and my mind was digging the way this man made me feel, and judging by the way he was nibbling my lips, sucking my tongue, and palming both cheeks of my ass, he was digging me, too.