When I got home, Roman was waiting for me. "I'm sorry you had to find everything out like this." He said as soon as I pulled the door open, I had a massive headache, the last thing I wanted to talk about was the events of the last week. I needed a break, I needed to unwind and I needed to be away from Roman.
"Where's Kitty?" I asked rubbing my throbbing temple.
"In her room."
"Thanks."
I found Kitty sprawled across her bed, a Hello Kitty pillow between her legs, her head was over the side of the bed, her arms dangled awkwardly to the floor. She was watching a video on her iPad which was on the floor between her hands. "Hey Mama." She greeted me without looking up.
"What are you doing tonight?"
Kitty folded one of her arms beneath her chin and tilted her head to look at me. "I was going to this poetry club down town. One of my friends introduced me to it and I must say I'm impressed by the talent."
"Cool, I'll tag along."
"Be ready for seven."
"Okay."
I took some pain killers and went to bed. My alarm woke me at five and I went to take a shower and ate some leftover Chinese food. I always missed JQ when it was time to eat and with Thanksgiving only days away, I still feared food poisoning. Coco waved to me on her way out of the apartment, "Motherfucking Azari." She grumbled.
"Azari's here?" Dom's head whipped around, she was sitting in the living room watching television.
"He's going to take over the office," I explained, "Stone fucked up big."
"Rumour has it that he's going to have some good help with running things." Coco winked at me as she headed out the door. God I hoped my working relationship with Azari won't cause me the same problems with Dom as my living arrangements with JQ had. I must say Dom has good taste in men, she didn't just jump on some random man at a club, he had to have money and look like an Ambercrombi model.
I retreated to my bedroom, Roman was on the phone with his manager, his eyes pleaded with me. I wasn't mad with him, I just wasn't in the mood for his apologies and having to face my own stupidity.
I dressed in a jade colored romper with a low cut in the neck. I noticed for the first time that my behind and thighs had gotten bigger. My mother had wide hips and thick thighs and apparently I was on the way to looking like her in the lower region. I was on the way to busting out of my B cups and would have to go underwear shopping. I decided to forego jewellery and stepped into a pair of red pumps. I went to the power room where Kitty was applying light makeup. I did a nude eye look and applied cat-eyes liner, then applied some red lipstick. I let my hair swing, it hung down to my butt now, I needed a hair cut.
"Let's head out then." Kitty said and clapped her hands. She wore tight jeans and a white lace blouse, pink pumps and accessories added a pop of color to her outfit.
We climbed into the Escalade and Kitty drove us to the club. It was located in the basement of an unused warehouse, if you did not know the location it would have been easy to miss it. On stage a woman was crooning her lungs out while a bass player strummed his instrument. People were sitting at round tables sipping javas.
"Hey Charlie," Kitty led me over to the bar, "This is my friend Brooklyn."
"I know, Flow's girl." The bartender nodded and slid a apple martini to Kitty. "What'll you be having Brooklyn?"
He was a big man with a Jersey accent, buzz cut, stubble and brown eyes that seemed to belong to a child rather than this burly fella. "I'm good." I told him and he offered me a complimentary espresso.
"Okay, okay, that was Miss Vex ladies and gents!" The host strode onto the stage and snapped his fingers along with everyone else in the club, it amused me, I felt like I had been kicked back to the nineties. "Miss Kitty Kat has just entered the club y'all, give it up."
Kitty wiggled her eyebrows at me before strolling onto the stage. The bass player gave her a tempo and Kitty closed her eyes, what came out of her mouth was the deepest, most passionate tale I had ever heard. A tale about a young girl who came to a strange country, a girl who was raped by a man she trusted and used by the men she loved, it described the child as a rose, soft, delicate, white with innocence and later the rose bled red as innocence was lost and then became black as she gave up on moral and ethics and did what she had to to survive. It told of how this girl who came from nothing found everything she could ever want in a house of strangers, in an industry that was frowned upon, about how she had learnt to love herself and how she is now ready to try to find love again. When Kitty's tale ended the patrons snapped and she came back to me, a pleased smile on her face.
"That was amazing." I breathed.
The host called up another performer, the club went wild with snapping and cheering. "Ooo, listen to this, this guy is so deep, you'll feel like he's reaching into your soul and telling your life story."
The host had called the well muscled, mahogany skinned guy Archangel, three women followed him on stage and when the base started the women started wailing. The guy licked his lips and a few of the women in the room shrieked. When the guy started speaking I was hypnotized, his voice pulled me in. "Come closer, closer, closer, silence is a virtue for what I'm about to tell you. A story about a little girl named Maggie who never understood love. See, Maggie was only eight years old when her mother found a boyfriend and started acting like she struck gold. They got married, he moved in and then began the game of cat and mouse that little Maggie couldn't win. Puberty came early, for this girl in my story, maybe it was her genes or it could have been her jeans, and her step father, let's just call him Jean. With her breasts poppin' and hips rollin' Jean couldn't help but notice that little Maggie wasn't so little any longer. For weeks the nights seemed longer as old Jean began to ponder, replacing his wife with his his step daughter. It wasn't long before Jean began to knock on little Maggie's door, it was his house and his roof so she could not ignore the sound."
The room had fallen into silence, the woman screeched into the mic, a forlorn sound, a haunting wail, Archangel made a sound in the mic with his tongue, a knock, knock, knock. "Little Maggie pulled the door open, Jean said, 'hey baby girl how's it goin',', 'fine', she replied, the innocence of a child toward a man she trusted, the only father that she's ever known was about to treat her like she's grown. He said on her bed, said they were going to have a talk and the unsuspecting child began the walk to the event that would shape the rest of her life. So she sat down beside him and they talked, he told her how much he loved her mother who was his wife, and then he touched her, the bulges in her Belle and Beast nightgown, told her a man had desires, things that the child could not understand but she nodded." The base stopped playing, a keyboardist played a suspenseful note, one that left everybody waiting, curious about what would happen next. "He said, 'Maggie get up and take this dress off girl', the child was confused, but she was a good girl, she did as she was told although she was about to be used. The cotton pooled on the floor and she stood there, in nothing but her flowered panties, and then he came over."
There was another pause, Archangel tapped the mic, thud, thud, thud. When he spoke again his voice was barely a whisper. "He came over and suddenly those flowered panties were at her knees and her touched her, teased her. Little nipples hardened but the sensation confused her. This was wrong, a song that played constantly in her head, I should tell my mom. And then he was naked, and she was naked and they stood there, her breathing shallow, fearful, his breathing harsh, lustful." There was silence, there wasn't even any of the ambiance music, Archangel closed his eyes and continued to speak. "He put her on the bed and spread Maggie's legs, forcing his hard length into her opening that was too small to take it. Maggie said ouch and begged him to stop, she wanted to scream but he put a pillow over her said silencing her, 'quiet girl, you know you want this, so shut your big fuckin' mouth and take this'."
My hands tightened on my seat and I waited for the rest of the story. "After five agonizing minutes it was done, he'd stolen her virginity, 'you better don't tell mommy what you made me do', he said to her like it was her fault, her doing, like it was all her. But she laid on that bed with her legs wide open, confused and scared with everything hurtin'." Archangel held up a hand and the music began to play again, the woman began to wail again. "It was the first time but far from the last time, night after night he visited her, she grew to expect him. She was thirteen years old and had a body of eighteen, big breasts, large hips she was something amazing. Men noticed, women noticed, Grams said, 'somethin' ain't right', but there was nobody to dare tell Maggie's mommy about what happened at night. She got older, started to bleed monthly, Mommy said, 'baby you can have babies now'. She didn't explain so Maggie didn't understand so she hid when her belly started to swell at fourteen."
I gasped along with a couple other people in the room, "Nobody can hide a pregnancy forever, she was called nasty, a slut and a whore, by people at school and the woman in the corner store. Mommy blamed the little boys on the street who always told Maggie she was something sweet, and just before the baby was born Maggie told Mommy what her step father had done. The slap resonated like an atomic explosion, 'not my dearest husband, he loves you like his own, never say that to anyone or little girl we are through'. But the child was born and his features were telling but Mommy lived in denial and so the abuse continued. Maggie lived in a dark world where she was given no love, and now she was scorned by the friends and her family, with a son to raise things became very hard for poor little Maggie."
The wailing stopped, but the music continued. "The child grew and Maggie got older, being a mother was second nature. School was a bust she was too tired to study so Maggie got a job at her local Wendy's. But bad luck followed Maggie like an unwanted shadow and once night she experienced a fear like nobody would ever want to. It was late and she was closing when five men walked in, they said they wanted the sweetest thing on the menu. 'I'm closing', she said, 'I cannot help you'. And then left."
He stopped speaking, the music stopped playing and he looked around at his audience, "She went to take out the trash, simple procedure, but then a guy came in, followed by another, and another, and another and another. Sweetest thing on the menu was to be found between Maggie's legs, she ran, they pursued, they tackled her and beat her and one by one the proceeded to rape her. This was different from what he step father had done to her, he was gentle they were not, he did genuinely love her. For hours they were at it, high up off some white powder, an they they left her, cold, beaten and battered. For years she was molested by a man who had been her father, but it was what happened in the alley that broke her. Fear and depression had worn her down, and when her second son was born she was way past done. She couldn't love him like her first, for he conjured dark memories, he looked too much like her unknown enemies, she saw all five on them in his face, their blurry eyes the night of her rape."
He checked the watch on his wrist, "She was seventeen with two rape babies and no one to love her, not a man nor her mother. She tuned out of the world with the help of a white lady, she was so gone that she ruined her third baby, she was dead before she was dead and buried. Staring down at her lifeless body, in a cheap white coffin, the only she had hated whispered low and loving, 'I love you Miss Maggie, you will always be Mommy'." He raised up his shirt and there was a tattoo on his chest of a smiling woman but I was too far to read the writing or see the features clearly.
"Oh my God." I murmured when I finally grasped what Archangel was saying. He had already left the stage when one by one his audience snapped out of their trance and began to clap, apparently for such a grasping story snapping was not enough.
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