to deliver those pictures, these investigators these days have come up with all kinds of ways to identity folks in disguise.” I stopped to catch my breath. “Even if he doesn’t call the cops now, he probably will once he delivers the money and I’m safely returned. Jesse Ray worked too hard to get the money he’s got. He is not going to let it go that easily.”
“We’ll worry about crossing that bridge when we get to it,” Wade snapped. “Me and Jason will be back at the motel in a couple of hours. What do you want me to bring you to eat? You must be hungry as hell by now. You want some tacos? Some ribs? How about a bucket of KFC?”
“A sandwich will do,” I mumbled. “And while you are at it, pick me up some deodorant and some clean clothes. And don’t forget some underwear.”
It was the middle of May. Even though Berkeley was breezy throughout the day and near a lot of water, including the San Francisco Bay, the weather was fairly hot. The sun was already beating down on the cheap motel. The thin plastic curtains on the motel windows didn’t keep the sun’s blinding rays out. I was sweating everywhere on my body.
I had not cleaned myself since I’d left home the morning before, and I had not showered after my bedroom romps with Wade in his mama’s house and in the motel. I was beginning to feel and smell pretty ripe and musty. I was a clean woman. I was used to taking a shower every morning and a long, hot bubble bath every night. There was nothing more disgusting to me than the smell of day-old sex and dried cum caked up on my thighs and face.
I took a quick shower, and I do mean quick. The shower area had water bugs crawling up and down the moldy walls, and roaches sliding across the plastic shower curtain, and the hot water was almost as cold as the cold water. I almost fell when I noticed a used condom in a cracked soap dish on the windowsill.
After I dried myself off with one of the stiff towels in the bathroom, I slid back into the same clothes that I’d worn the day before and stretched out on the bed.
I could not relax or get too comfortable, because I had so many disturbing thoughts swimming around in my head. As hard as I tried to focus on the present situation and my future, my past came back to haunt me again.
CHAPTER 13
I didn’t enjoy having sex with Wade on my thirteenth birthday, even though I had acted like it was the best thing that had ever happened to me. Because I’d already experienced a few orgasms—the first one by mistake, by clutching a pillow between my thighs while lying in bed—I thought I knew what to expect.
But the first real sex was painful, just like Maria had warned me. “Listen, girl, it’s going to hurt like hell when you lose your cherry. Me, I could barely walk when it happened to me.” I was not surprised when Maria told me she’d had sex for the first time when she was eleven. With her long wavy black hair, a cute round face that was almost as brown as mine, and the body of a woman twice her age, I could see why the boys couldn’t keep their hands off her.
“I’ve done it a dozen times and it still hurts,” added Denise Conners, one of Maria’s friends.
We were in the bedroom that Maria shared with four of her siblings. I looked toward the door to make sure none of them were eavesdropping before I responded. “Well, if it hurts, why is everybody doing it?” I wanted to know. Despite the tone of the conversation, there was a tingling in my crotch that had become quite familiar since I’d started having these conversations with my friends.
Maria and Denise looked at each other, then at me. They shrugged their shoulders at the same time. “We do it because everybody else is doing it,” Denise said with a heavy sigh. That was one of the reasons I did it when I did.
Not only was sex with Wade the first time painful, but it looked downright ridiculous. That was bad enough. But the way that he behaved during the few minutes that it took to get it over with—yelling, making faces, and humping like a mechanical bull—you would have thought that it was painful for him, too.
After Wade had what I thought was some kind of spasm, the way he started jerking and hollering even louder and slamming into me, he gave me a few sloppy kisses and told me what a good piece of pussy I was.
My jaw dropped open, and it took me a few moments to compose myself enough to speak again. “What happened?” I asked.
“What do you mean by that? Don’t you know?”
“Uh, I thought you was, like, dying or having a heart attack or a stroke or something.”
Wade chuckled and tapped the side of my head. “I came. I got my nut.”
“Oh,” I mumbled.
“Didn’t you get yours?” He sounded disappointed.
“Uh-huh. I got mine, too. You really know how to do it ….”
He belched and then let out a loud breath. “I know. That’s why these damn girls won’t leave me the hell alone. They get some good sex, and they just about go crazy. Following me around and shit ….”
“I know what you mean,” I managed. I didn’t have the nerve to tell this boy that I’d had better sex with a pillow than I’d had with him.
After he let out a few more belches and a couple of farts, he just lay there on top of me, breathing loud through his mouth. His body jerked a few more times. Once Wade returned to his senses, he leapt off the mattress and turned on me like a snake. Not only was he mad because I’d made him forget about some ball game, but he cussed me out for getting blood on his mama’s sheets, too.
“Oh shit! Damn you, girl! I done missed my basketball game! And, you are going to get me in all kinds of trouble with my mama! Look at all that goddamn blood on them sheets!” he screamed, struggling to zip his pants. “Go home and take a douche!” He gave me a sharp look, and then he laughed. He laughed like I was the biggest joke he’d ever seen.
To this day I can still feel the sting of those words. Knowing that he’d been amusing himself at my expense didn’t make it feel any better. That day, I knew that I’d have to figure out a way to put men in a place in my life where they did me the most good. It was the first goal that I’d set for myself. But I had still managed to smile at Wade after his outburst.
“All girls bleed the first time. Didn’t you know that?” I said, sliding back into my panties.
“Huh? Yeah, I knew that. But not the girls I been with!” he clucked.
“Do you mean to tell me that I’m your first virgin?” I asked, feeling more special than I thought I would.
Wade shifted his eyes, then gave me a thoughtful look. “Uh, yeah.” His voice had softened. He even smiled as he sat down next to me on the messy mattress. “You ain’t never done it before? You let me be the first?” he asked, with a proud look on his face.
I nodded, giving him a shy look.
“It was kind of good, huh? I think we should do it again. Spread open them legs,” he ordered, glancing at a clock with a Mickey Mouse face on the wall facing his bed. “Hurry up!”
“Do we have time? What about your mama? What about your basketball game?”
“My mama is at the nail shop. And that game is over with,” he said, tugging at my panties.
“It still hurts,” I confessed, making a face and rubbing my crotch. I slapped his hand away.
“Oh, that’s right. Okay, then,” he muttered, clearly disappointed. He perked up almost immediately. “Suck my dick then,” he suggested, with a shrug, licking his lips.
I shuddered and made another face. “I never done that before,” I whimpered. Despite what my girls had told me, and what I’d seen in some of the nasty magazines they’d shared with me, sucking dick didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t want anything to go into my mouth that I couldn’t swallow, and I told him so.
Wade talked me into doing it, anyway. He talked the whole time I was