Deliver Me From Evil. Mary Monroe

understand,” I muttered. I was glad when Wade laid his head back down. “Uh, do you want me to go now?”

      He rubbed his chin, sighed, and shook his head. “Naw,” he said, waving his hand. “You can stay, but just watch what you say to me from now on. Do you hear me?”

      “I hear you,” I muttered, my head bowed like a puppy.

      Wade cleared his throat. “You know what? I do kinda like you, Christine. You are cute—uh, not cute—you are a real fly girl. Turn over here so I can lick your pussy.”

      “Huh?”

      “This old, funky college girl that I hang with, she told me that most women like getting licked better than they like getting fucked. She showed me how to do it real good.”

      “What about the blood down there on me?”

      Wade let out a sharp laugh and made a face like he was in pain again.

      “Damn! I forgot about that,” he hollered, slapping the side of his face with the palm of his hand. “Well, I’ll do it some other time when you ain’t bleeding. But guess what? I wouldn’t mind having my dick sucked again before you go home.”

      “What you got to be smiling about?” Mama asked, bringing me back to the present.

      “Nothing,” I mumbled, my eyes on the floor.

      I could not imagine what my parents, especially my mother, would say if they knew what I’d done with Wade. As a family, we rarely talked among ourselves, anyway, about anything. I never knew what they were thinking and vice versa. Sometimes it seemed like I lived with mute strangers. Sex was a subject that was never discussed in our house. As a matter of fact, the closest that my mother ever came to discussing sex in my presence was to tell me about all of the difficulties she’d endured to bring me into the world, always including the fact that she’d had such a hard life that she’d never wanted a child in the first place. She always made the forty-eight hours of labor, loss of blood, and extreme pain sound like it was something that I had caused on purpose. And, each time I ended up apologizing to her for being born. It was one thing to know that I’d been a “mistake.” But that didn’t stop me from making enough mistakes of my own along the way. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but Wade would turn out to be the biggest mistake I’d ever make in my life.