hard that the hot air streaming out of his mouth irritated my eyes. The sweat that had dripped from his body had saturated the thin sheet, which had almost slid off the mattress.
“Oh, baby, that was the best yet. Seems like the older you get, the better you get. Ain’t a young girl in this state that can snap, crackle, and pop her pussy the way you can! Shit. Even you couldn’t do all this when you were a young girl yourself,” he told me, slapping my backside. This was one of the few things that I didn’t like about having sex with Wade. He slapped me on my rump the way I’d seen the jockeys at Bay Meadows slap their horses’ asses.
Wade sat up and looked down at me, wiping his face with the tail of the sheet. I was still on my back, looking up at the cracked ceiling. I had so many thoughts swimming around in my head, I couldn’t tell where one ended and another began. One was, I didn’t like it when Wade, or any other man for that matter, reminded me that I was no longer a young girl. I had a house full of mirrors, so I knew that. I was vain, so how I looked to other people concerned me. Despite Wade’s choice of words, I still enjoyed his company. He did the one thing that my husband now did only every once in a while: he made me feel desirable. I could look and smell like a pile of shit and Wade would still cover me with kisses. The last time I approached my husband, smelling like a rose and wearing my sexiest negligee, he rolled his eyes at me and told me to go put on some clothes before I caught a cold.
“Was it good for you?” Wade asked, once again squeezing my breasts so hard that I pushed him away.
“It was good for me,” I told him. Though my mouth said one thing, my mind said another. Like if it bothers me now when people mention my age and I’m only thirty-one, what is it going to be like when I’m fifty-one? Would I still have enough of the ransom money left over to get a face-lift then?
I needed to keep my mind on the current situation. I couldn’t afford to let myself get too distracted.
“Why do you still have that worried look on your face, girl? Didn’t I tell you that I got everything covered?” Wade asked, looking worried himself.
“Have you ever done something like this before?” I replied, trying to at least look like my mind was focused on the right things.
Wade gave me a puzzled look before he responded. “Kidnapped somebody?” For a moment he looked like he wanted to laugh. “Hell, no, I ain’t never kidnapped nobody.”
“Then how do you know you’ve got everything under control?”
“Look, this was your idea,” he snapped, with one hand up in the air like he wanted to slap my face. He screwed his face into a frown and patted his stomach. Then he let out a stream of belches, which rolled out of his mouth like thunder. “I shouldn’t have ate them day-old sardines and oysters this morning.” He belched again, shaking his head and patting his stomach some more. “I wasn’t that crazy about doing this shit with you in the first place. Kidnapping is a serious crime! Now, if you was going to back out, you should have done that before I called up your old man and got this ball rolling. But, it still ain’t too late. You can go on back home and pick up where you left off, but you better come up with one hell of a story to tell your old man about how you got loose. And, no matter what you tell him, it better not include my name,” he warned, shaking a fist in my face.
“I am not going to back out now, Wade. I know it’s too late. And I need that money. I need to get up out of this city,” I whimpered in a voice that was cracking with each word. “I love Berkeley, and I thought I’d spend the rest of my life here. But I know I can’t do that now. Jesse Ray’s crazy if he thinks I am going to spend the rest of my life cooking and cleaning and taking care of his family and putting up with their bullshit by myself. And in my own house at that! I am tired of trying to talk some sense into that man’s hard head. Now all I want is to get as far away from him and my crazy in-laws as possible.” I snarled. I was surprised at how strong and determined my voice sounded when I got angry.
“Then quit worrying. You making me nervous,” Wade insisted, giving me an exasperated look. “I know what I’m doing. My mama didn’t raise no fool. Shit.”
“I’m not worried,” I said, with a pout. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind these days. I just hope that everything works out all right.” I sat up again and gave Wade a concerned look. “Maybe you should call Jesse Ray again tonight. Just so he knows you mean business. He can be pretty stubborn and exasperating. You saw that by the way he dragged you around on the telephone.” The insides of my thighs and my crotch were still throbbing. I started massaging myself with both hands, but that didn’t help. If anything, it made me ache even more.
“I told him I’d call him again tomorrow. Now if you want this thing to work, we got to follow our own rules, too.”
Wade pushed my hands away and started massaging me. That didn’t stop the aching in my private area, but his hands felt a lot better to me than mine did.
“I don’t trust J.R. I know he said he wouldn’t call the cops or tell anybody, but what if he does?”
“Look, if he calls the cops and we find out about it in time, we split,” Wade answered, pulling his hands away from my crotch. “I got a Mexican buddy down in Mexico City that owes me some favors. We could hole up with him from now on if it comes to that. The law ain’t too fond of him, so we wouldn’t never have to worry about him blabbing. Mexico is full of folks running away from something, so we’ll feel right at home. And if it comes to that, Jesse Ray will get to keep his money, but he won’t have you no more. As long as you don’t slip up, he won’t never find you or find out what happened to you. For all he’ll ever know, you laying dead somewhere in the mountains. Now do you think that the man you married would want to spend the rest of his life with that on his mind? Do you think he’d let something happen to you that he could have prevented?”
“My husband loves me,” I insisted. But I had to wonder just how much Jesse Ray loved me after the way he’d hemmed and hawed when Wade called him up. I wasn’t so sure anymore.
Wade rotated his neck and brought his lips together with such a quick move, they snapped shut like a coin purse. With his eyes on my face—and with a look on his face so lifeless, you’d have thought that he was watching this year’s most boring movie—he slid his tongue out and moistened his lips before he spoke again. “Your husband loves you? Uh-huh,” he muttered, nodding. “And is that why you are trying to cheat him out of half a million dollars?” Wade laughed.
CHAPTER 5
“I don’t like it when people laugh at me, Wade.” I pushed his hands away and gave him the dirtiest look I could manage, but that didn’t even seem to faze him. He kept laughing. “I wish you’d stop that!” I snarled, pinching the side of his arm. The two pillows that had been on the mattress were now on the floor, too flat and flimsy to be of any use, anyhow, so it didn’t matter where they were. I propped my head up on my arm, with my cheek pressed against my elbow, breathing out of the side of my mouth. Wade had eaten the day-old sardines and oysters, but there was such a foul taste in my mouth, it seemed like I’d eaten some, too.
“Then stop humoring me,” he said, looking serious now.
“I signed a prenup,” I said in a low, hollow voice, holding back a belch of my own.
“You did what?”
One of the few things that I didn’t like about this man was that I often had to tell him the same thing more than once. I couldn’t remember how many times I had already told Wade that I’d signed a prenuptial agreement. But I told him again, anyway.
“I signed a prenuptial agreement. If I divorce Jesse Ray, I get next to nothing. I’ve already told you that.” For some mysterious reason, I had a feeling that this would be the last time I’d have to tell him this. I gave Wade a pleading look. “I can’t stay on with him the way things are.” I cleared my throat, but it was still hard for me to continue speaking. “Jesse Ray has changed. His work, his family, they all come before me now. It wasn’t always like that,” I said hoarsely.
“Christine,