stared from my crotch to my chest.
Jason snorted and gave me a thoughtful look. Like he didn’t know what to say next. But then he started talking like he didn’t want to stop. “Shit, shit, shit! The brother is right,” that snaggletoothed sucker said, grinning. “It might take more than a phone call to make this thing work. A few good pictures will sew this thing up tight as a virgin’s honeypot.” Jason snapped his lips shut as his eyes roamed up and down my body some more.
I sighed and tilted my head back for Jason to tie the blindfold around my eyes. Now at least I wouldn’t have to look at his leering face for a few minutes.
CHAPTER 7
All kinds of prostitutes, from elderly women to teenage boys, worked day and night, seven days a week, rain or shine, along San Pablo Avenue, a gritty street that ran from Oakland to Berkeley and way beyond. They did their business between parked cars, stretched out on the ground, with a homeless person as the lookout; in the backseats of their tricks’ cars; or backed up against walls in back alleys.
But the ones who really meant business did theirs in some of the cheap motels up and down San Pablo Avenue and some of the nearby streets. With rooms that they rented out by the hour, some of the motel owners had the nerve to offer cable TV. It had been a long time since I had been inside a motel as tacky as the one I was in now. If Jesse Ray hadn’t given me a job and fallen in love with me, I would probably be on my back in bed with some stranger in motels like this one on a regular basis by now. I had not been a bad youth, just confused and impulsive. Back then it seemed so cool to be like that. I had wanted people to like me so I’d eagerly become part of the wildest crowds. Not only had I fucked my brains out, I had done just about everything else, including drugs and thefts. It would have been easy for me to slide into prostitution. But by marrying me, J.R. had saved me from a life of despair. Well, almost. The attention and the respect that he had once given to me had made me feel better than I had in a long time. I had worked hard to reinvent myself and for a while it had worked. The housewives in my posh neighborhood had no idea how happy I was to be among them. It saddened me that it had come to this.
I had to rub my nose because there was a foul smell in the air, and it was so potent, I couldn’t tell where or what it was coming from. Last week they found a woman who’d been dead for three days under the bed in one of these motels. The bed that I was standing next to sagged in the middle, but I was not about to look up under it. When I sat down on it, with my hands tied and my eyes covered, I sank into what felt like a deep valley. I gritted my teeth as Jason snapped several Polaroids of me, which he was going to deliver to Jesse Ray after the second telephone call.
“That’s right. That’s right,” Wade said in a breathy voice, rubbing my leg as he squatted on the floor by the bed like a director. “Get one more of her face from the side. Baby, poke your lips out,” he ordered, pinching my thigh. “That shit looks real dramatic,” he said, clapping his hands.
“All right. This is as much as I can stand of this,” I snarled. “Take this shit off me.” I had already started wiggling the ropes from around my wrists.
I was disappointed when the blindfold came off because Jason was the one who had removed it. He stood there grinning, with that one tooth he had left at the top of his mouth hanging from his gums like an icicle. When he touched me, with hands that looked like paws, my flesh crawled.
Wade was standing over me, looking at the pictures I’d posed for. I refused to look at them as I snatched my clothes up off the floor and got dressed. I didn’t even have to look at Jason to know that he was enjoying every inch of my naked skin that he could see with his beady eyes.
It had been a long day, and it was going to be a long night. Around eight, Wade drove Jason back to wherever it was he lived these days. I didn’t want to know any more about that man than I needed to know. And I knew more than I wanted to know already. I was glad that he didn’t even know about my bogus plan to flee to Hawaii after we’d collected the money from Jesse Ray. I had warned Wade not to tell him. Especially now that the plan had been initiated.
I knew I would have trouble sleeping. For one thing, I had to wonder how Jesse Ray had explained my absence to his mama and the rest of his family. Since they all lived with us, and were so used to me being there to fix dinner for them and clean up behind their sorry asses, they would get nosy and impatient right off the bat.
After I watched television for a while, I glanced at my watch, surprised to see that it was a few minutes past nine o’clock. Adele, my bitch-on-wheels sister-in-law, sat around with rum and Coke and waited for me to braid her hair every night around nine. I knew that by now she was mad as hell. The fact that I had not been there to prepare dinner and bathe my invalid mother-in-law would have already set her off. These were just a few of the rituals that I’d endured every night for almost a year. That’s how long my sister-in-law and her family had been living with us. To them, that’s what “a little while, until we get back up on our feet” meant.
I pretended to be asleep when Wade returned to the motel room a couple of hours later, cursing as he tripped over the empty pizza box that Jason had left behind on the floor. He took a quick shower, then crawled into the weak bed with me, naked and rubbing on my butt with both hands and his throbbing dick.
Despite the fact that I had arranged my own kidnapping to get money from my husband so that I could start life over as a single woman, I still had feelings for Jesse Ray. My history with him had not been all bad, and no matter what happened and where I ended up, even if it meant jail, I’d always be grateful to Jesse Ray for all the good he had done for me.
I didn’t love Wade the way I had always wanted to. He was not the kind of man that I would marry and have babies with. He was more like a real-life fantasy. And, in the real world, no woman in her right mind married a fantasy. But he’d been my first love and my steady lover for the past several months. I cared enough about him for that. How could I not? The fact that he had been a “maintenance man” in a lot of other women’s lives (and probably still was) over the years didn’t bother me. He still made me feel special.
Especially when he agreed to help me commit a crime that could ruin us both for life if we got caught.
CHAPTER 8
As much as Wade turned me on, I still ignored him rubbing and patting my crotch. I had had enough sex for one day. He wouldn’t let me off that easily, though. He slid my panties off and fucked me, anyway, all the while thinking I was asleep. For the next hour, he rode me like a mule before he slumped over to his side of the bed like a boneless corpse.
I had had some very long nights in my turbulent life, but this was the longest night that I’d ever had to get through. But the ruckus that the hookers made running in and out the rooms on both sides of us, and fussing, fighting, and fucking their tricks, would have been enough to keep me from getting to sleep, anyway. And, even though this was not a family-friendly motel, somebody outside had a baby and a dog that were crying and howling so much, I could barely tell one from the other. I couldn’t have slept if I had wanted to. I knew that I wouldn’t really sleep well again until after Jesse Ray had paid the ransom money for my return.
If he did.
I was still wide awake when Jason returned to the motel around ten the next morning. Grinning as usual, of course. I was annoyed and angry to see that Wade had given that punk a key to the room. I didn’t have a key. Not that I was going to be out taking a morning stroll or anything, but to me, it would have made more sense for me to have a key than Jason.
“I figured y’all would be hungry,” Jason said, stumbling into the room, holding a brown paper bag. “These bear claws is a day old and the coffee is kind of weak, but I went to the cheapest and closest place I could find.” He took out one of the bear claws and bit into it with that one tooth, his whole face twisting from left to right as he chewed. Then he set the bag down on the dresser, looking me up and down. I was still naked, thanks to Wade. But I had the covers pulled up to my chin, so it didn’t do Jason any good to roll his eyes up and down my body, hoping to see my crack through a crack in the covers.
“Thanks,