Fear don’t do nothing but paint red across the neck, tell them all how easy it is to split you open.
The man nods and his friend joins in, taking a hit of the blunt. “Camila.” He draws out her name, chuckles a little. “She been in the game so long, bet she got some fine tricks.” I don’t know who he’s talking to because he’s looking at the sky like he expects it to talk back.
The man next to him is shirtless and looks me in the eye. “Yeah, cost one damn pretty penny too.”
Sky man turns to him. “You ain’t been with her?”
“No man never been with Camila and lived to tell no one about it. You got that kind of money, you also got a hit out on your ass.” He focuses back on me. “Guessing you one of Camila’s new girls. She knows how to pick ’em.”
His eyes gaze over every part of my body and I feel as naked as I do right out of the shower, before the shea butter has absorbed into my skin.
“If you’ll excuse me, I got somewhere to be,” I tell them, maneuvering between their bodies up the steps toward the front door and the blasting trap music. Shirtless yells after me, “Imma find you later, girl.” And I know that is exactly what I came here for, but needles still course up my spine like a warning.
Inside, the heat of the room pushes down from the ceiling and this is a different kind of bodies on bodies: these ones grind and, instead of joy, there is so much wanting, everything Mama says not to do. We’re all wanting something, though; most of us replacing what we really want with skin, which works until you wake up and the mirror is a blur of time twisting around the throat.
I make my way through the first room, then the second. Someone is dancing on a counter in the kitchen and every corner of the house is occupied by half-clothed people. I head toward the table and the scent of spilled vodka. Looking for the cleanest bottle, I find tequila and pour it into a plastic cup. I tip it back and the moment it touches my lips, I am hit with a sweetness that shouldn’t accompany hard liquor but I’m too tired to care where it might have come from. I drink more than I should, hoping it’s enough to last me even after I’ve danced and sweated half of it out, hoping it will kick in quick so the paranoia will fade.
When the warmth has made its way into my chest, I turn back to the chaos. There are so many eyes in the room and I go in and out of locking with them, receiving every wink and second glance but responding with nothing but a cold stare. I’m looking for her, know she will be taller than most of the room with whatever sparkling shoes she has mounted the length of her onto.
She’s standing on the patio, arms above her head, twisting her body to the sound of some other music that probably doesn’t exist in this universe. Camila is more radiant than the bassline of this track can handle. I swerve toward her, slide past a short man who looks like he is standing guard at the patio door. Camila sees me and pauses the glide of her neck toward her shoulder, swings both hands up, and squeals. “?Mija!”
And I really do feel like hers.
Camila takes me into her arms and today she is orange, head to toe. I didn’t think orange was a color that could be worn without it looking like Alé’s cheap quincea?era dress, but Camila wears it flawlessly. She has shorts and a tube top on, both shimmering a deep blood orange. It’s like the juice of it drips down to her feet, which are adorned in neon boots that get darker and more saturated in color as they make their way up her thighs.
“How you doin’? You got a drink?”
I nod and Camila turns to tell the semicircle of people gathered around her, “This is one of my lil hoes, Kia. Don’t nobody mess with her if you don’t got the cash to back it up. My girls run expensive.”
Most of the people around Camila nod or murmur hellos, but all their eyes remain locked on her. They don’t even look at her ass or her tits. Camila’s face is enough to send any room into a frenzy: dimpled chin emphasizing every other dip in her face, she is angles with a sweet curve on every edge. Her eyes are endless in their brown, and Camila wears her eyelashes like they are accessories in themselves.
“You met Demond yet?” she asks.
I shake my head. Camila tells me I gotta learn how to talk a little more and I laugh.
She notifies everyone on the patio that she’ll be back and brings me inside, through the kitchen to a closed door that she opens like this might as well be her house.
The moment we step into the room, I’m hit with smoke. They’re hotboxing and I swear there ain’t no air left to breathe. The bed is the central focus in the room, gotta be king-size, and about ten people sit and lie scattered on it. They’re all girls except for the man in the middle, who is wearing sunglasses and has the most delicate designs shaved into his head. He is skinny, but longer than any man I’ve met in real life. His feet reach the end of the bed. I don’t know where he’s looking under those sunglasses, but I feel watched.
Camila leads me toward the corner of the room to a couch I didn’t even notice was there under the fog of smoke, and we sit down in between two girls.
“Demond, this my girl Kia. The one I was telling you about.”
Demond slides his sunglasses down to the bridge of his nose and I can finally see his eyes, even through the mist of smoke. They look like grease has saturated the eyeball, slick and slippery. They are black but there’s something else behind the black, edge-of-the-knife silver flashes. He twirls his nose ring around a couple times, then coughs.
“She special.” His voice is a penetrating croak, rings out across the room.
Camila swirls patterns on the back of my hand, her legs crossed, leaning toward Demond. “And she don’t got no daddy.”
I shift on the couch, the leather sticking to the back of my thighs, uncomfortable, and I’m not sure what Camila thinks she’s doing, selling me off like this.
“Doing fine on my own,” I say, and every head in the room swings to stare at me, all the girls’ eyes blazing.
Demond sits up, pushing one of the girls off him, setting his feet on the floor. He clasps his hands together and stares at me. We can’t be more than five feet from each other now, but the haze is still so thick.
“Baby, I can take you to a whole new level.” His breath is a mix of peppermint and weed, flows out with the husk of his voice.
Camila turns to me, whispers in my ear, “Just listen to him. You don’t gotta make no choices tonight. Give him ten minutes, then come find me.”
Her torso rolls back up and she is standing, removing her fingers from my hand, orange and radiant and leaving me. I watch her disappear through the smoke and out the door until it is just me, Demond, and a coven of girls.
Demond reaches for the hand Camila has left unoccupied and pulls it toward him. He opens each of my fingers from the fist and stares at it, palm up, like he’s reading it.
“You young.” He isn’t asking. “I don’t mind ’em young but I can tell you gon’ be trouble, that right?” The bones in each of his fingers poke at me.
“Just don’t like being told what to do,” I respond in a deep voice to mask the chill that has migrated to my stomach.
He laughs at this and within seconds the girls have made a whole chorus of giggles. The moment he stops, they do too.
I remove my hand from his grasp, lean back into the couch. “Don’t wanna be your little bitch, laughing at shit that ain’t funny.” Only way to make it out this room is to talk as big as he does. I try to make my voice guttural now. I thought I might have wanted this before I came, but now, looking at him, I know he won’t protect me, won’t make things any easier, even if I do make more money. I’d be giving up my chance at anything close to freedom, at a life outside the night world.