Chapter 46 Mehar
MEHAR
Dinner was perfect. This was the best night I’d had with Quest since before the birthday party blew everything up. He was completely focused on us and not distracted by all the drama that’d been occurring.
“You bring me peace,” he said as he reached his hand for mine.
“I feel like I can be more vulnerable with you,” I confessed.
“You sure? I feel like there’s something you’re hiding from me. Something you don’t want me to know about you,” he said, reading me with dark eyes. There was the whole matter of my money-making activities. But I wasn’t ready to tell him just yet.
“I don’t know what you think it is, but…”
“Don’t worry about it. In due time, I’ll learn all there is to know. Shit, you know my darkest shit.”
“Yeah, my heart still breaks for you. I know that’s why you don’t want kids.”
“Yeah, I can’t go through that again. The loss and the betrayal. And then this shit with my mother… Fuck that. I don’t wanna get into that right now. No drama tonight. I just wanna enjoy you, Peach.”
I smiled and we shifted the conversation.
We talked about the spa. He asked me about my business plan and I told him and he listened like it was a pitch meeting and not a dinner date, asking questions about location and overhead and licensing that told me he was taking it seriously.
He didn’t offer to fund it. But I can tell he was tempted to.
He just listened. And that mattered more than any check he could’ve written.
We talked about Zephyr, and how Mekhi was barely holding it together, and how Bella was staying at the hospital around the clock. We talked about Freetown and his vision for the development and how he wanted to start acquiring land by the end of the year.
When we walked out of the restaurant, I was holding his arm and laughing at something he’d said about Rita trying to set up a GoFundMe for a male stripper.
The night air was warm, the street was quiet, and I finally felt like a woman who was allowed to be happy without waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The other shoe dropped. And it crashed through the fucking ceiling.
“Dame CoCo.”
The voice came from my left. I knew it before I turned around.
I knew it the way you know a sound that’s been haunting you for months.
It was Timothy Baker, stepping out from the shadow of the building next to the restaurant in a wrinkled suit with his tie loosened and his eyes wild and red-rimmed like he hadn’t slept in days.
He’d lost weight. His face was gaunt, his hair was uncombed.
He looked nothing like the federal judge who’d walked into my dungeon six months ago with a briefcase and a secret.
My entire body went cold.
“Please,” Timothy said, and he was already moving toward me with his hands out like he was reaching for something sacred.
“Please, I’ve been paying tribute every week.
I’ve sent you thousands of dollars. You won’t respond, you won’t see me, I just need one session.
I’ll pay whatever you want for your time.
Just one hour. Please, Dame CoCo, I’m begging you. ”
He grabbed my wrist.
Everything happened in layers after that.
The first layer was my own heartbeat exploding in my ears.
The second layer was the look on Quest’s face as he processed what he was hearing, and I watched him assemble those words into a picture that was going to destroy us.
The third layer was Quest’s hand closing around Timothy’s wrist and removing it from mine with a grip so controlled and so precise that Timothy made a sound between a gasp and a whimper.
Quest moved before I could speak. He grabbed Timothy by the collar with one hand and hit him with the other.
It was a clean, devastating punch that snapped Timothy’s head sideways and sent a spray of blood from his lip across the sidewalk.
Timothy crumpled, but Quest caught him before he fell and hit him again, this time in the stomach, folding him in half.
Then he grabbed a fistful of Timothy’s hair and yanked his head up so they were face to face.
“If you ever come near her again, if you ever say her name again, if I ever see your face within a hundred feet of her, they will not find your body. Do you understand me?”
Timothy was nodding and bleeding and crying all at the same time, snot and tears mixing with the blood running from his mouth. Quest shoved him and he hit the ground hard, his suit scraping against the concrete. He scrambled to his feet and ran down the street without looking back.
Quest stood there for a second, flexing his hand. Then he walked to the Maybach without looking at me, got in, and started the engine. I stood on the sidewalk for about three seconds, feeling the weight of what had just happened settle onto my chest before I walked to the passenger side and got in.
He pulled away from the curb. The silence in that car was crushing because I knew what was on the other side of it and there was no way to prepare.
We drove for about two minutes before he spoke.
“What was that.”
Not a question. A demand.
“Quest…That was a judge.”
“Nah, you know what the fuck I mean.”
“He’s a former client.”
“A client of what? You a fuckin’ hoe? You sellin’ pussy! I swear to God if I been eatin’ pussy that randos are digging in, I will fuckin’… Yo' don’t fuck with me Mehar!”
“No I’m not a hoe! And don’t you ever threaten me again.”
“If you sellin’ pussy, I’mma do more than threaten you.”
And there it was. The moment I’d been dreading since the first time he kissed me.
“I’m a dominatrix,” I said. “Dame CoCo is my name. I have a dungeon in a rowhouse in Dupont Circle. Men pay me to dominate them verbally, physically. I don’t have sex with them.
I don’t touch them sexually. They pay tribute, they follow my rules, and I break them down.
That’s the service. That man was a federal judge who became obsessed and couldn’t handle being cut off. ”
The Maybach was going sixty in a thirty-five zone and Quest didn’t seem to notice or care.
“How long?”
“Since I lost my fuckin’ fallopian tube.”
“How many men?”
“I’m not doing this.”
“How many men, Mehar?”
“It doesn’t matter how many. It’s a job. It’s how I’m funding my spa. Every dollar I’ve saved for that business came from the dungeon.”
“Other men.” His voice had dropped to something barely above a whisper, and somehow that was worse than yelling.
“Other men are on their knees in front of you. Other men are paying to be in a room with you. Judges, politicians, whoever the fuck else. A bunch of grown men paying my woman for the privilege of being at her feet.” He laughed, but there was nothing funny in it.
“And that nigga on the sidewalk said he’s been sending you tribute every week.
So while I’m eating you out on blackjack tables and calling you Peach and telling you shit I never told another living soul, you’ve got a whole roster of men on their knees in a basement somewhere calling you Dame CoCo. ”
“It’s not sexual, Quest.”
“I don’t give a fuck if it’s sexual to you! It’s sexual for them. A man is on his knees in front of you and that’s supposed to be MY position. Mine. Nobody else’s. I don’t share, Mehar. I don’t share you, and I damn sure don’t share whatever the fuck it is that happens in that room with those men.”
“You don’t own me.”
“I put my stamp on you the moment I kissed you.”
“Oh hell no. Every man who’s ever tried to control what I do with my body got cut the fuck off.”
“Don’t compare me to those niggas.”
“Then don’t act like them!”
We were both yelling now. The Maybach was flying through streets I wasn’t paying attention to and the night that had been perfect twenty minutes ago was on fire and neither one of us had an extinguisher.
“I asked you who trashed your apartment,” he said, and his voice cracked on the word apartment, just barely, just enough for me to hear the hurt underneath the anger.
“I looked you in your face and asked you if you knew who did it. And you said no. You lied to me, Mehar. You lied to my face after I shared… you know everything about me.”
That hit me so hard I couldn’t breathe for a second.
Because he was right. He’d given me the most painful thing he’d ever carried, and I’d been sitting on a secret that I was too scared to share.
The comparison wasn’t equal. Quindon was a dead child and Dame CoCo was a business, but the betrayal of trust was the same.
He trusted me with everything. I’d held back the one thing that could break us.
“Quit,” he said.
“What?”
“Quit. Right now. Tonight. Shut it down. I’ll fund the spa myself. Whatever you need, the full amount, tomorrow. Just quit.”
“No.”
“Mehar.”
“I said no. I’m not quitting my business because a man told me to.
I don’t want your money for my spa. I want my money.
Built by my hands, earned on my terms. That’s the whole point.
If I let you write a check and shut everything down, then you bought my obedience and I’m right back where I started.
A woman who gave up a piece of herself so a man could sleep better at night. ”
“So you’d rather lose me than give up a dungeon.”
“I’d rather not be with a man who makes me choose between him and myself.”
“Cool. We done.”
And with that he quickly drove back to the hotel. Where he went into his room without ever turning and looking back at me.