Chapter 43
Chapter Forty-Three
Men are trash.
Not some men.
All men.
Just trash.
I met Rashad Bordeaux at a country club mixer three months ago.
He came from a good family—two doctors for parents and an older brother at a Top 5 law school.
The Beauvais Country Club liked to throw these monthly mixers for young, single members to mingle.
It was really just a poorly veiled scheme to encourage moneyed black youths to stick to their own kind—that is both rich and of color.
Heaven forbid the good, privileged flock within The Beauvais walls marry into middle class black families—or worse, working class.
So for this, there was The Youth Mixer.
When I went to my first event ten months ago, I was a little worried I’d be a pariah.
I’d only just got out of a very public relationship with the son of Miami’s most infamous crime boss five months before.
In my mind, this almost certainly made me “tainted goods”.
But alas, in these last few months I’d come to understand that men really only want three things.
A pretty face, a nice ass, and a closed mouth—unless opened wide for the reception of dick, of course.
When it came to face, ass, and talkativeness, I checked off all the boxes.
Ever since coming out of the hospital fifteen months ago, I just wasn’t the talker I used to be.
Despite the fact that I was absolutely “tainted goods,” my unwillingness to speak unless necessary, paired with my face and body, turned out to make me one of the most popular participants at The Youth Mixer. Second only to my own twin sister.
Rashad Bordeaux was the ninth man at the club that I’d given the time of the day.
I’d picked him, just like the last eight, because he had nothing in common with Him.
Rashad was short—my height. Born from a family of Louisiana Creoles, he had skin so pale that he could pass for white.
With his dark eyes and his sandy brown curls, there was nothing about him that resembled the man who haunted my memories.
That’s how I liked it. All of them light. All of them short. And all of them self-absorbed.
Rashad was my ninth, but that did not make me a whore.
Over the past year, I’d slept with very few of the men I’d entertained.
If we were talking how many bodies I’d invited in since Kain, Rashad would be my third.
They were to drown out the memories, done with the hope of forgetting Him.
Three men got to explore my depths after Kain.
I referred to them mentally as first, second, and third.
The second was because the first only made me remember Kain more. And the third—Rashad—he just so happened to be around when my loneliness got to be too overpowering.
The men I had been with didn’t just differ from Kain in appearance alone.
While I made efforts to be with men who had nothing in common with him, I’d gotten subpar sex as a side effect.
These new hands differed in the ways that they touched me, fingers rabid and rough.
They served themselves, primarily seeking their own pleasure, and then mine as an afterthought.
They didn’t pretend to love me. They never even tried to see me—not the real me, at least.
That’s how I liked it.
If they could see me, then they would see how utterly unimpressed I was.
Sometimes the sex was decent. Most of the time it couldn’t even be that.
However, when all the lights are off, a touch is a touch, a kiss is a kiss, and if they didn’t speak, I wouldn’t have to think about how their voices didn’t sound like His.
Rashad, my third since Him.
He came after Nathan and Vergil, the fourth man to know the depths of my insides, and it only took him two weeks.
I wasn’t particularly attracted to Rashad.
But my parents liked him. They liked everyone I brought home ever since Him.
But they really, really liked Rashad—more so than the other men that came before he came along, and definitely more than the first. Rashad made my parents laugh.
He made them smile. This was something I no longer knew how to do, so I kept him around so that I wouldn’t forget what their smiles looked like.
Rashad, who I called Shad, had a small apartment just outside of Downtown Miami, in a neighborhood that was being newly gentrified.
He, of course, was the gentrifier in this equation, snagging a twentieth-floor condo overlooking the changing Overtown neighborhood skyline.
The view was beautiful at night, so I found myself there often in the evenings.
We’d just returned from two Thanksgiving dinners—one at my parents’ house and one at his grandmother’s house. After a long night of awkward family encounters, we were in his apartment, trying to get in a lazy fuck before I called myself an Uber home. It was regular people stuff, I guess.
I kept my shirt on; something I only did when the man I was with insisted on keeping the lights on. Rashad’s hands circled around my waist, grip a little too tight, a little too eager.
“Your parents were really feeling me at dinner tonight,” he whispered against my neck. Great, because every woman wants to think about her parents just before she gets fucked. Rashad bit down on the delicate skin on my neck, and over his shoulder, I released a sigh.
To him it might’ve sounded like a satisfied breath, but it was really an expression of my own frustration. Unwanted conversation aside, Rashad, despite his best efforts, just didn’t know how to touch me. All of his attempts to try new things only served to remind me of this fact.
“Baby—”
“I told you not to call me that,” I interrupted softly, squirming under his hands slightly.
“Sweetheart,” he corrected himself, allowing his hand to creep under the fabric of my shirt. “We’ve been doing it for at least two months now. Why are you still hiding from me?”
I hated that he was twenty-six and still referred to sex as doing it. In my moment of subtle irritation, I forgot to respond.
“Lauren?”
“You want me to take my shirt off?” I whispered hesitantly, pulling backward to look into his dark eyes.
Looking into Rashad’s eyes was like looking into an empty cave.
There was nothing in them except, given the right lighting, my own reflection.
With a silent nod, his hand crept further into the underside of my shirt.
I drew in a sharp breath, but didn’t allow my hands to come up to stop him.
The pale pink color of my top fell around us, and Rashad’s eyes fell down to take in the exposure.
He looked at my bare skin as though he was hungry, his tongue coming out to run between his pressed together lips.
Saying nothing, he just took it all in, his face lowering to make sure he didn’t miss an inch of me.
When he saw it, I knew.
Confused, his eyebrows came together questioningly before his features relaxed. I could almost see him remembering what everybody in the city knew.
Last year, I was shot. It didn’t leave me dead, but it left me with a long, raised scar running along my ribcage in one clean line.
The healed cut was nearly black in color, desperate to be seen and always succeeding.
For a split second, Rashad’s lip curled in subtle repulsion and as discretely as he could muster, his hand at my waist lowered as if he was trying not to touch it. The blemish was too ugly to touch.
My boyfriend looked at me like I was gross, and so I felt gross.
“It’s not that bad,” he assured, though I couldn’t be sure if he was trying to convince me or himself. My arms came up to cover my exposed skin, and twice I swallowed to keep the cry rumbling in my chest from surfacing. “Lauren, it’s really not that ba—”
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” I whispered, turning away from his staring to reach for my shirt. As my fingers wrapped around the fabric, I felt the point of his chin rest into the crook of my neck, his arms coming around me from behind, resting just over my breasts.
“Sweetheart, it’s not the end of the world,” he whispered into the silence of the room, his voice tiredly pleading. “You’re beautiful,” he assured. “It’s not like that thing is on your face, right?”
That thing.
I felt like I might throw up.
“I’m going home,” I announced with a shaky voice. My shoulders squirmed as I tried to wiggle out of his grip. Rashad’s arms around me only tightened. “Shad, let me go.”
“Don’t be like this,” he kept his voice quiet, a whiny plea coloring his tone. “You got me all worked up, gorgeous. Just lie down on your stomach. I’ll be quick, I promise.”
He leaned forward with me in his arms, going lower and lower until I was left pinned under the weight of his body.
My arms came up behind me in the hopes that I would get the point across if I smacked him around a few times.
Pressing his body into my back, Rashad grabbed at my wrists, pinning them above my head with one firm hand.
From behind me, I felt his other hand squeeze in between us, guiding his erection through the confusion of my kicking and squirming.
“I said no!”
He said nothing in response to my refusal, and he made no sudden movements to get off, snaking his erection between my thighs. His breath hit the back of my neck, hot and quick with anticipation. If he could see the tears forming in my eyes, he wasn’t deterred by them.
“Rashad, stop. I don’t—”
He pushed in, his erection roughly forcing into the dry skin of my unwilling body.
I didn’t scream. Instead I sunk my head into the pillow in front of me, turning my head towards the window at the far side of the room.
Drowning out the sounds of Rashad’s animalistic grunts, I focused on the view of Downtown Miami.
It was dark outside, the city lit by dozens of lights that twinkled with the reminder that in that moment, life was going on all around me.
Each light was a person, a family, a group of friends.
Maybe they were gathered around a dinner table and taking turns revealing what they were thankful for.
What was I thankful for? A tear rolled down to the tip of my nose, my soul crumbling over the robbery taking place within me.
My body wasn’t mine in that moment, snatched from me in a painful violation that seemed to go on for hours.
All the while, I laid there silent, on my stomach, staring out the window of Rashad Bordeaux’s apartment, taking in that beautiful Overtown skyline.