Margaret Sexton - A Kind of Freedom

“My turn,” she said, and she eased her face down, down, down. His dick was throbbing now with the weight of the urge inside him. Ordinarily this was his favorite part, but there was something about this girl’s titties that wouldn’t let him go, that seemed to contain the whole of existence inside them, and if he could just stay connected—

She didn’t have to pick his dick up to slide it in her mouth, it was already upright. She wrapped her big lips around it and bobbed her head up and down, up and down. She had done this before. He didn’t have many more bobs left in him. After that, he would put his mouth between her legs. That wasn’t his thang. He didn’t love the smell of pussy and it seemed to always be there, lurking, no matter how clean the girl was, but she was earning it right now. She was giving him life and any minute a fraction of that very force was going to burst inside her.

He was so enshrined in the world of her bedroom he didn’t hear the knocks, and it wasn’t until Bon Bon yanked her mouth from him that he realized they had been sounding for some time. It must have been her goddamn mama, but Bon Bon would know what to shout to send her off, and in a minute they could get back to business.

Sure enough, Bon Bon yelled through the door, “Not now,” but she darted around the room for her clothes too, sliding into her panties and some shorts. Before she could slip her top over her head, the door burst open and a man as big as T.C. was tall busted in. T.C. froze; he was still acclimating to the knocks let alone this new disruption, and he didn’t know enough to search for his boxers, pull them over his dick, which was straight as an arrow despite everything.

“What the fuck is going on here?” the man shouted. He reached over to her desk and slammed her computer off it. T.C. heard it land with a crack. Then the man walked over to her drawers, pulled the top one out, turned it over, and emptied her socks, panties, and bras onto the floor. A receipt floated out too, drifted to the carpet. T.C. eyed it; whatever it had been for cost only $13.10, but for some reason Bon Bon had kept it.

Finally T.C. snapped back to attention, repeating the man almost verbatim. “What the fuck is going on?”

Bon Bon didn’t say anything. She had managed to slide her shirt on. She tossed T.C. his pants, and he stepped into them, his eyes on the maniac in front of him, whose green eyes lit up as if they were electric.

“It’s not what it looks like, baby,” Bon Bon said, but T.C. wasn’t sure which one of them she was talking to. He had decided once he got his clothes on, he was going to bolt for the door. Tiger would have just made it back to the Ninth Ward, but this was an emergency. This mothafucka was crazy, there was no doubt about that, and Bon Bon, just watching him ransack the place as if he came over every Saturday to throw her shit around, must have been nuts too.

He was pulling on his shirt when the man got in his face. Bon Bon stepped in then, trying to protect him, but she was 110 pounds soaking wet, and when the man pushed her out of his way, she fell onto the bed in a soft thud. There was nothing between them now, and T.C. couldn’t do anything but back up when the man pushed closer. Before he knew it, he was cornered against a wall between the bed and the dresser; there was nowhere else to go.

“Look, man,” T.C. said. “I didn’t know nothin’ about you. I thought she was free, we wasn’t dating or nothin’ like that, it wasn’t nothin’ serious. Let’s just put it behind us.” He had never been in this situation before, but because he was always the peacemaker among his friends, because he didn’t love this girl, and because the comfort of his own bed beckoned to him, his words streamed out like gravy on a plate of rice.

The man didn’t budge. It wasn’t that T.C. was scared to fight, but he was tired. He’d had to become someone he wasn’t the first few weeks of jail. You would think his height would have been a deterrent, but men made knives out of metal scraps from the ceiling, hid them in their boots in the Orleans Parish Prison, pulled them out if you so much as stepped in front of them in line. He would never lose the scar that stretched like a Y alongside his belly, and that was enough. The idea of bustin’ this nigga’s head open, which he was sure he could do, was like asking a man who had just finished a marathon to climb Mt. Everest. No, if he wasn’t going to bust a nut, he needed to excuse himself and call Tiger. Maybe he should have gone home in the first place, to see if his mama made him a welcome-home meal.

T.C. repeated himself. “I told you, wasn’t nothin’ going on between me and her,” but the man still didn’t move.

“Nothing, Bakari, I swear, nothing,” Bon Bon added, in her squeaky little-girl voice.

“Look, I promise you, you don’t want none of this,” T.C. said, his voice more solid this time. “I will crush you,” he added when the man still hadn’t backed up. “I will crush you,” he repeated, his voice like stone.

The man pushed him now. T.C. didn’t fall, but to his surprise, he staggered a bit. He began to wonder if the accumulation of his day — watching his hopes dashed, being on the other side of jail and still running into it — had taken something vital out of him. The man pushed him again, harder this time, and in the seconds it took him to regain his footing, the man pulled out a knife. Bon Bon had been trying to mediate from the sidelines still, but when she saw the knife, she stopped talking and started screaming.

T.C. looked at her instead of the knife itself. The adrenaline he’d experienced during altercations in jail, that force of survival, seemed to drain out of him now, and he didn’t know if he was going to be able to get the knife out of the man’s hands without slicing himself up, maybe somewhere you couldn’t simply bandage up again.

He looked into the man’s face. Where had he seen him before? Of course everybody in New Orleans was light bright and damn near white, but this man had red hair too, and those eyes — he recognized him from somewhere, even if it was just a picture. He was certain of that now.

Then the man waved the knife under T.C.’s chin, and he would have swiped him if T.C. had snapped his head out of the way a second later. T.C. looked up at the window behind him. He could try to climb up, but the man could cut his legs while he figured out the lock. He turned back to Bon Bon, begging her for help with his eyes the way he had been begging her a few minutes earlier for a different matter, but she was just as paralyzed as he was, her screams like sirens from that night four months back when he had been only a mile from home, and the door to his world had come crashing in. T.C. looked back at the knife and heard the click of a burner cocking across from him. They all turned to the doorway. Bon Bon’s mama was there, pointing a Glock 19 in the air with both hands.

“I’ll blow both y’all motherfuckers’ heads off if you don’t listen up,” she said. “I tried to raise Bay Bay right,” she went on. “I guess it wasn’t enough, but I did what I could. Now I’m going to give you one minute to get your shit and get the fuck out of my house.”

The man slipped the knife in his pocket and sprinted out of the bedroom door. T.C. wasn’t cornered anymore, but he stayed where he was. What was he going to do? If he ran out now, he would just get sliced in the street, maybe more brutally because there was no mama to defend him. He looked at Bon Bon again. She was crying this time.

“Mama,” she said in a soft, shaking voice. “It wasn’t T. It was Bakari. You know how he is.”

“All I know is I won’t have that in my house,” her mama said, looking as if she were mad enough to turn the burner on her own daughter. She was still aiming at T.C. though. Bon Bon got up and pushed her arm down. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay,” she repeated.