Excerpts from Blood and Vengeance by Keith Kareem Williams & Keith Gaston - Excerpt 1

The tiny bedroom reeked of marijuana mixed with the faint odor of the perfumes she sprayed and the incense she burned to try to mask the scent. She smoked weed way more than she ate which worked out perfectly in her profession. It was almost a job requirement that she protect her slender waistline at all times but she also needed to medicate herself to get her mind right, just to make it through her shifts with her sanity intact. Sassy needed the stranger’s faces and male parts that she was forced to get familiar with to become a blur. That way, she could wash away the pain and stains of their touch when she showered. Otherwise, she feared that they would leave the type of scars that only she could feel and see. At the moment, she remained fairly sober because she didn’t mind the company of the guest that currently laid his head on her bed. Will Samson was special. Everyone on the street outside must have heard her moaning, despite the fact that he wasn’t even the best lover that she had been with. All the same, everything that she felt inside her body while she was with him was all real. She had seen all shapes, ages, races and sizes of men but she sexually connected with him differently than she had with anyone else. That was probably because, if her suspicions were correct, she had been his first. It turned her on and excited her to know that she had basically trained him how to please her. There was also something deeper about him, something that she couldn’t explain with words but whatever it was, she had never felt it in any other man.
          The evening air was stagnant and not much breeze blew through the open window. The noisy ceiling fan really didn’t do much about the sweltering heat as it spun weakly overhead and squeaked like a distressed mouse caught on a sticky, glue trap.
Will’s nine-millimeter handgun sat in its holster, slung over the metal folding chair in the corner. In the dark, she couldn’t see his eyes but she could sense him straining in the poor light to look at it. He was always wound up and paranoid, no matter how intense or satisfying the sex was.  Whenever that gun wasn’t firmly in his hand or safely secured near his left armpit, a few inches from his heart, he would stare it at almost as if he expected it to grow wings and fly away. He had even given it a name.
          “Who do you love, me or her?” Sassy asked.
          “Her,” Will answered dryly.
          “All this ass, these tits and this pretty face but you love her and not me?”
          “She’ll save my life...you’ll get me killed. One day, I’ll probably have to use her to save me from you,” he answered.
          “I would never hurt you. Have you ever considered that maybe I love you?” she asked, realizing how ridiculous it was that she felt like the mistress, second place to a black, cold, metal gun.
          “I doubt that.”
          “Why?”
          “You don’t love men. You don’t love me. You don’t even love yourself. You only love money...because you believe it can save you from everything you hate.”
          “That’s a cruel thing to say.”
          “Not cruel...honest.”
          “Suppose I told you that I slept with three other men today?”
          “Then that’s what you did. You don’t belong to anyone, especially not me.”
          He climbed out of bed and walked over to the folding chair to get dressed in the dark. He didn’t like when she started to get emotional and sentimental with him. Those moments seriously threatened to make him forget what she was and he knew that that was dangerous, for his life and his heart. Sassy leaned over and turned the black switch on the lamp on the nightstand. The room was instantly filled with a tacky, rouge glow because of the thin scarf she had thrown over the shade to soften the light.
          “Why’d you turn the lights on?” he asked.
          “I like looking at you,” she answered, lustfully studying his scars and tattoos.
          Will looked back over his shoulder as she lay naked in the bed and wished that he had left the lights on during their high-spirited sexual romp. She really was something to behold. If her skin wasn’t marred with tacky, poorly drawn tattoos, she would have looked almost like a woman straight out of a painting, graceful and flawless. However, her imperfections made her desirable in a way that inspired the nastiest of thoughts. He looked away from her before he was tempted to turn his short stay into an all-nighter. He had things to do and he had put them off for long enough. He really shouldn’t have kept her company for as long as he had but he believed that if he might not survive the night, he wanted to die with the recent memories of a woman’s thighs fresh on his mind. It might even have been good luck because he hadn’t been kissed by death just yet.
          “You really don’t care about me do you?” she asked, pouting with her head on her white satin pillow. She saved her best white linens for his visits.
          “I do.”
          “You have a funny way of showing it,” she said, sounding as cliché as a line straight out of a romantic comedy.
“How am I supposed to show it?”
          “I don’t know,” she answered then paused. “You never say sweet things or do anything nice for me.”
          Fully dressed with his gun securely strapped in place, he walked over to the bed and sat down next to her. He looked into her sad eyes and carefully weighed what he would say next.
          “You work in a house of lies. Men come here and spend money to feel important and the women pretend to enjoy dancing for their howling amusement, to boost these petty, unimportant men’s egos so they can stomach going home to face their small lives with their wives. Men come here to fool themselves into believing that they can afford the part of you that their hands can never touch. You will never give that to any of them. That game plays out over and over again, every night, in all of these little back rooms. This...what we’re doing...is the only real truth.”
          “You’re too complicated.”
          “I’m not. The truth is always simple, basic and easy. Fantasies and lies get complicated because it’s hard to keep them believable.”
          He leaned close to her face in a rare tender moment and pressed his lips to her forehead. Sassy smiled and got butterflies in her tummy like a school girl anticipating her first kiss. That delicate moment didn’t last long and she felt foolish for thinking it would.
          “Doesn’t that mean it’s time for you to go?” she asked as his phone began to ring in his pocket.
          “In a few more minutes. I want to spend a little more time with you,” he answered and for the next ten minutes, he ran his fingers along the smooth curves of her face and played in her hair as if he was looking at her for the last time. Then, almost as if he had been coldly calculating the time that had passed with clocklike precision, he abruptly got up from her bed.
          “Would you care if I got hurt or killed?” she asked.
          “I would shed tears at your funeral,” he answered and Sassy couldn’t tell if he was being sincere or sarcastic.
          Will counted out a thousand dollars and tossed it on the pillow where his head had rested for the two hours he had spent with her. She reached across lazily to pick up the knot of money but didn’t bother to count it.
          “You left way too much,” she said as he walked to the door, certain that, as usual, he overpaid for his stay in her land of milk and honey.
          “I didn’t. I left exactly what I owe you. The extra is for the information you got for me,” he answered and walked out of her room.