“Ay, you one of Demond’s girls?” one of the men smoking a Backwoods on the front steps calls out to me.
“No, just pulling up for Camila,” I call back, walking toward them.
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.