Candy Licker (13 page)

The right side of the house was where that dude Knowledge stayed, and there were a total of three suites on that end too. Knowledge had one of his own, and Long Jon, Hurricane's chief of security, and his girl, Peaches, lived in one, and the other one was empty.

Teema switched her gangsta booty down the hall ahead of me. “I'ma introduce you to Peaches, but don't fuck with her 'cause she ain't right upstairs, and if you ever see that crazy bitch anywhere near the kitchen watch her like a hawk. She so scatterbrained she'll be tryin to make toast and fuck around and burn the whole house down.”

We walked what seemed like another mile to the right side of the house. There were three doors and we stopped outside the one in the middle.

“Peaches! Peaches!” Teema hollered, then knocked real quick, opened the door, and clicked on the light. I saw her from the side. Sistah had been sitting there in the dark checking out the wall. Teema had to call her twice before she even turned our way, and then she looked around like,
What? Where am I? Who are you?

I glanced around the huge room. Wide-screen TV, nice stereo. The furniture was da bomb, but the covers were tossed
off her bed, clothes and junk were all over the floor, and the suite had a funky odor like she needed to open up the windows.

“Peaches, we got a new girl in the house.”

She focused her eyes on me and I was shocked to see how beautiful she was. “Good,” she said, “ 'cause all them other bitches livin’ up in here are past tired.”

“Who's tired?”

Peaches cut her eyes. “That bitch Laniqua for one.”

“No, girl.” Fatima shook her head. “Remember, Laniqua drowned, Peaches. She
been
gone.”

Peaches shrugged. “Whatever. The bitch was tired.”

“Hey,” I said. “I'm Candy.”

She stared at me for a second then said, “Hey your damn self. Who you? You cute, but them contact lenses are played. You got that red weave working but them blue eyes gotta go.”

“I'm Candy,” I repeated.

Peaches yawned and stretched, ice glinting from her ears, neck, and wrists. Her soft brown hair hung down her back in loose curls. “Teema, what I told you about busting up in my room? I'm hungry. Tell Long Jon to bring me something to eat.” Then she stared at me again. “Who you? Girl don't be so damn fake. Them blue eyes gotta go….”

Teema grabbed my arm and pulled me out the doorway. “That's Peaches. Like I said, don't fuck with her. She cool, but she been beat down too much. The bitch has brain damage.”

I followed Teema down a hall and into a room with a dropdown movie screen and a bunch of soft velvet love seats. A hot new flick called
G-Spot
was playing on the screen, and stretched out on a sofa near the front of the room was one of the flyest chicks I'd ever seen.

“Sissy,” Teema said, grabbing my arm and parading me in front of sistah who had rich ebony skin and wide eyes. “This is Candy. She's a new singer getting ready to sign a contract. Hurricane dropped her off and she's staying in the middle.”

Sissy swung her feet to the floor and stared at me. Her bone-straight hair seemed to say
whissssh
before settling around her shoulders. “What? Girl, stop lying and get out my face. I know that crazy motherfucker ain't bring no bitch up in here to put in the middle!” Then she stood up and grinned. “Oops!” She covered her mouth. “Damn. I didn't mean you a bitch. Girl, how you doing. I'm Sicily, but you can call me Sissy.”

I nodded and said hey, even though I didn't see why these hef-fahs were so damn shocked to see me. Hurricane was a grown-ass man. He was probably what? Thirty-five pushing thirty-six? I couldn't have been the first piece of pussy he had brought home.

“Yeah,” I said, giving them both slight attitude. I'd just lost my mama, almost lost my sister, and had flown across the country from one coast to another. I was tired, and it was time to let my position be known because I knew how minor and jealous chicks could be. “I'm Candy,” I said real straight-up-like. “And that's right. I'm Hurricane's new woman. I'm a hot-ass singer and a badass bitch, and I'll be chilling in the middle.”

I had put my mark down with boldness and confidence, but that's because I was dumb and didn't understand that Fatima and Sicily had been through all this shit before. They knew some details about the mighty Hurricane that I didn't know yet. They knew that before the night was over my new man would come home and give me a long kiss and a hot bath, then stick his
.44
between my legs and threaten to splatter my pussy all over the mattress.

W
e walked back down to the kitchen where Teema and Sissy put me up on the house rules. Rule number one? Hurricane was king and his word was the law.

“He snaps on the regular, and he don't take no shit from nobody,” Sissy said, “but he got these niggahs up in here so vexed they don't give him none neither.”

I stared at her with her pretty black self. “Vexed? For what?”

She laughed. “You must ain't seen your contract yet.”

“Rule number two,” Teema said. “Don't touch shit in this crib that don't belong to you. If Hurricane didn't personally give it to you, that means you stole it.”

Sissy jumped in next. “And rule number three … the attic is a badland. Don't go your ass up there. Never. Not for anything.”

“What's up there?” I asked.

Teema gave me the stupid face. “If Cane wanted us to know what was up there, he wouldn'ta put the shit off-limits! You better learn real quick not to ask no whole lotta questions around
here. Don't nothing but men's business go on in this house, so keep your mouth closed and roll with the program.”

“So what do the females do?”

They thought that shit was funny.

Sissy hollered. “Suck dick!”

“Fuck their men!” Teema laughed.

I found out that Teema liked to sew and made most of her clothes. Cooking was Sissy's thing, although she was so bony I doubted if she ate much. “Cane owns a rib shack but he don't allow no hog in this camp,” Teema told me. “But Sissy be sneaking that shit in here anyway. She seasons the hell out of our food with it, then feeds the evidence to his dog, Predator.”

As tired as I was I sat talking with them for over an hour, but it had only taken me a minute to see what was really going on. Sissy, Peaches, and Teema had flawless skin, banging bodies, silky hair, and empty lives. They were made up, dressed up, iced out, and bored as hell living way out in the boonies on Long Island.

I was glad that I had talent, and if I stuck with Hurricane, I knew I would have a booming career. I liked looking good and having fun, and I loved sex more than most men. But sitting around all day while the fellas was out there getting recognized wasn't my thing. I needed much more than that.

H
urricane had been sexy, sweet, and generous while we were in L.A., but less than two weeks later things had changed between us in a hurry. For one thing, he had been perpetrating that night he finger-fucked me on the dance floor at the House. Wasn't nothing hot or sexy about his ass. All that licking pussy
juice from his fingers and thangs had been a big act designed to get me where he wanted me, and from then on my orgasms were my own damn responsibility. And all that mutual dream building and conversating about my singing future went out the window too. He let me know real quick that there was no questioning him about his business or about my career. He immediately signed Scandalous! to a two-album deal that named Knowledge as our lawyer and Joog as our manager, and as soon as my bruises healed we got busy in the studio, working day and night to lay down our tracks and produce our hit album.

My shit was still live and you know I held it down on the mic, but I was grieving bad for Mama, and being in the studio was hard. It took me a minute to get past the guilt I was feeling because in spite of everything that had went down, I still wanted to sing. I still needed to sing. Hurricane simplified shit for me real fast though. He said I
had
to sing.

So I did, and I can honestly say it still made me feel good. Mama always said my voice was a gift from God, and since she had always got so much joy out of listening to me, maybe in some sort of way she could still hear me.

When Caramel arrived she moved into the empty room on the right side of the house, but I was in the studio so much that I didn't have a lot of time to spend with her. In a couple of weeks I would have to take a day off and get her enrolled in school, but in the meantime I ended up leaving her at the mansion, as long as Sissy or Teema was home. I didn't trust Peaches to look after her. That would be too much like the blind leading the damn deaf.

But then I found out that Teema and Sissy weren't much better. Those two chicks were devious and conniving, and as soon
as the door closed behind me in the mornings they started putting my sister up to all kinds of stupid shit. And Caramel was down for whatever too. I don't care what those doctors said. That bullet had done something to my sister. Caramel before she got shot was not the same Caramel after she took that bullet. She was still beautiful and the way she wore her hair covered her bullet wound almost completely but something wasn't connecting upstairs and it seemed like her whole personality had changed.

Where before the shooting she was a gifted pianist, these days she acted like she'd never even read a musical note before. And all of a sudden she wanted to be a rapper. Lil’ Kim, if possible. Hell, even if she could rap, Caramel had too much ass to be walking around dressed like Lil’ Kim. She had major attitude with me all the time too, and that was new. The doctors said all these changes were because of the violence involved in her trauma, and I believed them. Who knows what afflictions I mighta walked away with after having a gun stuck to my head and hearing the trigger pulled.

But more than Caramel's personality had changed. A few weeks after she got home she told me she wanted to come down to the House of Homicide and party. This is from a quiet little mouse-girl who never even had a boyfriend. Caramel was seventeen years old and Mama had recently bragged to me that she'd never even been kissed. Let alone felt or fucked. And now she was flossing around in shorts that showed her crack and wagging her round ass under the greedy eyes of grown men.

We had never gone back into Mama's house after the murders, so Caramel had lost all her clothes and everything else that she owned. Her little stuff hadn't been worth all that much, but
Hurricane had given her several grand so she could buy some gear and get herself right again. I'd asked Teema to take her into Midtown to shop at Macy's and Nordstrom, but as soon as I saw the plastic bags they came dragging home I knew for sure they had been on Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn, or Fordham Road in the Bronx, or maybe even Jamaica Avenue in Queens.

Everything Caramel had bought was too short, too tight, and too loud. My baby sister was walking around looking like one of those desperate chickenheads who posed outside the House of Homicide hoping to hook a baller every night. All her shit might as well have been neon and silver-studded and screaming, Fuck me, fuck me, and fuck me
hard.

Another thing that bothered me about Caramel was that she acted like she wasn't bothered about Mama. She never wanted to talk about her, and whenever I mentioned something about Mama she brushed me off and acted like she didn't wanna hear it. I couldn't figure out what she had against Mama all of a sudden. I understood why she dissed me, because she had every right to be mad at me. I was the one who put them in that situation in the first place.

“You and Mama was the ones tight, Candy,” Caramel had the nerve to say to me. “Y'all was the ones always talking and singing and doing shit together. Y'all left me by myself most of the time, and neither one of y'all came to see me when they had my ass locked up in foster care.”

“Uh-uh, Caramel,” I protested. “It was always all three of us. You don't remember? We slept on one mattress together, and me and Mama always put you right in the middle! We did everything together, Caramel. Mama didn't play favorites with us. She loved us both the same.”

She looked at me with my same blue eyes, then turned her lip up and walked away. I really didn't know what to do about her. I had to go to the studio, so I couldn't stay home and babysit her all day. Vonnie said to leave her crazy ass back at the mansion 'cause it wasn't like she could walk way out to Harlem from the boondocks anyway, but I got the feeling Vonnie just didn't want Caramel around. Baby sister had a banging body, and she mighta been looking just a little bit too fly and too hooched out for Vonnie's tastes. Vonzelle Desiree Greenley did not like competition. Standing onstage next to me every night was bad enough without having my younger image blocking on the scene too.

But Dominica told me to just deal with the changes in my sister and to bring her on down to the studio with me. “At least there you'll be able to watch out for her, Candy. It don't matter how grand Hurricane's mansion is if it's way out in south hell. Caramel probably feels like a prisoner up in that camp. Coming down to the studio will be like getting out of lockdown.”