Sunni sat at her mahogany desk with a big smile plastered on her face, squirming, feeling the moisture between her legs. She was getting wet as she counted all of the men who had run up through her place of business that day and given her so much pleasure. There was Alex, Ben, Drew, Abe, Tom, Grant and George. Grant was one of her favorites, except she had to see him twice to reach the climax that Ben always brought her to. Ben was the best of the best, a certified big hat. Just looking eye to eye with him made her explode like no other orgasm she had ever had in her life.
Sunni didn’t notice her best friend, Cher, standing in the doorway, watching her about to climax.
“Damn, chick,” Cher said. “If dick ain’t never made you cum in the past year, I swear those benjamins have.”
Sunni didn’t respond until she finished counting her salon’s night deposit. She came out of her trance when the money was sealed in the plastic pouch the bank provided for business owners.
“Girl, be quiet,” was her delayed reaction. “After all that good dick I done had, who would have thought that I’d be saying, ‘fuck dem niggas, I want the money’?”
“Damn, that’s what an empty, broken heart can do to you.”
Just then Beatrice, one of the stylists that Sunni had fired earlier that day, entered her office. “Excuse me, can I talk to you?” Beatrice asked.
“What is it?” Sunni snapped, wondering why Beatrice was back up in her shop. “Is it about my money?”
Beatrice ignored the question. The last thing she wanted to do was get into a verbal battle with Sunni, so she calmly said, “I really need to talk to you.”
“So talk,” Sunni said. She could cut people up with her tongue and had no problem drawing her sword.
“I know I haven’t paid you, but I need to get my supplies from you before I can give you any money. I need my stuff to make money,” Beatrice said minkly, not wanting to set Sunni off.
“Until you pay me my money, you can’t get nothing from me,” Sunni shot back. “You worked in my shop for weeks—shit, over a month—and never paid me a dime booth rent. And you think that I’ma let you get your stuff back?”
“How am I going to make money and pay you if you don’t give me my stuff back?”
“Sell some pussy. I don’t give a damn. All I care about is my money.”
Beatrice was hot, but what could she do? She shouldn’t have left her supplies out in the open. “I’ma get you your money, don’t you worry,” Beatrice said as she turned and walked away.
“You’re going to have to,” Sunni said in a singsong of victory.
Ta-Ta, another stylist, walked in as Beatrice was leaving. “I say take it out that ho’s ass if she don’t want to pay.” Ta-Ta specialized in boof-to-the-roof ghetto hairstyles. Bottles of hair gel and bags of weave were all that surrounded her station, located in the very back room of the shop.
Since the twenty-four-hour salon catered to all people, Sunni gave Ta-Ta the evening shifts. She didn’t come in until after 6:00 P.M. and usually worked until the wee hours of the morning laying hair down. When Ta-Ta came into the shop, so did eighty-five percent of the gossip, which she sprayed through her teeth like a can of oil sheen.
“If all my workers were like you, I wouldn’t have to be locking up people’s shit,” Sunni said generously, glancing up at Ta-Ta and her bright orange hair. She was so successful at what she did because she was a product of her own craft. Ghettofabulous was her middle name. And for every track of weave she put in, a piece of gossip came out. That chick worked like a slave and brought a lot of money into Sunni’s shop.
Sunni stood up and put her bag of money in her purse, next to her gun. Best believe a soul wasn’t going to touch her loot.
“Now make sure that my office door stays locked,” Sunni instructed Ta-Ta.
“I don’t know why you ever gave that damn Beatrice a job noway,” Cher jumped in.
“Everybody deserves a chance. I mean, look at me,” Sunni said, raising her arms and looking around her private office in the rear of the salon. A client who happened to be one of the city’s hottest interior designers had decorated it. The mahogany furniture accented the tan color on the walls. The black-and-white still photos that graced the walls were framed in mahogany frames on bright yellow mats. The chairs were pale yellow leather with silver legs; the floors a yellow-and-cream checkerboard. Sunni had spared no expense once she turned her first profit.
“I feel ya,” Ta-Ta said to Sunni with her arms folded, “but she was Scoop’s cousin. I’m sorry, any nigga that sends me to the penitentiary, I ain’t giving nobody he knows a job. He cost you three years of your life,” she said as she blew a bubble.
Sunni focused on her grandmother’s picture on the wall above Cher’s head and thought about Scoop. Which just pissed her off. The more she thought of Scoop, the angrier she got at Beatrice, who was the next best thing to Scoop to take her anger out on. Which was probably the real reason she had fired her.
“Do you ever think of Scoop?” Cher asked Sunni.
“He sent me to the penitentiary. What the hell you think? Hell, I thought about how I wanted to…naw, I try not to think of how I want to kill that bitch-ass nigga!”
Cher could see the emotion on Sunni’s face, and she knew that the incident with Scoop wasn’t something that Sunni wanted to talk about. So she switched it. “Girl, have you heard from that guy we met at the mall the other day?”
Cher and Sunni carried on with the majority of men who crossed their paths just like men tried to carry on with women. They would turn him out, and if it was good, they passed his ass on to each other, and talked about him after Sex and the City went off. It was real for Sunni like that. She loved getting her pussy licked. If she hadn’t witnessed in jail firsthand all the extra drama and emotional abuse that came with lesbian relationships, she would have long found her a woman to kick it with by now. But since bumping coochies and getting her grass cut by another woman wasn’t her thing, she decided that she would carry it like a nigga. “Money Over Niggas” was her golden rule. She would get her money right and make cute dudes her boy toys whenever she felt the urge.
The last toy she played with was a guy named Mason. Mason was broke as a broke-dick dog, but, boy, could he lick a clit. He did it so good that Sunni played dude like a quick trick, paying his $99 cell phone bill in return for him giving her best friend some boss head, too. And that fool did it. Just like men did women, Sunni and Cher laughed and talked about him like a dog afterward.
Sunni cut the conversation short. “I’ve got to get to the bank. I’m tired, hungry and sick of the smell of burnt curling irons.”