Originally published in
Succulent: Chocolate Flava 2,
edited by Zane
The week ended with my head in a daze, stories circling my brain. I could still feel a slight cramp in my hand from all of the homework assignments I struggled to complete over the course of the week. I had known that the Black Writer’s Workshop would be exhausting when I applied several months ago. Like many others in attendance, I had felt the need to do something affirmative to prove to myself that I was in fact taking myself seriously as a writer. This was my chance to be around people and call myself a writer without being ridiculed. I wasn’t a computer programmer anymore. I was just someone who was working on his short stories, aiming at getting a book completed by the end of the year. So when I packed up my things for a week in New York, I had no idea that I would meet her, the muse who would get me through the week.
I first saw her during the opening dinner meet-and-greet. She didn’t really stand out very much either. She had a kind of funky Afro, kind of like Nbushe Wright’s doo in Dead Presidents. Her Stevie Wonder t-shirt hung lazily from her body, and if it had not been for her shorts riding up those long, sculpted legs, it might’ve taken me a little longer to really notice her. She had a casual beauty like Sanaa Lathan, the kind of beauty that was subtle in drawing attention. I had always found that type of woman irresistible.
After introducing myself and learning that her name was Meredith, I began to keep an eye out for her during our workshop breaks and during the meals we ate at the university cafeteria. On the second day, while having lunch, I spotted her at a table with several of her classmates.
“Excuse me,” I said, as I approached. “Do you mind if I sit here?”
She looked up at me and smiled. “No. It’s cool.”
I sat down diagonally from her, introducing myself to the two other women seated nearby. Being the only man at the table, the women quickly directed their attention toward me.
“So where are you from?” the woman named Rachelle asked.
“Mississippi,” I responded.
“Ooh, you probably had to escape slavery to get here,” said the one named Diamond.
“And I ain’t never goin’ back. Nah, sur. I’s likes my freedom!”
They laughed, but I hardly noticed anyone, except Meredith. She had a sexiness that danced just beneath the surface, and at that moment, all I wanted to do was undress her, lay her down on her stomach and plant kisses all along her chocolate moon-shaped ass.
“You here for poetry or fiction?” Meredith asked.
“Fiction.”
“Really? Me too. Whose your workshop teacher?”
“Jonathan Cadet.”
“Man, I was trying to get him for my class. I’m taking Cynthia Wordley. She’s great though.”
“Well, I’d love to read some of your stuff sometime,” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Like Erykah Badu says, ‘I’m an artist, and I sensitive about my shit!’”
Her smile made me smile, and from then on, I found myself mysteriously sliding into this groove, writing the same kinds of stories all week long for my workshop. The first story was about a man and a woman who met at a sex anonymous meeting and fell off the wagon soon afterwards. The second story was about a guy having repeated wet dreams about the same woman every night. The third story was about a woman who caught a man jacking off at a stoplight late one night and offered to finish the job for him. It had gotten to the point that when I came to class Mr. Cadet would have an assuming smirk on his face. One day he flat-out asked me if there was something thematic that I was trying to accomplish with my randy collection of stories.
“I don’t know. I think I’m just following where my muse leads.”
He nodded. “Well, it’s good to have a muse. Stirs the creative juices.”
Creative juices? I wanted to swim in those.
But I was a little too nervous to really step up and put it out there with Meredith, so I laid low and chatted with her during the brief moments when we’d connect during the day. Nothing special. Just enough to keep my imagination sparked. Before I knew it, the last day of the workshop had arrived, and the realization that I would probably never see her again began to sink in. I had written all of these stories about being with her, all of these fantasies, and it was about to be over. Just like that.
Another realization dawned on me too: I had spent the entire week writing out my sexual frustrations with stories that I would probably never be able to use professionally, not unless Zane found one of them worthy of publishing in an anthology. If I didn’t put it out there with Meredith, then I would have wasted a week.
That night I didn’t see her at the banquet, and when a group of my classmates had decided to go out for drinks, I kept an eye out for her, hoping our paths would cross going in and out of pubs. When I didn’t see her out and about or hanging out in front of the dorm with other students, I began to question whether she had already left, headed home. When the thought that I had completely blown it set in, I promised myself that if I should see her before the program officially ended the following morning, then I would put it all on the line.
I knew that she was staying in a room at the end of the hall on the floor above mine, so in a final attempt to contact her, I went up to her dorm room a few minutes before eleven that night and knocked on the door. I could hear shuffling as the door opened slowly.
“Yeah,” she whispered, squinting her eyes against the light of the hallway. It was pitch black in her room.
“Just wanted to see you before you dipped out tomorrow.”
“Oh, OK,” she said, barely coherent. “How are you doing?”
“I’m good,” I said. “And you?”
“Just tired. I gotta catch a flight at eight in the morning, so I have to get up at the ass-crack of dawn.”
“Oh,” I said, chuckling at her joke.
She would be at the airport in a few hours, and I wanted to kick myself for not coming by her room earlier or even trying to get at her before the last day. I could have just wished her well with her writing, but I knew that if I didn’t tell her how I felt, I would never get the opportunity to. The words came out in a blur.
“Meredith, I know that this is really bad timing, but I just had to let you know that I’ve been feeling you all week. I can’t stop thinking about you. Hell, all of the stories I wrote this week were about you.”
She looked at me for a moment as if I had told her that Malcolm X was really a Baptist preacher.
I continued. “I hate that it took me this long to tell you, but I couldn’t let you leave without knowing that I am really attracted to you, your voice, your smile, your personality. On that first day when I saw you, something in me wanted to connect with you.”
The more I listened to myself, the cornier the stuff I was saying sounded. I was messing up big time, but at least I was getting the basic idea out there. She had an expression on her face like “this nigga is crazy,” and I couldn’t blame her.
“Well. That’s all. I was hoping to talk with you a little bit before you left, but I didn’t want to cut into your sleep. I guess I should lay it down myself.”
She nodded her head.
As I started to walk away, she said, “You wrote stories about me?”
“Yes,” I said, turning around.
“Well, were they any good?”
“I don’t know if they were, but it felt good writing them.”
She smiled as she closed the door.
A half hour later, I was lying on top of the covers on my bed listening to Raheem DeVaughn on the portable boom box I had sitting on the desk in my room. Although the lights were out, I could still catch a mild glow of light through the blinds, reminding me that the city was right outside my window. I had been staring at the ceiling so long, lost in my thoughts, that I had assumed I was asleep.
The knock was very soft, but somehow I still heard it. Dressed in only my boxers and a t-shirt, I got up and walked to the door. Looking through the peephole, I could see Meredith standing there in an oversized Clark Atlanta sweatshirt, her flannel pajama bottoms hanging down over her New Balance running shoes. I opened the door, and my stomach immediately started to churn with butterflies.
“Come in,” I offered. I cleared off a spot on my bed for her to sit down.
It took everything I had in me to suppress my smile. She had actually come to my room! It didn’t matter what for either. She was there, and that was really all that mattered.
“Hey, Marlon, I just wanted to take a look at some of your stories. I don’t think any guy has ever written a story about me before. I just had to see what you had to say.”
“No problem,” I said, pulling out the stack of stories I had printed out during the week. I had arranged them in the sequence in which they were written, so the sex-aholic meeting one was on the top. I handed them to her before I realized that I should be embarrassed by how blatant my stories were. Meredith had really brought out the freak in me.
As I sat in the chair by my desk, facing my bed, I watched her read the first story. She nodded occasionally, as if to say, “Interesting.” When she finished the first story, she placed it back on the stack resting next to her on the bed.
“So I inspired you to write a story about two sex addicts?”
“Well, sort of. More like motivation.”
“Motivation? Are all of the stories like this?”
Now I was really embarrassed. “More or less.”
She lowered her head for a moment as if to reflect over what she had just read. Lifting her head, she slid out of my bed and stood up in front of me. “I am Meredith Jones, and I—” she sighed, in a voice of mock frustration, “—am addicted to sex.”
I looked at her with my eyebrow raised, and just then I saw her smile, that same smile from the first day I had lunch with her. I stood up from my seat.
“I am Marlon Shepherd, and I too am addicted to sex.”
The words were nearly identical to the words in the story, save our names. I could feel my erection starting to push the fabric of my boxers.
“So, Marlon, what do we do now,” she said, looking down at my erection.
Her mouth sealed around mine before I could catch my thoughts, and her tongue danced against mine, causing me to ease my hands slowly down her back, around her waist, and onto her ass. She moaned as we fell back onto the bed.
I lifted her sweatshirt and smiled when I realized that she wasn’t wearing a bra. I held one of her breasts in my hand and flicked my tongue across her nipple, quickly enveloping it with the warmth of my mouth. My hand eased down into her flannel pajama bottoms, and at that moment, I realized that she had only been wearing the sweatshirt, pajama bottoms, and sneakers—nothing beneath!
Slowly I went over the length of her body massaging her muscles with my fingertips and replacing the sensation with my mouth. I made a soft wet trail from her neck, down below her navel, and as my lips reached the inner part of her hip, I lifted her legs to drape over my shoulders. She eased toward me, allowing her clit to rub against the tip of my nose before sliding down onto my tongue. She rocked into me as I licked and sucked, her hands holding my head as she moved her body back and forth. I cupped my hands beneath her ass, lifting her into me, and her legs shot out, erect, as she screamed out in ecstasy, shivering.
I stood back from the bed, admiring her sexy body reclined in the light of the room, her wetness dripping down onto my sheets. She slowly sat up on the edge of my bed and slid one hand up my t-shirt onto my chest, as she pulled my throbbing erection from my boxers with her other hand and ran her tongue along the entire length of my shaft. I moved my hips forward involuntarily, as she took the head into her mouth. Working me back and forth with her hands, I did everything I could to keep from cumming. I wanted to feel her sliding up and down me before I came.
Wetting up my shaft with her saliva, she guided me between her legs and eased me into her hot wetness. The warmth worked its way down my shaft as I wrapped myself completely around her. Her hands rubbed my back, and I stroked her as if it were the last thing I would ever do in life. Lifting her legs into a “V” formation, I eased myself into her until she gasped. As I rotated my hips, I looked down at her beautiful, sexy chocolate complexion; her full, firm breasts; and her athletic body. I massaged her calves with my fingertips as I held her legs spread.
“Ooh, I like it!” she cooed. “It feels so good!”
I smiled, but I couldn’t respond because she felt so incredible that I could cum if she so much as wiggled a toe. I wanted to hold off and enjoy her all night. I didn’t want her to get on that plane the next morning and leave without knowing that she was all that.
We rolled over, and she climbed on top of me, sliding her hips into mine. I could feel her wetness dripping down my balls as she pushed into me and wiggled her body. And when she was ready, she did a Kegel pull that made me scream out.
“Oh, shit! I’m gonna cum!”
She pulled me into her as I felt myself exploding in what felt like a psychedelic Technicolor orgasm, my erection throbbing in repetition as her walls tightened around me. We held on to each other for what seemed like one interminable moment before realizing how late it was.
As she dressed, I watched her cover up her perfection with each piece of clothing I had taken off earlier.
“I want a copy of the stories,” she said.
“Take them. I have the files on my laptop.”
I walked her to the door and kissed her. “Sleep well,” she whispered, caressing my face.
I offered to walk her back to her room, but she refused, saying that she was fine. She only asked me to do one thing for her just before she left: she asked me to write this story.