We all waited.
She again said nothing, but she did it going to the bed, turning her back to it and collapsing on it.
Since this was not normal Jinx behavior (as far as I knew), we all approached cautiously.
“We’re in the middle of a mission, and you’re freaking out, so you need to talk fast, Jinx,” Raye demanded.
“He wants me to quit the life and move in with him,” Jinx said to the ceiling.
The room went wired.
It did because we knew what this was about.
Jinx had a regular. He was an accountant. We’d seen him. He looked like Clark Kent, suit, glasses, tall, built, dazzling, the whole shebang.
On their “dates,” he brought her gifts, flowers, and according to Jinx, tipped well.
All of that was why Raye asked, “Is this about Clark?”
Jinx lifted her head. “Clark? His name is Noah.”
“Great name,” Shanti said.
Shanti barely got that out before Jinx jumped up from the bed and started pacing.
No, not pacing. It wasn’t in a line.
She was so agitated, she was prowling every inch of the room.
And she did this blathering.
“He says he’ll take care of me. I said I don’t need no hombre to take care of me. He says if that’s the case, I can get a job. I can contribute to our household.” She threw up her hands, still prowling, and shouted, “Our household!”
I thought that was sweet.
Apparently, Jinx didn’t.
She stopped shouting, but she didn’t stop prowling.
“I said I couldn’t afford to contribute much to whatever household he might have because I know he’s loaded. And he knows I’m not. He says he doesn’t care. Whatever I feel I need to do, I can do. I said I wasn’t gonna change my whole life for some güey who’d eventually kick my ho ass out when he got tired of me. He said I wasn’t a ho. I said, you think I’d suck your cock for free?”
The four other women in the room emitted various versions of pained, girl-you-so-fucked-up-with-that moans.
She stopped pacing and looked among us.
“What? Am I wrong?” she demanded.
Not a one of us was going there.
But Shanti asked, “What’d he do after you said that?”
“That’s when he got mad, threw money at me, and I hadn’t even fucked him yet, and he stormed out,” Jinx answered. “The fuck of that was, I’ve never seen the man mad, and it was hot as infierno, and he’s generally hot as infierno when he’s doing his mild-mannered shit, so him mad was actually hot-ter than infierno.”
I was pressing my lips together.
Shanti was now studying her booties.
Joey was chewing the side of her thumbnail and looking anywhere but at Jinx.
