dreads and grabbed my now throbbing hard-on with
his other hand. “I now your family too.”
“Yes you are, my gorgeous,” I whispered weakly as he stroked
me, and my kisses found the soft flesh of his neck. “But I do love it when you
call me ‘ Papi .’”
“Really?”
“Yes I do.”
“Okay, Papi ,” he giggled as he eased me up to his
lips.
“Junie!” Frankie called out again from the other side of the
door.
“Just a second, Frankie.”
“Oh, sorry,” Frankie then said knowingly, a naughty little
smile in her voice. “Listen, why don’t you guys finish up what you’re doing and
I’ll meet you down by the pool bar. Maybe I can find me some of what y’all
gettin’.”
Étie and I looked at each other with a sudden wide-eyed glee
as Frankie clicked away from our door, down the shiny tiled veranda that
fronted the row of rooms on the second level, anxious to get her drink and her
groove on. We broke out into hysterical laughter. And then our eyes met and
stilled us both, but not for long, for we were anxious too. And so we made love
again, one more time for good measure.
Chapter Seven
I nearly forgot how really beautiful my baby sister was
until that sunny afternoon as she sat perched seductively on a shaded barstool
and held court over a handsome trio of male tourists from three different
corners of the world. There was a bare-chested, bare-assed, tight-chiseled
blond European nearly bulging out of a shameless G-string bikini. His dark tan
set off his piercing blue eyes with a startle. Next to him was a hairy-chested
Spanish lothario with a gold nipple ring and a buzzed six-pack. Perched next to
him was a dark-chocolate Jamaican slim-sized hunk. In his white shorts and
sandals, he looked more like a pretty young back-in-the-day Taye Diggs than the
pretty young back-in-the-day Taye Diggs did.
They hung on Frankie’s every word. They marveled at her
every gesture and laughed hysterically at her corniest quip. They vied shamelessly
for the favor of her glance like horny young students with hands in the air,
hoping to be called on by the teacher they each had wet-dreamed about. Étie and
I, ourselves replenished and flush with the joy of our intimacy, smiled and
marveled at the sight of Frankie holding her audience spellbound.
“Baby, your sister is so quite beautiful,” Étie whispered to
me as we drew closer to the scene.
“She said the same about you,” I whispered back to him, in
his ear, stealing a small kiss on his neck in the move.
“Jesse! Étienne!” Frankie burst into glee at the sight of us
approaching, compelling her triptych of admirers to follow her grinning glance
and check out what they falsely assumed was more competition. And what my
sister said next confirmed those assumptions as both wrong and right.
“Gentlemen,” she said to them as she jumped up and hugged
both Étie and me, “this is my brother Jesse. And this is Étienne, my fiancé.”
The three of them—German Wilhelm, Spanish Alejandro and
Jamaican Carlton—displayed their surprise and masked their disappointment
handsomely as they rose jauntily to the occasion. They pumped my hand, then
stood in line to give Étie congratulatory backslaps and roughhouse man-hugs.
And in tribute to my sister’s unquestionable appeal, they swore, at her
request, to be at the wedding ceremony that upcoming Friday in downtown Santo
Domingo.
“The perfect photo op,” Frankie would say to me later.
“Pictures of us with a few ‘locals’ and a dignitary or two will really soup up
the package for the meeting with the immigration officers. Now what will really
set it off, Junie, is if we did it in a church.”
“No, Frankie. No church. That’s something both Étie and I
are really firm about.”
“But why?”
“Look. It’s bad enough we’re breaking the law. We don’t want
to call down lightning bolts by selling the lie in a house of worship.”
“My God, Junie, you are such a conventional