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personally involved with. This scenario is wrong all the way around. He can’t foist Bryce on Keisha and Jada like that.
“You know what? Forget it. This isn’t happening.”
Bryce flushes. “What? Why?”
“Because it’s my goddamned prerogative.” Tristan stands to indicate he’s done.
“Well, if you change your mind,” Bryce says as he stands, too.
Tristan walks him to the door. “I won’t.”
“Thanks for nothing,” Bryce says and struts out of the office. Tristan closes the door and returns to his desk.
He pulls a small, framed picture out of his desk drawer. It’s a photo he and Keisha posed for at her mother’s home on Christmas day. Clara Lee did the honors herself, printed it out, framed it, and gave it to him as a gift. Somehow she managed to capture them looking like a couple who were madly in love. Although it was truly smoke and mirrors, he likes the picture because it illustrates what he could have if he weren’t such a goddamned lost cause. The broken girl who resides at the Lakeshore Meadows Rehabilitation Facility is proof of that.
However, Clara Lee’s gesture over the holidays reminded him so much of his own mother. Alyssa White was a romantic, a devoted wife who loved her husband and children fiercely. She packed so much love and precious memories into the years they had with her, but even so, it still wasn’t enough. They were robbed of her in middle school, high school, and college. She wasn’t there to usher them into adulthood, and she isn’t here to see the type of men her sons have become.
He takes another look at the picture. The woman he finagled into becoming his submissive is surprisingly very much like his mother. She told him that someday she would want more than he was willing to give. Perhaps that day has come, and no amount of money, nothing he can offer her will convince her to return. She’s an idealist who knows what she wants from life, and he’s an emotional cripple who can’t begin to give her what she needs. His mother always said, “One emotion you can never buy is love.”
Tristan is beginning to see that after seven submissives in as many years, he’s no closer to proving his mother wrong.
     

     

CHAPTER THREE
    Keisha
     
In the weeks following the end of my arrangement with Tristan, I throw myself into my work at Kente Studio Records, because we have a growing list of talented clients primed for superstardom just clamoring for my attention. Even though I’ve resumed weekly visits to my therapist, and she’s helping me with my anxiety issues, I can’t seem to shake the anger that has taken up residence in my damaged spirit.
I’m such a head case that my Fairy Hoochie Mama and Triple-G act as if they’ve testified in a criminal case and have gone into their own version of witness protection. Both sans wings, the former wears a black jumpsuit with the letters FHM embroidered on the left breast pocket in white, and the latter wears a white jumpsuit with GGG embroidered on the right breast pocket in black. They haven’t spoken to me, other than their daily urgings for me to call Tristan, since I walked out of his condo. I’m waiting on one or both of them to take this farce even further by beginning a hunger strike.
Instead they bug me daily, especially after work, and specifically just before bed when I’m as horny as a garden toad with no release in sight—except my hand or my vibrator. Neither appeals to me because “once you’ve gone kink, vanilla stinks.” Or that’s what I tell myself about Tristan White and his addictive brand of kink. 
Call him , the fairies chant, sometimes alone, but most often together. You know you wanna .
“Shut the fuck up,” I say and cover my head with a pillow.
My hand itches to dial the familiar digits almost as much as my ears long to hear the sexy baritone. I don’t get relief, even in my dreams. My mind conjures scenes with Tristan in my sleep where I can see and feel his sexy, muscular body in all its