Happy Valentine's Day!
I'm sure the wait has seemed unending. I assure you that Manstress Diaries Book 2 will be coming to you in 2025 (Title, TBA, BYAI). In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this snippet of Chapter One, Headshots.
A week before release, I will release Chapter One in full for free to subscribers to my website. It's free to sub, so don't miss out on updates. For those of you who have read book one, thank you for your support and I hope that you will pick up book 2!
Bye for now,
Darrell C. Scott Jr.
Headshots
Board the plane to a new city with a half-stranger. Ride his dick until you forget all about your ex and the trail of blood you left behind. It’ll be fuuun! Hmph…The lies I tell myself.
3:00 AM on a self-care Sunday. I was up, cruising Jackd for my next fix, wishing I’d declined Grant’s invitation to run away together. His mannish snort in the dark diverted my attention away from the muscled chocolate torsos in my inbox to his naked body buried next to me underneath the hotel sheets—his clammy hand resting on my thigh.
We both fled Houston in a hurry for a reason. His motive? Unbeknownst. But I knew he had deep, looong-winded strokes that made me lose track of time. The sticky details of our past didn’t matter because we were in the land of make-believe. We could pretend to be whomever we imagined, even if it were only temporary. For a while, I liked it that way. The fairytale is easier to imagine when you only have the best parts of someone to feed the fantasy.
The first two days were the most exciting. We had brunch at Villa Blanca, where I sucked him up in the bathroom and again at the hotel before having the Prime Angus filet at a nearby rooftop hotel overlooking West Hollywood. We jogged from Venice Beach to the Santa Monica Pier the next morning, and then, later that night, we went to a car meet in East LA. Hidden under the shadows cast by buildings and dumpsters, I let him finger me in an alleyway in between a corner store at the intersection where a blue Mustang and a white Stingray did donuts in the street. Revving engines masked the sound of my moans and his grunts as he sprayed his seed on the bricks.
“You Nasty,” I said, biting my lips.
“Yeah, and you like it.”
After that, he threw himself into his work, and I had become an afterthought, left to entertain myself around the hotel until he was ready to lay in bed and fall asleep watching CSI. Is this what my life would be like if we made things official? Sporadic moments of attention and sex when it fits into his schedule, followed by several days of being ignored? What would that be like once I returned home? Would he call?
Both of our phones vibrated, his on the nightstand and mine in my hand. I silenced mine, hoping he wouldn’t hear it. My eyes widened at first glance at the message on the screen from a prospect I hoped would be more attentive to my needs than the one snoring next to me.
A D:
Wassup, Khai? I’d love to shoot you.
Was that a dirty joke that flew over my head or a threat? After having spent the last few nights watching reruns of CSI with Grant and fighting nightmares, I had a hard time deciphering reality from paranoia. I swiped the brightness down, wiped the crust from my eyes, and reread the message.
ME:
Huh?
A high-pitched shriek and the sound of screeching tires prompted me to cut off the TV and tiptoe to the bathroom to wash away the back sweat that glued me to the sheets—Aftereffects of yet another night of having tossed and turned.
Steam fogged the mirrors and smothered the room wall-to-wall in a thick haze. I closed my eyes and tried my best to think happy thoughts to cleanse my mind of the man who lay still at the bottom of a stairwell landing, his head cracked open from the sharp-edged steps. His loafers, scattered in opposite directions on the ground, red-bottoms up as his blood oozed into the cracks of the concrete.
Get out of my head.
Get out of my head.
With my hand clenching the sponge, I squeezed the eucalyptus-scented suds over my neck, shoulders, and spine. I tried to scrub it away. An hour later… Pooched up in a chair outside on the balcony, I tried to smoke it away. My cartridge was low on oil, so the high wasn’t hitting as hard, and it tasted more like gasoline than Fruit Loops. Scrolling through porn on Twitter while sipping coffee didn’t help my frustration.
A D:
My bad, cutie. I want to shoot u with my
camera, lol.
You can check out my IG
@IshootPortriats.
I’m no creeper. Promise.
The smell of my blonde roast finally lured Grant out of bed, but not in between my thighs as it was intended to do. I peeped my head between the crack in the sliding glass doorway. He was on his computer, tinkering with an Excel sheet. Had he even brushed his teeth? Can’t say I was surprised. This was his routine every morning since the car meet.
His phone lit up with an incoming call. I stepped inside and slid the door behind me.
“Hey, Stranger.”
“Good morning, shawty.” He said, as he silenced it and then looked me up and down.
“You going to answer Rodney’s call? That’s the second time he’s called this morning.”
“Oh, nah. That’s just one of my coworkers at the office. I’ll call 'em back.” I stood there with raised eyebrows for a moment.
“Oh, that’s nice to hear for once,” I said, noting that this was the first time he’d ignored a work call in days. I tossed my satchel on the bed. My laptop, a few school books and folders, sunglasses, multiple pens, and a pack of cigarillos spilled onto the mattress, and I rummaged through my empty bag, hoping to find another cartridge hiding deep in a corner pocket that maybe I’d forgotten about. As I dug around for liquid gold, a thought wrinkled Grant’s forehead.
“Yo, do you always carry that around?” He pointed his nose at my purple external hard drive still plugged into the dongle connected to my laptop.
“Yeah. It has backed up patient records and passwords and a lot of other shit I need access to but don’t want to be stored natively on my computer.”
“You haven’t done much work since you’ve been here.”
“Yes… And? I’m prepared, should I need to be. Besides, I wouldn’t be doing this if I had something to smoke.”
“Just be careful. Those things are easy to damage. You could lose everything. I’ve had that happen to me before.”
I opened my sunglasses case, wrapped it in the blue silk cloth, snapped the lid, and stuffed it back into my bag. “There. That should be enough protection until I get home.
He clicked his tongue. “Thank me later.”
With my black-framed aviators covering my eyes, I said, “Maybe we can go somewhere I can have a reason to wear these. Perhaps the dispensary? I need a new cartridge.”
His head was turned towards me, but his eyes were stretched in the opposite direction with one hand on the mouse scrolling through endless cells filled with figures and dollar signs.
“Damn, shawty. It’s still early. They’re not even open yet. Chill for a lil’ minute. We can go later this evening.”
“Evening? This is an emergency.” I dangled the empty cartridge in front of his face. “By the time you get showered and dressed, they will be open.”
“Eh. I can’t. I have work to do. You could also schedule a delivery.”
“I’m not sitting around rotting in this hotel another second.” He scratched his head and sighed.
“How about you take the car, get yourself some breakfast, and go shopping? When I’m done here, I’ll meet you at the smoke shop.”
“Breakfast? Alone? I thought this was a vacation for both of us. Shouldn’t we do things like, I dunnooo—go shopping and eat breakfast together, like we used to?”
He shrugged and looked at me with a disconcerting expression like his hands were tied.
“Let me submit this report real quick. My new boss is planning a product launch in a few days and I need to make sure these numbers are right. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. Then, I’m all yours. Okay?”
“Hmm… Where have I heard that before? Oh, Yeah! Like yesterday when you needed to finish a budget and investment allocation, and the day before that, when you needed to revise a supplier contract. Oh, and what about when you had me waiting at the hotel bar for 2 hours while you took a call?”
“Look, Khai. I’m new here, and I’m on a 90-day probationary period, which means—”
“You can re-negotiate your contract for a pay increase at the end of the evaluation period. I know. I know.
“I was going to say, I need to prove myself. You don’t know everything, Khai.”
“Oh, really? What don’t I know?” I said, with my eyes squinted. He turned his head back to the screen.
A D:
You down?
“Fine, I’ll go. But know that I’m going because I want to and not because you said so.”
I refilled Grant’s half-empty mug, placed it in front of him, and kissed him on the cheek.
After several outfit changes and 3 shots of Crown 5 minutes before noon, I stood in front of the mirror, dripping lathered up in coconut oil, and smelling like Gucci. I thought Grant would come in and kiss me goodbye or something, but he didn’t budge from his seat. It was time to enjoy what was left of the vacation, even if that meant Grant wouldn’t be a part of it.
“Touch My Body” blasting through my headphones, I trod up and down Rodeo Drive from boutique to boutique in my pink ombre sneakers. Click, click-click annnd, post! I snapped a few candid selfies and posted them on Instagram. Captioned: Retail therapy was long overdue. Maybe one of my Instagram admirers might DM me something like, “You’re in my city,” and I might be obliged to entertain them.
My next stop was the dispensary. I was stalling because I hadn’t heard from Grant yet. It had been 3-hours since I’d left him alone at the hotel, and I hadn’t eaten anything all day. I checked my phone one more time to see if I had somehow missed a message from him. Nothing.
I finally sent that text back to the AD on Jackd.
ME:
I’m down. Where should we meet?
He dropped his location. The driver Grant had hired pulled up to the curve and hopped out to help me load my bags in the trunk before speeding off down the road.
“I won’t be going back to the hotel just yet, Myron.” He made eye contact with me through the rearview mirror and tipped his captain's hat at me.
“Where to, Mr. Allen?”
“How far are we from Venice?”
Over half an hour later, we arrived in front of a grey, stucco townhome with red muntins framing windows that stretched vertically along the house. Myron opened my door, and I stepped onto the street, facing a black iron gate. Pushing it open, I navigated through the small courtyard, the white rocks crunching beneath my feet until I reached the front door. Before I could ring the doorbell,
“It’s open."
A stocky man with orange hair and skin the color of butter greeted me in the foyer with a Nikon camera draping from his neck. He adjusted some settings and I stood stiffly as he raised the viewfinder to his eye and pointed the lens at me. The camera flashed, and he grinned with satisfaction.
“Wassup? I’m Adrien.” He said. “Sorry for the off guard, but I want to remember the first time I saw you walk into a room.”
He dusted off his palm-tree printed t-shirt and then reached out to shake my hand. His white arm made me do a double-take. There was just enough yellow to suggest ‘one drop.’
“Thanks? I guess? And, I’m Khai.” Not knowing what else to say, I examined the white gallery wall in the main living space where one might expect a TV to be mounted. Many of the photos were of artistic nudes of black men. Some of them I recognized from Twitter.
“Nice place. Did you take all these photos?” I asked. He put one hand over his face to hide his big smile, but not before I noticed the small gap in his front teeth.
“Yeah. Just some of my favorite portraits.”
“You like shooting naked men, huh?”
“Erotic fine art photography.” He said.
“Do you shoot women?”
He swept his arm in front of his body, gesturing toward his work displayed on the wall. “No. I don’t. Men are my muse.”
“Is that what you want? To shoot me naked?”
With his nose pointed at me, he said, “Something tells me that’s not how you get down. I was thinking loungewear or something like my— ”
I unfastened one button on my shirt. “Don’t be so sure about that.”
- Manstress Diaries
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