The Pleasure Trap by Niobia Bryant Page A

still had the room hot and steamy. It immediately clung to his nakedness and filled his nostrils. Joy was standing before the mirror above the pedestal sink, applying makeup she didn’t need in a circled area she’d cleared on the mirror. She barely spared him a glance with eyes even more hooded by the effects of the weed.
    â€œI got time to shower before you boot me out this bitch?” he asked, already walking past her in the spacious and stylish bathroom to turn on the jet spray.
    She paused in lining her lid with a brown eye shadow to look at his reflection. “Are you mad about having to go to work?” she asked, her voice condescending.
    Graham paused in his move to step inside the shower stall. “My ass was working when you scooped me up,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”
    â€œSo what’s all the drama about going back to that shit?” she asked with a rare use of profanity as she pressed one hand against the edge of the sink and the other against her hip as she faced him.
    He ignored her and stepped under the spray, avoiding wetting his dreads as he soaped the contours of his body so vigorously that his elbow kept jabbing into the slate-tiled wall. He ignored that as well.
    His anger at feeling discarded like food that had spoiled rose in him with more heat and intensity than the spray of water against his form. Man, to hell with this.
    He leaned his upper body out to eye her. “Look Miss High and Mighty, you should’ve let me know you just rent a dick for a week,” he said, hating that even in the midst of his anger, he felt drawn in by her exotic beauty. He wanted nothing more than to grab her face and kiss every bit of the gloss from her plump, heart-shaped mouth.
    â€œRenting?” she said snidely, closing her makeup bag sharply and not sparing him a glance. “Humph. I’m not even renting this apartment. I don’t rent, I own.”
    Fueled by the weed, the coke, and his fiery emotions, Graham stepped out of the shower. He had to correct his large body as he slipped and slid across the floor until he stood towering over her petite frame by nearly two entire feet. He grabbed her wrist to stop her retreat.
    Joy looked down at his hand and then up to lock her glazed-over eyes on him. “Release me, Six-Nine,” she ordered in a quiet voice that contradicted the strength underlying it. “Release me. Wash your ass. Go to work. I will see you when I get home.”
    Both his stance and his grip on her wrist relaxed. “Home?” he asked, his eyes filled with perplexity.
    She freed herself from his loosened grasp before she left the bathroom. She returned almost as quickly holding a key and another glass vial in her hand. Joy handed him the key and opened the vial just long enough to tap a small amount of the powder on the back of her hand to snort before capping it.
    His brows dipped in surprise. He knew she laced her weed with it. He didn’t know she snorted.
    â€œFabulous pick-me-up,” she said, pressing it into his hand as well before licking any residue from the back of her hand. “It’ll get you through the day.”
    As she walked back out of the bathroom, Graham looked down at the key and cocaine—both were new additions to his life. He closed the lid of the commode and sat both things atop it before climbing back in the shower. Even as he washed, and through the steam swirling around him, his eyes kept shifting to the top of the commode. He slowly began to recognize a desire for both. A want. A hunger.
    Rinsing away the suds, he turned off the shower and didn’t even bother with a towel as he stepped out, nude and wet, onto the heated tile floor to pick up the vial. Smoking it. Snorting it. What’s the difference?
    Mimicking what he’d seen Joy do, Graham took his first sniff of cocaine.

Chapter 8
    Joy
    Six Months Later
    Â 
    â€œY ou a’ight, dude?”
    Graham looked up over his