Thong on Fire by Noire Page A

I was young, but I wasn’t dumb, and it had been a long, crazy night. Old men liked their dicks sucked too.
    “How bad you wanna get back to Manhattan?”
    I didn’t give it another thought. I slid across the seat and put my head in his lap and went to work. What the fuck . I’d sucked plenty of dicks, and like he said, nothing in life came free.
    But his ass had tried to yank me. I’d swallowed his muscle so good he’d started singing real loud in Spanish. But as soon as we left Queens and got over the bridge and into Manhattan, he pulled over and told me to get out.
    “Okay, we’re in Manhattan, baby. I’m about to make this U-turn. Out you go.”
    Of course I’d screamed on his ass and all that, but it didn’t matter. He was behind the wheel, and that truck full of big water jugs wasn’t moving an inch without his say-so.
    If it wasn’t for Tai I woulda had to walk home all the way from the Queensboro Bridge. I’d called her and she’d done me a favor by picking me up, so I guess she had the right to bitch and chastise me now. It was the price I had to pay for asking her to steal her mama’s car. I sighed and put my head back under the pillow while she screamed on me about how crazy I was to be getting in trucks with strange men and giving them head just for transportation.
    As far as I was concerned, listening to Tai talk her shit was no different than sucking that old man’s dick. It showed me that life would always be a bitch, and there was no such thing as a free ride.

    A few months later my whole world caved in.
    Uncle Swag got knocked.
    The feds came gunning for him while he was in a meeting at work, and pictures of him with his hands cuffed behind his back and being led out of his office were being flashed all over ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN too.
    Tai and I were cutting school when I found out. I was sitting with my head back in a sink at the Locks of Love hair and nail salon, and Tai had gone next door to buy her second platter of fried fish and chips. A nice Robb Hawk cut was playing over the speakers and I was loving the way my girl Carmiesha’s fingers were working my scalp.
    “Raise up,” she said, gathering my wet curls up in a towel. I sat up and wiped my face with the facecloth she was handing me, and when I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw on the television hanging from the wall was Uncle Swag.
    “Oh shit!” I jumped up from the chair. “Yo!” I waved my hand back and forth real quick. “Turn that music down for a second! Yo turn that fuckin’ music down!”
    By the time they turned down the music and found the remote for the television, I’d missed most of what the reporters had said. But the little bit I did catch scared the shit outta me. Uncle Swag was being arrested for signing off on illegal liquor licenses to unqualified bars and clubs. They were hitting him with tax evasion charges and accusing him of taking kickbacks too. My whole body was shaking when Tai walked back in the shop chewing a mouthful of fish and dropping gobs of tartar sauce all over her titties.
    “What’s wrong?” she said, noticing the panic in my face. I felt like I had just swallowed a huge rock and it was sitting on top of my bowels.
    “I gotta get home,” I said, drying my face and snatching up my purse and book bag. Tears forced themselves from my eyes and I had no way to hold them back. My uncle was my world and I loved him hard. “Something bad happened to Uncle Swag,” I sniffed. “I gotta go home and see how to get him some help.”
    “Hey where you going with wet hair?” the blow-dry girl called as I ran past her and toward the door. I threw my hand in the air.
    “Not now!” I hollered. I almost broke the damn door down getting out of there, and if Tai hadn’t been light on her feet and right on my heels, that door would have swung back and knocked her ass out.
    “I think she wanted you to pay her,” she huffed, trying to keep up with me as I jetted down the block toward the