The Clique

by Brandie

Genres: Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

The first rule when trying to survive prison is to find people who are going to watch your back. Sometimes alliances like this are made in the weirdest situations. For Mo, Royal, Emil, and Ascada, the last place they wanted to be was in prison together, but as fate would have it, they all became inmates of the Walsh Facility for Women. As different as they all are, they do have one thing in common—Spencer. Spencer is known on the streets as a hustler with nothing to lose. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself, and that includes the children that he’s fathered with three of the women who are locked up.

But when Spencer gets arrested by the feds, all sorts of drama jumps off, putting the girls in a situation that they can’t get out of alone. The last thing any of the girls wanted to do was “bury the hatchet” and be friends, but they will have to in order to get out of this mess alive.

Release date: April 24, 2012

Publisher: Urban Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

Tuesday morning June, 2005

Ring, ring, ring! “He-ll-o,” a sleepy voice answered. “Bitch, put my muthafuckin’ baby daddy on the phone!” the loud, angry woman demanded.

Mo swallowed hard, squinting her eyes together, trying to wake up out of the sound sleep she was in. She rose up, leaning on one elbow, glaring at the blue neon clock sitting on her nightstand. The time was 3:28 A.M.

“Funky bitch, you hear me? Put my baby daddy—”

Mo sighed loudly, taking the screaming voice in the phone away from her ear. Here we go again, she thought. I’m so tired of this shit! She cut her eyes to the right and watched Spencer—her and several other women’s baby daddy—who was snoring like a pig.

“Bastard!” She mumbled to herself, as she reluctantly eased out of the bed and into the bathroom, where she could roast this ho for interrupting her good sleep. She looked back at Spencer once more to make sure he was still sound asleep, closed the bathroom door, and took in a deep breath before letting loose. “Ho, you callin’ my muthafuckin’ house, my phone, worrying about my man, my baby daddy. Ho, ain’t you sleepy, up all day and night worrying about a man that obviously occupying my bed?”

“You can kiss my ass! ’Cause if Spencer was yo’ man I wouldn’t be carrying his baby.”

That comment hit Mo in the gut. The screaming woman on the other end of the phone was right, and she probably was pregnant with his umpteenth child. She wanted to cry and yell, “Who is this? And why did he run to your bed?” But the ho was calling Mo’s phone to prove something, so a challenge she was going to give her.

“I’m so tired of y’all lame-ass, wannabe-me hoes, claiming he got y’all pregnant or moved y’all into a condo, bought you a new car.”

“Fuck you, ol’ dumb, ghetto-ass bitch. Just put Spencer on this gotdamn phone!” The truth had struck a nerve with the irate woman.

Mo was on a roll, and she wasn’t about to stop now. She was going to teach these bitches about fucking wit her. “Who is this? Cheryl? Kim? Lisa? Which stank pussy of the month is this?” She laughed, tickled to death that she was irritating the hell out of a woman who had intended to shake her up with the phone call .

“Yo’ worst nightmare, bitch!”

“Obviously, I’m the one pressing on yo’ mind. You calling me, knowing damn well Spencer got his own damn phone.”

Mo had pulled the woman’s card. The other end of the line went silent. It was clear that this woman had another agenda besides speaking with Spencer.

Feeling like she had one up on this hoochie, she sat down on the toilet, tired from the day before and from all the extra additives Spencer brought to their so-called “seasoned” relationship.

“Well, since you don’t believe shit stank, go look in the trunk of his silver Chevy. I left you a present.” The deviant voice laughed, and the phone went dead.

Mo looked at her unfamiliar reflection in the chrome, circular mirror. She rubbed her fingers over her entire face and didn’t recognize herself. Her once wide, bright eyes now had dark circles that made her look tired and worn out, older than her twenty-five years, all of this, compliments of trying to keep up with a whorish man.

I know this trick just trying to put fear in my heart and shake me up, but curiosity is getting the best of me. Against her better judgment she slipped on her light green, terry cloth robe, grabbed the keys to the Chevy, and remained barefoot to avoid turning on the lights and waking Spencer up. It was amazing that this man could sleep through dogs barking, telephones ringing, and a loud TV, but as soon as a light switched on, he was groaning and moaning for it to be turned off.

She lightly jogged down the stairs and out the front door, hesitating slightly to make sure no one else was outside with her, before stepping on the front porch. She popped the trunk with the remote. She threw a pair of sneakers, a tool kit, and a basketball to the side to find nothing. She knew Spencer’s sneaky ass wouldn’t leave anything behind. Naw, not slick-ass Spencer. The only evidence he leaves behind is other bitches’ babies.

Ring, ring, ring!

She jumped, forgetting the phone was in the pocket of her robe. “Ain’t shit in this trunk,” Mo said, aggravated that she’d allowed some groupie to disturb her sleep and emotions.

“Oh, but it is, baby girl, it is. Look in the tool kit.”

Mo snatched the kit and popped it open. She shook her head in disbelief. The sonogram read Hye baby girl and had a due date upcoming in two days.

Mo shouldn’t have been angry. This wasn’t the first time Spencer had left behind a little surprise after he’d laid up with a sideline ho. First, there was Pig, the neighborhood piece of ass. He said he was drunk and she took advantage of him. She took him all right, right to the delivery room and the courthouse.

Not even a week after Kaja was born, Sue’s gold-digging ass knocked on the door with a pink bundle in her hand, claiming Spencer was her daughter Kendall’s daddy. And all of this took place three years before Mo and Spencer had their first and only child, Kemoni.

Unfortunately, what was supposed to be the happiest day of Mo’s life became one of the saddest. Down the hall from her hospital room, another young girl named Stacy had just given birth to Spencer’s child, a stillborn.

Mo bit down hard on her bottom lip, letting the salty taste of blood settle into her mouth. She kept repeating the last name labeled in the corner of the sonogram. “Hye ... Hye ...”

“Yep. Mrs. Layla Hye to you, bitch.”

Mo forgot she still had the phone tight in her hand, but the voice was no longer coming from the phone, it was coming from behind her. I can’t believe I let this ho creep up on me! Here I am digging in this damn trunk, not paying attention to my surroundings.

With fear in her heart, not knowing if it was a gang of girls or a weapon waiting on her, Mo spun around on her bare feet and there was Layla.

Layla Hye was Mo’s biggest rival, going back to the seventh grade. And now here they were still battling at age twenty-five.

Standing five foot nine, all thick thighs and hips, Layla was badd. Her creamy, dark brown skin was flawless, and she looked like a gorgeous modern-day Amazon. The long eyelashes, perfect white teeth, and short, sleek, jet-black bob kept suitors at her door. But she didn’t want just any suitor. Naw, she wanted Spencer Mack. And now, pregnant with his child, she had the assurance that he would be in her life forever.

With a nasty frown on her face, Mo said, “Damn, ho, Spencer really got yo’ ass sprung, riding up in front of my house at four in the morning.” She began moving toward the street, where Layla was sitting in her car only a few feet from the entrance of the driveway. Mo felt a rush of heat run from her head to her toes. The anger running through her veins was enough to turn her into The Incredible Hulk.

Layla noticed the evil look on Mo’s face. She thought she was too cute to fight, so she stayed locked tight in the ’05 Mustang that Spencer purchased for her, with the window halfway down.

Layla was the classic dope man’s bitch—obedient, spent all her money on designer clothes, kept up a lot of shit, and stayed in everybody else’s business because she had no business about herself.

“Isn’t she pretty? Looks just like her daddy.” Layla was talking mad shit, her foot resting lightly on the gas pedal.

“Oh, you think having a baby by a hustler who already got countless baby mamas makes you special?” Mo searched the ground for an object to throw at Layla’s smug face. “When you were childless, you was a hot commodity, but now you just a number, another one of Spencer’s baby mamas.”

“You just a baby mama, but I’m gon’ be his wife.” Honkkkkkkkkk! Layla blasted the loud horn. “Go get ’im so he can tell you that we gon’ be together.”

Mo laughed as she picked up a medium-sized rock. “Don’t embarrass yourself. He’ll do that for you in due time. Have you looking stupid, telling everybody that he leaving me and you and him gonna get married in Vegas and honeymoon in the Keys. Oh, and let me not forget the house in Lost Valley.”

Layla’s smile dropped. That’s exactly what he’d told her, and what she’d been telling all her friends and family.

“Well, maybe this time I hit the jackpot, since yo’ funky pussy can’t get pregnant no more.” Layla’s smile returned. She knew that would knock Mo out faster than a punch could. “This good pussy can pop out as many as his heart desires. The boy you can never give him.”

Mo was crushed. How could Spencer tell this trifling whore her deepest secret? She fumbled with the phone in her hand, making it recall Layla’s number. When Layla looked down to retrieve the phone call, Mo chunked the first rock and hit her on the side of her head.

As the rock hit Layla’s head, her foot came off the gas and clutch, and the car began to jerk.

Mo couldn’t hold back any longer. The comment about her becoming sterile after Spencer gave her an STD was too much information for this trick. She threw the other rock, cracking the top of the window and sending shards of glass into Layla’s eyes and mouth.

Layla screamed out, hitting the loud horn as she choked on small pieces of glass.

Mo rushed the car, pulling on the door handle and, at the same time, kicking the door, denting it with her bare heel. Mo reached into the broken window and grabbed hair, skin, anything she could get her hands on. When she finally got a hold of a handful of Layla’s hair, she held on for dear life. The more Layla twisted and struggled to stay away, the harder Mo tried to pull her through the broken window.

“I bet ... yo’ ass ... will think next ... time ... you step to ... me!”

Layla was gagging as she tried to start the car, but she had a choice to make—fight Mo off and have a half a head of hair, or pull off and lose it all.

The glass began to cut into Moe’s wrist and forearm as she tried to pull Layla’s swollen, pregnant body through the window.

“Let me go. I’m pregnant,” Layla yelled out.

“Mommy! Mommyyyyyyyy!”

Mo instantly released Layla’s hair and slowly backed away from the car.

Layla quickly started the Mustang and sped off, spitting glass, blood, and threats.

The purple skyline presented itself to Royal as she slid her chocolate, silky, restless body from beneath her lover’s arms. This had been the seventh night straight that her nightmare had woken her up at four-thirty in the morning, leaving her exhausted, black-eyed, and stressed out.

She walked her naked body into the kitchen and filled her ol’ faithful, multi-colored mug with tea and vodka. As she sat at the table and gazed into the purple haze, she thought about the nightmare that was tearing her life apart.

Being the daughter of a dead, AIDS-infected mother and a deceased father, not to mention an evil stepmother, was a nightmare she’d dealt with, eyes wide open. Her best friend Mo would always tell her, “If you can go through everything that you’ve been through and still walk like yo’ shit don’t stank, then you are my idol in every sense of the word.”

Royal held her best friend’s words in a chokehold.

They’d met one hot, crazy summer when they were eight, in Newbie, Georgia. Royal, while on a time-out, sat behind a whitewashed wire fence on a huge peach porch, pouting and picking all the buds off her mother’s white roses for revenge. Just then, a big silver car with a silver circle and V inside on the hood appeared, and a white lady and a little girl looking to be around the same age as Royal pulled up.

Royal thought, Mrs. Busey must be taking in another foster kid.

For about ten minutes, Royal made eye contact with the little light-skinned, almost white-looking, girl with dry, kinky hair across the street at Mrs. Busey’s house. And she instantly wanted to go and play, but this stupid new time-out rule had her on lock.

Royal wasn’t a bad child, just curious and rambunctious. But lately her mother had put her in time-out so much, it seemed her butt was beginning to flatten like a pancake from becoming best friends with the front porch. Her mother had become sick a few months earlier, and with every month some new symptom was claiming her body, and Royal’s playtime.

After about thirty minutes of wishing, picking, and scooting across the porch, Mrs. Busey’s front door busted open, and the white-looking girl ran like a slave across the street, not even looking to see if a car was coming. Royal would have to teach this new girl the codes of streets.

“Your ass will get run over if you don’t look from side to side at least three times,” Royal’s mother would tell her whenever she took off a little too quickly.

The little girl rested her pale fingers on the wire and stared into Royal’s eyes as if she was a monkey on display at the zoo.

Royal looked at the little girl’s hands then at her own.

“Gosh, you are very, very black. My grandpa would say, ‘Very berry,’” Mo said properly.

Royal laughed aloud then responded in her Southern dialect, “So what? You are confused, mixed up with black and white. Oreo!”

Mo shifted her weight from foot to foot. “I am white.” She didn’t care if the little girl she was looking at was orange. She just wanted to get out of that mean, old, fat lady’s house that was yelling back and forth with her mother about a father she hadn’t even met yet. But she was wondering if he was as dark as the pretty girl with gray eyes sitting in front of her.

“Not wit’ dat nappy hair. And if you call me black again, I’m gon’ come off this porch and whup yo’ ass good.”

The pale girl touched her hair like it was the first time she’d acknowledged it was on the top of her head.

At that very moment, the white lady fell out of Mrs. Busey’s front door.

“Moses, Moses.”

Mo was so caught up in running her fingers through the mess on top of her head, she didn’t hear the lady calling her.

“Yo, DFACS lady callin’ you.”

DFACS? Mo would have to ask her grandfather what that was, since everyone she’d met that day kept throwing that word around.

As Mo was about to sprint back across the street, Royal ran to the fence. “My name Royal, since you gon’ be stayin’ at Mrs. Busey’s house.”

“I’m not staying at that fat lady’s house. We just come to pick up my father,” the girl answered.

As Mrs. Busey stood on the front porch in a pink, flowered duster, smoking a Newport and shouting obscenities, the white lady screamed to the top of her lungs, “Moses, let’s go, dammit!”

As the girl ran back across the street without looking for any cars, She yelled, “My name is Mo!”

Royal laughed to herself about the first of their many encounters before they became best friends. And now, after all they’d been through, Mo seemed to be at the heart of her nightmares and heartache. She’d held on to her life-altering secret for eight long, hard years—for as long as she could—and now that she was about to turn twenty-five, she wanted to make things right in her life.

Her cousin Ascada told her that letting go and opening up would be the only way for God to forgive her and for her to move on to a prosperous future. Royal knew in her heart that all her troubles in life had come from keeping this secret. Maybe she would have to move out of the state of Georgia after revealing her secret to Mo. Maybe they could fight like two wild lionesses and then become cool again. Maybe.

Mo finished wrapping the Ace bandage around her wrist and arm. She ran to her running car to check on a sleeping Kemoni one more time before heading back to deal with Spencer.

She first made a quick phone call to one of her best friends Emil, to let her know that she and her daughter would be there soon. She wanted to call Royal so bad, but lately it seemed like Royal was on another team.

Then Mo snuck back into the bedroom and straddled Spencer’s thighs, pulling out his huge, already hard penis. She began to stroke him, rapidly rubbing the tip of his head with her thumb. Licking her thumb, drenching it with saliva, she returned it to the tip of his dick, moving it faster.

“Mmmmmm ...”

Spencer tried to move, but Mo had his legs pinned. He continued to enjoy the strokes, thi. . .