Pain was so twisted that he knocked over several bar stools on his way out of Shooter’s. He and his crew had had a blast with the two hustlers from uptown. And to make it sweeter, they were scheduled to get a piece of that fine light-skinned bitch who had been onstage. At first he thought Rel was full of shit and wouldn’t be able to pull it off, but he had sat there and supposedly watched the young man make the call.

“I don’t believe I’m going through all this for a piece of pussy,” Lex said from the passenger seat of the truck.

“I told you, man, shorty likes to role-play. When I spoke to her on the jack she said she was gonna give all of us the time of our lives,” Rel said from the backseat.

“Yeah, I’m dying to get a piece of that fine pussy, too, but this is some weird shit,” Jay admitted, snorting a line of cocaine out of a dollar bill and handing the tray to Pain.

“Hey, man, if you don’t want none of this trim, you can take the faggot way out like ya man,” Rel told him, referring to Lah, who had opted to pass on the pussy and go home.

“Watch ya mouth, duke. You don’t know me well enough to be calling me out my name,” Jay warned.

“Both of y’all niggaz shut the fuck up. I’m trying to bust ass and head back to the hood,” Pain growled.

The men in the car went back and forth for the entire ride uptown. Groovy stayed silent. Every now and again he would shoot Rel a dirty look, which Rel pretended not to see. He wanted to fuck Yoshi, too, but didn’t particularly agree with the way his man was going about it. Though he had gotten in the car with them, he wasn’t sure if he was ready to take the ride.

By the time Yoshi stepped out of the cab in front of her building, she was dead tired. After shaking her ass for the majority of the night, all her strength seemed to have fled her body. She wasn’t even sure if she would stay awake long enough to eat her food.

Thankfully, there was no one in front of her building when she got there. She didn’t knock the young dudes who hustled on her block, but sometimes they made her uneasy. She was standing on her stoop, fumbling for the lobby key, when she felt a presence behind her. She spun around to find herself staring into the drunken eyes of Rel. He was flanked by three other men and they didn’t look like they had come to pay a social visit.

“What’s popping, bitch?” He grinned.

That was the last thing Yoshi heard before pain exploded in her cheek and everything went black.

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