Hii$ RoYaLTy

           The date July 22, 2009 is a date that I will never forget. It was a cloudy Wednesday afternoon and while I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to Pastor Ballard’s Bible study, I was excited about choir rehearsal because our choir director Mr. Hankinson had agreed to play a song that I composed myself. I’d been trying to get him to use one of my compositions since I began writing music. I wasn’t much of a gospel lyricist so Mr. Hankinson wrote words for the music, and they were amazing. I couldn’t wait to sing the song with the choir for the first time and I really couldn’t wait to sing it for the church that following Sunday. However, it wasn’t my music that made July 22, 2009 memorable. It turned out to be the day I experienced a miracle.

           “You’re not gonna change my mind,” Kareem said to me while putting on his Jordans. “I’m done with school, Ant.”

           “Why now?” I asked while looking at myself in the mirror to make sure my tie was on right. “Baby, why would you drop out of school right before our senior year?”

           “Because it’s pointless. I’m not goin’ to college or doin’ anything important so I don’t see why I should waste my time.”

           “So, being at school with me is a waste of your time?”

           “That ain’t what I meant and you know it. Anthony, I’m just done with that shit. I’m done with it. I’m a grown ass man. Fuck…I mean, forget school. I got other stuff I need to be worried about.”

           Kareem Taylor had been my boyfriend for a little over a year but we’d known each other since elementary school. He was my best friend up until sixth grade, which was when he began picking on me and hanging out with the bad boys at school. I later figured out he picked on me because he liked me and even though I liked him, too, neither of us built up the nerve to do anything about it until the end of our tenth-grade year. I wrote him a letter basically telling him that I wanted us to be boyfriends. He came to my house after school that day and gave me my first kiss. And just like that, we were together.

           When my roommate Kelly asked me if it was okay if her brother came to stay with us for a while, I was a little hesitant to say yes. I’d been best friends with Kelly for nearly seven years but I didn’t know her brother, Antonio. She kept saying he had nowhere else to go after his girlfriend put him out and she didn’t want him falling back in with a bad crowd down in Baltimore, so I caved in and said it was okay. I felt like kicking myself for saying yes because he turned out to be fine as hell and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do with him since he was straight. Him being straight didn’t stop me from looking at his fine ass though. Still, him living with us did come with a few downsides.

           “CJ, he’s not gonna say anything,” I said over the phone to a paranoid DL guy I’d been trying to get some dick from for a week. “He’s just my roommate’s brother.”

           “Nah, I’m not cool with that, Trent,” he said back to me. “You told me your roommate was out of town. If it was just gonna be me and you in the apartment…”

           “What if I get him to go for a drive or something?”

           “He’ll do that?”

           “He might if I ask.”

           He sighed and said, “I don’t know.”

           “Baby, I already cleaned everything because you said you were gonna come through. I know you want some ass.”

           “I do but I don’t want some other nigga listenin’ and shit. I wish you would’ve told me before I took a shower and got ready to come over there.”

           “If I can get him to leave for a while, will you still come through?” He was quiet for a while so I added, “All I got on is a shirt and a pair of briefs. My ass looks nice as fuck in them, too.”

           “I’ll come through and let you sit that fat ass on my face if you can get that nigga to bounce for an hour or two.”

           “Alright, bet.” I ended the call and gave myself a quick look in the mirror before leaving my bathroom to go tell Antonio I needed the place to myself.

                                                  Me (Trent)

           I was out for an exercise run around the neighborhood when I saw two cars parked in my new neighbor’s driveway for the first time. I’d known the house next door had been sold for a while but hadn’t seen the buyers since learning it had been sold. All my wife and I saw were movers and trucks over there for the past few weeks. Now that they’d actually moved in, I decided to wait outside for one of them to walk out and see me so I could start a conversation. When nobody walked out, I pulled out my phone and called my wife.

           “Damian, I’m busy with something at work,” she told me after answering my call. “Is something wrong?”

           “Nah, everything is cool,” I told her. “But guess what?”

           “What?”

           “I think the new neighbors have finally moved in.”

           “Really? Are they white?”

           “I don’t know. They haven’t come outside since I noticed the two cars in the driveway.”

           “I hope they’re not white.”

           “They’re probably black. White people don’t willingly move into a neighborhood that’s a majority black neighborhood unless they’re running from something, no matter how nice the neighborhood is.”

           “That’s true. Well, walk over there and introduce yourself.”

           “I thought about doing that but I don’t know. What if they’re weird? And I just got through running. I might wanna take a shower first.”

                                          Me (Damian Patterson)

           “Baby, just go over and say hi to them. It won’t take long. I probably won’t be getting home until very late tonight, so it’ll probably be tomorrow before I can meet them.”

           “You’re working late again, baby? Damn, that’s the third night in a row. I’m tired of eating delivery and takeout every night, Tisha.”

           When my roommate Kelly asked me if it was okay if her brother came to stay with us for a while, I was a little hesitant to say yes. I’d been best friends with Kelly for nearly seven years but I didn’t know her brother, Antonio. She kept saying he had nowhere else to go after his girlfriend put him out and she didn’t want him falling back in with a bad crowd down in Baltimore, so I caved in and said it was okay. I felt like kicking myself for saying yes because he turned out to be fine as hell and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do with him since he was straight. Him being straight didn’t stop me from looking at his fine ass though. Still, him living with us did come with a few downsides.

           “CJ, he’s not gonna say anything,” I said over the phone to a paranoid DL guy I’d been trying to get some dick from for a week. “He’s just my roommate’s brother.”

           “Nah, I’m not cool with that, Trent,” he said back to me. “You told me your roommate was out of town. If it was just gonna be me and you in the apartment…”

           “What if I get him to go for a drive or something?”

           “He’ll do that?”

           “He might if I ask.”

           He sighed and said, “I don’t know.”

           “Baby, I already cleaned everything because you said you were gonna come through. I know you want some ass.”

           “I do but I don’t want some other nigga listenin’ and shit. I wish you would’ve told me before I took a shower and got ready to come over there.”

           “If I can get him to leave for a while, will you still come through?” He was quiet for a while so I added, “All I got on is a shirt and a pair of briefs. My ass looks nice as fuck in them, too.”

           “I’ll come through and let you sit that fat ass on my face if you can get that nigga to bounce for an hour or two.”

           “Alright, bet.” I ended the call and gave myself a quick look in the mirror before leaving my bathroom to go tell Antonio I needed the place to myself.

                                                  Me (Trent)

           I admit I was lying through my teeth when I told Marcus that I had no hard feelings after he stole my girlfriend. The day I learned about him and Yvette was the worst day of my life. I loved that girl more than anything and for her to cheat on me with my coworker was beyond fucked up. Marcus wasn’t my friend and we didn’t hang out or even talk outside of work, but that didn’t lessen the hurt I was feeling. The thought of causing both of them physical harm crossed my mind but I couldn’t do some shit that would land me in prison. I threw my hands up and decided to just let karma deal with them but it seemed that karma needed my collaboration.

           It all began one day after work. Marcus’s car was in the shop so his little brother had been coming to pick him up that week and I swear that boy couldn’t stop staring at me. His name was Darrion and Marcus talked about him to everybody. He was always going on about how his little brother was smart and had gotten into like thirty colleges or some shit. So, that one day after work while Darrion was waiting for Marcus to come out of the building, I approached him and had a little talk with him. Long story short, I exchanged info with him and that began my path to revenge.

           “Y’all see this shit?” I asked my viewers on Instagram live as I showed off the room I was in. “This Airbnb spot lit as fuck, ain’t it? I got some shit comin’ up for those of you who have joined my new OnlyFans. The video will be up tomorrow, I promise. Shit is gonna be hot as fuck. I swear y’all don’t know a damn thing about me yet.”

           I stopped recording and laughed to myself when I got a text from Darrion asking me for the Airbnb address. I texted it to him and then set my phone down before picking up my expensive camera and taking a test photo to make sure I had the lighting right in the room. With my cell phone, iPad camera and expensive Canon camera; I was going to capture the best footage for my first OnlyFans video with Darrion.

                                           Me (Shemar Mitchell)

           I’d been curious since beginning puberty, but I didn’t act on my curiosity until my last year of high school. I was a wide receiver on the football team so I had no problems getting girls. There wasn’t a reason for why I’d been curious, I just was. While most of my friends got horny whenever a girl walked by them, I got horny whenever a girl or a boy walked by me. It was that way all throughout high school for me as well. During my senior year, I became friends with Derek Calloway, a short openly gay dude in my English class. We didn’t really talk at school but outside of school, we talked all the time. The talking turned into subtle flirting and the subtle flirting turned into playing around physically. I knew he already knew I wanted to do things with him but I made it clear when I told him to skip school one day.

           “Why did you want to skip school?” he asked me over the phone that morning. “You wanna hang out or something?”

           “I wanna hang out but not out somewhere,” I replied.

           “So, you wanna come over to my house?”

           “Yeah. But I ain’t gonna come if you’re gonna be on some bullshit.”

           “Hakeem, we could’ve hung out after school. It’s not like you have football practice during the winter.”

           “Your parents would be home after school.”

           “Okay, and?”

           “You want me to come over or not?”

           “I do. But why are you acting so weird?”

           “I ain’t actin’ weird.”

           “Yes, you are.” He laughed a little and asked, “Is this about what happened the other night in your car?”

           “You know it does.”

           “Ugh, I can’t stand you curious DL boys. Y’all are annoying as fuck. Just because we were playing around in your car and your dick got hard doesn’t mean anything.”

           “Derek, I been thinkin’ about this type of shit for a minute now. I been thinkin’ about it since before I started kickin’ it with you. I just…wanna do somethin’ about it now.”

           He was quiet for a little while before asking, “Do something like what?”

           “Whatever you’re cool with.”

           I was nervous as fuck but I didn’t want him to know that. I’d been thinking about fucking him since the first time we locked eyes in English class at the beginning of that school year. I thought about him the most at night before going to sleep. My dick would get hard and I’d have to jackoff and bust a nut just so I could get to sleep. I don’t know what it was about him but he attracted me more than anybody else at our school. Just hearing his voice over the phone had my dick hard.

                                     Me (Hakeem Samuels)

           “So, wassup?” I asked him. “Are we gonna get into some shit or what? And don’t even think about playin’ games with me.”

           As crazy as it sounds, I met Tariq Hammonds through a girl I’d been fucking around with behind my girlfriend’s back. The girl was a frequent shopper at the Whole Foods where I worked and I knew she was working for somebody because she was clearly a hood bitch. So, I ended up fucking her in the back of her Ford Explorer on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then, one day she answered a FaceTime call from her boss and he caught a glimpse of me as she was putting the camera on herself. He asked her who I was and she told him I was her boyfriend, even though I wasn’t. I had no idea who he was and even when the girl explained to me who he was, I still didn’t know who he was. Nonetheless, I gave him my phone number when he asked for it because I could tell he had money.

           “He’s a gospel singer,” she explained as we were getting dressed.

           “Why the fuck did he want my number?” I asked.

           “I don’t know, Marcus. Why did you give it to him?”

           “Because he had on a gold Rolex with diamonds in it.” I laughed and she laughed before kissing me.

           That night, Tariq called me a couple of times while I was playing basketball with my boys. I noticed the missed calls after the game and called him back as I was walking home. He was very blunt with me and told me he thought I was a sexy man. When he asked me if I was into both men and women, I told him no but then he asked if I’d be interested in having a sugar daddy. It only took me about two seconds to think on it and tell him I was very interested. He asked me about some basic information and the very next day, a driver was sent to pick me up from the apartment I shared with my girlfriend Zora. I lied to her about it all; telling her that it was for a job opportunity.

                                         Me (Marcus Stanfield)

           All I did was have drinks and talk with him in his private bar during our first meeting. He wanted to know everything there was to know about me. He wasn’t disrespectful and he didn’t touch me at all. After talking for a few hours, he handed me an envelope and had me driven back home. I opened the envelope and when I saw it was a check for five thousand dollars, I damn near fainted. All I did was have drinks and talk with that nigga for a few hours and he’d given me five thousand dollars. After that, I was willing to go further with it. When I got deep in it, I decided to tell Zora.

           “You did what?” Zora asked me when I returned home from Tariq’s one night.

           “I signed some shit so I can’t go too into detail,” I explained to her. “But I’ve been…kickin’ it with this rich dude for a few weeks. That’s where my recent checks have been coming from.”

           Her eyebrows jumped up as she asked, “What rich dude?”

           “Baby, I really can’t go into detail about it. Tomorrow, I want you to put this in your account.” I pulled the check from my back pocket and gave it to her.

           “Eight thousand dollars?! Marcus, who the hell would pay you eight thousand dollars for hanging out with them?”

           I smiled and told her, “My sugar daddy.”