Excerpt from Southern Comfort by Cynnamon Foster (aka Nina Foxx)

If you haven't read it yet, here's something to get you started.  I'm diligently working on Eastern Spice, the next installment in the series, and reminiscing on how my characters met. Just a head's up, it's hot and steamy, but packs a real twist,  so if you don't want to read that kind of stuff, skip now. If you do continue, I promise you will enjoy it.  If you want to read more than is presented here, the book is available at all your book outlets.  You  can ask  your library, your local independent bookseller, or Barnes  and Noble to buy it, or you can get it at any online outlet.  it is also available electronically on Nook, Kindle and IBook. Enjoy.

One/Sería

I have to face it, I’m dick-whipped.  That could be the only explanation for why I was standing in the doorway of my apartment, wrapped in the sex-smelling sheets off my bed, answering my door while James was still laying in my bedroom, delirious with the aftermath of the good-ass sex we just had.  It was one in the morning, so I knew no good could come of the loca pounding on my door, jarring me away from some of the best d-I’d had yet.

I paused before I opened the door and tried to get my composure.  It was getting harder and harder for me to deal with all of the drama that seemed to follow James.  Finally, I took a deep breath and pulled the door open. None of this surprised me, but it still took a moment for the crazy-looking woman outside my door to register in my brain.  

“Where he at?”  She didn’t even wait for me to say hello, instead she tried to look around me and into my apartment. I hadn’t seen this one before. This puta, probably one of James’s many tricks on the side, had the nerve to be standing in my face, outside the apartment I pay for, in the middle of the night.  She didn’t even have the decency to get dressed before she left home.  Instead, she looked like a reject from a B movie, wearing what had to be her abuela’s bathrobe and pink fuzzy slippers. Her weave was jacked up, half in rollers and half down, and her face was smudged with the remnants of last night’s mascara. A big glob of what used to be eye makeup sat in the center of her nose and made her look like she’d gone to church on Ash Wednesday and received her ashes from a very short priest.

“Who are you looking for?” 

Of course I knew exactly who she meant, but I refused to be rushed or give her the satisfaction that she wanted. I knew this was going to make her more loca than she already was. We’ve been here before. You see, James had lots of indiscretions, but he always came back to me.  That’s just how it was. We had what some might call an open-relationship, an agreement that we occasionally “see” other people.  We never formally called it that, it just happened that way when I caught him with someone else and we never really talked about it. People trip sometimes when I tell them that our relationship is just about sex ‘cause they think that a woman ain’t supposed to have a fuck-buddy but I like to call things what they are.

“Don’t play me, Sería.  Where is James?” She spat his name like he was a bad taste in her mouth.  Well, the girl, Wanda, I think was her name, was certainly a bad taste in mine. 

My nosey ass neighbor across the hall opened her door and stuck her head out. “Do I have to call the police, Sería?” From the look on her face, I knew that she hated and pitied me at the same time, but I didn’t give a damn.  No one had asked her to pass judgment on me the way I was sure she had. 

 “No, but you damn sure need to mind your own business.”  Wanda hissed at her and she quickly slammed her door.  

Every time James and I broke up, it was behind some bitch like this one.  Most chicks wouldn’t be able to put up with their man being with other people, but it worked for me.  I was surprised at that at first, but I soon figured out that I could use it to my advantage, too.  The problem was the other woman didn’t always have the same agreement and they would act all crazy, like now, and my patience was wearing thin.  I was trying to be calm, but my anger was bubbling through. My back was so tense I was starting to have a headache.

I pulled my sheet tighter.  “What do you want? He’s asleep.”

“Well, wake his ass up then!”  She yelled at the top of her lungs, trying to do the job herself. Wanda wasn’t leaving and it looked like she was going to try and clown me.  She shifted her weight and placed one of her hands on her hip while a loose curler weaved back and forth, dangling near her ear. 

I was starting to see colors.  This witch only had a few more minutes before I totally lost it.  I have a long fuse, but when I’d had enough, I’d had enough, and I was having a hard time believing that this crazy woman was up in my face like she was.  

“Look, you’re disturbing my neighbors.  James is not coming out here to talk to you. I don’t know what in the hell you think this is, but you got no right to be banging on my door with your trifling ass! Don’t you have no home training?”

“Home training?  Don’t you bring my family into this!” Wanda’s eyes got wide and tension lines appeared in her forehead. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that she was going to try and push her way into my apartment in a minute.  “Don’t you tell me what I got a right to do.  I got every right.  James is my ex and I need him now! You knew what this was when you got involved. Go get him, and don’t you be trying to do none of that new age, voodoo shit either.”

I’d had enough of Wanda.  New aged voodoo shit?  I couldn’t believe she’d said that, yet I could. People often criticized what they didn’t understand.  Incense and candles ain’t voodoo. 

“Voodoo? You’re the one standing in my door at a crazy hour looking like a witch!”  Before I knew what was happening, I’d let go of my sheet and raised my hand to bust her in her face.  I never had a chance to hit her.  Something stopped my hand.  I looked over my shoulder and realized that James had sprinted out of bed and across the apartment to where he was standing now, holding onto my elbow like it was a slippery fish out of water.

“Sería, calm down,” he said.  James tried to pull me behind him but I wasn’t moving.  He leaned around me to talk to Wanda.  “What are you doing here?”

How in the hell was I supposed to calm down when the heifer was standing in my doorway, grinning ear to ear?  Right before my eyes, she stepped through the doorway, and just as she did her belly swelled until it looked like she had a cantaloupe under her shirt.  She sauntered into the room, her belly growing with each step.

“Aw, hell no,” I yelled.  

“He my baby daddy!”  Wanda yelled, pointing straight at James.  

Instead of denying it, the fool clapped his hands and jumped up and down like a two year old.  “I’m a baby daddy!”

Her belly kept growing and by this point, Wanda was as big as Eddy Murphy playing his mother in The Nutty Professor.  I started screaming but I could still hear Wanda’s words.  “You asked for this so you best be a good wife-in-law!”

Wife-in-law?  We were married?  I must have been really drunk last night.  My mother would kill me if I didn’t have a church wedding.  I screamed, James was still clapping and Wanda laughed like an evil scientist.  I stood there shaking all over until finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.  I thought I was going to faint and then I heard James calling me from far away.

“Sería, wake up.  You’re having a nightmare.” He shook me awake, and it was a good thing too.  This was unbelievable. If I’d kept dreaming I might have had a heart attack in my sleep. “You okay?”

I opened my eyes and blinked and realized it was really all just a dream.  Wanda wasn’t here and she wasn’t getting more pregnant by the minute.  I wasn’t even by the front door.  I was still in bed, wrapped in that sheet that smelled like us.  

“I’m fine.  I shouldn’t have eaten those peppers last night.”

James kissed me on the forehead and then lay back down, spooning me from behind.  Almost immediately, his penis poked me in the back.  “I can help calm you down.”

I let my body melt into his, enjoying the hotness of his breath on my neck.  I needed some comforting, for sure.  That was the most disturbing dream I’d had in awhile.  I’d had the same dream before, only not in so much detail.  Last time I had it, Wanda wasn’t pregnant, just crazy. 

James and I had been seeing each other for two years, and we’d broken up and gotten back together more times than I could count. Each time, I’d swear that I was done, and then we’d have the most amazing make-up sex ever, and I’d be right back where I started.  My friends kept telling me that it’s unhealthy, but it worked for me.  None of them were getting sexed the way James sexed me, so they couldn’t possibly understand. 

James wrapped his arm around me and ran his hand down the front of my body, slowly, from top to bottom, letting his hand come to rest between my legs.  I let them fall open slightly and his index finger found my clit.  Electricity shot through me and I moaned. 

“Yes, that’s it.  Relax and let me take care of you,” He said, kissing me on the back of my neck again.

I didn’t want a lot of foreplay.  This was morning-after sex.  He’d taken his time the night before, and we’d enjoyed it.  Now, I just wanted to get to the good part and we both had to get to work.

Apparently, James wanted the same thing.  He flipped me over onto my stomach and then spread my legs with just enough force, pulling me up onto my knees at the same time.  I dragged a pillow with me and leaned into it.  James entered me from behind in one movement and we stayed there for a minute, enjoying the feeling of his balls being so close to my ass.  

Finally, he began to move slowly.  He used one hand to finger my clit and he moved me gently away, then back to him until out bodies touched softly.  The feeling was amazing. I felt like fireworks looked as I gently pushed my hips back toward him.

The pressure started to build immediately.  I suppressed a moan and buried my face in the pillow in front of me.  We moved faster and he placed both his hands on my hips, moving me back and forth with a little more force.  Our bodies began to slap together and his balls tickled my clit just a little with each forward motion.  I moved with him, to make sure that I enjoyed the feeling of the full length of his penis. I rode it in and out, savoring each stroke.  

There was no way I could be silent now.  I moaned, not caring what my neighbors thought of me.  James slapped my ass, and I screamed.  I liked it just a little rough.  When we were like this, it was so much more than sex.  Our bodies reflected how we truly felt about each other, and it was almost primal. 

“That’s it, baby,” he said.  “You let it out.” James grabbed my hair with one hand, and thrust hard.  Our bodies made one last, loud slap.  He pulled my hair at the same time and my head jerked backward.  We both screamed and I was still as we came simultaneously.  Everything went white and my body tensed.  We didn’t move as James shuddered.  Finally, we collapsed forward onto the bed, together and we stayed that way until he got too heavy.  Gradually, I was able to see.  We might have our differences, but the sex was amazing between us.  The nagging feeling left over from my dream slowly returned.  It couldn’t be this great between them, too. He could play around with those other putas if he wanted to, but he’d only always be just playing.  Our shit was for real.