Let me just put it out there.

I was a nineteen-year-old Harlem girl with a healthy appetite. But it wasn’t sweets that I craved. And it wasn’t drugs. It wasn’t jewelry, and it wasn’t Prada skirts or fur coats neither. All that stuff was at my fingertips, mine for the taking. I was miserable in spite of all the bling. Because even though I rolled with the richest man in Harlem, I couldn’t get my g-spot hit. I was Granite McKay’s woman, and I craved dick.

I guess you could say G inherited me from my grandmother, who had been good friends with him and his mother. Even though he was twenty-seven years older than me, I had known him all my life. When I was a kid we lived on 136th Street in Harlem, and I used to run numbers for my grandmother. I could remember what everybody on the block played, and I never forgot a bet. Grandmother was sanctified but she played her some numbers every day. I would run up to the number house and put the numbers in, then keep track of who hit without ever writing any of it down. Every afternoon when whoever hit got paid, my grandmother got her cut and me and my younger brother Jimmy got a Nehi grape soda, a pack of watermelon Now & Laters, and some rainbow jawbreakers.

G owned the number spot and a lot of other businesses in Harlem, too. He had been married to a Puerto Rican woman at one time, but people said she disappeared one day and nobody ever went looking for her. G had a son named Gino, but nobody had seen him in years. He went to college in another state because G wanted him to live a different type of life.

By the time I was fifteen I was looking at Granite McKay with grown-woman eyes because he had a body that was out of this world.