Free Master of Power #1 by Erica Storm

Chapter One: Tonya
    “G o on. Get down on your knees and get it over with. You know you want to do it. Just get down on your knees. Yes. Yes.” I heard this loud sounding voice coming from the room as if two people were in there.
    I hoped the sound didn’t travel to the room next to ours, because in a quick minute there would be security knocking at our door, or bursting through the door. When the phone didn’t ring, I knew we were safe. I guess they build some hotel rooms to keep the noise at a limit, but anymore outbursts like get down on your knees, someone was bound to hear the loud shouting, moans, and groans coming from our room.
    I had just strolled out of the shower, and was drying my hair hoping the weather would be kind to my unruly afro curls. My hair only behaved when it was wet. When it dried, not even Prince back in the day could compete with my afro.
    It’s been a full week at a conference. Well if you don’t count Saturday and Sunday. This is the last place I want to be, but after watching my boyfriend, Wayne, pack his clothes and leave me, I needed to get away, so I reluctantly accepted Tamika’s invitation to tag alone with her.
    I didn’t blame Wayne for his sudden departure. He and I weren’t compatible anyway. He must have thought he had lucked out because he had latched onto a college graduate with an apartment. When he had to foot too many bills, he ran like a scared rabbit being chased by dogs.
    We had nothing in common except my apartment. I invested four years working on an engineering degree and college debt. I wasn’t making any money after graduation, and the rest of the time going from job to job, and traveling to conferences that had nothing to do with my degree in engineering.
    So I took whatever job I could get and that wasn’t enough to pay for an apartment and that’s where Wayne came in, and that’s where he left me. And that’s when I got an extra a job in sales because I couldn’t get any decent paying work with only a Bachelor’s degree. 
    Finding myself in sales, in this engineering firm, wasn’t where I had envisioned myself. I had no aptitude for sales. I rarely associated with anyone in the company, so I lost that job and while on a part time job at a department store, I met Tamika Johnson looking for conservative clothes. And looking at her with those short see through dresses, it was none too soon.
    Tamika is the kind of person who can get you to tell her anything. So I spilled my guts to her about my lack of a good paying job, Wayne, and my pending homelessness, and how I didn’t want to go home to live with my mother. 
    She smiled and said that she knew about a research opening in a law firm, and it would pay much more than my sales job at a department store. It was about money what can I say? And money is what makes the world go around as my mother would say.
    She had this saying also, “If you can’t spend it what good is it, and if you can’t spend what’s in a man’s pocket, what good is he?” She gave me that piece of old advice because she knew I was living with Wayne, and she didn’t like him. She had lots of saying but that’s just a few I could remember, and that’s one reason why I didn’t want to go back to living with her.
    When I turned twenty-one I had heard everything my mother could tell me, and anything else she had to say, I tuned out. I just stopped listening.
    When I graduated from school I had dreams of designing beautiful fast cars for women. After all it’s not your great grandmother’s time where the man worked, and she had to stay at home.
    I’m twenty three and I come from a generation of kids where I’m considered one of those educated arrogant spoiled black girls who thinks the world owes her something, and it probably does, but it’s not about to pay off in my life time, so I find my ass without a man, in jobs I hate, and I have to go to a conference where the speaker is a white guy who talks about mastering the power