Sex Empire✔️

22. Sex Ain't Better Than Love

You can't make a man fall in love just because of great sex. Alixandre Stone

Sometimes he wondered if everything he did was worth it. Trying to get his business in his sole hands, to pass down to his girls, when they were ready. And that was no time soon. He was forty-nine years young, in his prime. His body fit like he was still twenty-nine. He could catch the ladies like he was still twenty-one. He could go round for round, pound for pound in the bedroom longer than any twenty-something.

Sex was good, but sometimes it was not enough.

He looked at what he built in the last twenty years, coming from less than nothing. His brains and street smarts got him far. He grew up in the Darst-Webbe housing projects, or the "jets" as they called it. The ghetto, the slums. Where the poorest of the poor lived, most on Section Eight or getting some kind of government assistance. Torn down about twenty-five years ago to build a new "mixed-income" housing complex that was within walking distance of downtown St. Louis.

His mother did not mind being the welfare queen raising her nine kids, all by different fathers. Not like any of them lifted a finger to help once their seed was sown. They dropped out of her life before she even gave birth to each one. His mother was the known neighborhood "run-up," meaning, she let any and everyone run up in her. A hoe. Not a prostitute because she seldom got paid.

The neighborhood skeezer as many of his friends liked to call her. Nowadays maybe they called it a skank, a thot, or a bust down, a promiscuous woman who was always ready for sex...with anyone. Even young boys. He would never forget the day during his junior year in high school when his boys bragged about running a train on her. His mother!

One of them was probably the father of his youngest brother that came nine months later.

He was not embarrassed by the things his mother did. He always pretended she was his sister not his mother since she was sixteen when she had him and they grew up together. Pretty girl, that's where he got his looks for sure. Mentally, she was not all there. Always looking for love from men who just wanted to get their rocks off.

He was the oldest by far, pretty much raising his siblings till he left for college. Trying to erase his past, he did not visit them that often. His next sibling was his sister Tamra and she was like mother like daughter. Only three years younger than him and she started young as well.

He tried so hard to keep his brothers and sisters on the good side of the law and become hard-working individuals. You either made it out of that lifestyle, or you lived and breathed it every day.

Two brothers were in jail doing long bids for attempted murder. A sister in jail for life for murdering her boyfriend.

Tamra was forty-six with six kids, had finally stopped opening her legs to men, and became a responsible adult since her oldest child, Nasiree or Nas as they called her, went on to college and made something of herself. His niece was his everything, and he took her under his wing, helping her navigate college life at his alma mater St. Louis University on a full scholarship. At thirty, she was an OB-GYN doctor like him with her own practice.

Two sisters were junkies, in and out of rehab, and each had a few kids along the way that were taken from them and put into Division of Family Services custody. He fought to get them to stay in the family, which was how his mother decided to get her act right together and took them in. He made sure they had a nice house they all lived in and gave his mother a monthly allowance along with what the State gave her. His nieces and nephews lived a good life thanks to him and even worked for him at Stone's Bar

There was one other sibling. Killed in a drug deal gone bad.

That was his family.

The only brother he kept in his business was Roberto, who they all called ToTo. He trusted him with everything. He was only one year old when he left for college, so thirty-one now. Was just as smart as him, and managed to forego college because he was too smart for four years of learning something he already knew. Genius-level. Too smart to get distracted by women, that's why when Roberto asked to join his family business, he told him no.