CAROL TAYLOR

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

 

"Since publishing the first Brown Sugar I've been talking a lot about sex and it feels good. Brown Sugar became a best-seller because the stories were not just about sex; they were sexy stories about black life, in all its myriad forms. That's the beauty of being black, our diversity. And though we don't know it, our diversity is also our greatest strength.

 

In Brown Sugar 2 are best-selling authors, who you already know and love, writing outside of their genre but in their own particular style about characters you'll recognize in places you'll know. What their stories give you are different glimpses into the many different worlds that make up Black America.

 

IT FEELS GOOD TO BE BAD

 

To deny our impulses, is to deny the very thing that makes us human. When we've acted first and thought later. When we went with the flow and lost ourselves in the moment. There are few things that unify us; one is the irrational, impractical, out of character impulses that we've given in to. One of those irrational impulses is a one night stands. We've all had them. And if we're lucky, they've been great. I'm not gonna lie, I've had one or two or twelve, some great some not. But I've never regretted any of them because each has revealed not only something about myself but about men as well. Anyway, it's not what happens; it's what you do with what happens.

 

Brown Sugar 2 celebrates great one night stands because the beauty of a momentous one time encounter is that it doesn't reveal everything: the skeletons in the closet, the emotional dirty laundry, the crazy ex's or the nonsense we get so caught up in that we forget to have fun. With a one night stand all you have is each other in the here and now. Steeped in the present you can ignore the imperfections, the human frailties, and insecurities. Safely coddled in the moment you are to each other perfect in that instant.

 

That memory stays with you untarnished and glittering, wrapped in a ribbon of remembrance, unsullied by the day to day. A one-night stand is not about the unremarkable the practical or the mundane. It's about the fantasy of what could be though we know it will not be and the beauty of not caring. Either way, it feels good to be bad, that's probably why we do it."

 

Read more in Brown Sugar 2!