The begining of this chapter is what really makes it for MATURE audiences. If you don't want to read the more explicit stuff, just skim a little, the storyalways picks up again. The whole scene is basically an example of Joey's reckless behavior. Go on now. Read.

Chapter 3: It's Time to Grow up Joseph

Joey let out a satisfied moan as his orgasm burst. The girl, he wasn't quite sure of her name, something like Stephanie, slurped it up sexily before bringing her head back up and smiled. "You have to watch the hair next time or else I'm gonna get a bald spot." She giggled.

Joey lit up a blunt from behind his ear and took a few puffs. "Sorry, I guess I have a thing for blond hair." He readjusted his sunglasses before offering her a puff.

"So does this mean the party's over?" She asked looking at it.

Joey grinned. "Nah, this just gets things started for part two." The girl giggled in excitement and took a small puff before handing it back to him.

The section of the basement they were in was dark, small and lit by a single candle. The only furniture in there was a little night stand, which held mostly drugs; a television, a mini fridge, and a large group of cushions that covered the floor. Joey and the girl were laid out on the cushioned floor; his head propped up on a pillow.

Joey watched, smiling and smoking, as the girl unbuttoned the top of her school uniform. After removing her skirt and underwear, she pulled off Joey's shirt, being careful not to disturb the weed or his sunglasses. She had heard about bad things happening to girls that made that mistake. Once his shirt was off, she noticed that he had a tattoo on his chest. It said: Mai.

"Who's Mai?" She asked, helping herself to some of his beer.

"An old girlfriend. Not important right now."

"That's for sure!" She replied. Joey took one last drag before finishing it and placing what was left on the nightstand.

Joey grabbed her from the back and positioned her on his member, allowing her to get used to the feeling. He could tell from the expression on her face that it was exactly what she must have imagined. He quickly went to work, moving her on top of him.

Just as he was getting back into the zone, the girl stopped. "Wait," she said. "Do you have any…"

"Ah come on!" He said upset. "Why? I know what I'm doin'." He tried to keep going but she wouldn't let him.

"Please, please, please." She pouted. "I promise I can make it up to you." She sexily pulled at his already open zipper and yanked his pants down some more, pulling his testicles from their original position. "Please, please." She pouted as she played with his balls.

Usually people could still kind of see his eyes through the sunglasses but the room was too dark for her to see his eyes rolling back. "Fine." He finally said. "Women." He muttered as he reached underneath his own pillow, where he had a roll of condoms already. He tore off one and waved it in front of her face. "This what you want?"

"Uh huh." She said innocently. She slowly pulled herself off of his erection and watched as he carefully placed it on.

"There. Happy?" He asked after making sure that it was on securely. She nodded her head even more innocently and mounted him again. This time, Joey moved differently. He entered her quickly and pulled out slowly, trying to get the full effect. He quickly began to move faster, watching her breasts bounce. She tossed her head back and moaned.

As he humped her, his newly freed balls slapped against her underside. He felt as though he could go on forever. Or at least for another ten minutes, because that's when Mai made her entrance.

She came in like a gust of wind, without warning. The girl, Stephanie or whatever, was in the process of calling Joey a sex god when she was forced to stop mid sentence by the angry looking, blond haired woman who had just come in. Joey didn't seem to notice at all and continued to hump until he heard a terrifyingly familiar voice.

"Joseph Anthony Wheeler!" She yelled in a voice that even shook him. The girl scrambled away for her clothes leaving Joey high and dry with a hard on.

Joey tried to think of anyone he knew with a voice that struck fear into the very depth of his soul and knew his middle name. There were only two women he knew that could do that so he took a guess of what he thought was more likely. "Ma?" He questioned.

Mai walked over to him and stepped on his stomach. "Yes. That's right Joseph. It's mother. You know, the one that left you about nine months ago." She bent down and looked him right in the eyes. She grinned as his eyes widened in shock and recognition.

"Mai!" He yelled.

"Um, I'm gonna go now." The girl said, now fully dressed and edging towards the door. Once she was gone, Mai removed her heel from Joey's stomach.

Joey stared at her, recovering from his initial shock. Once he was able to think again, he spoke. "What the hell are you doin' here?" He said building up more courage. "Come to ruin my life again? 'Cause if that's the case, I got better things ta do." Joey adjusted his sunglasses and sat up, keeping his still exposed genitalia out of harms way.

"Who the hell do you think you're talking to Wheeler? And where do you get the gall to accuse me of ruining your life? Everything that's happened, you've done to yourself!"

"I'm sorry, you're right. I did do this to myself, because of you! But now that I think about it, you didn't really ruin my life. I'm havin' a hell of a time. Well at least I was until you came in so I'll ask you again, What the fuck makes you think you can waltz into my house and start trashin' me after nine damn months?" Joey was glaring at her and she could tell, despite the dark glasses.

"Well you see I was just walking through, hoping I wouldn't bump into your immature ass, when I saw Tristan and Duke. They told me some interesting things. You've been a bad boy Joseph."

"Figures it was them. I'll have ta have a talk with them later."

"I don't think so. I've seen what happens to people you get into disputes with."

Joey started to grin in a menacing way. He reached over to his nightstand and pulled out another pre-prepared joint. As he lit it, he started to laugh. "I guess that means you've seen Yugi and Tea too." The smoke was overwhelming in the little room but Joey seemed to enjoy it. "How are they? Yugi enjoy goin' ta school at home? What about the blood on their uniforms? Those can be some real tough stains ta get out. I hope they're feeling better now. Give 'em my regards and tell 'em I said, I can't wait to have another little chat."

Joey laughed cruelly, which Mai didn't take very well. She bent down and tried to snatch the joint from his mouth but as she was getting back up, he grabbed her wrist and bent it backwards. Mai tried not to let the pain get to her as she flipped the joint in the other direction and stuck the butt of it into his hand.

For a minute, it was as though he didn't even feel it. Finally, Joey let go of her wrist and held on to his hand as though just suddenly realizing it.

"Took ya a minute." Mai teased. "Now if you try to lay another hand on me again, I'll hurt you. Don't think I won't. I don't like you as much as I used to, so it'll be very easy. So, if you don't mind, pull up your pants so I can talk to you."

Joey looked at her for a second and then sucked his teeth. Slowly he turned away from her and began to remove his condom very carefully. "What's the holdup?" She asked after waiting for a while.

"Keep ya panties on Mai, it's almost off." Joey sounded irked. "Make yourself useful and pull out that garbage pail from under the little table thing there."

Mai gave him a nasty look, which he ignored, as she walked over to the pail and picked it up. She glanced down at its contents and did a double take. There were two or three used condoms in there; the rest were still in the wrappers, unused.

"Joey, this is absolutely disgusting. Almost none of these have even been used." She tossed the bucket in his direction. "Are you trying to kill yourself or something? Really what's your problem?" Joey's back was still turned; his attention focused on what he was doing. "And what's taking you so long? It's a condom, you're not trying to break into a safe or anything, just take it off."

"It's off damn it!" Joey snapped. In an angry outburst, Joey childishly tossed the condom over his shoulder and right in Mai's direction.

"Joey!" she screamed at him but he didn't respond as he started to pull his pants all the way up. "Look at me when I'm yelling at you!" Mai angrily turned him around to face her. Almost instinctively, she focused her attention to where he had been focusing his; his dick, and looked back at him.

Then she did another double take. She remembered how Duke was about to make a comment about Joey's genitals but Tristan stopped him. Now she understood why. As Mai gaped in horror, Joey simply sighed and rolled his eyes, knowing that her reaction would be just like Yugi's and Tea's and Serenity's and all his other old buddies.

"Joey. That isn't what I think it is, is it? Tell me that you have more sense than that. What is that?"

"What does it look like?"

"It looks like a piercing, but I know it couldn't be, right?"

Joey grabbed his dick and rubbed his thumb over the steel stud situated at the tip. "You know, it looks like a piercing to me too." Mai just shook her head and sat down on the floor with her back facing him. As she sat there, she could hear him pulling up his zipper and take a bottle from off the nightstand before he sat down next to her. Finally it seemed as though the worst of the day was over.

He sat next to her, on the floor, drinking from out of his beer bottles. For a long time, they said nothing. Mai was the first to break the silence. "Nice tattoo." She said without looking at him.

He 'humphed' in reply and took another drink. After yet another long silence, Joey spoke. "Sorry about that. You kinda caught me at an awkward moment."

"Please. Any moment would have been an awkward moment." Mai found it hard to talk to him. He seemed like a completely different person. He didn't even speak the same way. "Why are you doing this to yourself Joey?"

"I've been asked that question so many times." Joey seemed to half grin to himself. "But just because it's you, I'll tell you the truth. I'm doing this because I want to."

"What, you want to kill yourself? Because that's all this road is going to lead to. Either the drugs, the liquor, a dirty needle, a dirty girl, or the police if you don't get your act together, is going to get you killed."

"You say this like I don't know already."

"So is that your goal? Death."

"We all die, Mai. Me? I just don't wanna feel the pain of suffering till it comes. I'd rather be doing other things."

"Like hurting your friends?"

"They're not my friends!" Joey retorted, getting angry again.

"How can you say that after all you've been through?"

"Easy. I changed and they couldn't deal with that. They wanted me to be good old Joey again and I couldn't. They tried to say that they understood what I was going through, but none of them knows how it feels to know that one mistake fucked up everything. They don't know what it's like to be down on their knees crying for forgiveness and then be rejected. Everything always turned out okay for them, but not for me.

"And then those guys get the idea that the best way for me to be my old self again is to get over it? And they nagged and they preached, and they preached, and they preached until finally I couldn't take anymore. And whenever I was finally forgetting about you, one of them would bring you up again. So yeah, I hurt my "friends" and I'm not sorry about it. They claimed that they could feel my pain and now they are.

"Now they know how it feels to be on their knees, crying and be rejected and hurt. To loose someone you loved and wanted to grow old with and know that whether or not you'll ever see light again…is all up to that person." The way Joey had said that made Mai remember the old Joey that she loved. He looked like he had been keeping those feelings inside him for way too long. Now that he was done, Joey drained his last bottle.

"You know, that day, I suffered too. Don't you forget that." For a second Mai thought that she was about to cry over causing him so much pain, but she knew that there was no reason to. "You have no idea how much I wanted to forgive you and try to make everything the way it was."

Joey 'humphed' again. "Really? Then why didn't you?"

"Because I was being as immature as you are now. I wanted to forgive you but I couldn't. Because I suffered. You hurt me badly, Joey. You barged your way into my life, discredited my whole way of life, stole my heart…and then it was like you just stomped on it. You had no idea what I was going through. You had the nerve to say that you understood why I was so mad, why I was so hurt. You promised to never hurt me that way again. But how could you possibly have known what you really did to me?

"You pleaded, and begged, and cried, and cried, and cried, but for what? You want to know why I left, Joey? I left because I wanted you to feel my pain. I wanted you to know how it felt to be forgotten and heartbroken. So yeah, I hurt you and I suffered for it, but I thought you would learn something. But that was ignorant!

"It's time for you to step up. I know I can't tell you to go back to being your old self because that's impossible. It's impossible for me. But you need to get out of the gutter and stop trying to protect yourself from pain with self-pity. I've already tried that once, remember Doom? I can tell you from experience that it doesn't work. Because sooner or later some blond haired idiot is going to come up and try to set you straight before you wind up destroying yourself." At this, Joey cracked a real smile. She was using the past to haunt him.

Mai took his sunglasses off, revealing large, dark, sad, sunken eyes. There were large black circles around them and the white of his eyes were bloodshot and veiny, making him look somewhat like a raccoon with a bad case of rabies. However, his puppy brown eyes were still hiding there and revealed a sadness that he kept hidden behind his glasses.

Joey had never heard her side of the story before and the irony of it made tears begin to swell in eyes he had tried to disregard. "Looks like the new us have a lot in common." He could see that her eyes were beginning to swell as well.

"Not quite yet." Mai replied softly. "There's just one more thing that needs to be done." The emotions were beginning to flow and Mai held out her arms for him as he doubled over in tears that he had suppressed for nearly nine months.

"What's that?" He was able to get out after a while. Mai tightened her embrace around him. She felt like a mother who was trying to calm her child after he realized he'd been bad.

"You have to learn from it, like I did." Together they rocked for a while. The person she had in her arms was not her 'good old Joey' and she knew he never would be again. But now, she didn't care that he smelled like beer and marijuana, or that he probably had syphilis, or that he had a tattoo and an extra piece of jewelry in both his ears and in his penis. All that mattered was that Joey was changing for the better this time.

"How do I do that?" He choked. Having never thought she would hold him in her arms again he cried in joy. Mai continued to rock with him, stroking his wild blond hair.

"It's time for you to grow up Joseph."

Get ready for the final chapter.