by S. Ann Cole
“You can call me Axia, Rosa,” I said, toweling my hair. “Come in.”
“Mr. Nelson prefers formality,” Rosa smiled as she walked into the room. Her smile was always bright and genuine whenever she saw me, which told me she was fond of me. Maybe because we’re partially of the same kind. Because there weren’t many people who genuinely liked me. Many just tolerate me. Not because they want to, but because they have to. “I here to inform you dinner is ready. Do you prefer to eat here, or you eat downstairs? Mr. Nelson say you to eat here.”
Rosa concentrated hard when she spoke, seemingly annoyed that her English wasn’t polished. And I wondered why Lovello didn’t allow her to speak in her tongue since he understood it.
“Mr. Nelson can say whatever the hell he wants. Now he’s trying to confine me to the bedroom?” I shook my head. “I will be eating in the dining room where dinners are rightfully supposed to be eaten.”
Rosa nodded and started out of the room.
“Do you know if he went to get my things earlier?” I asked her as she was just out of the door. Surely, he must’ve brought clothes for me if he’d gotten my toiletries.
Rosa’s brows furrowed. “No. Mr. Nelson been here all day, making sure you okay.” Her eyes studied my robe, then shifted to the closet, a small smile pulling at her plump lips. “Have you checked closets? Your things ever-present, Miss Blacksille. Never left. Never left.” She shook her head to emphasize and held her hand, palm up, in the direction of the closet. “Go see. Your things still there. Always there.”
When I simply stared back at Rosa in disbelief, she twisted her lips to stifle her smile and rolled her big rump out of the room.
Still in shock, I slowly moved towards the closet, eying the handles as if a monster would lurch out at any moment. Maybe Rosa was just messing with me, because I couldn’t fathom why Lovello would keep my shit. Wrapping my fingers around the handles of the closet doors, I took a deep breath and opened them. I’ll be damned …
Lovello, indeed, had kept my stuff. Everything was there. Exactly as I’d left them. My clothes, shoes, handbags, cosmetics … everything. Something glistened on the vanity where my accessories and make-up kit were. As I neared the vanity and saw what it was, I couldn’t help smiling. It was his diamond-covered million dollar Chopard watch. There was a note sticking from its open box: “Hi again. I’ve missed your wrist. Wear me always, with pride, for I am yours.”
Grinning like a toothless baby, I latched the watch around my wrist, plopped down on the stool in front of the vanity and began combing my hair. I was home. Lovello never hated me. He’d kept every piece of me with him. He knew we would be back together. Or had he just hoped for it? If that was the case, then he must’ve had some strong faith to even write that note.
I was home. Everything suddenly felt right. Everything suddenly made sense again. Everything would be alright …
Well, in the heat of the moment, that’s what I’d thought …
I’d gotten dressed and journeyed downstairs, thinking that Lovello would be having dinner with me. But I was disappointed to learn that he was having dinner in his study, and had instructed his staff not to disturb him. That no one should. Being the rule-breaker that I was, I disregarded all orders and went to his study after dinner, but found that the door was locked. And when I knocked, he didn’t respond.
After a few more tries of knocking to no avail, I gave up and went back to bed. Nausea was annoying me again, anyway.
The next morning I woke up to find that I’d slept alone. Lovello never came to bed, nor was he anywhere in sight. It was only fifteen minutes to seven and he didn’t normally leave for work until eight.
The day brightened and dimmed, and I still hadn’t seen him.
Donna was there at my beck and call. I couldn’t even sneeze without being pounced upon with concerning questions. Marian had come by to do a few check-ups, and given me prenatal vitamins along with medication for my “panic attacks” and pregnancy-triggered anemia.
The night blackened and the morning burst through, and I yet again woke up to no Lovello.
For the next couple of days that was how things played. No Lovello, nowhere. The thing was I could never tell if he was home or not, because the place was so damn huge he could be at the other wing of the house and I wouldn’t know. Not to mention that I spent the majority of my time puking like a newborn, eating like a horse and sleeping like an Olympian.
Huge be the house or sick be me, however, it was obvious even to the blind that Lovello was avoiding me. And it was disheartening. It hurt … so much.
I’d thought things were good between us. At least, the last couple of words we exchanged gave the illusion that things were good between us. Maybe he’d been so frightened during my panic attack that he’d merely succumbed to being temporarily nice to me in the hope that I’d feel better? Yes, his words had been as smooth as olive oil, and I’d found comfort and promise in them.
He’d promised me he would take care of me. Yet, I’d been locked in his house an entire week without so much as a text message from him. He’d referred to the bedroom as ‘our room’. Yet, I was the only one who slept in it. I couldn’t fathom his behavior and why he was being so temperamental. I’d finally come to terms with the whole pregnancy thing, and all of a sudden he just disappears on me? Oh, and if I made it ten feet to the front door, I’d be intercepted by this buff Mr. Lenton figure who always seemed to pop up from God knows where. I freakin’ was imprisoned! But with all the aid I could possibly need. Except from the one person I yearned.
Was Lovello only keeping me here until I had the baby and then he’d just fuck off with me afterwards? Did he even come home at night or was he at his penthouse screwing around? If he didn’t want me, why the hell had he kept my stuff?
For no reason, sometimes, I would just burst into tears. Because I couldn’t comprehend what was going on. I couldn’t identify with myself or my life. One minute I was Axia Blacksille, governing my own life. And the next minute I was a weak ass mouthpiece, taking shit from a man. All because of love. Love had screwed up life, my head, my heart.
Love had a name, and I wanted to kill the fucker.
The nausea didn’t help either. Nausea has got to be the worst goddamn feeling on earth. I never know if I should stand, walk or run. Eat or puke, sleep or stay awake. I had zero interest in anything at all, except for an insane sex drive that never gets quenched. I alternated between not wanting to see any type of food and wanting to eat every eatable thing my eyes landed on. If I saw something edible advertising on television and even mumbled that I felt like it, best believe me that I’d be getting it before the day’s end. Which made me wonder at times if there was a microchip unknowingly placed inside of me or something, because I couldn’t understand how these people heard when I even murmured a need.
Sometimes I could swear I heard the barking of a puppy coming from the left wing of the house. I deemed it as my imagination, though, because I knew Lovello hated pets.
Trudy’s project was taking off perfectly, which made her too busy to talk each time I phoned her. So I’d refrained and began phoning Tish instead to secretly keep abreast of how my gym was doing. It was doing excellently. But she, too, was busier than ever. It was just my life that had slowed right down, while everyone else’s was throttling at full speed. Not like I could’ve been doing anything anyway, seeing that I spent around seventy percent of my days sleeping. In my new state, sleep was nothing I could control, I couldn’t choose when to sleep. Sleep descended on me whenever it felt like, at anytime, all the time.
One evening I felt miserable, torpid, joint-locked. My body, pre-pregnancy, wasn’t used to sitting on its ass doing nothing, and I guess it was rebelling. My body, pre-pregnancy, was overactive and got more exercise each day than was healthy. And now it was nothing but a source to bring about a new life; eating, sleeping, puking. Eating, sleeping, puking. It was exhausting. I wasn’t even three months in and I was ready for it all to be o
ver.
A walk on the treadmill seemed safe enough. So I jaunted down to the basement gym and stopped for a second when I heard music pouring from the room. As I continued down to the room, I heard Lovello’s voice crowing along to Trey Songz’s Heart Attack, with intermittent grunts. So he was home, then.
With his eyes closed, he was lying supine on the bench, pressing weights and grunting the words of the song when his breathing allowed him to. And with each lift of the weights, his muscles tightened in definition then flexed in a boastful dance. His skin was glistening under his sweat, his veins bulging in all the strained areas, his overgrown hair sticking to his forehead … Jesus … I missed this man.
A gush of wetness shot to my core as I set my water bottle aside and quietly walked over to the bench. I dropped down on my knees between his legs that were parted on either side of the bench. Sweeping my tongue across my lips, I tentatively ran a possessive hand over my most favorite part of his body. It wasn’t awake yet, but it would soon be.
Then came a loud clang as Lovello slammed down the weights and opened his eyes. The question “When the hell did you get in here?” flashed across his face, but I focused my attention on the thing that had once been a close companion of mine. The same thing that got me into this sickly position. Pulling down the waist of his gym shorts to expose him, I wrapped my fingers around his dick that was hardening with each passing second.
Lovello took a breath before saying, “Axia, what’re you doing? Stop.”
“Why?” I asked back, stroking my hand up and down his length without looking at him. I didn’t think it was possible for me to look into those eyes again without feeling pain.
“Because I don’t want you … to.”
My heart stopped beating for a brief moment as I tried to decipher if he was saying he didn’t want me, or he didn’t want me to touch him like this. I paused and found the courage to flick my eyes up to his, searching for an answer. But his slate-grays only stared back at me with impassivity. Shrugging it off, I brought my attention back to his now steel-hard cock and grasped him tight, then slowly licked my tongue around his head.
Lovello made a loud sigh as pre-cum sprouted from his tip. “Stop, Axia. What do you want from me?”
I answered in truth, “Everything … and nothing.” Then I took him wholly in my mouth, taking pleasure in his sharp intake of breath. Up and down his thick length my lips glided, punctuating with fancy swirls of my tongue around his head, sucking him hard, and then soft, squeezing him, then teasing him, keeping his orgasm at bay until I was ready to quench my undying thirst.
By this time, his head was tossed back and his hands were gripping the sides of the bench. His legs shifted restlessly as his moans graduated to groans, his groans to grunts, his grunts to growls. And I was loving it. I released my grip from the base of his cock where I’d been squeezing him to stymie his orgasm. Ready to slake that unquenchable thirst of mine, I began pumping him hard while my mouth sucked on his head.
“Ahhh … to hell with you, Axia,” he growled, as his hands found my hair and gripped. He was on the brink. I could feel him growing rigid. Swelling. Ready to blow. “Axia, stop … I’m gonna … Jesus…”
His hands left my hair to push at my shoulders, trying to shove me off. But I wanted to drink him like a frickin’ smoothie, so I knocked his hands away and pushed him to the back of my throat. Lovello’s hips jolted forward as a string of incomprehensible words flew from him. He grabbed my left hand and sunk his teeth into my palm just as the first flow of warm saltiness squirted down my throat.
I milked him.
All of him.
And swallowed him.
All of him.
Then, when he was empty, I tucked his semi-hardness back inside his shorts and sat back on my heels.
Lovello’s eyes remained closed as he slowly descended back to earth. The man was just so … beautiful. So sexy. So male. And I loved him. To pieces. I loved him.
When he opened his eyes, nothing had changed. They were still impassive. They still didn’t want me. They were glaring at me with such coldness. I couldn’t understand. I thought he said he’d take care of me. I thought he still wanted me. He’d called me ‘beauts’. And he only called me ‘beauts’ when he was really into me. But all I saw in his eyes now was … hate? It’s as if he wanted to see me like this. Hurt. Belittled. Begging for him. Needing him more than my next breath. It’s as if he wanted to break me.
Without an utterance, he swung his leg over the bench, grabbed his towel, tossed it around his neck and started towards the stairs. Tears sprang to my eyes as if I’d been sniffing onions. This treatment from him had now become unbearable. It wasn’t about the pregnancy anymore. It was about me wanting him with every fiber of my being, and him not wanting me at all.
“Love…” I called after him. He kept on walking as if he hadn’t heard me. “Love,” I repeated. And again, he ignored me. “Lovello Tyler Nelson!”
“What?!” he yelled, whirling around to face me with anger burning in his eyes. They seemed a bit glossy, but it could be the glossiness of my own eyes deceiving me.
“Why are you treating me like —”
“Because I love you!” he barked. His veins stood rigid along his neck, his face flushed red. “I love you so damn much and I don’t want to. You. Hurt. Me! You humiliated me. In front of my family, my friends, my staff … Jesus, Axia.” He roughly ran a hand through his hair. “I wanted to hurt you. I wanted to hurt you back in every way I could. I fucked Netta because I knew you were jealous of her. I fucked Nicole because you were jealous of her, too. I fucked both the McKel sisters over and over and over again, Axia. All the while telling myself that I was hurting you back. Even though you couldn’t see, I still felt like I was hurting you back.”
Lovello hurled his water bottle at the wall, looking like a ticked-off bull who just got his horns pulled. An angry Lovello was seldom. And I was beginning to think I was responsible for this enraged, foul-mouthed, insensitive person he was slowly becoming. “I want to hate you. To not love you anymore. I want to move on from you. But I know that’s never going to happen. Because you are mine. Made for me. From my rib. Without you, I feel like I’m goddamn suffocating. Nothing in this flippin’ world makes sense when I’m not with you.” A bitter laugh climbed up his throat. “So, I’m just gonna have to live with it. I’m just gonna have to sink my teeth into your serpent’s apple and live with the punishments for being led and ensnared into your sinful but oh so wonderful web. I’m just gonna have to live with the cold, heartless bitch that you are. Because you are mine and I am yours. I am yours, Axia. No one else can satisfy me, but you. Since I first experienced your touch, your kiss, your love, I knew that no one else would ever do. Just you. Only you.”
He made slow, calm strides toward me as I stared up at him, stunned speechless. Stooping to my level, he looked me dead in the eyes. “But I want you hurt. I want you pained. I want you to feel what I felt. That harrowing pain I’m yet to recover from, my heartless bitch.”
Unable to look at the sinister of a man that he’d become, I started to lower my head, but he gripped my chin and forced me to look back at him. “Start feeling pained yet? Whenever you start hurting and it becomes too much to bear, so much that you feel like hurling your ass off a bridge, let me know. Let me know that you’re hurt. That you hate the person you are inside. Because that’s when I’ll start loving you how you should be loved. For that’s the one thing I can’t not do. Love you.”
With that, he stood up and started out of the basement again. But as he reached the stairs, I heard the barking of that puppy I’d been hearing all week, along with the sound of small paws hitting on laminate steps. As the barking got nearer, the puppy sounded more and more like … Timo?
I sat up straight in curiosity, then shot up to my knees when the puppy bounded down the stairs and I saw that it was indeed Timo. So the barking that I’d been hearing all week was actually real. Timo had been here all along. But w
hy hadn’t Lovello let me see him? How did he even get Ally to hand him over?
Timo gamboled around Lovello’s legs, whining and wagging his tail as he’s wont to do whenever he wants to be petted.
“Timo!” I yelled, slapping my thighs for him to come to me. But my own puppy merely glanced in my direction, then redirected his attention back to Lovello.
I felt like wailing. Timo. My own dog of five years wouldn’t even acknowledge me.
A complacent smile slipped onto Lovello’s face as he bent at the waist to lift Timo in his hands, rubbing his favorite spot between his ears and mumbling, “You hungry, boy? Let’s go get you some food.”
“You’ve turned my own puppy against me? He didn’t even like you.” My voice was a hoarse whisper.
Lovello gave me a shit-eating grin and raised his brow. “Me? You did that all on your own.”
Bringing Timo’s face up to his, he brushed their noses as Timo licked his face. The guy wasn’t even a pet person! He never liked Timo and Timo never liked him. So what the hell was all this now? Did he want to hurt me that bad that he would go to this length?
“Look at him,” the pretentious ass crooned. “He’s so cute. How could you just give him up like that? Your own puppy … your own child. Just like that, you threw him down the drain without a care in the world. A life that belongs to you, that loves you so much. How could you?”
As he said this, his voice had grown cold, and I knew he was no longer talking about Timo, but about his child that I’d attempted to abort. “Oh, I know. It’s because you’re a bitch. With an insensitive heart that values the lives and opinions of no one but your own.” Turning Timo to face me, he said to him, “See that dark-haired, cat-eyed beauty over there? That’s our bitch. And she has a very, very black heart.”
Letting out an acerbic laugh, he mounted the stairs, making a show of petting Timo and leaving me feeling one hundred times worse than I’d felt before I came down here.