by Ju Ephraime
Damien had remained quiet during the exchange. But no sooner had Ms. Andrews walked out the front door than he pounced on Jake, firing questions at him in rapid succession until poor Jake had to tell him to slow down.
“I take it you would like to have Lisa back for a second interview?” Jake inquired, with a smile in his voice.
“I have not decided. I am still trying to make up my mind. Something about her unnerves me. I will give you my decision tomorrow.”
With that, he got up and began feeling his way to his bedroom. He needed some privacy, and Jake had better not follow him or offer to assist him right now. Reaching his room after what to him seemed like a very long walk, he sat on the edge of his bed and tried to go over the entire interview. He had difficulty concentrating because he was not able to get Lisa’s voice out of his head. The scent of her seemed to cling to him, which was strange because he’d only shaken hands with her once upon her arrival. He’d purposely not touched her hands when she was leaving at the end of the interview. He was tempted to walk to the sink to wash his hands, but something stopped him. Some masochistic side of him wanted to keep her around as long as he could. He knew if he were to hire Lisa it would cause an upheaval in the way he’d lived his life up till now. But he felt alive, really, truly alive for the first time in a long while, and the feeling was intoxicating, and he wanted more of it. The decision was made. He wanted to experience more of Lisa!!
He would instruct Jake to have her back for a second interview, and he would judge for himself if her effect on him were real or imagined.
The next day, Lisa arrived on time for her second interview. Damien decided he would remain in the background and allow Jake to conduct the interview while he stayed in the adjoining room. The effect of her scent on him was no less powerful. He became aroused just inhaling her scent. The tone of her voice did not help matters because her voice was deep and sultry. It made one think of silk sheets and warm bodies between those sheets. His imagination was running rampant.
His reaction to this young woman was so unusual that he became alarmed. He had given up on ever having those feelings again because, ever since his accident, he had not felt any desire for the opposite sex. He thought it was a psychological effect of losing his sight, and his doctor had agreed. However, Ms. Andrews was making him question his conclusion and reexamine things. This annoyed him because he was happy and content not to have to deal with the emotional hassle involved in trying to engage in a relationship with the opposite sex.
He felt inadequate because he depended on his sight during lovemaking, and he would be at an enormous disadvantage without it. He wouldn’t see the reaction on his partner’s face, a preference for most men because men were, by nature, visual creatures. He needed to see and watch what was taking place in his bedroom. This darkness in which he existed had not
worked for him before, so he believed his days in the bedroom were at an end. Now he was experiencing this powerful reaction to Ms. Andrews. Not that he was contemplating having an affair with her, but his head said one thing, and his body was clearly thinking another.
He instructed Jake to offer Ms. Andrews the position because he wanted to examine this phenomenon further. Also, he planned on using her in a very limited capacity for his personal care; he would try to do the majority of it on his own.
Ms. Andrews accepted the job offer, and she agreed to assume the position within three weeks. This way, she would have an opportunity to work with Jake to learn the routine before he left. Jake had promised that he would not leave until he was comfortable that Lisa could handle the job. Damien, on the other hand, had his own set of issues with Ms. Andrews that were not job related.
Four
Damien began questioning the soundness of his decision to hire Ms. Andrews the very first day she reported for work. Jake was not present, and Damien was forced to welcome her with a handshake. His reaction to her was immediate, so for her entire first day, he sat in his chair with an erection, which just would not quit.
He did not move from the chair until he’d sent her out of the room under the pretense of taking the mail to the post office. He had a dilemma. What was he going to do if this woman had this powerful effect on him every time he was in her presence?
He felt as if he were caught between heaven and hell. He had no idea how to handle the situation so he remained in his room and allowed Ms. Andrews to work with Jake for the duration of her training.
He’d thought having Lisa spend the majority of her time with Jake would’ve helped him, but it seemed to have made the situation worse. He tried going to bed early so that he could ease his discomfort. But there was no relief for him because he could not sleep. And when he did eventually fall asleep, he swore he could smell Ms. Andrews in his room. He knew that was not possible because her room was in the far north end of the building. But he had no explanation as to why her scent seemed so strong in his room. He was haunted by the odor of violet.
It was approaching three weeks since Ms. Andrews had begun working with Damien and, during those three weeks, not once did Damien have a good night’s sleep. Every morning he’d wake up to the strong odor of violet all around him. Damien began to question his sanity. He thought he was going mad. But it did not make sense that somehow the odor was stronger in his room in the mornings. He began to suspect that the only way Ms. Andrews’ scent could be in his room would have to be from her having been there. He decided he would have to try out a hunch the next time he smelled her scent in his room.
The scent was so strong it would often wake him, and then he could not get back to sleep because he would have an erection that would not go away. He could not even relieve himself because he knew he would not be able to dispose of the evidence without someone, possibly the housekeeper, Jake, or even Ms. Andrews, knowing his problem. Therefore, he kept a tight rein on himself and would not seek the satisfaction that his body so badly needed. Before his accident, this would not have been a problem because all he had to do was take a long shower, but given the fact that he was not able to see his surroundings, he did not want to chance someone walking in on him.
Damien did not have long to wait to test his hunch. The opportunity came that very night, not long after he’d fallen asleep. He awoke to the strong odor of violet all around him. He kept his eyes closed and called out, “Ms. Andrews?” He needed to prove to himself that he was not going mad. Imagine his surprise, when he heard her voice answering him from the dark.
“Yes, Damien. And please, call me Lisa.”
“Okay. Well, Lisa, why are you in my room at this time of the night?” he asked.
“I always come in to check up on you before I retire for the night.”
“You always come in to check up on me?” Damien asked, incredulously.
“Yes,” she again replied. “Jake asked me to do so to make certain you did not need anything. You are always asleep before I retire for the night, but I come in anyway.”
Damien was astounded. Why would Jake ask Lisa to do what he himself did not do and had never done? Was Jake trying to torture him? He began to wonder if Jake was aware of Lisa’s effect on him and his reaction to her. If this was Jake’s idea of a joke, he did not think it was funny. He would have it out with him in the morning.
Just then, Lisa interrupted his thoughts with the question.
“Is there anything you need?”
For a moment, Damien toyed with the idea of responding, “Yes, you,” just to see her reaction, but then again he could not see, so he had better leave well enough alone. She walked out of his room, but her effect lingered long after she was gone.
The next day, Damien had a talk with Jake about his instructions to Lisa, but Jake pretended he did not know what Damien was insinuating. He was very adamant that he only asked Lisa to look in on Damien because he himself always looked in on him before he turned in for the night. Damien was speechless.
“You always looked in on me?” Damien asked Jake again. He needed to
be certain he understood Jake correctly. “I was not aware of this. Since when did you start looking in on me?”
“From the first night you returned home from the hospital. You had a difficult time sleeping and were constantly twisting and turning, and several times, you almost fell off your bed. But on one occasion you did end up on the cold floor and spent the entire night there. The doctor feared you would injure yourself in your sleep, so I was assigned the task of checking in on you. I have been doing it from back then until I turned over the responsibility to Lisa. If you do not want her to visit you while you are asleep, just let me know and I will ask her to stop.”
Damien hated hearing himself referred to as a responsibility, but for now, he would swallow that bitter pill, although truth be told, he really had no other choice.
“It is not that I do not want her to come into my room in the middle of the night. It’s just that I have a difficult time getting back to sleep after she leaves. You know my hearing has become very acute now from overcompensating for the loss of my sight.”
“I will ask her to be quieter in her nightly visits to your room. It’s a funny thing. You were never aware of my presence in your room the many nights I visited you.”
Damien had the distinct impression Jake was laughing at him, but he chose to ignore him for now. However, that did not address his nightly torture, which continued for several weeks. There was no reprieve for him because his problem did not go away with the daylight. He remained in a state of arousal all day. This had him primed, and as a result, he was always in a foul mood. Unfulfilled desires and thoughts of Lisa consumed him, night and day, day and night. His brain could not tell the difference. He was like a man possessed. His obsession with Lisa was beginning to take a toll on him. He had painted a mental picture of her in his mind’s eye, and it drove him insane, not knowing if the reality matched his imagination.
He could tell she was tall from the sound of her voice, which came from way above him when he was sitting and she was standing next to him. He visualized her as being almost as tall as he was, and he was over six feet tall in his bare feet. He could not tell if she was
fat, thin, flat-chested and ugly, or even the color of her hair and eyes. It was very exasperating. Something had to give, and soon.
Five
That night Damien was in his room, asleep. He couldn’t tell exactly what woke him, but he knew someone was in his room. He felt the air shift around his body, which gave him an indication that someone was leaning over him. He took a shallow breath in, and then he smelled her—the odor of violet. Always before, he had purposely tried not to inhale too deeply because he thought, by resisting the scent, he was resisting Lisa and her effect on him. Tonight, however, he opened his senses to her unique scent, and it invaded his body like a drug. He inhaled deeply, and it hit him like a punch in the stomach.
He could no sooner control himself than a starving man could resist a plate of food placed before him. He reached up, grabbed her, and rolled her underneath him in one movement, and without speaking or saying anything to her, he began kissing her. He was not satisfied with a simple kiss. He was practically devouring her in the kiss. His tongue began having a duet with hers. So consumed was he with passion that it took him a while for his brain to register that she was kissing him back just as hungrily, moaning with every thrust of her tongue.
That sound penetrated his sex-clouded mind, and he began to pull away from her. But she reached for him with both hands and pulled him back down to her mouth, and he was lost.
He was not prepared for the need that threatened to overwhelm him. He tried slowing down, but he had waited too long. He had been too long without the company of a woman. He did not know how to handle the sensations. Sensations the like of which he had never felt before were rocking him. The part of his brain that still functioned was telling him to stop, but he could no sooner stop kissing her than he could stop breathing. They were both tearing at each other’s clothes.
This slowed them down somewhat. Then his other
senses kicked in. He could not see her, and he knew he loved the scent of her, but God, she felt good beneath him, all lean and compact. Her skin was smooth as silk. Thank God she was not flat-chested. She was perfect! But he had to stop because this woman was his employee, and he did not feel it was right to take advantage of her. He started it, and he would end it.
“Lisa,” he said. “We have to stop this before it goes any further and we do something we’ll both regret.”
***
Lisa was breathing hard as if she had run several miles uphill, but she did pull back and made a move to get out of his bed, which took her three tries. Her legs were not quite steady. They felt as if they would give way under her any minute. She was forced to lean into the bed to take the bulk of her weight off her legs if she wanted to maintain her dignity. She did not want Damien to realize how much being close to him affected her.
Standing on the side of his bed, Lisa began carefully moving backwards, keeping her eyes on Damien the entire time. She did not feel she had the willpower to turn and walk away. So, by walking backward, she’d be able to see if he made the slightest move towards her, and she knew she would have no hesitation moving back into his arms. They felt so wonderful around her. Being in his arms, she forgot he was blind because there was so much unleashed power radiating from him. His ability to flip her over so easily was a testament to his powerful strength. She was fascinated by the hard, lean length of his body, the way the muscles flexed and rippled underneath his skin as he lay there, his top half exposed to her hungry eyes.
Lisa felt a breathless, painful ache in the region of her heart as she contemplated the situation between Damien and her. She had taken this job to be away from all manner of temptation. She’d had only one serious relationship, and it had ended badly. Not because her heart had been broken, but her pride, more than anything, had been wounded.
All throughout school, she had purposely not gotten involved with any of the guys who were sniffing around her. She had to keep telling them she was not interested in seeing anyone, and that her schooling was more important to her. She had taken a loan to finance her education and had no intentions of repeating any of her classes. She’d seen some of her classmates having to repeat classes because they were involved with some guy who cheated on them, or they had gotten pregnant and had to drop out of school. No way. She’d worked too hard to get into that school to throw it all away because of some guy.
So she had graduated from nursing school with honors and had been able to secure a great position as an ER nurse at one of the two large hospitals in her hometown. She liked the job well enough and had been making great strides towards becoming supervisor. She felt she would finally be able to relax and give some attention to her personal life, which is why she had been receptive to Liam when he began paying personal attention to her. She did not encourage him, but she did not discourage him either.
Liam had been the newest heartthrob in the ER. He didn’t appear to encourage the women, but most of the nurses were making a play for him. She didn’t like men who were too pretty, so he was most definitely not her type. That was until he began paying special attention to her and she forgot her most fundamental rule—you don’t eat where you sleep or something similar to that.
Looking back, she had to conclude she had just been lonely, and any attention was better than no attention, and she had finally given herself permission to date. Unfortunately, she had chosen the wrong man.
It turned out that Liam was a selfish, egoistical man who felt he was God’s gift to women. Lisa had pointedly ignored him, so she had gotten under his radar. He had made a bet with the other doctors in the ER that he would have her on her back underneath him inside a week…and he almost had.
They had been spending a lot of free time together, the occasional lunches and coffee breaks, walking to and from the parking lot to work, that sort of thing.
One Friday afternoon, almost a week into t
heir casual dating, he’d invited her out to dinner. Although a tiny voice had whispered to her to take it easy, she ignored it, telling herself it was just dinner. What could go wrong with just dinner?
That night Liam arrived on time at her door, at precisely 8:00 p.m. She didn’t allow him inside but grabbed her evening purse and raced out to meet him before he could ring the doorbell again.
If she’d thought Liam looked pretty in his white lab coat, which is the only thing she had seen him in, he looked positively ravishing in the dress trousers and light blue fitted shirt he wore that night. The blue in the shirt brought out the blue of his eyes, and with the hair falling on his brow, he was a sight to behold. She remembered pinching herself to see if the entire thing was real.
***
She wasn’t the only one taken-aback, because Liam did a double take when she walked out of the house in her silk, cream-colored sheath that hugged her body in just the right places. The dress was sexy, but classy and the cream color of the dress had given her newly-colored red hair shine.
Liam had made reservations at a local Japanese restaurant, which had a great sushi bar. He hoped she liked sushi.
In no time, they were on their way. He’d made the dinner reservations for 8:30, giving them some time for a few drinks before dinner.
***
They walked into the bar, which was pretty full for a Friday night. The atmosphere in the place was vibrant and alive. She wasn’t certain why, but it might have been the kind of music playing in the background. It sounded like a pulse beat, giving her the impression that the walls were alive, and if she placed her hand on them, they too would vibrate.
Liam ordered a drink for himself and when he asked her what she wanted to drink, she foolishly said, “I’ll have whatever you are having.”