Chapter Six
~Christian~
“Holy and rude?” I repeated, confused, while barely containing the laughter that threatened to blow from me, when laughing was the last thing I should be doing.
She meant business and would keep her word, and I put that on everything that was holy and rude.
“Holy signifies my truthfulness in making you pay in ways that will be very rude for bulldozing your way into my life and making me deal with shit when I needed to be working to pay for school,” she explained bitterly. “Instead, I had to come home. Now, my budget is gone to hell… although the weather would’ve blew my ass here anyway. That’s not even the point, because you were pushing me in this direction first. So, thank you very much and if I had a step stool, I’d punch you for it..”
I roared with laughter. “I believe you’d try it.”
She was not anything if not truthful with others. Herself, not so much.
“Damn straight I would.”
I shifted on the bed to lay down on my back. “I’ll get it for you then.”
“Get what?”
“The step stool.”
“You would?”
I had thrown her off balance. If I was into bragging, I would’ve pumped my fists in the air, because I had her where I wanted her… sort of. Undressed, beneath me, and with my ring on her finger was the ultimate goal that was still very, very far from being achieved. It was wiser to just be alert and grateful that the first step, a rather damn small one, in getting her attention was completed. Only a series of giant leaps would get me to my final destination, but I was no damn kangaroo.
Therefore, no reason to brag when the energy needed for the work cut out for me was so great. Especially, when she sounded so sure I’d be regretting pushing her into dating or doing anything she didn’t want to. I was just as convinced she’d make me sorry as well. Foreign was like a bear; when poked, you got her claws. Good thing I was okay with a good mauling that would make me stronger if I survived. I wouldn’t really be alive without her though, so my all was going to be put into making her mine, so I didn’t have to coast through life any longer. Six months of that was brutal.
“Sorry about your budget, Foreign. Won’t happen again. Does six months of dating sound fair for not releasing the tape?” I spoke while holding my breath, balancing on a razor edge of uncertainty.
This could go either way—she could tell me to go to hell and would get away with it. If she didn’t, and that was what I was banking on, it would be stupid to take away all her control. Without being in possession of most of it, she’d feel extremely trapped by me instead of just a little. That feeling would take over her emotions, unable to feel anything else.
Extremely trapped by her parents was exactly how they made her feel. Look how well that worked out for them. No need in me going down a path where failure lay. If Ma-ling and Terrence had tried a different tactic with Foreign, she may well have been in Terrence’s life at the end where he had wanted her to be.
Sudden heart failure took the opportunity to make amends with her from him, opportunities that he could’ve grabbed if he hadn’t been as stubborn as his daughter was. I wasn’t following him down that path either, and I wasn’t going to my grave with regrets too. The next minute wasn’t promised to anybody, hence the façade of blackmail to get what I wanted more than my next breath while I was still breathing. If I failed anyway, then I could say I tried. Terrence couldn’t.
“How should I know if six months is fair?” she sniped. “Nobody’s tried to blackmail me before.”
“A year then?” I asked merely so she would pin down the time limit I wanted, herself.
Six months would seem like a breeze compared to a whole year, guaranteeing she’d jump on the lesser. I hoped. Control was what she thrived on, needed the most, so that was the game we’d play. If I hadn’t got her to at least like me by then, when I was scheduled to go back to Africa on a shorter trip of constructing another hospital, I was shit out of luck.
“Hell no, not a year, Christian!” she hollered directly in my ear. “Your demanding increments are supposed get smaller, not bigger.”
Chuckles erupted from me, and I had to wait until they faded. “I can’t do less than six months. Tough nut to crack, remember? Your outer shell is made of invisible titanium. A tool hasn’t been invented for that, and I need six months to find a cheap rocket scientist to invent one.”
Surprisingly, she giggled, a beautiful, airy sound that sat down on my groin like a ton of bricks and gave me instant wood. Damn, I wished she’d do that more often, I thought as I adjusted the tent leaning to the rightthe wrong way—in my slacks. Shit, maybe she shouldn’t laugh when I didn’t have access to her body.
“Six months it is. That’s it. That’s all, then you give me access to your home, security system, and your electronic devices along with their passcodes, so I can erase every single pixel of that blasted sextape. If I find out that someone else has a copy of it for safekeeping so you can barge into my life again and demand something else, I’m going to take a page out my girl’s Nevaeh’s book and start burning places up that even look like you’ve been there. There’s every chance your dead body will be in the middle of one of those fires. You got me?” Tough negotiator, this one was.
And computer-savvy too, didn’t see that coming. She was a sous chef for God’s sakes. Where did the need for computer skills come in, in a kitchen?
“Deal,” I chirped.
She snapped, “No, not deal. How many dates do I have to suffer through?”
I threw out the first number to hit my mind, “One hundred.” Not enough.
“Fifty,” was her swift comeback.
“One hundred and fifty.” Not enough either.
“Christian, smaller, not bigger dammit!”
Took everything in me to not burst out laughing at her outrage. “One hundred then.”
“Arrrghh!” she literally growled, making my blood pump faster.
I added a new sound to the growing list of the ones I loved from her, and that was just about every noise this woman made. God, she gave me life.
“Foreign, you said smaller. One hundred’s smaller than one fifty last I checked.”
“And you know one fifty wasn’t your first bid. Why am I explaining blackmailer protocol to the blackmailer?”
Protocol? I didn’t know there was one, but I hadn’t tried to extort anyone else before. Maybe she knew something I didn’t.
“I thought you hadn’t been blackmailed before,” I remarked just to extend the conversation, desperate to learn something new about her no matter what it was—something that would get me in her good graces would be perfect.
“I haven’t, but everyone understands the rules of negotiating,” she spat.
“This isn’t your typical deal.” No, it was fake blackmail with no rules… probably.
“Christian,” she rebuked, not loving the change in topic one bit.
“Fine, ninety-nine.”
“One number down? Please! That’s a joke, and I’m not laughing. Forty-five.”
I was tempted to raise the number again just to tease her. It was fun bantering with her, but I had her on the hook, needed to reel her in before she got too frustrated and jumped off the hook then braced herself for the never-coming backlash of our sextape never going public. She really was the type to take her chances when the odds were against her. Even when she didn’t know the odds were stacked in her favor, that she had me in the palm of her hands, and had the upper one.
“To show that I can be reasonable, how does sixty sound? Ten a month.”
She gasped. “You call making a sextape just barely inside the law, without my permission I might add, then holding it over my head to spend time with you reasonable?”
“No, I call ten dates a month just to talk and eat with you while spending time with you reasonable. Everything else is drastic measures on my part.”
“Agreed!” she hurled back, referring to my ‘drastic measures’ only, and this was where I pretended to not know that.
“Sixty it is then… unless, we’re still haggling.”
“No,” she murmured, her voice almost inaudible, weary. “Sixty is fine.”
She sounded like I had gotten the better of her. I didn’t like it, rather have her taking her frustrations out on my eardrum. Fighting me back. Sounding alive, the way she made me feel.
“That number doesn’t include when you ask me out on a date though, Foreign.”
“Are you out of your mind?” she yelped. “Don’t count on that, buddy!”
There she is.
“I wasn’t counting on that… but I wish I could,” I added quietly.
Now, I sounded beaten. Better me than her.
“Yeah, no, Christian, you’ll be doing all the asking for dates. I’ll be the one with the calendar marking big red x’s on it, counting down so I’ll know when I’m done with you.”
Her statement stung like she had turned loose a swarm of bees on me, bidding them to do their worse. At this point, I wished she had told me to go to hell. I wasn’t going to live through the lashes from her mouth. God forbid she tried to really kick my ass. Your mama warned you.
That she did. Now, I got to reap what I sown. Yeah, well, you asked for that when you chose this path, so don’t start complaining now.
And I won’t.
What I had to do was get her to the point of being able to tolerate me before she took an ax to my chest next, literally and figuratively. Time for the next step in the plan: give her space again to come to grips with me managing a few hours of her time for the foreseeable future and to cool down. I wanted her anticipating, not dreading, when I set up our first date. God, I really hoped time healed all wounds.
“Here’s the rest of the terms. We are exclusive, Foreign.”
“We? There’s no we!”
“For the next six months, there is a ‘we’.” Forever if all things went as planned, but wisely, I left room for failing epically and living without the woman that struck a chord with me just by emitting sound from her mouth.
Her soft exhale bumrushed my ear, caressing it through the damn phone. “And if I step out on you?”
Well, I’ve just been cheated on, but I sure as hell wasn’t about to tell her that. This was where bluffing came in, which I loathed. Too damn risky to be called out on blowing smoke up somebody’s ass, but there were no other options, which went extinct when I gave her the CD.
Before answering, I exhaled quietly, to clear away apprehension that she couldn’t ever know I felt because she’d used it against me for sure, then deflected her question. “Do I have to answer that, Foreign?”
Seconds passed brutally slow before she finally rejoined the chat, “No.”
“Good.”
“What happens if you step out on me?”
“I won’t,” I stated firmly.
“Damn, you said that quickly.” The disbelief in her tone was unmistakable, and then she giggled. “Still, just so we understand each other, I get to castrate you if you cheat on me, and that sounds like fun right about now, so think real hard about the consequences before doing it. I’m not into catching diseases.”
Diseases? Why was she worried about that when we weren’t going to be sleeping together? Oh! She didn’t realize what she’d said. Probably a bad idea to bring her attention to it. She would reinforce the barriers between us, as well as the part of her that might not think I was the lowest of the low right now, and then I’d never find a way into her heart.
“I said ‘I won’t’ quickly because I meant it, Foreign, but okay, if you catch me cheating, you can try to castrate me.” She won’t get the chance, because there was no one else I wanted as much as her. “On to the next nonnegotiable clause. If I miss any of the ten dates during a month, I’m assed out of those dates because it’ll be my fault. You get to not put up with me.”
“How sweet of you,” she sneered. “Now, let’s hope you miss a lot of dates.” More lashes from her tongue had doubts descending upon me like a flock of crows looking for a fresh carcass to get fat on.
What if she really wanted nothing to do with me and I was just delaying the inevitable; life without her? Well, I had tried being without her, and suffered more lonely days and nights than one man could stand. Now, I had to try being with her, and making the time pleasurable for her.
Stocking up more resolve to finish what I had started come what may, I shoved the doubts aside. “Foreign, dating you, not someone else, is what this is all about. If I wanted someone else, I’d be where they are. Next clause. You’re allowed to miss dates that won’t count against you for realistic reasons, such as having homework, women issues, and being sick, which I’ll be the judge of. Oh, and you have to provide irrefutable proof of all.”
God himself knew that a woman on her monthly was the time to avoid her. He created it after all, but if I thought running a hot bath and feeding her chocolate along with pain reliever would make her feel better, then I was all in.
“If you think for one second that I’ll provide you with a note from my professors, a doctor excuse like you’re my employer, or even a freshly used tampon, you’ve got another thing coming, buddy.” Freshly used tampon?
I choked on the ridiculousness of it. “Foreign, I’ll know if it’s that time of the month for you just by your feisty levels increasing. If I don’t implement you have to be dead, dying, literally bleeding or completing your education, you’d have more excuses than a man on death row to skip out on me, then we’d never get together. How else is getting to know me going to work? And it’s you that’ll have another thing coming if you can’t prove why I should let you out of our deal for one night.”
“Well, excuse me for not knowing how far you’ll go to get what you want, Christian! So help me God, when I catch you slipping, you’re going to realize just who the hell you’re dealing with the hard way.”
I believed her, wholly. “I take the blame for seeming as if I have no boundaries, but I do. Enough terms for one night. If I think of anything else, I’ll call you. For now, I’ll talk to you…” The line went dead before I finished, which I did anyway. “…later, sweetheart. Sweet dreams.”
After she killed the connection between us, I put my phone on the tall nightstand. Replays of the most interesting parts of our only two conversations, plus the X-rated images of her in my bed, fired off at random inside my head. That has been par for the course since we met. The unfaded memories and audible playbacks were like missiles, targeting soft spots that longed for Foreign. Soft spots that grew more painful the more time I spent without her.
My heart had this fucked up idea that if it kept reminding me of her, the equivalent of torture, I’d get off my ass and make a play for her. Stupidly, I came here and gave my own psyche new ammunition to aim at me, which was the latest conversation we had. I was this close but so far away from getting what I craved, her. Each reminder of that was like hot needles piercing my flesh, and this was why you don’t play head games with yourself. You know all the best places to hit within and lose more than you win.
Hard as I tried, like skipping to Africa for half a year to build a school, houses, a hospital, and adequate water systems in a small village in Kenya, I couldn’t let go of the idea of being with her again. Every time I tried, an epic battle between my mind and my heart ensued. The first skirmish between the two started the second I realized that she had skipped out of my bed. My heart won the battles by a landslide. Every. Single. Time.
My mind, never having a chance from the get-go, took a devastating hit that cost it all rights and territory to my dreams and my waking moments. Then my heart signed all rights and territory to it and my mind over to Foreign without my input or permission. Had she wanted the beating block in my chest, it would’ve been all good. Now, I prayed like hell that my mother wasn’t right when she warned me that I’d just make things worse with Foreign by forcing her hand.
I laid back then prayed for sleep. Thinking of her hurt more than it helped. When an hour rolled by, I figured sleep must’ve been busy elsewhere and needed something else to take my mind off all I was failing at. Work it was then, so I got up and went into the office.
Half an hour later, when the right email got sent to the wrong recipient, work was thrust out the window. Concentration shot to hell, and wishing I had an assistant, I got up from the desk only to plop down in the next room on a king-size bed draped in royal blue with the resort’s gold emblem in the center of it again, intending to just think. That wouldn’t screw up my livelihood at least. You’ve fucked with her money too, Christian.
The thought rocked me, and I bolted upright. The nagging feeling that had been with me since I got to my suite rose in intensity. It dawned on me that Foreign had been in a strange city for years, alone, struggling to make a life for herself when I could give her everything she wanted and more. Now, I was ‘blowing her budget to hell’.
Nothing should’ve bothered me more than making myself at home in her world where I clearly wasn’t wanted. I would’ve figured out what the nagging feeling was about much sooner if she didn’t have me twisted up inside, but my subconscious was on point; making sure I didn’t make another penny as long as her finances were compromised.
Usually, nothing stopped me from focusing on work, especially things I could easily take care of. Workaholic by choice, I didn’t like for anyone to have money troubles. Not knowing where the next meal was coming from and if the utilities would be on or off was something I couldn’t tolerate. No one else would either if I was aware of their struggle. Never would I be the reason anybody’s education was hindered.
Suddenly, I had more plans for Foreign, but these, she would never be aware of… if I could help it.