Chapter 15 – Geralynn
Chapter Fifteen
Geralynn
Your worst enemy is the most fertile man you know.
I don’t care that a positive pregnancy test means our “freedom” because that so-called freedom is a fucking illusion.
I won’t be “free” at all. The contract Nicki forced me to sign will be effective immediately with the second stage kicking in as soon as a doctor detects a heartbeat.
I don’t want to think about any human being having a heartbeat that shares my blood and Renzo’s.
This baby will grow up calling a man who thinks of me as less than dirt their father.
I won’t be able to tell if I have morning sickness or genuine worsening anxiety about the reality of what’s happening here.
When Renzo sees the test, he wraps me up in a warm hug that makes me want to throw up. If Renzo is showing me affection, I’m in a shitty situation. This man thrives when I’m miserable.
“Don’t worry,” he whispers. “We can get back at my sister for doing this to us… together…”
A shiver travels down my spine. I don’t respond to him because I haven’t worked out my feelings about Nicki yet.
Involving Renzo in this conflict seems like a mistake.
I know he’s her brother, but doesn’t that mean she knows even more than I do how terrible of an idea this is?
I don’t understand Nicki’s motives. In her letter, she says that she wants to help me, but I can’t understand her reasoning.
I thought I knew Nicki. Now, I wonder if she’s more like Renzo than I thought. I feel like I’m caught in some twisted family game. Maybe Renzo was right about one thing – I’m not meant to be a part of their world.
Nicki opens the door. Rather, her assistant does.
We can’t see who exactly she has working for her due to his mask, but she found a man even bigger than Renzo.
I don’t know how Nicki armed her assistant before this timed release, but Renzo’s eyes travel immediately to the weapon in the guard’s hand and strapped to his body.
His grasp on my hand tightens and if I didn’t know Renzo any better, I would have mistaken the squeeze as an effort to comfort me or get closer to me.
Truthfully, he knows we’re better off united against Nicki and it’s his anti-social lizard brain’s last ditch effort at getting me to like him.
I can turn off my brain while Renzo has his dick inside me and focus on the pleasure but outside of those moments, I remain in complete control over my feelings toward him.
I remain unmoved by the past two weeks, more disgusted than ever by his relentless demands.
He’ll probably still want to draw me with my legs spread open to add to my humiliation.
He can never let those sessions go by without making some inappropriate comment about my body or skin color.
I don’t know why the hell Renzo thinks I want to hold his hand.
But I squeeze his hand back–only out of instinct.
“If we’re free, why do you have a gun?”
A distorted voice emerges from the masked bodyguard.
“Miss Taviani’s orders.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Not important. I will leave the house in five minutes. You two will be here surrounded by armed guards outside the perimeter, but otherwise with complete access to all the resources you need for survival. In two days, Nicki and her lawyer will bring over the rest of the documents along with legal representation for the two of you.”
He has a strange accent. I can tell even with the distortion. It sounds almost like a Philadelphia accent but a bit weirder. I don’t know if Renzo detects the accent, or if it’s an important detail. Renzo levels his gaze with the armed guard, but appears to accept our circumstances.
We both signed the contracts “No Retaliation Clause”. I didn’t know Renzo honored his word this much, but he doesn’t grab the gun and get us both killed like I secretly feared that he would.
“Perfect,” Renzo says. “Does Nicki have my car?”
“Your car is outside, fitted with a device that requires a code from Nicki for your key to work.”
“Who the fuck authorized this?”
He doesn’t actually answer my question. He just says, “Sorry, man.”
“It’s fine,” Renzo snaps bitterly. “You’re just a worthless rat doing a job.”
Renzo pushes his luck by using the word “rat” as an insult.
It’s one of the first things Nicki taught me about her family.
We were kids and she warned me that I was to never casually use that word in her house or it would send her family into a fit.
One of our other friends screwed up at a sleepover once in middle school and her mom almost fainted.
We might be prisoners, but Renzo must still have some power because the bodyguard doesn’t respond at all to the direct challenge. Within five minutes, he’s gone just like he promised and I’m alone with Renzo again for another two days with more “freedom” within our fancy prison.
Like the guard promised, there’s no sign of Nicki for two whole days.
When Nicki returns, I refuse to leave my position in Renzo’s reading chair to greet her in the living room. I don’t want to talk to Nicki. I want to read Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis in this chair and pretend that I’m not pregnant with my best friend’s brother’s baby.
I’m pretty sure that I’m off the hook when Renzo returns to his bedroom with a sheepish look on his face. Renzo doesn’t have the capacity to be genuinely sheepish.
“What do you want?”
He walks over to me and starts rubbing my shoulders. This doesn’t make Renzo come off as endearing as he thinks. But he finds the knots in my shoulders perfectly to physically assist him with manipulating me.
“Nicki wants to talk with you to repair your relationship.”
“I’m reading,” I respond, trying not to moan as Renzo hits and removes my knots with deft fingers. He’s such an asshole.
“I can see that,” he says impatiently, quickly stifling his impatience because he apparently needs me. “But Nicki is sad.”
“You don’t give a shit about that.”
“I don’t,” Renzo says. “But I’m trying to strategize, mop girl…”
There it is. That stupid degrading insult falls so easily from his lips.
He says it with such a sneering tone that makes what might otherwise sound ridiculous cut my spirit deeply.
I know Renzo genuinely considers himself above other people, and it’s uncomfortable to sit with the knowledge that I allowed this man to enter me and knock me up.
It doesn’t matter that I was under duress.
Ultimately, I did this for money. For my future.
For a legacy. The odds of a woman from my background leaving poverty are…
miniscule. This is my one chance at the lottery.
Nicki might be right that this is life changing money, but this wasn’t her choice to make.
She took my autonomy and I can’t forgive that overnight.
I might not ever forgive her for tying me to Renzo Taviani for the rest of my life.
She believes this experience will soften her brother, but I’m nowhere near that naive.
Hatred doesn’t change overnight. Babies don’t change hatred.
Nothing changes hatred. There’s no cure for it.
Nicki might want to believe the best about her brother, but it’s hopeless.
At least when it’s all said and done, I’ll get money.
I’ll get my law degree. Maybe I’ll even work for Plant, Parker & Nigel, LLC, the biggest Black-owned law firm in Buffalo, New York.
I’ll provide for this baby, so when Renzo inevitably wakes up from his sex haze and remembers that he hates me and Black people as a whole… I won’t need him.
Single mothers fall in love all the time.
If love is meant to happen for me, it will.
It always bothered Nicki that I made it out of my teens without losing my virginity.
She took it personally that I didn’t share her sexual escapades.
I shared with her how much it hurt to not have any guy I liked ever like me back.
Did Nicki somehow interpret that to mean that I wanted her to set me up?
Even if that’s what I meant, she knows that I hate Renzo. Nothing about what she did makes me want to talk to her. My heart feels strangely cold and empty, despite Renzo’s attempts to draw it out of me via a shoulder massage.
“What does she want from me?”
“Forgiveness.”
“That’s impossible.”
Renzo chuckles. “Okay. Then play her game. You want things out of your life, don’t you?”
Mostly, I want Renzo to be less of an expert at massaging knots out of my shoulders.
Whenever his touch sends incredible thrills straight through me, I want to jump off the dock and submerge beneath the murky green waters until I forget.
Renzo shouldn’t make me feel like this. I know I have access to self-respect.
Even if the sex is good, I keep my walls up during the day.
I ignore how I feel at night right before I fall asleep.
I’m pregnant, which means I’m hormonal and crazy.
Any positive feelings about Renzo must be related to that.
I can’t even think of the baby as his “demon seed” – that’s how powerful the hormones are already.
I’ll let myself love this baby as long as I remember to hate Renzo.
Forever. Even if he’s a damn good masseuse and a halfway decent strategist.
There are things that I want. Renzo entertains himself by keeping me with my legs spread all day, but if I have any intentions of being something more than Renzo’s baby mama, I need to study for the LSAT.
I need study books and materials so I can draft Renzo as my study buddy.
He might think food controls me, but I can come up with ways to control him too.
“I want to study for the LSAT.”
Renzo groans.
“What? Did you think I would ask for a sex swing and some lube?”
“It would be less boring than textbooks and study guides.”
“I have ambitions, Renzo. I’m not just some ‘mop girl’.”
He smirks. “Does that really get under your skin, janitor?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Fine,” he says, purposefully digging into my shoulder knot in just the right way so I have to stifle a moan of pleasure. “You want study guides. Tell her you’re working on forgiveness and…”
He leans in so his warm breath tickles my neck. “Get what you want, Geralynn.”
I hate how my stomach throbs and my pussy pulses against my will when Renzo says my name. It’s so rare for him to call me something that isn’t derogatory that just hearing Renzo say my name feels like praise. This man makes me feel so fucked up and he’s totally unapologetic about it.
I don’t even know what he wants, but I’m wary about playing into it. If getting involved with the Taviani family has taught me anything, it’s that I can’t trust either of them. That doesn’t mean Renzo doesn’t have good advice.
“Fine. I’ll go see her.”
Nicki sits at the kitchen island with a bottle of wine and a glass. She knows that I can’t drink, right?
“I know you can’t drink or smoke,” she says. “But I need this.”
Her self-pitying expression makes me want to scream. Is that a manipulation too?
“Was our whole friendship a lie?”
“What?”
She stops pouring wine and seems genuinely surprised at my response.
“Nicki. Best friends don’t drug each other and scheme like psychopaths.”
The word sends a flicker of a reaction through Nicki. She grips the stem of the wine glass until the tips of her fingers redden, but she doesn’t look up at me even after I drop the bombshell word “psychopaths”.
“In ten years, you will have a beautiful nine year old girl, the house of your dreams, a law degree, and we’re going to be sisters.”
“That’s not how that works.”
“You’re going to marry my brother,” she says calmly, tipping the wine back into her throat. Oh. Have I missed something? Nicki lost her mind. That must explain what’s going on right now. Nicki has gone crazy.
“I’m… not.”
“I know what I’ve seen over the years. The two of you hate each other more than any two people should even care about each other.”
“You realize that doesn’t even make sense.”
“It makes sense to me. You’re meant to be. I won’t wait the rest of my life for you both to figure it out.”