Chapter 18 – Geralynn #2
The insult doesn’t bother him. Renzo never allows anyone else’s opinions to influence how he thinks or what he feels about himself. He stares at me with his unnerving, reptilian focus. “I love you.”
Does he think repeating those words makes it any easier for me to understand what he means? I look down at the practice test in front of me pretending that the words aren’t swimming together. There’s no way he means this.
“You heard me,” Renzo repeats. “I love you.”
My eyes snap to him and I wish I didn’t feel so frustrated with him, but I immediately feel resentment from him doing this.
Renzo doesn’t feel love for anyone or anything but himself.
He might love his sketches, but that doesn’t count as loving me.
Renzo mistakes his new obsession with breeding for love, but he has no idea what that means.
“Renzo, please. Stop with the distractions. This situation hasn’t changed your fundamentally held beliefs about race.”
He reaches across the table and allows his fingers to brush the top of my hand.
The electricity that follows will never stop making me feel guilty.
But it’s not love. I don’t feel any love towards Renzo.
We tolerate each other. Renzo and I help each other because his sister threw us into this situation. Sure, we have sex… But that’s not love.
“What do you want me to do?” he asks calmly, but without relenting either his past or future positions on the matters between us. “You want me to go back and stop myself from calling you names? We’ve been together for weeks, Geralynn.”
Renzo has this quirk of saying my name with a slight Italian accent. I wish it didn’t completely turn me on to hear his smooth voice purring the three syllables of Geralynn, but it sends a shiver of arousal straight between my legs.
“Your sister forced us together. Once the baby gets here, we won’t have to spend all day together or look after each other. You can go back to screwing Italian girls or Canadian girls or whatever you did before Nicki shoved us together.”
“I want to be with you.”
He runs his thumb along the underside of my palm.
No. The energy travels from Renzo’s thumb straight through my palm and all the way up the length of my arm.
What would loving this man even look like?
We hate each other. He can’t mistake our natural human responses to captivity as some type of deep emotional connection.
“You want to own me. There’s a difference.”
He shakes his head, dismissing me immediately. “There isn’t.”
I continue to find his stubbornness irritating.
“You can’t be this easy to convince, Renzo. So please, just drop it. I want to improve my score on the LSAT.”
“I love you.”
“Stop it.”
“I’m crazy enough to change my mind like this.”
“I’ve known you basically my whole life and you never once hinted at even remotely liking me.”
“Then why didn’t I get rid of you?”
“That’s hardly where the bar for a decent man lies.”
“I got rid of each one of my sister’s boyfriends or friends that I didn’t like. Yet, the one I supposedly hated the most ends up here. Pregnant. With my baby.”
“We were drugged.”
“I could have strangled you.”
“But you didn’t,” I respond, struggling to hide the bubbling frustration mixed with all the other emotions I am downright desperate to suppress.
Why does Renzo have to push this now? I’m 10 weeks through this pregnancy, at a point where just about everything else about my body and my future will change.
I can’t think about my feelings for him when I don’t even know which one of my feelings belong to me and which ones are purely derived from the hormonal cocktail coursing through my body.
He hates me. And he doesn’t know how fucking confusing it feels to be pregnant for a man who hates my guts and visibly recoils at my presence during the day but tongue fucks me to orgasm at night.
I can’t sign up for a life spent in this confusing push-pull of Renzo’s emotions.
It’s much easier to deal with him hating me and the clear cut “relationship” we had back then.
It is so much easier to hate a racist than to love him.
“Don’t expect me to be impressed that you didn’t strangle me,” I say to Renzo, meaning it, but struggling to hide all the other feelings beneath my anger with him. He had no right to kiss me or touch me the way he did while we were trapped together and inspire all these confusing feelings in me.
He could have just knocked me up and left it at that.
He didn’t have to have me perched open on the table with my legs spread open.
We didn’t have to get to know each other.
Renzo tricked me into this painful intimacy where he now wants to keep me and I can barely keep my head above water when I’m in the same room with him.
“I have had hundreds of opportunities to kill you or torture you and each time… I can’t bring myself to hurt you because I don’t see you as less than human at all.”
“What a glowing compliment.”
My biting sarcasm does nothing to stop my heart from racing anxiously. I would say anything to restore my control over myself, but nothing I can think of works. Renzo takes my hand and presses it to his lips which is the worst possible thing he could have done aside from…
“I love you,” he says again, slamming the final nail into the coffin with a damaging thud. I let out a loud, frustrated noise and slam the LSAT book shut, getting up from our otherwise peaceful study session and hustling towards the door. I need space from Renzo right now.
Of course, he doesn’t fucking get it. Renzo closes the distance between us easily with his much larger stride, grabbing my wrist and forcing me to whip around and face him with all my ugly emotions pouring out.
“LET GO OF ME.”
“I want to talk to you.”
“I don’t want to talk to you!”
I turn on him and the adrenaline coursing through me takes control.
With Renzo chasing behind me, I push the double doors to the dining room open and find very little air waiting for me outside.
I just need to get away from him. Without looking back and without thinking at all about where I’m going to run away from Renzo in an isolated mansion – I run.