Chapter 12 Ivy
TWELVE
ivy
I took a seat at the kitchen table and immediately melted into the chair cushion.
And not in a good way. My head was heavy, so were my limbs and my eyes.
I lifted the cup of coffee I’d just brewed to my lips, taking a slow sip of the hot caffeine, moaning a little at the bite of heat against my tongue and the instant gratification of tasting the robust, sweet coffee.
The night before was a horror show. Me, home alone with a baby that wouldn’t settle down and stop crying unless I was holding him.
Thankfully, I remembered the teething essentials Baby Love’s grandparents provided Leo and me with when we first brought him home from the hospital.
The teething essentials were packed in a gift basket with other things we could use now and later.
I thought it was a bit much, but that proved to be incorrect.
I’d finally gotten him settled down a few minutes prior. He just kept bringing his little fingers to his gums and biting down whenever he wasn’t hollering at the top of his lungs.
I dropped my head into my hand and smoothed my fingers against the inner corners of my eyes.
Even light was too much for me at that hour, which was why I was sitting in the kitchen in the dark. I needed to sit in the dark, as tired as my eyes were.
This was the first moment throughout the day that I had gotten some reprieve.
I planned to do some recording earlier today, then decided I’d take care of it tonight after putting Baby Love to sleep, but dammit, I was too tired to lift a camera, much less record a video that would be half as interesting as the one that garnered so much attention previously.
I heard Leo chuckling as he stepped down the stairs behind me.
“Of course, baby,” Leo said, his voice growing louder as he drew near to the kitchen. “I should be out there in the next hour.”
I turned to look at him just as he stepped into the kitchen, switching on the light.
I cringed, turning away from the overhead light in my seat at the kitchen table to cover my eyes with my fingers.
He laughed before the room lit up, then he quickly stopped, saying into the phone, “I’m about to head out now. I’ll call you in the car.”
I inhaled a deep breath and let it out really slowly through my nose.
Then there was that. Leo and his bullshit.
We had sex. I could finally allow myself to put a name to what happened that night. You wouldn’t even know we had sex the way he’s been walking around here, avoiding me.
“I didn’t know you were down here,” he said low, taking quick steps to the fridge. “I just needed some water.”
He smelled good. Looked even better. In all black, his designer wool coat and Chelsea boots already on. No different than the way he was smelling and looking the night before… and the night before that. And the night before that...
Every night since the hookup in his bedroom, Leo had been going out. With Vanessa.
I tucked my lips into my mouth to rub, trying my hardest to get rid of the feeling that thought elicited whenever I thought about him going out with her and what he was doing with her.
I really shouldn’t have cared, but somehow I did… now.
“You waiting for a burglar or something?”
I lifted my eyes to him.
“Why were you sitting in the dark?”
“Because I’m tired.” I nodded my head, still looking at him. “I’ve been up for the past 24 hours. How about you?”
He blinked in response.
“You look well-rested.” I pressed my lips together. “Jubilant.”
He was also different. Leo looked different to me since the hookup in his room. He looked at me differently as well since then.
Unable to maintain eye contact with me for more than a few seconds. Always needing to focus on a distraction to have a reason not to look my way.
I shook my head, moving my attention to the baby monitor he picked up from the city weeks ago.
He got it the day after I had to leave Baby Love with him to take a much-needed shower.
For a few days after that day, Leo was a present guardian to the baby.
Showing up and helping to care for Baby Love.
But lately, specifically after our hookup days ago, he’d been distant.
And I couldn’t bring myself to ask why. Because I didn’t want to hear the truth. Because what happened that night was still something I was processing. Alone.
Leo cleared his throat, gesturing toward the door. “I’m about to head out.”
“I heard,” I said, snapping my neck in his direction. “Must be nice...”
Leo kissed his teeth.
“… to be able to decide on a whim to drive close to an hour to the city to go eat, drink, and be merry.”
“Ivy, don’t give me that shit.”
I jerked my head back.
“I got games every other day,” he started. “Flying out and making sure to fly back the same damn day so you won’t be here alone with Baby Love the whole time—”
“And somehow I still feel alone with him, hmph.” I feigned shock. “Funny how that is.”
He pressed his hand to his chest. “I’m here during the day. I help out.”
“For an hour or two,” I said. “After that, you’re back in your room, sleeping off the drinking and partying from the night prior before you’re up again taking your ass back out for another night of drinking and partying.
” I shook my head. “You’re using the city and Vanessa,” I gritted out, “as an escape from your responsibilities here.”
“When did you start having a problem with how I spend my time, Ivy?”
Since he made me feel heaven on earth while still alive. Very alive.
There hasn’t been a minute in any day that I hadn’t thought about that night he and I had. It was the most random thing I’d ever done, but the most soul-stirring too. I don’t hook up. It has never been my thing. Kendra used to say I was too in my head to do it right, and she wasn’t lying.
The one time I tried hooking up with a guy I wasn’t dating, before the guy and I could get back to my place and actually do it, I had to change my mind because I kept wondering what would happen after.
What we would say to each other? How would I send him home?
All the questions living in the moment has no answers for, so I’ve just understood hooking up as being for everybody else and not me.
But the night Leo and I had sex unexpectedly, everything just flowed.
Everything just felt so right, including the act itself.
I didn’t need to get in the headspace to focus or concentrate.
Didn’t need to overthink, wondering if he was okay and if I was making him feel as good as he was making me feel.
I was just feeling and reacting from that feeling, and it was the most amazing thing.
But he’s been a jerk ever since.
“If I were you,” Leo said, pulling me back into the kitchen with him. “I would take more advantage of the Simmons’ and their offer to watch Baby Love.”
I kissed my teeth. “I would never do that. I would never ask them to watch the baby so I could go out and drink and fuck in the city.”
He scoffed a laugh. “Who said anything about fucking?”
I squeezed my eyes closed, pissed at myself for saying the one thing that was really bugging me.
Because I knew that’s what he had to be doing with Vanessa.
That’s all they ever did. He’s joked about them barely having conversations because they spent most of their time on beds always having sex.
So I knew that’s what they had to be doing with his frequent visits to the city.
Leo held two hands up in front of himself.
“Look,” he said, running a hand down his beard. “You’re tired right now and understandably frustrated…”
And confused as to what the hell we are at this point.
“I get it.” He nodded. “I’m just saying you can take a break from all this too, Ivy.”
I rolled my eyes away from him.
“You can get out there, enjoy the life you thought you were gonna have before all this shit went left.”
“I don’t want to do what you’re doing, Leo.” I turned in my seat to face him completely. “I don’t want to be a deadbeat, just dropping that baby here, there, and everywhere.”
His brows shot up. “A deadbeat.” He clenched his jaw next. “You calling me a deadbeat now?”
I just stared at him.
He hollered a laugh. “Wow. And for the fucking record, you wouldn’t be dropping him here, there, and everywhere. He’d be going to his grandparents. Grandparents who offered to take him whenever.”
“You just don’t fucking get it.” I shook my head. “Handing the baby off to others isn’t a solution to the overall issue here, Leo.” I pointed at him next. “We don’t even have a name for him yet.”
“Here we go with this shit,” he expressed lowly.
“It’s been three months, and you haven’t been around long enough for us to decide what we are going to call him.”
“Choose a fucking name then, shit.”
“Choose a fucking name,” I repeated, scoffing a laugh and looking away before refocusing on him. “The point still remains. You have been going out way too much. You have been clubbing, dining, and whatever the fuck else you’re doing when you’re not here… you’ve been doing it too damn much.”
“And who the fuck made you the authority on that shit?!” he shouted. “Hmm? I ain’t married to you. We’re not together.”
I scoffed.
“I am trying, Ivy,” he stressed. “I’m trying, aight? I’m trying my best to balance my career, my life, and a life I didn’t get to choose. I am fucking trying here!”
It started as a sound of the baby stirring in his crib, the sound echoing around the kitchen through the baby monitor. A second later, Baby Love released a sharp cry, which made me close my eyes. It wasn’t only his crying that made me close my eyes. It was my attempt to keep the tears in.
My life hadn’t felt like my life in three months, and at the rate shit was going, it probably never would. Especially now that I’d slept with Leo, who I always felt was just a friend, but now I couldn’t place him.
I kissed my teeth, lifting my mug and bringing it to my lips to take a large gulp, knowing it would be cold by the time I made my way back downstairs to finish it.
As I pressed my hands onto the table to stand, Leo told me, “Nah, I got it.”
“It’s fine,” I spat.
“I said I got it,” he replied with a level of bass that made me sit my ass back in my seat.
We stared at each other for a moment, Baby Love crying in the background.
How could this have been the same man that made me feel all the good feelings that were humanly possible to feel at one time? Every time I recalled that night, my mind transported me back to that space and time, me coming beneath him for so long. An orgasm I thought would last forever.
“Just relax,” he said softly. “I’ll take care of him before I head out.”
He was out of the kitchen a second later, making his way up the stairs to Baby Love.
I shook my head to myself, dropping my forehead into my hand next.
Would we ever talk about it? Was it him going out or was it him going out to see Vanessa that bothered me?
Why did I care? That night he and I shared should’ve been nothing, but then again, I don’t know how to hook up, so I’m pretty sure I didn’t do it right.
Because I don’t think I should be feeling this way.
I dropped my head back between my shoulders, only lifting it again when I heard Leo’s voice through the baby monitor.
“Hey, hey, what’s up?” Leo said softly as he entered the room. “Shh, you aight, you aight. Come here.”
His voice sounded different. Calmer and so damn… sexy.
I brought the monitor closer to me, bringing it closer to my ear.
“Why you in here making all this noise anyway? Hmm?”
The tension in my shoulders and chest gradually released as I listened.
It was amazing how quickly Baby Love settled the moment he heard Leo’s voice.
“I got you something,” Leo said next. “The good stuff too. That liquid gold, homie.”
I snickered to myself while shaking my head.
“You know you living the life right?” Leo asked Baby Love next. “You get up whenever you want to, celebrated when you fall asleep, get someone to get you a bottle. Sometimes it’s me, often it’s that fine ass lady down there giving me hell right now. Man, let me tell you.”
I kissed my teeth.
“You are very loved, little guy,” he whispered. A second later, there was the sound of him giving Baby Love a kiss. That made me press my hand to my chest. “You still scare me, but… you are very loved.”
There was silence after that and only the sounds of Baby Love drawing milk from his bottle, making gratifying baby sounds as Leo fed him. Baby Love’s milk-drinking sounds always melted my heart hearing it in real time.
Leo was good with him. It was something I noticed after the night I left Baby Love with him. He just needed to be around more often and not acting like we didn’t just inherit an entire baby which, yes, meant our lives, and the lives we knew, had to change.
Leo was right, though. Life wasn’t life, and it had become hard without warning, but shit, I was figuring it out, and I couldn’t help but feel like I was figuring it out alone.
Especially now with the hookup in the mix causing even more confusion in my headspace.
“Aight,” he said low, taking careful steps down the stairs behind me. I glanced over my shoulder to meet his eyes. “He’s sleeping again. I fed him, burped him, all that.”
I said nothing, just kept looking at him.
He draped a long arm over the staircase’s banister. “So, we good now?”
What a loaded-ass question. And good on what exactly?
Not wanting to be the Ivy I knew got under his skin, I nodded.
“Mm-hmm,” I added.
But could we ever be good again?
“Aight.” His back was to me as he pulled open the house door, stepping out. “I’ll see y’all in the morning.”
Damn.
Just like that.
I rolled my eyes and inhaled a deep breath, my shoulders tensing and my heart too.
Did Leo feel anything the night we were intimate?
I know he has a lot of sex. Vanessa was the most serious non-relationship he’s ever had.
Before her, it was a different girl every other day.
Random-ass women he stacked up for one purpose, to fuck, and fuck often.
But did he not feel anything with those women?
Any of them? Did he not feel anything with me?
I resolved in that moment that those were way too many questions to have without answers. And I’d get them… from Leo.