“I’m here. You okay?”
“I’m laying here wishing you were beside me, baby. I can’t seem to sleep without you beside me. I should’ve brought you. I know you’re upset. I’m sorry you’ve been through so much in the last month. I’m working on fixing things. I’m on that road to making things better. Promise I’ll find a way. Love you.”
“I heard Etta James on the radio today in a restaurant and miss you so much. I didn’t know I was lonely without you until I had you. Now I don’t think I would want to live without you. Can’t wait to marry you and dance again with you to that song.”
Then there was a link to a YouTube video link. Then another text.
“I miss the smell of your hair & how you wrinkle your nose at me & the way I wake up every morning with you all wrapped around me. Love how you keep wearing pink since I bought that pink fishing rod for you. Miss you. Write back?”
That was 4 days ago. He’d given up on messaging me. I touched the link to the video and it opened a YouTube window and started to play the Etta James song and it was playing to images from the Disney Wall-e movie. I loved that movie.
As the song filled the air so much emotion surged through me I thought I was going to fall over. When she sang about her heart wrapped up in clover the night she looked at him I thought about us in that field on his farm with me in the grass, him over me with sunrays practically bursting from him and how much emotion I’d felt in that moment. I thought about him dancing with me and singing this song in my ear. I pushed away thoughts of him screaming in my face with his belt in his hand and then I saw that couple on the stage in Vegas embracing one another after he gave her what she needed and she gave him what he needed. I thought about how amazing it was when I declared I was his in the bathroom in the hotel that night. The look in his eyes, the heat, the emotion. The freedom in being his was something I wanted now. Right now. When I gave into being his I didn’t have to feel anything but the bliss of giving myself over to him. I put the phone down and ran to the bathroom and hit the brakes when I got to the shower door.
He was still in the shower. Did I want to climb in there with him and bridge the gap between us? I was so fucking scared of what I felt for him, of what he’d made me into in such a short amount of time. I was so scared of who he could be. Did I embrace our relationship and take the good with the bad? Or did I stay in this shell, this sub-existence I was in for the past several days? This man bought me and at first I was so infuriated about it because it made me a thing that could be bought but thinking about him doing it to end his father’s hold on my father, it was something that spoke more of him thinking of me instead of himself. But it was still me being traded among these men like property.
But was it so awful to be the property of Tommy Ferrano? He loved me. He wanted a life with me. What kind of life we’d have, I didn’t really know, but I was the one he wanted to seesaw through light and dark with. He’d sent me lovely messages while he was gone. He’d missed me. I was here feeling sorry for myself while he was off trying to fix things to make our lives better and missing me while I was ignoring him. Regret lanced through me.
I pulled my sweatshirt up and over my head and unhooked my bra. I took my pants and panties down and pulled my socks off and then I opened the shower door. He turned around and looked at me and finger combed his wet hair out of his eyes and sighed. I pulled the elastic out of my hair and dropped it and then wrapped my arms around him and put my cheek against his chest.
He didn’t put his arms back around me, just stood there, and I thought maybe I’d pushed him too far. My heart squeezed painfully.
“Tommy,” I whispered into his chest and then touched my lips to his wet skin.
“What?” his voice was cold.
“I’ve been a naughty girl.”
His torso stiffened.
“I’ve been cold and distant and living in my head and I need you to bring me back to life. Show me who I belong to, that it’s not okay for me to be like this, to feel like a robot.”
His hands gripped my shoulders and he stared right into my eyes, straight into my soul, even. I needed this. We needed it.
“You’re free to go,” he said.
I frowned, “Huh?”
“You’re free. Go.”
He left me in the shower. He just left me there.
I pulled my chin off the floor and got into a bathrobe and when I came out of the bathroom, he wasn’t there. I exited via the patio doors and hurried down the stairs, water still dripping off me in just the long white robe and nothing on my feet and saw that all the garage doors were shut. The gates were closed and there were guards mulling about. I didn’t think he’d left that fast so I went back into the house through the main floor patio doors.
Not in the kitchen. Not in his office. Not in the family room. The door to the back hall was open.
I went down the back hall and heard thudding downstairs. I ran back up to the bedroom and queued up the song on my phone I’d been listening to multiple times a day from the laptop during my poker playing on the YouTube and quickly blotted up the water in my hair with a towel, then as I got to the bottom of the basement steps I slipped it into the pocket of the bathrobe. I could hear the thud, thud, thud very loudly. I found him in the gym. He was in just a pair of black gym shorts and he was beating the ever-loving life out of a big heavy bag, his skin still wet from the shower or maybe wet with sweat; I wasn’t sure.
I stood behind him.
“Hey,” I said softly.
He flinched and then started hitting the bag harder.
“Tommy.”
“You have until the count of ten to get outta my sight,” he said, not turning around.
“What? Why?”