My mouth opened then closed as I fought the perplexity over his behaviour. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me, Zo. Who the fuck is that gormless twat? You looked rather…
close
.”
What – the – fuck!
“Excuse me?” I repeated stupidly. My mouth wasn’t acknowledging the words my brain was currently telling it to express as I watched his fury radiate in waves around him.
“He’s… look Daniel…”
“Will you stop with the fucking Daniel. My name is Romeo!”
I pursed my lips and returned his scowl. “I am not calling you something that depicts how many fucking women you have been inside.”
A wicked smirk curled his lips and he took a step into me, numbing me frozen as he trailed his finger slowly across my jaw. “You don’t seem to mind when my cock’s buried deep inside you, Ink. In fact you’re usually screaming something like ‘oh fuck, deeper baby, harder, fuck me harder baby.”
“Fuck you!”
“Exactly what I was saying,” he mocked with a grin. “I just wanna know who he is, Zo. It’s not a difficult question really.”
“I’m pregnant!”
I gulped and stepped back as his face paled and his eyes widened on me. He didn’t appear to be breathing as a shiver shook his body and his fists clenched and unclenched. “What?”
I shrugged. “I’m pregnant.” I lowered my eyes, not wanting to see the hatred and disappointment in his, smiling at the sight of his heavy black boots, also scuffed but very different from Adam’s footwear.
“I thought that’s what you said.” He ran his fingers through his hair and exhaled as he slumped into the chair. His head dropped as he stared at nothing in particular in the carpet. He was silent, his mind working out different scenarios before he looked back up at me and sighed. “Okay, I’ll… we’ll… we’ll be okay. I can take time off tours, I’m sure the others will be fine…” he muttered as he smiled at me. His smile broke my heart and I fought to keep my soul inside my body when it wanted to sink through my arse and dissolve into the carpet. “In fact, I know they’ll be fine, especially now…”
“It’s not yours.”
A silence so intense filled the room, swallowing the air with huge gulps as my soul decided it was better off in the carpet fibres. I watched as goosebumps exploded across the ink on his arms, many of the designs my handiwork. He rolled his lips and nodded, “Adam’s I presume?”
My legs wobbled with the hurt on his face so I took the empty chair and nodded to him. He nodded again then looked back to the floor but not before I saw him squeeze his eyes closed. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I answered honestly.
“So…” He lifted his head and fixed me with his eyes, the ache and disgust rabid in the sharp blueness. “So you and Adam, are you…?”
“Not really, just an occasional thing. A bit like us…”
He shot out of his chair. I blinked as his body penned me under him when he gripped the arms of my chair. “Fuck that, Zo. We were…”
“We were what?” I scoffed when he stalled. “Boyfriend and girlfriend? Lovers? In any sort of relationship?”
He chewed on his lip but removed his eyes and his hands from me, “We were…”
“We were exactly what you wanted us to be, Daniel. Nothing! That’s what you told me. You told me you didn’t do relationships, you just
fucked
. And that is precisely all you’ve been willing to give me for two fucking years.”
Anger exploded in and over me, its potency flinging me from my chair to defend myself and my actions to a man I was so in love with but who only wanted to
fuck
occasionally. I had given up, moved slowly onto someone who could and would love me. It didn’t matter that I didn’t feel the same. After losing Shane, love didn’t even come into the equation any more. I wasn’t bitter over his death, we’d had our time and we’d enjoyed every damn second of it and regret wasn’t in my heart, only loneliness and I knew Adam could rid me of that awful consuming emotion.
The pregnancy was somewhat of a different path in my life, that’s all, but hopefully, finally, my heart could embrace someone who would love me in return.
“How long have you been seeing him?” he asked eventually, his voice soft but still heated.
“Around three or four months.”
His eyes widened then narrowed hatefully, “You... you been fucking him whilst you’ve been fucking me?”
“Whoa,” I stormed and shook my head in astonishment. “How many women have you fucked in the last four months, Daniel? You’ve been nowhere near for over three months.”
He stilled, his body stiffening with realisation before he closed his eyes and pulled in a deep breath. “Yeah,” he blew out as he opened his eyes and gazed at me. “Just… cheers, baby.”
He turned and I watched as he walked slowly away.
He took my heart with him that day but not only that, he took something else – my ability to love. I felt it pull from me with every step he took across the room, tearing from inside me and lifelessly following him as if a pet unwilling to let its master go.
I only saw him on occasion after that, maybe two or three times before the birth of my beautiful boy, Jakob Shane. He was strictly professional, just a small polite smile and a friendly hello and each time it fractured my soul a little more.
I never stopped loving him but Jakob filled my heart with all the love I needed. I wasn’t empty anymore; I had my friends, my boy and the occasional romance and that was all I needed.
I didn’t need anything else. I didn’t need Daniel, or Romeo as I now stubbornly referred to him as. He wasn’t my Daniel anymore; he was just Romeo, the lead guitarist for Room 103 and that was just the way it had to be.
13 months later
I STARED AT the phone that appeared to be glued to my hand, the faint beep alerting me that the caller on the other end had disconnected.
Jakob was rocking his chair frantically, screaming so loudly I swore the mirror above the fireplace cracked a little. The morning TV program I had been trying to listen to, and had turned up high due to Jakob’s lung exercises, was blasting out the latest One Direction song. Henry, the six month old Labrador my mother had insisted on buying for Jakob, cocked his leg on the tall vase full of dried flowers beside the fireplace, his urine trickling over the ceramic and flooding the marble hearth I had cracked my head open on a few months ago after a night out. The oven timer was bleeping to tell me the pizza I had popped in for lunch would now resemble a cast-iron discus that could be used in the Olympics.
I blinked, finally. But still didn’t move. The phone in my hand seemed heavy all of a sudden. I slowly placed it beside me on the sofa, my eyes fixed to it like it would suddenly blow up, although I’m sure it wouldn’t make a speck of difference to the current chaos surrounding me.
“I can’t,” I whispered to no one, luckily, because they wouldn’t have heard me anyway. “How am I supposed to do that?”
Jakob’s cries became ear-splitting, slapping me out of my head. I lowered my eyes to him. His fat legs kicked frantically, his purple face full of anger as his wet eyes glared at me.
“I know, mate,” I whispered in his ear as I picked him up and wandered into the kitchen. Turning off the oven, I stepped up to the kitchen window. The rain was beating down hard, hundreds of rivulets streaming down the glass and pooling along the ledge. The sky was grey, the clouds dark and ominous as a bolt of lightning flashed in the distance. “Well I think autumn’s truly here, hmm?”
Jakob hiccupped when I snuggled his neck with my nose, inhaling his own personal smell, using it to calm the storm that was going on in my own chest. “I’m sorry, Mummy’s a little out of it today. Lunch!”
His wide blue eyes found mine and my heart squeezed. He grinned at me, his teary face a contrast to his current happiness. “I wish I could forget things as quick as you,” I sighed as I sat on the chair and slid the bottle into his mouth. His eyes held mine, his little murmurs of appreciation giving me cause to smile.
My gaze shifted back to the outside world. The flashes were getting closer, a faint rumble of thunder breaking the silence that had now descended around me.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
I squinted at my own thoughts, my attention now grabbed by an orange leaf that had been slapped to the window by the high wind.
You could bake in the sun every day.
Turning my head, I smiled at the huge canvas of Shane and me that was fixed to the wall above the table. His stunning smile into the camera captured my soul, squeezing it tight. My heart sighed. I missed him, he would know what to do.
You can start again.
My eyes flicked from the window, to Jakob, to Shane, to the window, to Jakob…
“Why not?” I suddenly voiced. “Why the hell not. There’s nothing here for me. For us,” I added when I looked down at my son. He was only six months, he could adapt so quickly.
I lifted my eyes to the window and snorted. “Yeah, and the weather here really tempts me to stay.”
Finally, my attention settled on my late husband. “And you will be wherever I am.”
I growled at myself as a single tear squeezed free. I swiped at it, refusing it but others followed until I was sat sobbing on a plain wooden chair, in a dismal kitchen, in a rented terrace house that held no memories or I had no connection with. It wasn’t even home, it was just a building with a kitchen, rooms and a bath. A house I had never seemed to settle in.
A tear landed on Jakob’s nose, making him blink.
“How do you fancy Miami, mate?”
BOSS NUDGED ME in the ribs, earning him a scowl. “Fuck off.”
He smirked at me. “Look at her go. That’s one woman who is hot for you.”
My eyes narrowed on the tall, thin woman shimmying towards me. Her square knobbly knees seemed to stick out a mile in front of her, her precise blonde hair barely moved on her head as she danced. Her short, tight dress displayed, quite shockingly, a lump in the crotch area.
As though only just noticing. Boss cocked his head and studied her before leaning into me. “Do you think she has a dick? You know, like those her-men?”
Rolling my eyes, I rubbed my face with my hands. I was so tired. The tour had taken it out of me and I was looking forward to a couple of weeks at home, alone. Or maybe now I had some alone time, I didn’t want to actually spend it alone.
I swallowed the lump that had just formed in my throat with my thoughts, my dick hardening instantly. I loved being with the guy’s, they were my life, but I could never quite be myself. They would never understand and after the three month tour, I was becoming irritable and frankly, quite desperate.
Looking at the
her-man
again did the trick, my cock deflating like a balloon pinned to a dartboard.
“Fuck! What the hell has Brent allowed in?”
“I think it’s his wife,” Bulk said, quirking an eyebrow.
“The fuck?” Jax barked out, his eyes wide on the ever encroaching woman/man who refused to take her eyes off me.
I shook my head at her and turned back towards the bar, hoping my blatant brush off would give her a clear message. The guy’s snorted when an erection pressed into my back, the woman now grinding up against me.
“Go for it, baby,” Boss taunted, “Romeo likes it any way he can get it!”