LOVERS Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  LOVERS

  Roxy Harte

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Lovers

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  About the Author

  Dedication

  R, the man who loves me for both my darkness and my light.

  Prologue

  The Dream

  Bianca

  The sun was warm on my back, hot yellow sun, heating me, warming me, the back of my neck growing damp as I hurried to keep up. Mother’s hand held mine tightly. A drop of sweat trickled down my neck, tickling. I swiped it away.

  I remember thinking it must be a very special day, because I was wearing my one good dress, the bright blue one that abuella made for me, but remembering hurts too much and is now only revealed in dreams.

  I watch the memory in my head like a film, no longer associating me with the child…she hurries as fast as her small legs will carry her, the bright blue dress flashing under the searing yellow sun.

  It is the colors I remember about the day, little else.

  Mother’s vivid red lipstick, the curl of white smoke spiraling up from a cigarette.

  “She’s scrawny.”

  “Please. She’s strong. Look how beautiful she is.”

  In my mind the girl child spun when her mother told her to, showing the man with the stinky cigarette how her pretty blue dress fanned out around her. He fingered a long tendril of her hair, dark brown, falling past her waist, a lighter brown than the dark black coffee bean-brown of her eyes.

  Green flashes. Pesos. Her heart fluttered, excited. Pesos mean her mother will not cry tonight. Pesos mean her belly will not scream all night.

  “Does she have any sisters?” the man asked.

  “No, five brothers.”

  “Pity.”

  Colors flash and the girl screamed, “Momma!”

  The man was telling her to be quiet, to not make a scene. Her mother screamed to her, “Don’t forget. I love you,” but she was in a car and the sound of her mother’s voice was muffled by dirty windows she could barely even see through.

  The colors are what she remembers from that day. Ugly brown rags, lying on a table, a woman promising her that if she takes off the blue dress she can have it back to wear for mass on Sunday, but she won’t take off the blue dress because if she does, how will her mother ever find her?

  Muddy gray walls, gray floors, gray place.

  She runs and runs, one hallway becoming another, an alley, the same gray, everything gray and dirty. She runs, trying to run softly because heavy feet follow, crashing noise behind her. Surely he won’t hear her because he is so noisy himself. A high-shine glossy brown door breaks the gray and she opens it, hiding, thudding feet rushing past.

  A crinkling sound behind her. She turns to see a newspaper folding, and that black print on gray paper becomes a color in her mind. A soft laugh. “What do we have here? A little mouse?”

  When I awake, it is the colors—the vibrant blue of my best dress, the crimson of my blood spilled with the flash of a shiny silver blade—that haunt me. I can’t bear to believe I was once that girl.

  Chapter 1

  Bianca

  Ring, ring.

  The ringing phone startles me awake from a dream I can’t remember. Don’t forget. I love you. I shiver, thinking it wasn’t a dream I want to remember, but pieces of it tug at my mind—tear-filled eyes and bright red lipstick.

  Ring…

  “Hello?” With an angry curse, I answer the phone, even after seeing that it is Emma, and after it being only a week since I asked her, politely of course, to not call the house phone, to call Jameson’s cellphone, so that I wouldn’t have to play the role of message relater between my boyfriend and his wife.

  “I need to speak to Jameson. Now.”

  I roll my eyes at her lack of social grace, no hello how do you do, just a demand, and with that another day begins.

  Rolling over in the bed, I make eye contact with the man in question, mouthing, Emma.

  It is his turn to roll his eyes, but he holds out his hand for the phone and I flip over with a harrumph, putting my back to him. I tug on the sheets, wrapping into them snugly, making sure he realizes I’m not going anywhere. Sure, I could get out of bed and get started with my day, showering and such, to afford him some privacy, but it’s barely dawn, and my alarm isn’t scheduled to go off for two more hours. If he wants privacy, he can go into the other room. He doesn’t, he stays right there in the bed beside me; so instead of going back to sleep, I get to listen to a one-sided argument.

  “It’s my night, Emma.”

  Obviously, she is trying to get out of tonight’s visitation.

  “I am not switching nights. I have plans.”

  You have plans?

  “No, the plans cannot be changed.”

  What plans? Damn. I am not getting caught up in this. I am not the one mad at Jameson, Emma is, and if he has plans I don’t know about, so what? I have plans too. I’d bet money this type of argument takes place across America on a daily basis. Ah, the joys of court scheduled visitation.

  “She has a name, Bianca, and no, she is not part of the plans I have with the boys.”

  A shower might not be such a bad idea after all.

  “Yes, that’s right, the boys had dinner with me and Bianca. Why? Because I live with her. She’s important to me. They need to get to know her better because she is part of my life.” He rolls out of bed and starts pacing.

  Ah, the true button pushing begins. Button pushing as only a true sadist can, delivering no mercy�
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  “What do you mean, you guess we don’t need to go to counseling this week? This isn’t about us. How can this be about us?”

  Oh, joy. I sigh, watching his facial color darken considerably.

  “I’ve always been who I am! I never lied to you. That is not an excuse to keep my boys from seeing me.”

  Ew-w, ouch, she had to play that card this morning. That card being the one that declares, ‘If you insist on being polyamorous, I will insist that the judge see you as not necessary in the lives of our children.’

  “What are you talking about?” he screams into the phone. “Being poly was as important to you as it is to me. The only thing that has changed is that you don’t like Bianca!”

  Jameson slams the phone on the nightstand and looks at me incredulously. “She hung up on me!”

  “So? Boys or no boys tonight?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  I sigh, slumping back into the pillows.

  He picks up the phone, and I don’t have to ask to know that he is calling her back. “Baby, don’t hang up. We can work through this. I love you.”

  Okay, now it’s time for me to take a shower.

  I CLOSE MY EYES AND let the water run down my face, hating that hearing him tell her that he loves her manages to poke something inside of me. It hurts, I admit it. And not that he says he loves her, I totally get that. They’ve been married for ten years, I’ve barely known him three. And it isn’t because he doesn’t say “I love you” to me, because I think he would if I let him; I don’t want him to because when he looks at me, it isn’t with love, it is with lust.

  If he ever said those words to me—I’d know it was a lie—I’d stop seeing him. I’d have to. Love. What a fairytale.

  I used to obsess over love. When I was seventeen, I wrote a song about wanting to be loved. I even recorded it. It’s embarrassing now, but I can honestly say that it is my only claim to fame. A one-hit wonder that I called simply Love Me. It quickly climbed the pop charts and stayed at number one for ten weeks…I know, doesn’t sound like much of an accomplishment, does it? Well, in the music world at the time, it was quite grand. Love Me made it big in dance clubs and was used as the title track to a major motion picture that same year. I actually wrote the song as speed metal, an angry teen’s cry for validation, but by the time it reached the recording studio, it became someone else’s idea of what it should be.

  I scream, “Love me!” in the shower stall, repeating the opening line several times, as it was intended to be sung, a screeched growl…screamed so loud and so gutturally that it leaves my throat burning.

  Too late I found out it was a good way to really ruin the vocal cords, leaving my range limited. Not that I worry about that now. The girl I was at seventeen doesn’t exist…she was just a blip on the radar.

  Forgotten years but not regretted, not completely.

  The money from that one song left me financially set for life, because I found out quickly that I didn’t want the life of a teen-idol—the groupies, the entourage, the insanity…the drugs, the alcohol, the promiscuity…the scandals, the lies, the police—my name and my face making tabloid headlines every single day for some bizarre stunt or act of rebellion. It was better for Bebé to fade into obscurity forever. So at nineteen, I fired my manager, unloaded a lot of extra people and made the big decisions that would ensure my financially stable longevity.

  I close my eyes, not crying, because tears are so overrated.

  I have never been loved—by anyone—so the pain I feel for walking away from a career that was once called brilliant leaves only a dull ache in comparison.

  I often wonder if it was the version or my voice responsible for propelling Love Me to the top of the charts. I think about it now, obviously a bit older and wiser, I see the song’s softer, gentler side. Sometimes I think I should rerecord it, but really, wouldn’t that just be pathetic if my one-hit-wonder made it big a second time and then I could in truth be the girl with only one song—and maybe I am—my life reflects that song.

  I still crave the illusive idea called love.

  Some days I even believe that I’ve come close to finding it. I actually have very strong feelings for several very special men.

  Yeah, well—I’m not there yet.

  I hear Jameson’s scream through the closed door and the thick buffer of tile. “Emma! I’m calling my lawyer right now!”

  I feel horrible for him as I hear their argument escalate over the pulse of the shower spray, at least the one side of it I do hear is escalating. Emma really knows how to push his buttons and will leave him emotionally shredded by the time they end their call, regardless of how it ends.

  I’m glad it’s my night to be with Adrian, because I really don’t want to be around Jameson tonight. I hate hearing about Emma, and I especially hate hearing about her latest efforts to emotionally destroy him. Before he moved in with me seven months ago, I had no idea how manipulative Emma was; although she made it quite clear she didn’t like me all three previous years Jameson and I had been dating, it only escalated when he moved out.

  She told me once early in my relationship with him, “Jameson Walters is mine and will always be mine. You don’t have anything in common with him other than sex. I bore him children.”

  News flash for Emma: I don’t want his children.

  I just want to have sex with him. A lot.

  She did make a serious mistake that day though, rubbing my face in the fact that Jameson and I had so little in common. He’s bright, if a little dull sometimes. He’s educated, he teaches philosophy and religion at UCLA. And I’m who I am—vivacious if not very smart, though I did get my GED once I settled back in the States after the last world tour. After…

  Well, I don’t think about that.

  Emma’s comment spurred me to nudge Jameson into moving forward in a business venture he’d been talking about the entire time we’d been dating, though his search for financial backing had failed. I told him I wanted to open shop. Together, we opened a small, local chain of stores, sex toy stores. We called them ‘Wicked Pleasures.’

  Because of his affiliation with the university, he is a completely anonymous partner, only our lawyer knows his identity. Our lawyer is good at keeping secrets; he’s known all of mine since I was eighteen.

  It isn’t public knowledge I’m an owner either. I’m not a big fan of having my face out there. It’s a privacy issue.

  I was a little surprised Jameson never asked once where the money came from.

  It was a mutual decision not to tell Emma, but it defeated the purpose of being able to rub her nose in it. Oh, Emma knows the stores exist; anyone who has driven by one of our dozens of billboards knows the stores exist. Maybe that’s why I decided to start teaching classes on FemDom there. Out of a childish desire for his wife to know something about who her husband is when he is with me, I placed a dozen billboards around town. They weren’t subtle. I wore leather and had a model, bearing a nerdish-resemblance to Jameson, kneeling before me. She discovered almost immediately, inciting what can only be termed Bianca Rage. Yeah, it really is that bad that we had to give it its own emotion identity. Ever since, I have been the plague of her existence.

  Shortly after, Jameson ended up on my doorstep and I regretted my immaturity but only because of the effect it had on his children’s life. I’m a horrible person, and I pay the price in the weight of my guilt.

  I’ve never been a big fan of live-in partners, but I wasn’t going to close the door in his face either. I think I thought that in a few days time, the storm would blow over and he’d go back home where he belonged with Emma and his boys. Now, I’ve grown comfortable with him living here. Companionship is nice. Who knew?

  Wicked Pleasures, incidentally, is where I met Adrian, my other boyfriend. Eight months ago I interviewed him to teach Shibari classes, which he does on his off nights from his own business, the A-list hotspot, Orgasms, a fetish inspired nightclub that is more fun and games than dungeon and
chains but it does draw the crowds.

  Having two boyfriends who run in the same friend and clientele circles has its entertaining moments, especially since they don’t really like each other. Oh, I get it, nothing personal, it’s just that sometimes bumping into the guy you know had sex with your girlfriend that morning is a little stressful.

  I close my eyes, Adrian filling my mind because I can’t wait to see him tonight, and right after the visualization of his dark eyes and wicked smile comes the image of his dick. He has a beautiful penis. Long, wide, thick veins close to the surface that make me want to lick their beautiful length. He’s not quite as darkly skinned as I am, except for his cock. It is dark and when it is engorged and takes on a life of its own, it tinges purple. That is how I see him in my mind. His cock, dark violet against a nest of thick black pubic hair, pulsing, waiting for me to take it into my mouth, which I gladly do…