Description
In the Jimmy Rogers Chronicles, book 2 – It’s Impossible, Aaron shares with Belle the basis of his life long affection for the black community.
It’s sometime in the future, about 11:00 a.m., I’m in my office on the fourth-floor suite of our recently opened Remember’s in Thailand. I receive a call on my desk telephone console and I see the call is from our master bedroom.
My heart jumps, my chest expands, my eyes light up as they always do when Belle calls, then a smile is born on my lips.
“Hello”, I say, all business like. She says, “Sir, this is the front desk, so sorry to trouble you but you are needed, can you come?”
“On my way,” I say as I spring to my feet and head out of my office, walking swiftly passed the Director’s room, toward the hall that ends at the doors to our suite.
I use my key card to open the door, walk through the entry way, through the family room, through the entertainment room, past the kitchen, my pace quickens as I head toward the double French doors to our master bedroom.
My heart is skipping every other beat in anticipation of what I can do for the “front desk”.
I open both doors wide and there in our raised bed, all I see is Belle’s stunningly beautiful face encircled by a cloud of puffy, white comforter.
It’s the design she created for Bergdorf Goodman’s line of luxury bedding. The allure of the contrast between the whiter than white puffy and her radiant brown skin with red and gold overtones, takes my breath away.
I’m so over taken with hunger to hold her, I’m momentarily frozen. The first imagining she ever inspired in me “Oasis” flashes across my mind.
I regain control of my legs and begin slowly walking toward her. As I come closer, I wonder if her frequent use of black and white in her many fashion and home décor designs are her way of telling me she knows how deeply I care about race relations.
She knows my favorite color combination is black and white.
It’s the thing that has been most consistent throughout my life. It goes back to 1943 when Julian Steele and his wife Mary Dawes purchased a farm in my little town to raise their family.
Julian graduated, from Harvard University in 1929. Mary received a Bachelor of Arts in early childhood education from Boston University.
After completing her studies, Mary worked at the Robert Gould Shaw Settlement House in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Roxbury then was for Boston, what Harlem was for New York City. That’s where Mary met Julian, the center’s director.
Their relationship led to marriage in May 1938, an interracial union that was, at the time condemned by both white and black communities alike.
Mary was the daughter of an old New England family and a Boston socialite. Her descendants were among America’s first families. I remember my Father reading to my Mother from the local newspaper such hateful things said about them, I couldn’t understand why. I was only three years old.
When I was sixteen, while at my Grandmother’s on my Mother’s side, Grammie and I were in the attic looking through an old wooden crate and came across some of the newspaper clippings from when Mr. and Mrs. Steele moved to their farm.
The more I read the more I became angry at the terrible injustices done to these people, who by then I had come to see as just very nice neighbors.
In 1952, when I was twelve, Julian became the Town Moderator. My Dad, was best friends with the Head of the Board of Selectman. My father attended every Town Meeting and as his oldest son he always took me with him.
As Moderator, Julian presided over the meetings ensuring the proceedings followed Robert’s Rules of Order. Everyone who wanted to express their opinion or position on any topic on the agenda was allowed to freely express themselves, but not until recognized by the Moderator.
Julian was the one, when the time came who would call for and declare the results of a vote. He was clearly an educated man, a good man, a fair man and as I read those newspaper accounts those feelings, I first had at age three but could not understand or describe, came crushing down on me.
The racial slurs, the vitriol, the social ostracism and threats of violence Julian and Mary endured from people writing in the newspapers and gossiping was so cruel.
It was the first time I had to confront the reality that human beings were capable of evil toward other humans. It shattered my childhood naivety and my belief that people were essentially good.
Some of the articles called into question their moral character. Some of the most egregious among their haters claimed that their marriage was “illegal.” I asked Grammie about that and she said, “That’s true in some States but not so in Massachusetts.”
I flashed back to hearing my Father reading the articles to my Mother and I remember her saying something I hadn’t really understood until now, “What’s so hard to understand, they love each other.”
My Mother understood because she loved a man that was not easy to love. She got it.
By now I’m sitting on the edge of the bed. Thoughts of Belle’s motives for using so much black and white in her designs, have faded from my mind. I’m bending over to untie my shoes as Belle puts her hand on me. Her hand, her hands. I really cannot single out my favorite among all that I hunger for and adore about her physical being, but her hands are definitely contenders for top honors.
When she holds my face in her hands as she sometimes does when she just has to feel her lips pressed to mine, oh what that does to me.
The exhilaration of my face caressed in her hands; I swear every time she does that my life is extended immeasurably.
As I straighten up, her hand rides all the way up my back to the top of my head. I turn my head toward her; her hand is now touching my forehead and she starts sliding it down the side of my face, tracing her thumb around my ear so gently it makes me shiver.
I look at her eyes and think how angelic she looks when she closes her eyes. I broke the silence and said, “You called Madame, what can I do for the front desk?” When she slowly opens her eyes, and I am again captivated by them, I know I’m at the command of what ever it is those ebony eyes want from me.
She barely whispers, “We need to be kissed.” Oh my God I know what that call means and every cell in my body is at her service. I say, “I believe we can take care of that. Where would you like me to start?” She says nothing.
As I slide under the covers, the warmth of her body embraces mine like a warm summer wave. I waited a lifetime to be exactly here with Belle, I know it’s impossible ever to say goodbye.
Our bodies are instinctively drawn magnetically toward each other as she wraps a leg around me, resting on the cheeks of my buttocks. Her legs, her legs, oh, oh, oh, her legs, I take a deep breath.
She pulls me closer with her leg as if she wants me to become one with her. She slowly opens her eyes and I see she both wants to give me all of her and wants me to give her all of me.
We look into each other’s eyes, taking our time to truly connect with the other’s inner spirit before we give all of our physical being to each other.
In that moment, I feel the truth of what I’ve come to believe, that when love is whole, body and soul intertwine. That the two become one, no longer separate, but one breath, one beat, one offering.
Her eyes and my eyes move at the same time to each other’s lips. Her lips, her lips. From the very first time I saw Belle, my lips hungered for her lips. Whenever my eyes light on her lips, I think of what a hungry child feels on a hot summer day as they are handed a favorite ice cream. Their lips involuntarily widen in anticipation of that first contact as do mine as I long to kiss her lips.
But I gather all the power within me not to go to her lips, yet. I see in her eyes that is not where she wants to start either. If we can restrain our hunger and “slow this roller coaster down”, we have the potential to pleasure each other even more than the grand heights we have achieved so often in the past.
This goal is like an unwritten pact we have never discussed but both understand.
I know she feels as I do, totally committed to deepening our knowledge of the other’s needs and fulfilling them to the fullest because we have both discovered that our greatest joy is pleasing the other.
She shifts slightly beside me, and the comforter rustles like a soft breeze over water. Her leg stays hooked around me, her hand resting on the back of my neck. We don’t speak. We don’t need to. The silence between us is so full it hums. Every breath she takes seems choreographed to the rhythm of my own heartbeat.
I press my forehead against hers. Eyes closed, we hold each other in a moment that feels untouched by time. In this space, nothing matters except the gravity pulling us inward, closer, deeper. I feel her warmth traveling through my skin, through the spaces in me I didn’t know were still aching.
We shift slowly under the covers, the way only lovers who know each other’s rhythms do. There is no rush, no need to prove anything. Just this, the sharing, the yielding, the giving. My fingertips trace the length of her spine, and she responds not with words but with a subtle arch, a soft exhale, as if her whole body is saying yes.
She pulls me tighter with her leg, and I bury my face in the hollow of her neck, breathing her in. There’s a sweetness in this nearness, like I’ve come home from a long and lonely road.
I could live in this moment. If time stopped now, if the world decided to hold its breath, I’d ask for nothing more. Her body, her soul, wrapped in mine, not possession, not conquest, but communion.
I kiss the top of her shoulder, and she turns her face toward me, our noses barely touching. Her lips part slightly, but no words come. None are needed. The way she looks at me says everything. It says I am wanted. Trusted. Chosen.
I move slowly, as if each second is a gift I want to unwrap ever so slowly. Every shift of her body under mine feels like a verse in a song only we can hear.
And just as I begin to feel myself dissolve into her, becoming part of the warmth, part of the light, the sunlight of her love.
Then, the loud, prolonged sounds of a fire truck’s siren jerks me out of bed.
Damn. It’s just another dream.
And yet, even if it’s never real, it still reshapes me. This love, unheld, unanswered, still turns me into someone more whole than I was before.
Still half-lost in the warmth of her nearness and the echo of her breath, I close my eyes again and whisper to the silence, I just can’t stop it, I just can’t stop it right now.
