Behind Closed Doors

Chapter Thirty-one

Throughout the remainder of that year Henry refrained from calling Phoenix, and he did not see the guy. He considered the guy to be a dangerous thing, and so he was taking the necessary precautions to set himself safe. And to his consternation, Phoenix returned the silence with zero phone calls, nor were there any emails he sent to Henry like he had been doing when on the set of a movie.

But what he never reckoned was the fact that he was going to miss Phoenix. He missed the guy with an intensity that scared him half to death, and he hated it, this feeling of dependency he had on this guy who had upset the balance of his life. Phoenix is like a ghost; he’s haunting me, he thought. It was complete torture for him, this unholy, secret passion he had for Phoenix, and when the guy had walked away from him at the police station, he had taken a part of Henry’s heart with him into the sun.

By early December Fiona gave birth to another set of twins, another boy and a girl, and Henry was now a proud father of four kids. Though happy, he still craved the touch of that guy, and he knew that if he were to quantify the emotions and thoughts he had expended on Phoenix in monetary terms, then he would be a richer man because Phoenix had stolen all his thoughts from him.

That year, he refrained from heading down to Anambra with his family, and Rosalie locked up her Ikoyi home and came down to VI to stay with them. One day the woman went out for an outing with a group of her girls, and when she returned, her sports car screeching to a halt before the entrance, she got out, saw Henry reclining on a chair in the manicured lawn, and then she moved to join him. In her hand was clutched a magazine, and on the cover was Phoenix.

Henry sighed, for he knew that now was the time for him to talk about his lover with his mother and possibly warn her off if she had designs on him. ‘Mother, do you like Phoenix?’ he asked.

‘Of course I do. He’s got the kind of looks that will melt a woman. And besides that, he’s the nicest thing in shirts to be seen.’

‘Stay off him, mother; the bastard is not good for you. He is not what you think he is.’

Rosalie looked him squarely in the face, and she was all beauty and all knowledge, with that knowledge glowing in her eyes. ‘Are you warning me, Henry?’ she asked, her voice cold, icy. It was the ‘I am your mother, so don’t you dare play with me, kid!’ voice. She was pulling the Mother card now.

‘I care about you, mother.’

‘Phoenix is very different from other guys,’ Rosalie said in a low, voice, her eyes shining with excitement. ‘He has this way of turning his entire attention on you as if you’re the only person in the universe. It makes a girl feel special, wanted.’

Henry was smiling when he heard this. It was so true. Phoenix had a way of making you seem like the only thing in the universe when he was with you. He could give attention like no one Henry had ever met, and he was magnetic, full of charisma when the mood was upon him. It was what had added up to make him what he was at that point in his career.

Henry leaned forward, his long tapered fingers on the tabletop. ‘You may like Phoenix, not as a friend but perhaps as a lover, but I am telling you with good authority that the guy is not good for you. He is a predator, not someone you should want in your life. Stay away from him.’

Rosalie’s face was clenched with a cold emotion that Henry could not decipher for the life of him, and he felt really sorry that he was butting his head into the affairs of his mother, but Phoenix was his lover, the person he loved and also despised more than he despised any other person in his entire life. So he had to do that, to warn his mother away from the abomination they were both committing; and then the thought crossed his mind: had his mother been having sex with Phoenix? It was unthinkable that Rosalie should be touching that body.