Love Hates…
AARON ANSAH-AGYEMAN
LOVE HATES
A CHRISEFFE BLISS
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The Author
EPISODE 17
Chris turned to look directly at Effe.
His face was a mirror of the pain he felt inside.
“I was with Uncle Brooks for years before Baaba came along,” Chris said softly, his eyes never leaving her face. “You see, when he was younger, he made Baaba’s mother pregnant, but he left her alone because her parents didn’t want to see him with their daughter. Later, when I was twenty-years old, I helped him search for his lost love and daughter. Unfortunately, Baaba’s mother was dead, but her daughter was still alive.”
“Baaba, yes, I remember her telling me her long-lost father showed up!” Effe whispered, horrified. “We were in school, and she was staying with an auntie then. That was when she left Takoradi and settled in Accra. We lost touch for a while after that, until my father later opened a branch of his business in Accra and we were reunited. We visited each other a lot, and I met her father on a few occasions…but I didn’t meet you, Chris.”
“Well, I moved out to a new place a couple of years after we found Baaba, yes,” Chris said softly. “We brought her home. Uncle Brooks had a bad heart, and he was so glad he found his daughter again. The only thing he wanted was his only daughter marrying the only son of his friend.
I didn’t know what love was, and Baaba and I eventually drifted into a relationship. I was quite okay with it, you know, thought I could live with her. She was beautiful, nice company, good cook, an all-round woman. So, yes, I was cool with it. Uncle Brooks was very happy. We made plans to marry.”
He took a step close to Effe and glared intently into her eyes.
“Uncle Brooks was dying, Effe,” Chris said passionately. “I wanted his last days to be happy and comfortable because he was the only person who took me in and loved me when my father died. Do you understand how much I owed that man? Do you understand how much I loved that man? I can never repay him with all the money in the world!”
“Chris!” Effe whispered with tears in her eyes as the enormity of what he was saying sank in. “But…but…Babs…she said…her father embezzled your money and…and…she even showed me evidence of some police documents where you had him arrested. But he was released when she agreed to marry you…she showed me all! She had a police friend…I’ve forgotten his name, and he was at the Central police station who confirmed the story!”
“She fucking lied to you!” Chris said harshly. “Everything I owned was for Uncle Brooks! He could take all the money I had and it wouldn’t have settled my indebtedness to him!
Look, it came to a time when I was only forcing myself to marry Baaba because I wanted her father to be happy and comfortable, and maybe give him a grandchild before he died. He wanted a grandchild so much, you know! But I made it clear to Baaba that as soon as her father died, the marriage was over!”
“Explain to me, Chris, please!” Effe cried frantically as her heart beat with passion. “I don’t understand what you’re saying! You were going to divorce her after her father’s death? But why? Why, Chris?”
“Because she was just a damn fucking cheat!” he hissed passionately. “Hell, I came home one afternoon and found Baaba and Jonathan making love in our house. Jonathan was also like a brother to me due to the fact that our fathers were friends, you see!
So, when we started working at the company, Jonathan and I moved into my father’s house finally, because I thought he was a good brother to me. And I came home early from a trip with Jonathan’s father, a couple of days earlier.”
He shook his head and sighed, and then he turned and stared out across the lake for a while.
“They didn’t know I was back,” he continued. “I let myself into the house and there they were, making love in my room. Baaba wept and begged me when I caught her in the act, saying it was a mistake and crap like that.
I made her be aware that I could not break up with her because it would break Uncle Brooks’ heart. He was already a very sick man, you know. But I made it pretty clear that my marriage to her would only be a marriage of convenience, for her father’s sake, and that I wasn’t going to have anything to do with her.
I told her that after the marriage I wouldn’t even sleep with her, so she could go ahead and sleep with Jonathan and give her father a grandchild, also for her father’s sake. I also let her be aware that as soon as Uncle Brooks passed, I would divorce her, and then she could move in with Jonathan with her child if she succeeded in giving birth with him. I wanted absolutely nothing to do with her again.”
“Oh, no!” Effe whispered tragically. “No, no, no! Chris! She and Jonathan planned all this and made me the evil one? But why? When I came back from the States, I tried to find you, because the whole unsavoury business really gave me a bad time, and I wanted to clear things up with you. But Baaba informed me you sold your shares to Jonathan and his father and moved on.”
“That’s another damn lie!” Chris shouted into her face. “They forged my signature
and falsified documents and took over the Company after I was imprisoned for raping and assaulting Baaba. By the time I came out of prison there was simply nothing I could do because they had taken over the company completely, and secured themselves with all the necessary documentations with the assistance of bribed officials!”
“I’m so sorry, Chris! Oh, what have I done? There are things I still do not understand though, because…I saw you clearly assaulting Baaba, Chris, that she made me hide in her wardrobe!” Effe cried agonizingly. “I saw the wounds on Baaba…the ones you inflicted, Chris!
That Doctor Anaman, yes, I believe that is his name…Gabriel Anaman, yes…he always dropped hints about how beastly you were, always hurting Baaba and that she could lose her life. I saw her calling you all the time, and yet you never showed up when she was in the hospital. I saw you beating and…and raping her when she was still hurting from her wounds you had inflicted on her!
I saw her in a neck brace two weeks to the wedding, and she told me you slammed her into a wall because she had an infection and asked you to wait untill she healed completely before making love to her!”
“Again, a bunch of lies! I stopped making love to Baaba the day I saw her and Jonathan. She wouldn’t take it, and always tried to make me make love to her, but she disgusted me. I told her she could continue making love to Jonathan if she wanted.
Secondly, I’ve never hit a woman in my whole life,” Chris said softly with passion. “Whoever you think you saw from inside that wardrobe beating and raping Baaba…it wasn’t me! But then again, you could be lying about that. Maybe, just something you made up and convinced yourself it was me.”
“No!” Effe cried and took steps back, putting the trembling fingers of her right hand to her lips. “Don’t say that, Chris, please, I beg of you! Please, I saw you clearly, and that’s the truth! Please, don’t say it wasn’t you, Chris, please! It was you…I saw your face, close-up, and recognized you when Jonathan brought you to the restaurant!
I later came out of the wardrobe and I was standing just inside the bedroom doorway peeking into the living room, and I saw you assaulting her and making love to her! You, Chris, you! Your face, your body, everything! The wicked look on your face as you thrust into her haunted me for a very long time!
It was the face of a beast, and as she lay on the sofa with her head over the side she could see my face, and she was begging me not to come into the living room…because if you had seen me, you would have killed her! Her face, Chris, it was so tortured! I just couldn’t allow her to live her life with the beast I saw! That was what convinced me to lead you on!”
“That wasn’t me! Beat and rape her? I’m not that kind of man, Effe! I’m not a bloody sex maniac! Whoever it was might have been wearing a mask of sorts to make himself look like me, the bastards! Uncle Brooks was given less than a year to live,” Chris said grimly and painfully.
“Baaba knew that I meant what I said, that as soon as he passed, I’ll divorce her! So, she and Jonathan found a way to destroy me. They found you, and you set me up completely, like the fool I was. Later, your twin sister bore false witness against me, with the help of that wicked doctor called Gabriel Anaman.
I was sent to prison on an initial sentence of fifteen years, and then Jonathan and his father forged my signature as if I had sold my shares of the company to them. So, my father’s company, Bawa Incorporated, was registered as Afful and Son by the time I came out of prison. There was nothing I could do. They took over my business, and left me with nothing!”
“But that could not be allowed to stand!” Effe cried, more with horror than with any conviction. “There are laws…processes! You should’ve sought redress for the injustice!”
“Uncle Brooks was the only one who could’ve set the records straight in my defence, but he died whilst I was in prison,” Chris said, almost savagely. “There I was, a man coming out of prison for rape and assault. How was I going to prove that I was short-changed by those bastards?
Meanwhile, they paid the right people to make the documents of the takeover look very genuine, together with my signatures, pictures and compensatory amounts paid into my bank account and withdrawn by me three weeks after I was released, also carefully forged because I never saw a pesewa of the purported sale amount!
Now, it is all beginning to make sense to me. This is absolutely the work of Jonathan. He’s always been that cunning and wicked, manipulative and jealous. He might have found somebody that looked exactly like me, or paid the right price to have somebody made up to look like me, exactly like the false wounds on Baaba that were exhibited in court. And they drafted you in to perfect their plans. They played me well, yeah…they really played me big time.”
And as Effe looked at him, her heart bled, and she knew insurmountable pain.
“I saw you, Chris!” she kept whispering, because only by believing that he had been the wicked man she had seen abusing Baaba could save her sanity at that very moment. To know that she had been exploited so totally and used to destroy an innocent man who had lost his inheritance without gaining a pesewa, and spent life in prison for no crime, was more than her gentle soul could take.
The pain ratcheted up her heart and tore it to ribbons so savagely that she could barely breathe, and the tears were her only means of solace that prevented her from going mad.
“I don’t want to hear you saying that again,” he said savagely. “It wasn’t me! They found someone that looked like me, or purposely had somebody put on a mask to look like me. But, take my word for it, Effe, for the very last time that whoever you saw wasn’t me. I’m not capable of that sort of cruelty against a woman who happens to be the only daughter of a man I loved.”
Without knowing what she was doing, Effe raised her right hand and put it on his chest, and when he looked into her eyes, he saw a broken soul. He saw how her face was trembling, and how her whole body was in deep agony.
“If it wasn’t you, and Babs did this to me…oh, Chris!” she said in agony. “What have I done to you? I helped them destroy you! I can’t take that, I can’t live with that, no! It will kill me surely, this part I played in this whole horrible thing. What have I done, oh Lord?”
“I loved you, Effe,” he said softly. “I didn’t know what love was until I met you, and in less than two months of knowing you, I knew you were the only woman for me. I desired you, wanted you, needed you! I couldn’t tell you about Uncle Brooks, or that I was waiting for him to die.
That would have seemed callous to you, and maybe made me lose you. That was what I thought, so I wanted to wait and play it out. I was hoping that you also loved me enough to wait, and I was praying that after his death, if you were still alive and single, I would marry you. I loved you so fiercely, so absolutely, but on that fateful Saturday in February, you ripped out my heart and killed my soul forever.”
He looked down suddenly, but not before she saw the tears bubbling in his beautiful eyes.
Even now, she saw he was still hurting over her betrayal.
Her mind was in a turmoil, and as she cast her mind back, and recollected in a flurry how he had been toward her, and knowing now that he had not been shamming, but had loved her for real, it tore her heart savagely. This man who even then had been going through so much, sacrificing his own happiness just to make a sick old man happy again, and losing everything so callously in the process.
A man who, even after finding his fiancée cheating, had remained friends with them, and had been prepared to let them have each other, had been so cruelly hurt in the process by two sick minds!
How on earth could Baaba be capable of this atrocity?
The Baaba she had known had been sweet and caring and good! What had happened to her? Was it because of her association with Jonathan Afful? Why on earth had these two been this wicked and vile?
She saw just a single tear rolling down Chris’ right cheek, and she reached up with a trembling hand and gently brushed it away, and then her soul just broke. She could not breathe as she stepped close to him and linked her arms around his waist and put her face to his chest.
“If you don’t forgive me, Chris, I can’t live with this torture,” she whispered quaveringly. “It is one thing knowing you were an abusive bully threatening the life of my best friend, and another thing knowing I helped to destroy the life of an innocent man!
I’m so sorry, Chris! I will do anything, anything to help set things straight, Chris, please. I don’t care if I have to go to court with what we have now. Indeed, I insist we do make them pay for this atrocity. Surely, there are a lot of honest lawmen around! We have proof too, in Eyram, my sister. I can help you turn this around and get your inheritance back, Chris. And I’ll do it gladly.”
“I can forgive you, knowing you were played too, Effe,” he said with a deep sigh. “But what is done is done, and what will be, will be. First, there will be criminal charges against your sister, you know, for her role. That, I do not want.
Secondly, I’ve moved on from all that rot. Let them keep the company, let them enjoy the spoils of their war. But Karma will roll around eventually, you know. Already, I hear Jonathan has almost run the company down, and it is in a lot of debts. So, I moved on a long time ago, Effe. Let it be. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
He made to move away, but she would not budge.
He reached down and held her shoulders as if to push her back, but suddenly he froze.
None of them knew who moved first, or how it happened, or even why it should have happened. Suddenly, his hands were around her waist and her arms were around his neck and their lips were glued together in a fierce, passionate kiss.
His arms were fierce bands around her, pressing her tightly against his rigid form, but she felt no pain. She drew down his head fiercely, and kissed him with broken abandon, parting her lips to receive his tongue and kissing those sensuous lips of his hungrily.
Her body tingled with waves of pleasure as his hands moved deliciously down her body, sliding down along the gentle sway of her hips and revelling in the exquisite beauty of her form.
Effe’s hands slid down his chest, matting into the soft hairs and descending toward his taut belly. Chris groaned, and his left hand moved across the swell of her buttocks, and his right hand claimed her left breast, feeling her taut nipple beneath his touch.
And then he froze suddenly.
Effe continued to kiss him, but she knew deep down that she had lost him as he lifted his head slowly.
“Chris?” she whispered in fevered agony.
He was looking down at her, and for the first time since meeting him again she saw no hatred in his eyes. For one very brief beat of time, he was caught unguarded, and the expression on his face took her breath away. It was the look he used to have, that look that made him kiss her nonstop, the look that made his hand reach out to touch her even when he was asleep.
It was the look he had had so many years ago, that haunted look of sheer love and bliss when he had told her how much he loved her, and how he wished he was not promised to another woman.
That time, young and inexperienced, she had thought it was a lustful look, that there was nothing good in him only the craving for her body. But now she saw it as it was, and realized just how much she had missed it, and how much she had been craving for that look.
She took a step toward him, but he stepped back from her and sighed deeply.
“Let’s get back to the truck, Effe,” he said softly and turned away from her.
Effe hesitated, barely breathing.
She knew that they had been close to a sort of discovery, close to the precipice of something alien and beautiful, but his armour had slammed down and pushed him from the edge, and that had broken the portal link that might have sent their hearts beating to a different kind of rhythm.
But maybe he was right!
He was a married man, and she had a man who adored her and wanted only the best for her.
There was a particular path they could not travel on now, because they had taken different branches in the road.
She walked with lethargic slowness to the truck and climbed in.
They looked at each other for a while, and then he engaged the gears and set the truck rolling forward on the highway again.
He was quiet for a while as he drove, and then he picked up another pack of cigarettes from a compartment between the seats, but Effe reached out suddenly and snatched it from his hand. He looked at her with shaded eyes.
“Would you stop doing that?” he asked, a trifle irritated.
“No, Chris, you’re not smoking in my presence,” she said as she wound down the window and threw out the pack, and then wound it up again.
“You’ll get arrested if you continue doing that,” he said.
Effe looked at him, and she smiled.
She was once more overwhelmed by the latent feeling of relief that was assailing her because they had managed to find a truce of sorts and that his roiling, boiling and exploding hatred was no longer directed at her with a vengeance.
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He looked at that smile on her face, a smile he remembered so vividly as if it had been only yesterday, a smile that used to melt the blood in his veins and set his heart thudding and yearning to spend an eternity with her.
His jawline tightened perceptively as he turned his attention back to the road.
“Chris,” she began, her voice soft and tender.
“Listen, Effe,” he broke in calmly but firmly. “You explained things to me, and shed a little bit of light on issues that have bothered me for a long time. So, I understand that we both made mistakes about each other, that’s cool.
And I now understand that Baaba and Jonathan played both of us, and in the process, they gave me a sucker punch, and destroyed me completely. Thank you for shedding light on that, and elucidating me.
Maybe, I will take them on when I think about it for a while, and maybe I wouldn’t. That’s my decision to make. So, we’ve had our talk, and cleared a bit of pain, but that is where it ends. It ends there, Effe. You understand me, right?”
“No, Chris, I don’t really understand what you said,” she said with a little scowl. “When you say it ends there, what exactly does it mean?”
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[/passster]Premium Story: A ChrisEffe Bliss :: LOVE HATES :: EPISODE 15
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