"Just some juice."
"Ok. What restaurant do
you want food from?"
A few minutes later, Cristina went to the restaurant that Nicole wanted and ordered a fried chicken salad for Nicole and a big burger for her, with the works, the biggest burger that they had. It was one pound of beef, perfectly sexy and round, ketchup, special sauce, melted cheese, onion, lettuce, and tomato. As a side dish, she ordered a "Paradise Salad" that had fresh green lettuce, tomato, bits of real bacon, purple onions, chicken, shrimp, and ranch dressing. She got Nicole fresh orange juice, and just when she was about to take the tray to the table, a sweet man appeared before her. He hadn't seen her face because he was right behind her, but she had a nice, curvy and athletic sexy body, and he liked what he saw. She just showed them the half mask that she was wearing on the burned side of her face and walked away, but the man wanted this woman and he wouldn't give up. He followed her to the table. Just when she sat down and she was about to eat, she had a gorgeous, sweet man right beside her, kneeling before her. Ben, Nicole and Brooke took one look at him and gasped.
"Cristina," said Brooke, "someone wants your attention."
Cristina turned her face to the left side and gasped when she saw the man. "Oh, my God!" They laughed.
"Please," said the man, still on his knees, "give me a chance, just one."
"Do you really want to be with me after what I just showed you?"
"I don't care that your face is disfigured!" he yelled, making everyone give their attention to that table. "You're the sexiest woman I have ever seen! No woman has that body!"
Cristina gasped and looked around her, confused, wondering if this was really happening, as all of the women looked at her, smiling, and wondering if men would love them and like them this much if they were physically imperfect. Cristina said, "Oh, my God, am I dreaming?"
"No," he said and took Cristina's hand, "you're not dreaming. I've tried relationships, multiple serious relationships with physically perfect woman and those women taught me that physically perfect is not always perfect and that the looks of a woman are not what matters."
Shedding tears, Cristina said, "That's sweet. My husband just left me because his mistress disfigured me."
"Oh," said the man, "so you weren't born like this." He was relieved to know that if he and Cristina ever had children, depending on how well they took care of one another, their children wouldn't be genetically defective or simply deformed.
"No," said Cristina. "That whore burned my face with acid." She was eating her food too quickly. She was eating the salad first. Right now, she was depressed and she was turning to food for comfort.
"Eat slowly, sweetie," he said, holding her hand so that she couldn't put that bite of salad in her mouth, "Eating food too quickly causes indigestion."
"Tell me about it," commented Nicole as she ate her salad. She'd already eaten half of the bowl. Brooke and Ben laughed hysterically.
"Do you see that? Take it easily. I know that you love food, but you've got to give your esophagus the chance of taking the food to your stomach, bite by bite, and you want to give your stomach time to accommodate the food. If you don't do that, you will end up throwing up."
"Yes," said Nicole and Brooke laughed again. "That's one of the reasons why I threw up a few minutes ago. I don't know what came over me. I just lost control and ate too quickly." Brooke looked at her and said, "Probably, you were fantasizing about something that didn't have anything to do with food," and Ben laughed. Something strange was happening to Brooke. It seemed that she could think about nothing but sex.
"Oh, what I was fantasizing about is good food, trust me," said Nicole. "That food that I was fantasizing about is way better than the food in all of the restaurants in the world."
"Whoa!" said Brooke. "Is that food as good as," and rolled her eyes to look at Ben, and rolled her eyes back toward Nicole, "this one?" and Ben pulled his upper body back, bulged his eyes, and gasped, and Nicole, Brooke and Cristina laughed at him.
"Yes," replied Nicole, "it's as good as that one."
"And what 'food' is this?" asked Christina out of mere curiosity.
"It's Noah Spears," she said and everyone else laughed.
While Nicole and her gang were talking about Noah non-stop, Noah was having a conference with the medium. He listened quietly as she told him the messages that Noah Bryan was trying to send him. They were only understandable o the medium and not to Everett or to Noah. After she told him everything that he was trying to say, she warned him.
"Be wary," she said, "there are many horrific things ahead for you and those that surround you."
Surprised, Noah said, "I don't understand," shedding tears. "Why would he want to hurt us? Why would he want to hurt me? My health has not been good. I've lost countless sleep since he was murdered. I dream of him every night," crying bitterly, "and the things that she did to him." Corey and Everett gave him a big hug.
"It's not that he's going to hurt you. You see, you're going to be the center of a bloody conflict between Noah Bryan and his murderer, and while they're fighting, they're going to hurt you. Noah B is going to be hitting her continually, making her life a living hell. You see, he's not resting in peace. He's not going to rest in peace until that woman is destroyed, and the worst of all of this is that he's never going to manifest before her. He's not going to be there, physically, but his spirit, which is trapped in the mansion, it will continually be tormenting her."
"And I'm going to be in the middle of it."
"Yes, because every time that something happens to her, she's going to think that you're to blame and she's going to start hurting you and tormenting you. By the way, only you can put an end to all of this."
"How?"
"That's what you're going to have to figure out because not even I know that."
Noah looked at Everett and Corey with a face of horror. He couldn't believe his ears. "What if my own son destroys me while he's trying to destroy Hayley?" he said, panting. "I've just signed my death sentence by going into that mansion and living there."
The medium shook her head and said, "No. You didn't know that your son was trapped there. You thought that he was resting in peace. None of what's going to happen to you from now on is going to be your fault or your doing. It's going to be the deed of a woman that's been attacked, and she doesn't know who's attacking her."
Noah Bryan was not trapped in the mansion, however. He was only showing the medium that he was trapped because his father was in between him and his enemy, Hayley, not because he'd been locked down in one place.
Although he wasn't resting in peace, he could go anywhere that he wanted, and no one would notice it because it wasn't a child that was running around freely and causing havoc everywhere, but the spirit of a tormented child that wanted revenge. He was at Hayley's house right now, but she couldn't see him. She was doing some very important reports for a law firm, which was her job everyday, at home. Suddenly, the computer turned off on its own, and she hadn't saved her work! "Damn!" she screamed. "Now I'm going to have to do that all over again and write it in totally different words because I don't remember anything of what I just wrote! What am I going to do now?" She thought that the power had gone out, but it wasn't so. Only the computer turned off. Every other appliance in the house was on and it was intact. There were no electronic clocks with blinking zeros on them or anything. "What happened? Did the computer do that?" she said, confused. "Is the power supply bad? Am I going to buy another computer? What about all of the work that I have to turn in at four o'clock today? Damn!"
Suddenly, she heard a child laughing. It wasn't a five
year-old-child, though, like the one that died in her hands, it was a ten- year-old child. If he was made of flesh and bone and if he had a face and a body, he would be much bigger, much more powerful, much more frightening, and much stronger than the child that died.
Every month and every year that passed, Noah Bryan became bigger and stronger and more powerful. It was as if he was alive, really. He was growing as if he was alive. It was unbelievable, but it was true, and he wouldn't stop growing and living until Hayley were dead. "What's going on?" she said as she walked around the house. The child just kept on laughing, and laughing, and laughing. The computer got turned back on, but it seemed like Hayley had done nothing in it today. None of her work was saved, not even the changes that she'd made to the computer. The wallpaper that she'd installed, it wasn't there. Replacing that wallpaper was a made-for- wallpaper picture of Noah Bryan's dead body, that Michael had rescued and scanned to send to Noah as soon as he had his email address, to torment him. After doing this, Michael would delete the picture from the computer hard drive and memory so that if Noah complained to the police, he would have no proof that Michael was using this picture to abuse him, mentally and emotionally, until he would go crazy in the end of it all. His love for Hayley was so intense, so morbid and so sick that he'd hurt anyone just to please her; anyone, even people that he didn't even know, just to make him happy.
Hayley's love for Scott was exactly the same, except that Scott wouldn't use her to hurt anyone. On the contrary, if he had to, he would seduce her just to keep her from continuing to hurt his family. Still, he didn't know who would seduce Hayley just to destroy her and stop her dead in her tracks in the very near future. It was the person that he least imagined, and this would literally take his breath away and shake him as soon as he knew.
However, Michael had no idea that Noah Bryan was now using this picture to do to Hayley the same thing that he intended to do to Noah, and that picture would never go to Noah's inbox because once that it contaminated Hayley's mind, it would be permanently deleted, and it would be as if it had never existed. Hayley ran away as soon as Noah Bryan died when she pushed him down the stairs, with Michael's assistance, and Noah Bryan fell on his stomach, so he was on his back when he fell, and Hayley never saw his totally- destroyed face and his literally dismembered and broken body.
Hayley went back to the computer and saw the picture of Noah Bryan's corpse on her desktop. She gasped, bulged her eyes, and with a face of utter horror, she opened her mouth widely and screamed, "No!" with extended vocals, and with all of her strength. Luckily for her, not all of her neighbors worked, and there were some retired neighbors, young and old, that would rescue her, and only minutes later, they were all knocking on her door to see if she was ok. She went to the door, stumbling as she continued to look at the screen. She opened the door. Right there, Noah made the wallpaper disappear for a few minutes and took the computer back to a normal desktop. Hayley cried in Niagara's arms. Niagara was a sweet, loving, forty-eight- year-old retired woman that started practicing her profession as a lawyer since she was twenty, and a sudden permanent physical disability forced her to retire. She had severe cerebral palsy and her hands were too weak to do anything or carry anything with.
She needed someone to position her grandchild in her arms correctly so that she could hold him.
"What happened?" said Niagara as she went in and Hayley closed the door behind her. She had a motorized wheelchair and she could go anywhere that she wanted.
"I saw a picture of a corpse on my computer desktop. It disappeared," said Hayley, looking at the screen, "but it was there. I know that it was there."
Noah Bryan started to laugh uncontrollably, and both women heard him. He wasn't willing to hide from anyone. He wanted everyone to know what Hayley had done to him, eventually, so that everyone knew that Hayley was not the sweet woman that she was many years ago and that she stopped being the minute that she got obsessed with Noah Spears.
"I'm not going to tell you that you're crazy or refuse to believe you because this has never happened to me and I don't know what it's like. I'm going to take it from the psychological point of view instead of the physical or emotional point of view. Hayley, I'm going to be honest with you. This might be the product of your guilty conscience."
Hayley was shocked.
Niagara knew nothing. How could she possibly say something like this? "The product of my guilty conscience?"
"Don't get me wrong," said Niagara, "I didn't say that you killed anybody. What I'm saying is that someone is hurting because of you, and you don't realize it." However, the poor woman wouldn't have the pleasure of knowing for sure that she was hurting everyone in the Spears family. If it weren't for Noah Bryan's insatiable desire for revenge, the Spears family would be happy as can be. Spears International was doing greater than great. It was actually the most successful beauty care enterprise in the world. The factory workers couldn't stop making exemplary of "Jessica's Skin". It seemed that the more scrub that they made, the more scrub than they had to make, and it was really exciting, but at the same time, it was really frustrating and tiring. The family life was going great also. Hailey had no idea that Noah had his children back. She didn't know that her set up only worked for four years, and that justice had been served, and that all that Noah had to do was to go back home, after being out for so long. She didn't know that Noah and Nicole were going to get married. She didn't know that her daughter Brandy had sex with Noah and that she'd just gotten pregnant. This was the tragedy that could disgrace her family forever. It was as if Noah Bryan was trying to reincarnate through Brandy's baby. Brandy was having fun with her friends at home and at school as usual, without knowing that she'd just gotten pregnant. She never contemplated having a baby with Noah, but the night that they had sex, Noah wasn't carrying condoms around because he wasn't planning to have sex. All that he wanted to do that day was to work his butt off at Spears International to make it even more successful than it already was. He was making his dream come true and at the same time, he was realizing the dreams of everyone in the Spears family.
They just didn't know it yet. The irrefutable success of "Jessica's Skin" was just the beginning.
"I don't see who I could be hurting," said Hailey. "I'm just here, happily married, enjoying my sex life to the maximum with my husband and living a great life."
"Do you have a child in here, Hailey? I mean from what I understand, three of your five children are grown and your little girls are with your mother right now."
"It must be that I left the TV on in one of the bedrooms," said Hailey.
"Oh."
"Niagara, thank you for coming over and helping me."
"Sure," said Niagara and wheeled to the door. "Just remember what I told you. Try to think back and see what you've done over the last few days, because from what I understand, this happened today, and it didn't happen any other day."
"Right," said Hailey, still looking around nervously. "Something really weird is happening here, and I think I'm going to have to move out of this house."
However, Noah Bryan would follow her everywhere she would go. There was no escape. He was in her bedroom, sitting on her bed and smiling evilly. He loved it that she was afraid of him. What someone doesn't fear doesn't hurt him or her, and he knew, just by her fear that he would hurt her a lot more than he originally planned.
Meanwhile, Noah and Everett were leaving the cabin of the medium.
Their car was pulling out of the hilly area and taking the road slowly.
"Do you still see a monster when you look in the mirror?" said Everett. "What is all of this about? I still don't understand."
"I was just having a premonition, Everett."
"Oh, ok."
Noah looked back at him and said, "I'm going to have a party at my house tomorrow night. Do you want to come? You'll be my guest of honor."
Chapter 28
Brandy arrived at the Spears mansion. Fortunately, Nicole wasn't there because she was still at the mall. Geisha was preparing some chocolate mousse for Jessica, John, Jennifer and Simone. Suddenly, Brandy rang the bell. Luckily, Geisha had just finished whipping the mousse. All that she had to do was to serve it. She ran to the first living room, passing by the second living room, the dining room and the first hallway, and went to the door and opened it. She was surprised. She hadn't seen Brandy since Hailey and Scott got divorced and Scott kicked her out of the house. The girls wanted to stay with him, but since he hadn't adopted them because their real father was alive and well and he could've returned to them at any moment, he knew that he didn't have any rights to keep them, so he let them go, too, although he didn't kick them out.
The instant that Geisha opened the door and smiled at Brandy, Brandy remembered how Scott told her, right on that doorway, where Geisha was standing, that she and her sisters could come back at any time that they wanted to. Geisha wanted to give Brandy a hug, but she felt that if she did it, she would get too close because she'd never had physical contact with the girls. Brandy amazed her by initiating physical contact and giving her a hug. "Geisha, how are you doing?"
With tears in her eyes, Geisha said, "Brandy, I can't believe that you hugged me."
"Why wouldn't I hug you?" said Brandy, holding Geisha's hands. "Despite being the maid, you were always my best friend. Besides, although Mom and Scott were married for quiet some time, I always first that this wasn't our home because we are not Scott's biological daughters. Scott never had a daughter and that's why he treated us like his daughters, but we always knew that we weren't his daughters," said Brandy as they walked in and Geisha took her to the dining room to eat some of her delicious chocolate mousse. "Mom wanted him to adopt us," she sat down, "and he was about to, but as soon as he found out that my father was very much alive, contrary to what Mom told Scott," Geisha went to the kitchen, "he said that there was no way in the world that he would adopt us and take us away from our real father."
As Geisha brought the cups of chocolate mousse to the dining room table, she said, "And you love him for that, isn't that right?"
"Yes," said Brandy, smiling, "and even though our father doesn't know him, he loves him for that, too. Scott is a very good man, and he'd never take what doesn't belong to him."
Geisha went upstairs to Jessica and the children's rooms to tell them that their chocolate mousse was ready. Meanwhile, Brandy's phone rang all of a sudden. The doorbell rang. Hailey Marie hadn't had the chance to talk to Jessica at the restaurant like they'd agreed because her youngest son got sick all of a sudden and she had to take care of him. Thank goodness that the boy was recovering quite well despite having gotten sick less than twelve hours before. Brandy took the liberty to go to the first living room and open the door because Geisha was just walking down the stairs, and she didn't want her to run down the stairs, trip, and die when she got down. She opened the door while she ate some of her mousse. She smiled when she saw Hailey Marie.
"Hi, Hailey Marie," she said, and gave her a hug and a kiss. "What are you doing here?"
"I came to see Jessica," said Hailey Marie as they walked together to the dining room. "I couldn't see her yesterday because Aidan got sick."
Worried, and feeling badly because while Aidan was suffering, she was having one of the most blissful moments in her life, Brandy asked, "Is Aidan doing any better now?"
"Yes," said Hailey Marie, smiling, and they sat down simultaneously. Hailey Marie sat beside Brandy. Geisha rushed a cup of chocolate mousse to her as Jessica and the kids got down. "He's doing much better now." "What was wrong?" "Something that he ate in
his lunch hurt his stomach big time."
"If Mom found out, she wouldn't rest until she made you sue Cristina," said Brandy and laughed.
"No, it's not the Cristina's fault," said Hailey Marie. "It's just that he ate something that he'd never eaten before. It was something that the kids never had in their lunch before, and I think that Aidan was the only one to get sick."
"I didn't know that Aidan couldn't eat new things."
"Well, now I know that although he's not physically, mentally or emotionally handicapped, he has special needs, and I'm going to consult with a nutritionist to know what kinds of foods he can eat. It won't be hard to figure it out, and once that I do, he won't get sick in the stomach ever again."
Jessica and the kids sat at the table. The kids didn't know Hailey Marie and Brandy, but Jessica introduced them. She knew very well who they were. "John, Simone, Jennifer," she said, "these women are Hailey Marie and Brandy, my best friends." She didn't dare to introduce them as Hailey's daughters because she knew that they wouldn't accept her and that they would instantly kick them out.
They smiled. "It's nice to meet you girls," said John.
"I say the same," said Hailey Marie, smiling.
"They are John, Jennifer and Simone Spears," said Jessica, "Noah's children."
Caressing John's hair, Brandy said, "You are so handsome!"
"You're beautiful," he
replied.