godhead [COMPLETED]

21

The next morning

"You kissed!!!!" Lizabeth screamed.

"Lizabeth, lower your voice!!" I begged as she washed my hair.

"I'm sorry empress, I am just so amazed. It hasn't even been a day. Not even 24 hours" she reminisces.

"It's been a week since he arrived Lizabeth, stop exaggerating." I chuckled, rolling my eyes at her lies. "And...well...he wanted to paint my lips and I just thought--"

She smiled and tried to suppress her laughter but to no avail.

"I hate you!" I teased, "and don't think I am not aware of the lie you told him"

"What lie" she gasps, pretending to be offended by my accusations.

"I will kill you after I kill Leo" I teased her.

"You know you love me Calla" she bothered, standing to retrieve some pink smelling oils. We let the comfortable silence steer our conversation as I look up to the delicate designs in the ceiling.

"Donatello is a unusual man. He makes me so...nervous but so sane? Every time he speaks to me I become flustered. I can never find the right words to say to him?"

"I see your love story brewing already" Lizabeth sighs, pouring more oil into the waters.

"Lizabeth, you are too much." I smiled, looking up to my friend in the highest regard. I was thankful for her friendship. She has been the only one keeping me sane these past few months.

"You know, I don't think he has returned your book by Athello." Lizabeth hinted.

"It is still probably in his room. He will return it in due time."

"Aww...I am so impatient to read it" Lizabeth lies, a mischevious smile painted her lips. Of course she could not read, none of the women in Genovia were taught. "Why don't you go check and see? Maybe he won't mind?" Lizabeth suggests, gently wiping the floor of my wet footprints as I stood from the waters.

I push her arm, relishing at her mischief and tiptoe to Donatello's side of the room. I tiptoe across the carpet, moving to the board where portrait of me rested and smiled. The way he captured me was so effortlessly perfected. And my lips, they were finally filled and of course they looked perfect.

My eyesight lifts to the bed where Donatello laid asleep. Dark brown paint stains still caressed his athletic torso. I tiptoed to get a closer look, gently running a finger against his lips, remembering the softness of his flesh.

How beautiful he was. A true man.

He smiled in his sleep as he felt my touch, his lips rising against the warmth of my finger. How delicate they felt.

"Calla!!" Lizabeth yells from the other side of the room. He shuffles in sleep as he hears the voice. I quickly grab my book from the table and tiptoe out the room, making sure to close the doors behind me.

----

That same morning, I head outside and finally spotted Oslo in the library. He was buried in a new set of books and manuscripts. "Empress" he smiles, "I was just reading the latest manuscript from Roma."

"Have you now?" I asked unconvincingly but that was his invitation to proceed. He droned on about the papers and while I would have usually lept at the invitiation of intellectual conversation, I had the plan of the killing Leo and forming a coupe in the back of my mind.

What would Oslo do if I asked for his assistance? Would he be as willing to go against the emperor he had served for so long?

"Don't you agree empress?" he asks, snapping me out of my distant thoughts.