Authors: Emma South
“Haha! No problems here.”
Debbie pulled out and drove in the general direction of my apartment while I took the time to silently and, I hoped, subtly do a stock take of the kinds of things that had so far escaped her ‘work in progress’. Coffee cups dominated the area around my feet, but I was thankful to see that she at least kept the area around the pedals clear because, between the two, I’d probably rather get wet waiting for a bus rather than have some trash roll under the brake pedal and be in a car accident.
The backseat had a healthy dusting of new trash from the front seat, which shifted and tumbled around as Debbie took the various corners. One such cornering-event unveiled a stack of papers that looked like something from work, notes for some slideshow presentation. Another revealed a pile of trashy magazines, the top one declaring that some selection of celebrities had put on too much weight and lost their bikini-bodies. Then that one slid to the floor and the next magazine said that some new selection of celebrities, with a couple of the exact same ones, had lost too much weight and were actually dangerously thin.
It wasn’t long before we arrived at my apartment safe and sound, the rain still coming down but with a lot less volume than before. I gave one more faux-disapproving stare around the turmoil that was Debbie’s car and then turned to her.
“Thanks for the lift. I’d be willing to help you with your work in progress by borrowing a few of those magazines. Would you mind?”
“Uh, sure… but…”
“But what, can’t stand to let them go? I’ll give them back.”
“No, it’s not that. Some of them have, you know, Jeremy in them.”
I looked down at my hands, which had instantly begun wringing each other
at the mention of Jeremy’s name, and forced them apart before taking a deep breath.
“It’s OK. I can handle it, I’m a big girl. I’m,” I paused, “twenty six years old.”
“Up to you, take as much as you can carry. I’m sure there’s a plastic bag back there somewhere, use that so they don’t get wet on your way inside. I want them returned in
mint
condition, even if they aren’t in mint condition right now.”
“Thanks.”
I found a plastic bag that didn’t look like it had once carried some kind of food and shoved a couple handfuls of magazines into it. I braced myself for a mad dash into the cover of my apartment and gripped the door handle.
“See you tomorrow,” Debbie said.
“You too. Drive safe.”
The run to the foyer of my apartment resulted in getting drenched to a much smaller degree than when I had wait
ed for Debbie to unlock her car. I was actually feeling quite pleased with how strong and limp-less my leg was feeling. I felt like a regular person again, able-bodied and sound of mind, I even considered taking the stairs up to my floor but then thought better of it, there was no sense in being fanatical about my mobility after all.
I dropped the bag of magazines on my coffee table and avoided them for a few days but one evening, with nothing better to do, I tipped them out on to the surface and began flicking through one. Before I knew it I’d been through about ten, there wasn’t a lot of substance to them, but the captions were interesting.
Then I happened across something I’d known would be in there somewhere, deep down I knew it was the reason I’d been avoiding them. A picture of Jeremy with some stunningly beautiful tall blonde woman jumped out at me in high definition. I looked away for a moment, surprised at the surge of anger I felt.
When I’d managed to fight down the emotion I looked back at the page and turned my attention to the caption, printed in small white text partially overlapping the photo of the smiling pair.
‘Billionaire playboy Jeremy Holt gets cozy with former flame, Princess Thyra of Sweden. Does Mrs. Holt know about this???’
“Oh for f…”
A
princess
, of God damn course, a princess. I flicked to the cover of the magazine and searched for the date. January 2014, so it said. I slammed the magazine down on the coffee table in a huff, folded my arms and glared at my wall for a few moments.
“Calm down, Bea. What do you care?” I said to myself out loud before picking up the magazine again.
I flicked away from that page in a hurry and went through the rest of the magazine without really looking and eyed another one. After drumming my fingers on the table for a while I picked it up and flicked through that one too, coming across another picture of Jeremy with some other woman in sunglasses at a table, her hand on top of his. Once again I read the caption, which didn’t do much to improve my mood.
‘Don’t be fooled by that blonde hair, this mystery woman isn’t Beatrice! For shame, Mr. Holt!’
The date on this magazine was February 2014, which drew out a sigh. I looked down at my own blonde hair and shook my head, feeling suddenly more ashamed than ever about the night I’d spent with him at ‘our’ house on the lake. My vision blurred with tears that I wiped away before they dropped, as if letting them fall would somehow affirm to myself that I was hurt and catching them in time was an effective denial.
“You have a thing for blondes, huh Jeremy?”
I threw the magazine across the room, seeing the cover get torn off by wind resistance as it fluttered its way into the wall before flopping on the ground. I offered a silent apology to Debbie for the damage rendered to her collector’s item and re-crossed my arms while I mulled over what I’d just seen.
It didn’t take too long to get myself properly under control. At the end of the day, I
realized I didn’t have much right to get angry with Jeremy, I didn’t even fully understand where that emotion had come from. It was like a knee-jerk reaction, something that was just automatic. I was the one that had left him down there in his wealthy-wonderland-of-blondes, changed my number, and told him I didn’t want any contact. He was just moving on with his life just like my short letter had said, even more so than I was apparently.
I paced back and forth across my living room for a good fifteen minutes, picked up the magazine and put it back on the table, then paced for another five minutes. I glanced down at my phone several times before picking it up and carrying it with me as I paced. I must have started writing a text at least five times, deleting each one before I sent it.
My heart was thumping in my chest when I finally managed to press ‘send’. After everything that had happened in the past several months, after fleeing the state and disappearing off the face of the earth, this one text felt more like a point of no return than anything else. It was a message to Debbie. It said:
‘Maybe… you could give Leyton my number?’
Chapter 11
With both feet up on the coffee table, crossed at the ankle, my top foot shook rapidly from side to side as I forced myself to stay seated. I’d checked myself in the mirror about a million times, one more trip wasn’t going to reveal anything that the previous ones hadn’t.
Debbie had joked about how much it reminded her of the schoolyard, using her as an intermediary between Leyton and I, but little did she know how close to the truth all that was for me. The last date I could remember was with a guy in high school, a fast food dinner followed by parking in a secluded place with a few beers he stole from his dad’s stash.
I imagined this was going to be completely different, Leyton was unlikely to pick me up in his mom’s car for example. Oh God! What did people in their mid-to-late twenties do on first dates? What was Leyton going to expect of me? Maybe I wasn’t ready for this, I reached for my phone with the half-baked idea of cancelling when the buzzer for my apartment rang. It was probably a good hour or two too late to cancel.
“Hello?”
“Hi… It’s Leyton. Do you want me to come up, or...?”
“No, no. I’ll be down in a minute.”
“Ok, see…”
My finger slipped off the button, cutting off his final word, which I had a hunch was ‘you’. I searched for my handbag, eventually finding it on the couch, exactly where I had left it for my own convenience so I wouldn’t forget it, grabbed it, and rushed out the door.
Leyton had called me the very night I’d sent the text message to Debbie and after some awkward small talk we’d eventually settled on going out on Saturday night. Since then we’d exchanged several text messages of a slightly flirty nature, as well as some polite smiles around the office. I may have also paused my mail-trolley by his desk for a couple of chats, which I hadn’t done much in the past.
He seemed nice and he was definitely handsome. I wasn’t sure whether it was just because I’d learned he was interested in me, but he seemed more attractive every time I saw him. Part of me hoped that the attraction would continue to grow, but most of me had no idea what I hoped for. Either way, I was giving it a shot.
Leyton was waiting outside the front doors looking smart-casual with a light jacket insulating him against the mild chill in the air. He smiled when he saw me and I couldn’t help but return it when I opened the glass outer door.
“Hi Bea! Hope you’re hungry!”
“I am indeed, you going to tell me where we’re going yet?”
“Nope, it’s a surprise. Wait, you don’t have any allergies or anything I should be aware of, do you?”
“I’m not telling, it’s a surprise. If I start convulsing just get the shot of adrenaline out of my handbag and administer it straight to the heart,” I joked.
“I… what?”
“In case of allergic… uh, never mind.”
“OK, well your chariot awaits this way, Ma’am,” Leyton gestured towards the road.
After the bio-hazard of Debbie’s car and the frustrations of my own, it was nice to be driven in a car that could be considered ‘normal’ for once. It was spotlessly clean, but an unpretentious everyday kind of vehicle otherwise, and it worked, which was the most important thing really.
It only took about twenty minutes to get to Leyton’s mystery destination, a small but busy Italian restaurant with a bright sign above it featuring a couple of cartoon Italian chefs re-enacting the spaghetti kissing scene from ‘Lady and the Tramp’ with apprehensive expressions on their faces as they neared the end of the noodle strung between their mouths. Under the sign were the words ‘Rigatoni Brothers’.
“Here it is,” Leyton said.
“Great! I love Italian.”
Leyton took a deep breath and let it out, “That’s good, always a worry with a surprise like this.”
“You been here many times?”
“Yeah, it’s one of my
favorites. It used to be called ‘Vermicelli Brothers’ but most people thought of ‘vermin’ when they read it. They changed the name and kind of became an overnight success. They do all kinds of Italian dishes, but pasta is their specialty. Man, what they can’t do with pasta probably shouldn’t be done.”
“High praise, let’s eat!”
The restaurant was packed but Leyton had apparently reserved a table for us, so there was no waiting around. I was gob smacked by the size of the menu and flicked through it with my eyebrows riding high on my forehead. They had a page for pizza, a couple pages of breads, salads, and drinks, a couple pages of desserts and the rest of the thick tome was all kinds of different pasta arranged in various categories.
“This… might take a while,” I said.
“I hear ya. I’ve been coming here for a long time, I try to get something different each time and I think I’ll be an old, old man before I get through everything.”
I scanned through page after page of the menu while I tried to find something that really jumped out at me. We had to send our waiter away twice while I tried to make my mind up, long after Leyton had settled on a dish, and I felt the pressure growing, I didn’t want to look like some kind of moron that couldn’t pick food off a menu before the restaurant closed. At last I saw something that really piqued my interest.
“Salmon Ravioli! That sounds great, I didn’t even know that was possible. I’ll have that, sorry for the wait.”
“No problem.”
Leyton got the attention of the waiter again and soon added my mains to the order, which already listed Leyton’s creamy chicken and pumpkin penne and our starter of bread with a selection of dips, as well as a glass of wine for me and a lemonade for him. Our starter arrived promptly and was quite tasty.
It was a real getting-to-know-you kind of meal, with a few of the mildly uncomfortable pauses in conversation that I was sure were entirely common between people with no massive history together. Luckily those weren’t too prevalent, we did work for the same company and had often been out with the same group of people on a Friday night after work.
The salmon ravioli was absolutely divine, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d had something like it before but I had to wonder what the odds were of that, I thought it was a pretty unusual meal. Leyton’s looked brilliant as well. Whatever happened, I had a feeling the Rigatoni, or Vermicelli, Brothers had acquired another long-term customer .
Leyton was exactly the kind of person I’d envisioned myself ending up with. He was a hard worker that hadn’t been blessed with being born into money, or had much in the way of lucky breaks in his career, but he persevered anyway. He used to work in the same sales team as Debbie, but had been promoted to middle-management in another department around a year ago.
Something was missing from, or not quite right about, the evening though, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. He was a nice guy, he’d taken me to a nice place, he was attractive, but I didn’t feel that ‘click’ that part of me was hoping for. Still, on balance, I was certainly open to a second date because there was, at least, a possibility for something to grow between us. As long as he didn’t do anything
too
ridiculous between now and the end of the night, of course. I smiled as a few deal-breaker scenes played out in my mind.
“What’s so funny?”
“Hmmm? Oh, nothing. That ravioli was just really good, thanks for bringing me here, I can see why you’re such a loyal customer.”
“Oh yeah, it’s pretty special. You want some dessert?”
“Ugh… I don’t think I could fit it in, I’m stuffed! I could go for some coffee though. You?”
“Thank God, I’m pretty full myself. I don’t drink coffee, but I’ll have another drink if you’re having one.”
It turned out the coffee was not the Rigatoni Brothers’ strong point and although I inwardly chided myself at my pretensions of being a coffee connoisseur, I knew I’d had a lot better. Still, that wouldn’t stop me from coming back for the pasta. Leyton paid for the bill despite my best protests, though I only let it slide on the understanding that I would pay for the movie tickets, and we made our way back to his car.
The movie was OK-ish, I’d seen better and worse. I wasn’t sure if it was just because I wasn’t overly enthralled by the storyline but it really seemed to drag on a lot longer than it should have and my leg was actually beginning to feel a bit stiff and sore by the end of it for some reason, the first twinges of pain I’d had in it for quite some time.
Towards the end of the movie I felt Leyton’s hand come down to rest on top of my own on the armrest that divided us and I froze for a moment. This was the first event of the evening that really signified it as a ‘date’ rather than two friends catching dinner and a movie and I just didn’t know how to react.
Walking a fine line between wanting to show I was still open to the possibility of a relationship and not wanting to give any unintentional signals about how fast I was willing to move, I left my hand there for several minutes before using it to raise my drink to my mouth and folding my arms after I’d replaced the drink in the holder.
My mind wandered from the plot of the movie playing out in front of me and I tried to rationalize exactly what I had wanted out of the evening. It wasn’t like Leyton was being anything less than gentlemanly, it was just holding hands, not a hole in the bottom of the popcorn bucket sitting on his lap after all.
Something way at the back of my mind behind some iron curtain was fighting it tooth and nail though, something that wasn’t able to
verbalize its protests, but spoke through my gut reactions. One thing I
did
know was that I hated that unspoken protest, it made me feel like I couldn’t even trust my own judgment. That was what had made me stay so long with Jeremy trying to force that other life upon myself after I woke up in the hospital bed, and it was also responsible for the mistake I had made at Lake Oroitz.
Flipping the bird at that internal voice, I unfolded my arms and put my own hand down on top of Leyton’s, which he turned upwards to hold mine, and that’s how we watched the remainder of the movie. I hoped I hadn’t opened a can of worms for myself simply for the sake of telling a fictional protester in my mind to go to hell. What if he wanted to kiss me at the end of the night? What if he wanted to come upstairs or have us both go back to his place?
The same questions that had plagued me just before the date were front and center again. Just how far was tonight going to go? I hadn’t decided yet, but I was running out of time, if the damn movie would ever end.
Eventually, of course, it did and Leyton drove me back to my apartment while chatting animatedly about the movie, he had apparently enjoyed it a lot more than I had. He walked me right up to my door and shuffled his feet nervously with his hands in his pockets as he tried to find some words to say.
“So… I had a really good time tonight,” he finally settled on.
“I did too, that restaurant was... yum.”
“Well… goodnight,” Leyton leaned towards me.
I tilted my head upwards and
rose slightly on the tips of my toes, letting his kiss fall on my lips, but keeping them firmly closed and keeping it fairly brief.
“Goodnight, Leyton, see you at work.”
“Night.”
Leyton turned back towards his car and I let myself through the outer door of my apartment, still doing my best to make sense of my feelings. While waiting for the elevator to come down I pulled my phone out of my handbag to check for any messages and
realized I hadn’t turned it on since first turning it off for the movie.
After it searched for, and found, its signal it beeped to indicate a text had come through. It was from Debbie, and I pressed the button to view it. I had to roll my eyes when I read ‘
Don’t forget to use a condom
’ in black and white on my little screen. That girl had her mind in the gutter, for sure, but she was fun, and a good friend.
My apartment seemed so quiet and empty after the hustle and bustle of the Rigatoni Brothers and the deafening levels of the cinema audio system. It was only eleven pm, and my mind was still racing from the thrill and confusion of the evening so I decided to turn on the TV and make a cup of hot chocolate before hitting the shower and going to bed.
The TV sprang to life, commercials of course, and I went to the kitchen to fill the kettle with water and put it on to boil. I was just setting my mug down on the counter when I heard the TV announce what was coming up next in the show.
‘Next up in Billionaires Behaving Badly we give you a sneak peek into the life of Bad Boy Jeremy Holt. This guy knows how to party, just ask these five women who can’t get enough!’
I rushed back into my living room to see Jeremy on my screen, in some nightclub on the dance floor surrounded by scantily clad little hussies, smears of lipstick all over his cheeks and a stupid little cone-shaped party hat on his head as he danced the way only a drunken white man can. The women didn’t seem to mind his uncoordinated movements, pressing their lithe bodies up against him as they tried their best to be front and center for every camera shot.
Pain flared up in the palms of my hands and I
realized I was digging my own fingernails in while I watched the scene playing out before me. With great effort I unclenched my hands and held them firmly at my sides as I watched my so-called husband drink shots of hard liquor out of a topless blonde waitress’ belly button. Thankfully her breasts were blurred out on the screen.