Authors: Emma South
The commentary only served to rile me up even more, talking about which one of these ‘bouncy’ honeys would get to go home with him that night and saying there was actually room for all of them in his mansion. I fought for control, why did this kind of thing make me so angry? It was that damn thing in my mind behind the iron curtain again, I was sure of it.
I could only hope that shows like ‘Billionaires Behaving Badly’ were killing it. I didn’t want that thing inside my mind, second-guessing my every move, so I forced myself to watch until the end of the segment on Jeremy before storming off to my bedroom, my hot chocolate completely forgotten.
“At least you’re dancing with some brunettes,” I said to nobody.
Seething, I changed into my pajamas and jumped into bed, pulling my covers up to my chin as I squeezed my eyes against unexpected tears. I forced them down, not letting a single one past my eyelids, until I felt under control again and leaned over the side of my bed to fumble in the dark until I found my laptop.
Blinking away the residual blur from my eyes, I began a search for something I should have done weeks, if not months ago, and sent off several emails of enquiry. I was pretty emotionally drained by the time I was done and closed the lid, plunging my room back into darkness. I fell asleep while trying to focus on the positives from the day, instead slipping into nightmares about Jeremy.
The next day I spent a couple of hours sending out more emails and then cleaning my apartment to take my mind off things. I didn’t receive any replies to my emails outside of a few automated responses saying they had been received, but I hadn’t expected any due to it being Sunday.
Leyton texted me saying he had a great time again and asked if I wanted to have lunch that day. I said no, but suggested we meet up again some evening mid-week. The last thing I wanted to do was move too fast, regardless of how inexplicably angry I was with what Jeremy was doing.
Monday rolled around and it was back to the office for another thrilling day of moving pieces of mail around. I used the mailroom computer to check my emails at lunchtime and was glad to find several responses there. By the end of my lunch hour I had confirmed meetings for lunchtime on Thursday and Friday as well as used the company intranet to apply for a sales rep job at last.
I swore the lawyer I met on Thursday should have had contact lenses with dollar signs printed on them, he was absolute scum and wouldn’t listen to much that I had to say. The only way he would work with me was if I fleeced Jeremy for everything I possibly could. I left with a cold ‘don’t call me, I’ll call you’. The man I met on Friday was much better, though still slightly incredulous that I actually wanted to reimburse Jeremy for the money I’d spent using his bank card while recovering from my injuries.
“OK, Beatrice, we’ll do this your way, but I do have to advise you that this would be a highly unusual separation of relationship property. Especially in the absence of a pre-nup. But hey, it’s your divorce and I’ll act as you direct me.”
Chapter 12
It took a couple of weeks of snatched meetings during my lunch break, and one on a Saturday, before my lawyer, Matthew Horowitz, had all the information he deemed necessary from me, with only one more question asking if I was sure I didn’t want to ask for a little more and set myself up for life.
Matthew was going to handle all the contact with Jeremy’s lawyer, and assuming Jeremy was agreeable then I hopefully wouldn’t need to see him at all. Judging from what I’d seen in the magazines and on TV, I expected him to settle everything pretty quickly to protect his own interests. Top-end lawyers or not, Jeremy’s legal team could hardly have negotiated a better deal for him if I had wanted to rip his empire apart.
I went on a couple more dates with Leyton, each one just as pleasant as the first, and even ended up letting a kissing session outside my apartment last for several minutes. Somehow I managed to stop myself from letting things go any further, I told myself it was because I was preoccupied with getting my divorce underway. There was also something that felt like it was missing from our dates, and I still couldn’t put my finger on it. It bothered me enough to hold myself back and not open up to him completely, despite my otherwise growing attraction.
Debbie hounded me constantly for juicy details of my dates with Leyton and seemed baffled about how slow I was making everything go. She asked if I was a reverend’s daughter or something, and said that she would probably have been pregnant after so many dates. She also said that we’re only young once and I should loosen up a bit, have some fun. This was followed by a good-natured comment that I wasn’t strictly speaking ‘young’ anymore and I should really get while the gettin’ is good.
I knew she was joking, but for somebody who went to sleep aged eighteen and woke up aged almost-twenty-six, I really did feel like life was moving fast. Maybe I
did
need to take a page out of Debbie’s book and have a little fun. I mean, I didn’t want to live fast, die young and be buried in a y-shaped coffin or anything but it was a perfectly normal thing to do, the occasional fling.
That’s why today, a fine mid-spring Saturday, I was putting extra special attention into my preparations for a lunch date with Leyton. At the end of it, assuming he didn’t suggest it again himself, I was going to propose we go back to his place. Whether the date was extended by a few hours or overnight at that stage remained to be seen but I’d decided I was open to either possibility.
I was just choosing some lipstick when I heard a knock at the door. Looking at the time I bunched my fists and grimaced, I was nowhere near ready yet and Leyton was at least an hour early. The previous week he had arrived at the same time as one of my neighbors at the outer door and just come up to my apartment, so much for security.
He’d never been
this
early though, so I wasn’t sure what to do. Maybe he could go for a walk or something, I didn’t want to have him there while I was getting ready and spoil the surprise of the finished product!
“Coming!” I called.
I hurriedly tidied away anything that had to do with my preparations before walking to the door and opening it with a polite smile, ready to give him the verbal equivalent of a friendly kick in the shins. The smile quickly turned into a speechless ‘o’ of surprise when my brain finally registered what I was seeing in the hallway though.
“Hello, Bea.”
“Jeremy?”
“Can I come in?”
“
Jeremy?
”
“Yes, me.”
I shook my head as if getting rid of the cobwebs and stared at him, blinking like something was wrong with my eyes. It felt like somebody was spinning the emotional parallel of a wheel of fortune inside of me and I was waiting to see what it landed on. Looking like it might stop on joy, it actually clicked safely past and ended up trapped on the peg between confusion and anger.
“How the hell did you find me? Did my lawyer tell you?”
“Bea… don’t be angry, please. Your lawyer didn’t say anything he wasn’t supposed to. I have… well, you’re not exactly on the witness protection program.
“What did you do? Have you been spying on me?”
“No. I got the… the papers and I pulled a few strings so that I could come talk to you face to face. That’s all. Please, don’t be angry, can we talk?” Jeremy adjusted his jacket nervously for a moment before adding, “You look beautiful.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I said.
“Please, Bea, I don’t want to fight. I could fight anything, except you. Just hear what I have to say, will you do that for me?”
I sighed and moved out of the way gesturing into my apartment. Jeremy walked in, eyes darting around to take in the few features of my living room but mostly looking towards his feet. I decided not to stop him and make him take his shoes off, he had probably not touched the ground between here and his mansion between the red carpets, private jets, and willing blondes.
Jeremy leaned against the breakfast bar that divided my kitchen and living room and continued staring downwards with his hands in his pockets, taking deep breaths through an open mouth. I stood with the couch between us, my fingers lightly touching the top of it as I waited for him to say something.
“What do you want, Jeremy?”
Jeremy’s eyes shifted up to meet mine like he’d almost forgotten anybody else was in the room before looking towards the ceiling and scanning from left to right as if the answer might be written up there somewhere.
“I want,” he licked his lips, “I want you to tell me it isn’t true! Tell me this isn’t happening.”
“Jeremy… I…”
“Don’t let our marriage end like this, don’t… don’t kill it. I love you… please don’t do this.”
“Those words don’t
mean
anything to me, Jeremy. I don’t remember ‘us’. Whenever I think about the life that you say was mine, it just feels like a big mistake. I made
promises
, you don’t know what I’ve been through, I can’t have told you everything or you’d know we can’t be together.”
“How can you say that? How can love not mean anything?” Jeremy choked on a sob and raised his fist to his mouth for a moment before continuing, forcing words out on a throat that seemed hell-bent on closing up on him. “Keep fighting, Bea, remember what Doctor Jensen said. We’re in there somewhere,” he tapped his head, “you and I. Just never stop fighting for us.”
“I don’t know how to fight it and I don’t know what I’m fighting
for
. I told you that if I remembered we’d cross that bridge when we got to it. I’ve lost eight years of my life! We both need to get busy living so we don’t lose another eight searching for something we might never find.”
Jeremy ceased leaning on the breakfast bar and meandered over to my window, looking out at the
lackluster view for a moment before talking again, his eyes following random cars down on the road.
“OK, you don’t remember. I understand that. But what about all our hopes and dreams? All the things we were going to do? All those things that will never get a chance to be turned
into
memories?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Like our house. I was
there
when the frame of that house arrived on the back of the trucks, ‘Holt’ written in big black ink all over each piece. My name,
our
name. We’re in the very
bones
of that house, Bea… but now no Holts will ever live there.”
A tear rolled down his cheek and he wiped it away with the back of a hand before continuing.
“We were going to look out the window at our children playing in the back yard, talk for hours while the sun slowly rose over the lake, make plans for the future. The future…”
Jeremy faltered for a moment, still staring out the window, while I stood there lost for words. It felt like the burden of another person’s deepest wishes was being piled on to my shoulders. Jeremy eventually picked up where he left off.
“The future used to be something to look forward to, like meeting an old friend. Now it’s just black and scary, some unknown thing hiding in the shadows. What about our chance to take that picture of our kid on their first day of school? A backpack almost as big as they are, that big smile they have before they find out about math class. I’ve seen that picture, Bea, I’ve seen it in my head… but it feels like it’s being thrown on a bonfire now.”
“You can’t blame me for things that haven’t even hap…”
“Our first holiday together
without
the kids… a chance to be a couple after so long being Mom and Dad, like falling in love all over again. We were going to be so proud of each other. We were going to do great things and people were going to be so jealous of the sweet thing we had,” Jeremy turned away from the window and looked at me with desperation. “We can still have it all, Bea. All of that and more. It’s not dead yet… it’s hurt but we can bring it back. Just say you won’t stop trying… say you can do this… for me.”
It was my turn to look towards the floor. It wasn’t fair the way he had presented it, like I could just decide to change everything I felt, everything I knew about who I was. Doctor Jensen had said that memories
usually
came back, not always. It had already been the better part of a year since the accident, and he’d said months ago that it was already a longer case of amnesia than most.
I didn’t know exactly what I’d been thinking and doing during the eight years in which I’d met Jeremy, but I did know who I was before the lights of memory went out. I remembered my parents, I remembered my promises to them and to myself. Hell, I remembered the pictures I’d seen in the magazines and what he’d done on the ‘Billionaires Behaving Badly’ TV show. It was too much to get over, too much to fight for something I
didn’t
remember.
“I think you should leave,” I said.
“Where’s my wife?”
“I… she’s gone.”
Jeremy let out a shuddering sigh and began walking towards the door avoiding eye contact until, with his hand on the door handle, he turned and looked back.
“What do you see when you look at me?”
“I see a rich man who’s used to getting everything he wants.”
Jeremy’s brow furrowed, “You used to see a lot more.”
Turning back to the door he opened it just as a cheerful knock rang out on the wood to see Leyton standing there with a small bunch of flowers. The smile on Leyton’s face faded to confusion as Jeremy looked back to me and then turned to him again.
“Uh… Hi. Who are you?” Leyton asked.
“Who are
you
?”
“I’m Beatrice’s boyfriend.”
Jeremy stared at Leyton for a long time. I raised my hands to cover my mouth, wondering if I was going to have to call the police to break up a fist fight or something. The back of Jeremy’s head was unreadable, which was disconcerting, but then he turned to look at me, which was so much worse.
I’d seen people go pale before, of course, but Jeremy looked like time had stopped while he spent a month in a dungeon before time resumed its normal pace. He was positively grey, cadaverous even. Jeremy walked out the door, eye to eye with Leyton for a moment, the height difference between them negligible.
Then he was gone and Leyton was left with a bewildered look on his face. I was surprised the flowers hadn’t wilted in Jeremy’s presence, if the truth be told.
“Who was that?”
“That was my husband.”
“Oh, holy crap. What’s he doing here?”
“A surprise visit to dispute the divorce. What are
you
doing here? You’re early. Also, who said you were my boyfriend, god dammit? We’re dating!”
“Sorry… I just thought… well, I’m not dating anybody else. Are you?”
“No. That’s not the point though.”
I growled in exasperation and circled around the couch to flop down on it, leaning my head back and covering my face with my hands. My God that was intense.
“Uh… can I come in?”
“You know what? No. Not right now. Can you go do… something? Come back closer to when we arranged, or a bit later. I need to calm down and collect myself.”
“OK, I’ll just leave these here,”
I removed my hands from my face momentarily and looked over to see Leyton leaning in to put the flowers down on the little table I had near the door.
“You sure you’re alright?”
“Yes. Just go. Please.”
I turned my head back so it was facing upwards again and replaced my hands, blotting out my vision. The front door clicked shut and I was left mercifully in peace. Eventually my hands flopped down to my sides.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”
Standing up, I walked over to the window, looking out upon the view I’d had for months, the same view Jeremy had taken in for a few minutes. It was unremarkable as always, but I could understand why he’d stood there for so long, the constant movement of the city below was strangely helpful for thinking.