Just Friends: A Summer Fling With A Billionaire Heir

by Cynthia Dane

  I never wanted to drink before I met Zack. Not that Zack made her want to drink – most days – but she had certainly drunk more around him. Way more in the span of one summer than she had drunk before.

  She tapped her pen against the lesson book, staring at the wall in front of her. The school’s copy of her teaching schedule was tacked up. What a terrible reminder that this was the life she chose… over Zack.

  Not that she regretted it. The only thing Rachel regretted since stepping on the plane to Tokyo was not packing enough socks. She had forgotten that her school didn’t allow pure white socks. Something about them getting dirty faster, and that was simply not acceptable.

  I meant every word I wrote in that letter. From her needing her space to the insecurities that were insurmountable. Being with Zack for much longer would have sent her down the kind of mental spiral a woman does not easily crawl back out from.

  Naturally, she was grateful that he had paid for her mother’s care. Rachel wasn’t of the mind to pay him back, per se, but she was going to save up enough money at this job to pay the bills once the year was up. The offer had been too good to pass up once it had fallen into her lap. Daisuke hadn’t been able to promise her a raise, but he had hooked her up with the region of her choosing. She didn’t return to the exact town she had taught at before, but it was close enough.

  Everything was close enough. Close enough to the life she had once lived before meeting Zack.

  I think about him every night. When she lay in her futon late at night, reciting the next day’s lesson plans and going over the freelance work she did for select clients, she recalled what it was like to sleep in his arms and bury her face against his naked chest. For a few brief, select nights, she had been able to achieve true intimacy with someone again.

  She wondered if she would taste it once more someday.

  I only have myself to blame. She shouldn’t have pushed the relationship past what she was ready for. She had learned that lesson well.

  Still… she often wondered what he was doing, if he had moved on already, how his art was going… was Uncle Roy still in the city, or had he departed for wherever he wintered? Rachel’s birthday had passed, which meant fall was in full swing. Winter would soon come to that part of America. How much would it snow that year? As much as it would in Japan?

  What did Zack do in the winters, when going to the marina wasn’t as fun as it would be come summer?

  Rachel put away her materials. After one last trip to the restroom, she grabbed her things and the keys to the front door. Lights turned off. Shoes were back on. Rachel unlocked and opened the door so she could turn around and lock it again.

  A man waited for her. He stood beside a limo, holding a placard that said RACHEL TAYLOR in big, bold print.

  “Jesus!” Rachel leaped where she stood, nearly crawling up the wall of the rickety old school building. “What the hell!”

  The Japanese chauffeur wiped his gloved hand beneath the name on his sign. “Taylor-san?”

  Rachel didn’t know whether she should admit that she was the one he searched for or not. What the hell was this, anyway? Some kind of prank? Did Travis Kyle from her district think this was a funny joke to play on her since she was “fresh meat” again? Sending old Japanese men to find her at nine at night in the middle of a rural neighborhood?

  The chauffeur stepped forward and handed Rachel a business card. One handwritten word appeared before her eyes.

  “Please.”

  Her fingertips touched the ink on the card. She recognized that handwriting anywhere, even when her brain tried to tell her it was a lie.

  “All right,” she said with a sigh. The last train back to her apartment was supposed to take off from the station in fifteen minutes. It was a ten minute walk. If this driver screwed her out of getting home in a reasonable amount of time, he was looking at a nice, long drive back into the town Rachel lived.

  Instead, the limo pulled onto the highway – going in the opposite direction of where Rachel lived.

  They were heading into the city on a Friday night. The same night most of the region filtered into the city to go to the movies and hit the bars and clubs with their flashy friends. Rachel was not dressed for anything fancy. Her school had a generously lax dress code for teaching children. Instead of wearing three-piece suits, stuffy sweaters, and scratchy tights beneath conservative skirts, Rachel raced around the classroom in a pair of denim jeans and Pokémon themed T-shirts. Okay, so tonight I’m wearing a plain T-shirt and my flannel over it.

  Point was, Rachel was not dressed for a fancy night in the city. She was dressed for lounging around her apartment, eating bento from the corner convenience store and playing games on her laptop.

  “Where are we going?” she asked the driver, first in English and then in Japanese. “Can you even tell me?”

  The driver only gave her a small smile in the rearview mirror. If Rachel hadn’t recognized the handwriting on the card, she would be panicking.

  Or at least she swore it was Zack’s handwriting. What if it wasn’t? What if she was setting herself up for disappointment? Or worse? She was having a fit about him to begin with!

  Honestly, Rachel had expected Zack to track her down in Japan sooner rather than later. He had the means. He had the resources. The reason she didn’t tell him she was leaving was because she worried he would try to stop her at the airport or follow her in his own plane.

  Or maybe he would sail there in his yacht. That was probably what really happened and why he took so long to catch up to her.

  I haven’t written to him. I haven’t called him. They hadn’t spoken in nearly two months. For all Rachel knew, Zack had considered themselves broken up and moved on.

  She considered texting him, but she only had a cheap prepaid Japanese cell phone and never bothered to memorize his number. By the time she decided to text Parvati about this, the limo pulled over and a valet stepped forward to help Rachel out of the backseat.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” she asked him, but this man also did not speak much English. The more embroiled she became, the more Japanese she forgot.

  The building was nondescript, although a small sign hung out front. Most of it was written in Japanese. Rachel could make out a little bit of it. “Wondrous World of Fantastical Imagery.” That didn’t tell her much. All she learned from anything was that it was a semi-formal event. The women wearing little black cocktail dresses and the men in their collared shirts made her feel woefully underdressed. At least she wasn’t wearing a Hello Kitty T-shirt!

  The doorman took one look at her and motioned for her to come inside. Rachel still had no idea what was going on, but went along with it anyway.

  It was an art gallery. One packed from wall to wall with guests clearing a path for her.

  Women whispered to each other. Men looked her up and down. A man named Masayoshi Suzuki, who was credited with putting the event together, was the first to approach Rachel’s hand. His Japanese words fell upon her deaf ears. There was no way Rachel could appreciate what he said when her eyes were transfixed on the artwork before her.

  Her mind was blank. There was no thinking, “This is Zack’s work. I’d know it anywhere.” Not when the only thing she saw was…

  Her own face.

  It stared back at her from behind a veneer of carefully treated marble. Wisps of hair, made of stone but still looking like fine threads, fell against the statue’s cheeks. Rachel shook her head in absolute awe.

  Behind that statue was another one of Rachel looking over her shoulder, the plaid of her flannel shirts matching the one she wore now. Paintings of her referencing other artists’ iconic styles hung on the walls. Pedestals held little clay figurines of miniature Rachel’s doing different activities. It was whole museum of Rachels.

  But the gasp-worthy piece was the one at the back of the gallery where most of the attendees congregated, taking pictures and writing down their thoughts on cards. The same kind of card in Rachel�
��s back pocket.

  “Please.”

  On the wall hung an imposing replica of the sketch Zack did of Rachel that fateful day they first saw each other. But instead of simple pencil strokes, the artist had added ink and a little bit of watercoloring to highlight the brown of Rachel’s hair and the red in her shirt. She worked diligently on her translating, although the spine of her dictionary actually said Book of Happy Memories in Japanese.

  Another picture hung next to it, a veritable before and after of her relationship with Zack.

  It must have been the night of the wedding. It had to be, because that was the only time Rachel was naked like that in her boyfriend’s bed. While Zack took care to keep her assets covered, the silk sheet in the painting left her back exposed and a hint of her behind hanging out. It was intimate. It was translucent.

  It was titled Just Friends.

  “What do you think?”

  That voice was what sent shivers down Rachel’s spine, not the artwork. “I think,” she began, “that whoever this woman is, she’s more than a friend to the artist.”

  Zack stood beside her, emanating such warmth that Rachel almost missed the scent of his cologne. “I’m glad that’s what you immediately picked up. I can tell you with little hesitation that an artist always appreciates it when his intent is understood.”

  They stood in silence while Rachel processed what had happened that evening. Here Zack was, standing beside her, giving her the space she had craved while still broadcasting how much he had thought about her over the past two months – and how much he still wanted her. Rachel didn’t need to see it in his art or hear it from his mouth. She felt the intensity radiating from his body, only a few respectful feet away. The man held himself back from grabbing her, kissing her, pinning her next to the portrait of her face and making love to her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, compelled by the energy surrounding them.

  “For what?”

  “For what I did.” People continued to approach the artistic display, most of them politely looking in their direction before pretending to only be enthralled with the pictures on the wall. “It was awful. I was prepared for you to move on and find someone else.”

  “Everyone told me you might say something like that.”

  Rachel turned toward him, flabbergasted. “Who?”

  “Everyone. Seriously. Everyone I talked to because I was a miserable wreck for a whole week before deciding what to do. Then I was a productive miserable wreck.”

  “You did all of this in two months?”

  “Once my agent told me my latest patron was a Japanese businessman, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I ran it by Mr. Suzuki, who has turned out to be the most terrible romantic you could meet in Japan.”

  “Not hard to accomplish.”

  “I figured. Anyway, he doesn’t live near here, but I convinced him to display my collection here so you could see it opening night. Think it might be a hit.”

  “An obsessive look at one man’s love for one woman? I’m shocked.” Rachel said it with a smile.

  Zack shrugged. “Don’t know if I would say obsessive…”

  When Rachel spun away from the wall, she encountered another image of herself. There, on a tiny pedestal in the middle of the floor, was a carefully carved marble figurine of Rachel sleeping, like in the “After” photo of her relationship with Zack. She pulled out her reading glasses from her bag to get a closer look at the intricate details.

  “Jesus. How do you do something like this?” Every wrinkle in the blanket, every wisp of hair was there, and in such miniature form. Marble was hard, right? How did men like Zack and Michelangelo make it look so easy to create something soft from something so hard? If Rachel tried it, she’d break it in half – in frustration!

  “Great patience and an eye for detail.” Zack kept his hands clasped firmly behind his back. “You’re not mad that I did this?”

  “Why would I be mad?”

  “Because like you said. Bit obsessive.”

  Rachel kept her eyes focused on the little details presented in a tiny marble representation of her asleep in Zack’s bed. “Maybe there’s such a thing as a good kind of obsessive.”

  “Well… nobody counted on you saying something like that.”

  “Who are these people saying these things?”

  “I believe my father explicitly said, ‘Unlike in those romance novels, son, if you actually use your money and connections to track down a woman because you insist on possessing her, she’ll call the cops on you, not marry you.’”

  “Goes to show your dad really doesn’t know me that well.”

  “He could, you know.”

  Rachel should have expected he would say something like that. The only reason she didn’t excuse herself from his presence was because his voice was… how could she put it? Decode it? Decipher the bundle of emotions creeping on a tethered line between him and her? The Japanese had a concept called The Red String of Fate that permeated media and old wives’ tales. Everyone is born with a red string tied around their finger. Their soul mate is on the other end.

  That was the invisible string hanging between them. Just because they couldn’t see it didn’t mean it was any less red than the flannel on Rachel’s back.

  “I honestly didn’t think you would do something like this. You didn’t even try to contact me here. No letters, no texts…”

  “You said you needed space. So, I let you have your space, even though I wish you hadn’t done it like that.” Zack sighed. “Look, Rachel, I love you. I wasn’t lying when I said that. But I guess I can see how, from your point of view, it was too much to handle at once. Like I told you all those weeks ago, I guess I can get insecure too.”

  A man who did all of this – while also respecting her temporary boundaries – surely must have loved her. Rachel wiped something away from the corner of her eye. How was this even possible? How could she find a man like this?

  How could I have left him like that?

  “Two days after we slept together,” she confessed, “I saw what that blog had been saying about your dating life for so long. Then I saw you in that bar talking to that woman. I know I was wrong, but my brain was filled with these terrible thoughts that you were either still sleeping with other women or were going to soon.”

  Zack didn’t respond for a few seconds. Then, “They’re always saying things about me. They’re going to keep saying things about me. You have to trust me, Rachel. Trust me when I say that since the moment I met you, I never once touched or thought about another woman. I didn’t understand it at the time, but the moment I saw you through that window, I knew it was meant to be.”

  “I don’t believe in fate.”

  “Neither do I. That’s what makes it more miraculous.”

  Rachel took his hand, coiling their red string of fate within their palms. “This is pretty miraculous.”

  “So you’re not mad at me?”

  “How could I be mad at a guy who clearly loves me so much and respects my boundaries? As long as that man also understands that I may not be wholly open to changing my life quite yet…”

  “The night is young, hon. We can bounce on my own gallery opening and go, I dunno, grab some food and swing by my hotel room?”

  “It’s been ten minutes. It’s taken you that long to suggest sex.”

  “I didn’t say anything about sex.”

  Rachel entered his embrace. His arms wrapped tightly around her as she tipped her head back and grinned into the underside of his fuzzy chin. “You heavily implied it. Like you’ve been implying it since the day we met.”

  “I know what I want.”

  “What do you want right now?”

  He gently swayed them back and forth while a million cell phone flashes went off around them. If people hadn’t recognized Rachel yet, they certainly did now. Her face surrounded them. She was on every wall, on every shelf, and on every single pedestal adorning the gallery.

  “I want you, R
achel Taylor. We can figure things out from there. At your own pace, even. Promise to keep me in the loop in the future. No more running off under the cover of darkness. I can find you, anyway.”

  They kissed on that promise. The applause erupting around them sounded a million miles away.

  All Rachel could really hear was the thundering of her own happy heart.

  Epilogue

  “Zack and I met on a sunny June day. The same day I had vowed to remain celibate for the rest of the summer, for my own damn sanity.”

  Rachel hesitated before jotting down another word. All around her, women from different backgrounds typed on their laptops, wrote in their notebooks, and highlighted text on pages of printed paper. The café was boisterous outside of Rachel’s headphones – currently blaring an old J-pop album she had acquired right before returning to Japan – but the women at the large table remained silent, lost in their creative thoughts.

  It had been Zack’s great idea. This whole business of going to writing meetup groups to hash out some thoughts, since Rachel confessed she had always wanted to write a memoir about her haphazardous love life. Actually, I’ve always dreamed of becoming a writer. There hadn’t been time for that in between working as a teacher and translating all day. By the time Rachel had time to relax, her brain was fried. All she wanted to do was watch videos and play games.

  She was happily unemployed now. She still did a little translating work on the side for her favorite clients, mostly to have something to do and to keep her language skills sharp, but Zack had made it clear that she didn’t have to get a job if she didn’t want to. Somehow, I believe him when he says he doesn’t mind taking care of me.

  Rachel cut her contract short by four months and returned to America right before Halloween. Since she had finished her lease at her old apartment, she didn’t have anywhere she could afford to live. Zack offered to let her move in with him, but Rachel tensed up at the thought of moving in with someone for the first time under those conditions.