Just Like Yesterday

by Brenda Barrett

  Amy headed for the piano. "I will leave this one to the boys. I can never play a game with Brent without him acting like a madman."

  Wendy chuckled and then looked at Hazel. "So you and I get a chance to talk semi-privately."

  Hazel swallowed. "Yes."

  "I understand that you have memory issues and you can't remember that summer?"

  "That's right," Hazel said. "I can't remember a thing."

  "Have you considered hypnotherapy?"

  "I have," Hazel nodded, "but I knew of a girl who did it at the orphanage where I grew up. She had false memories and accused her stepbrother of some really bad things. It was a good thing they were proven to not be true."

  "Maybe the practitioner was not qualified." Wendy leaned back in the settee. "I tried it for stress relief and it works."

  Hazel cleared her throat uncomfortably. "I am not sure I want to remember. Sometimes I really want to and sometimes I don't."

  "Curtis wants you to," Wendy said, patting her leg. "I applaud him for staying away from you for four years. Of course there was your marriage to, er, John Baron. That added another year to his wait."

  "Hey Amy," Wendy said, grinning cheekily. "Play Wait in Vain by Bob Marley. I am dedicating this one to Curtis and Hazel."

  Curtis looked up from his crouched stance at the game board and laughed. "Yes, those are my accurate feelings."

  Hazel smiled but inside her head was churning. Obviously Wendy had no idea what the true situation was. She looked at Keith Decker and then Curtis, both sitting there amicably playing. Maybe she was the one who didn’t understand the true situation.

  *****

  "So, did you enjoy yourself?" Curtis asked as they made their way down the hill in the early evening.

  "It was fine," Hazel said. "Your family is nice. You are all a little weird but nice."

  Curtis laughed and looked at the back seat. Sebastian was all tuckered out.

  "Your mom thinks we are weird, Sebastian."

  Sebastian murmured something sleepily.

  "Are you coming over tomorrow, or should we come over?"

  "I'll come by your place," Hazel said, feeling a throbbing headache beginning at her temples.

  "Come over early," Curtis said, caressing her cheeks. She pressed her head in his hands and released a sigh.

  "Feel sleepy?" Curtis asked softly.

  "Yes and drained," Hazel said. "Drained, tired, and headachy."

  When Curtis dropped her off she let herself into the house and didn't even bother turning on the lights. She stumbled to her room in the dark and lay down on top of the duvet and closed her eyes, pressing her hands to her temples and willing her head to stop hurting.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  "You are one lucky girl, Hazel Brown!" Kenzy was driving them to the Fullham offices. The secretary had called Kenzy's number, wishing to speak to Michelle Brown. They wanted to speak about contracts and doing business.

  Because they had lied their butts off about their ages, they had no choice but to embark on their new modeling career in secrecy. Kenzy was supposedly her manager.

  She had just gotten her learners permit and was not supposed to be in the car without an adult who had a driver's license so she had bribed the gardener, Jakes, to come with her. He had a license but he hadn't gotten around to renewing it. That had been good enough for Kenzy. Hazel hoped the police didn't pull them over or they would be in serious trouble.

  Hazel looked through the window with a feeling of melancholy. Ever since she met Curtis Decker and they had posed together at that photo shoot in Lime Cay one week ago, she had been vacillating between periods of depression and agony. This wasn't a crush; it was excruciating. She wanted to see him again, to speak to him again. Her skin literally tingled when she thought of how his hand had rested on her hips for the poses.

  She had no idea that a person could feel this way. She alternated between wanting to see him again and not being sure what she would say if she did. She was going along with Kenzy and her modeling scheme because she reasoned there was a sliver of a chance that she would see him again.

  Maybe he was at his father's business place. She wouldn't dare tell Kenzy that she was thinking this way because Kenzy did not handle these relationship matters well. She would blab to Curtis if she ever saw him about how she felt and that would seriously embarrass Hazel. Her obsession with Curtis was her little secret.

  Kenzy hit the brakes hard at a stoplight. Hazel and Jakes hung onto their seats in fright.

  "Sorry." Kenzy looked behind her at Hazel.

  "Keep your eyes on the road!" Hazel hissed.

  "Ah, stop acting like a prima donna; you are a model, Michelle."

  "Stop calling me that," Hazel snapped. "We should have cleared up this Michelle nonsense ages ago."

  "But you are Michelle for this job," Kenzy said. "If you are not Michelle they will need your parents or guardian to sign a contract. Your guardian, Patricia Benedict, would kill us if she even knew you were not at Magnolia House anymore."

  That was true. She was already in deep trouble. Somehow she had decided to forget that.

  Hazel subsided in her seat and then sat up straighter. She didn't want to mess up her straightened hair that Kenzy had spent all morning wrangling over. All of this beauty work was becoming a burden and she hadn't even started being a model yet.

  Thankfully they arrived at the office in one piece, though Jakes had to take the car from Kenzy because she had difficulty parking it on her own.

  The secretary sent them through to Keith Decker's office as soon as they entered the Fullham suite. He had been waiting for them in his office, which was decorated with pictures of models. Many of them were of Adele on her various famous magazine covers.

  He was charming as usual. He stood up when they entered, shook their hands politely and basically treated them as if they were well thinking adults.

  He spoke to them at length about the modeling business.

  He told Hazel that he had gotten an offer from a Bridal Magazine for the pictures that she had taken at Lime Cay.

  They discussed standard fees for the pictures.

  She pretended that she wasn't impressed by the figure. And then he looked at his watch and said that he had lunch with his son in a few minutes. He asked them if they wanted to come.

  "Sure!" Kenzy said, her expression eager. "That would be great."

  They went to the Four Seasons, a hotel that was close to the office building. The food was superb and Keith Decker was in the midst of delivering a joke when Curtis walked in.

  Hazel's mouth went numb and she had to catch herself from not gawping at him. He was seriously handsome. A ray of sunlight caught his overly long hair that he had pulled back in a ponytail and turned it brown.

  "Ladies," Keith said with panache when Curtis walked up to the table. "You remember my son. Well, I am sure Michelle remembers you," Keith grinned when Curtis nodded at them in general.

  "Why?" Curtis asked, giving Hazel a piercing stare.

  "Well, Bridal Magazine said that you two made for a realistic and very good looking couple."

  Hazel blushed. Her ears turned red and she didn't want to see what Curtis’ reaction was. He didn't say a word after his father spoke and she avoided looking at him. Instead, she fixed her eyes on Keith Decker and allowed him and Kenzy to carry the majority of the conversation about one topic or the other.

  Keith was safer. His son was trouble. Delicious trouble. She didn't want Curtis to see how affected she was by him.

  When she finally looked in his direction after lunch was served, she saw that he was looking at her, a little squint to his eye.

  And then he looked at his father. That was when she realized that he thought that she was into his father and was ignoring him. It made him mad. She saw that and she reveled in it.

  Was he jealous?

  It gave her ego a little kick. She tested out her theory by leaning closer to Keith Decker and softening her eyes as he spok
e.

  Message received. Curtis was angry. He interrupted his father's conversation abruptly. "I have to go."

  He hadn't even finished eating his food!

  Hazel was on a power high. She could move Curtis Decker. Obviously he wasn't indifferent to her.

  She barely restrained herself from chortling as he stormed away, leaving his father and Kenzy puzzled.

  But not her. She knew that she had made him jealous. But what was she going to do about it?

  *****

  Hazel jumped up out of her sleep and blinked in the dark and with dizzying swiftness, her memory returned.

  "Oh, God," she whispered to herself in the dark, "I remember!"

  She sat up in the middle of the bed and pictures kaleidoscoped through her head. She saw herself in the middle of the business district waiting for a taxi after that meeting with Keith Decker. Kenzy’s car was hemmed in by a vehicle that was parked badly and she and Jakes had stayed behind to sort it out. She had gleefully told Kenzy that she would see her at home.

  Curtis had seen her standing at the bus stop and pulled up beside her, his eyes weary.

  "Get in the car!" He hadn't asked; he had demanded. She had been only too thrilled to obey.

  He warned her not to get entangled with his father. "He is married." He had looked at her, his eyes flaring. "I know that you are young and he might have encouraged you but you need to think about my mother. You need to develop some kind of moral compass."

  "But he likes me." The fib had left her mouth as she tried to act sophisticated, though her heart had thrilled that he was talking to her.

  "I like you too." Curtis had slowed down at a stop sign. And he sent her a speaking look. "Choose. Me or my dad."

  She had shrugged. "We'll see."

  That had inflamed him.

  He muttered, "I am too hungry for this. I should have eaten my lunch. You are coming to Port Royal with me. I promised Joe that I would take some equipment to him. I see that I am not going to be able to let you out of my sight."

  It was then that she met Joe and Pam. She had tried their jerk fish and she had loved it.

  To appear sophisticated she had lied to Curtis, perpetuating the fiction that she was twenty-one and a party girl out for a good time, even telling him about her part time job as a disc jockey on radio, completely stealing Amelia, Kenzy's cousin's life. Her reason for being single was that she had just broken off with her boyfriend a fellow disc jockey.

  And she had thought that the more she embellished her life and how sophisticated she was, the more he liked her, Michelle Brown. The girl with the straightened hair and the borrowed designer clothes. Not once had she mentioned who she really was, though her omission had stuck in her mind and made her feel guilty.

  And then one day she was invited to a meeting to be introduced to the editor of a popular college magazine. Keith Decker had set up the meeting at Buccaneer by the Sea, a place she had frequented with Curtis several times since that day at the Four Seasons.

  The magazine exec didn't show up and she had a meal with Keith Decker. Laughing at his jokes. Enjoying his company. Feeling nothing. Her crush on him had been fleeting because she had well and truly decided that she had fallen in love with his son.

  The more she saw of Curtis, the more she was convicted that she needed to tell him the truth about her age and everything. She was thinking just that when Curtis had shown up at the Buccaneer.

  He had been blazing angry at her but mostly at his father.

  She could see it now in her mind's eye.

  "She's my girlfriend," he had insisted. "Mine. This is not going to happen again."

  Keith had protested stridently but Curtis had made a scene and had asked her to choose. And she had stared between the two men, frozen into silence at the aggression rolling off Curtis and the angry cast of his face.

  She didn't know him like that—so bitter and angry. She stayed where she was while he stalked off toward the entrance of the restaurant and then it registered that she was seeing his retreating back and she had been galvanized into action. She had gotten up from the table, leaving Keith Decker, who was shaking his head in bewilderment.

  "Curtis, wait!"

  When she reached outside he had just about turned his car to drive out when he saw her. He stopped.

  She got in the car without saying a word.

  And that was when he cupped her face and kissed her so hard her lips tingled for hours after that. Their first kiss.

  He had driven her to his home in the hills, Villa Caelum. And she had asked him what Caelum meant that first time. He had explained it. He had also told her that his parents were staying at the apartment in New Kingston because his mother wasn't well.

  And then he had kissed her. And they had almost gone too far.

  Curtis had pulled back and told her that he didn't do casual sex and that he had serious feelings for her. He wanted them to get to know each other better, to take things slow. She pressed that matter nonetheless. She wanted to see how far his self-control went—she had taunted him.

  Dressing skimpier and skimpier, reveling in the banked up appreciation he had in his eyes…testing out all the feminine whiles that she didn't even known she had. But one afternoon, in the middle of a thunderstorm, she lost her virginity to Curtis Decker on the Wendy.

  Curtis was Sebastian's father.

  Hazel pushed a trembling hand through her hair and almost laughed in relief. She hadn't been with anybody else. If she hadn't gone to that stupid party with Kenzy to cheer herself up because Curtis had gone back to Canada two days earlier, she wouldn’t have hit her head and lost her memory.

  *****

  She turned on the sidelight and winced when the lights hit her retina. It was one o'clock in the morning. She dialed Curtis' number. She needed to talk to him. She really needed to say sorry. He must have been livid when he couldn't get in touch with Michelle Brown and instead found out that she was Hazel Brown. This call couldn't wait until the next day.

  He answered the phone groggily. "Hey Hazel?"

  "Hey." Hazel swallowed, a frog had suddenly lodged in her throat. "I remember," she croaked. "Everything."

  She heard rustling and then his voice sounded clear. "You do?"

  "Yes," Hazel whispered, "and I am sorry. I was a selfish teenage girl. I didn't know what on earth I was doing. No, scratch that. Maybe I knew but I liked the power of having you like me too. All I can say is, I was driven by hormones and a huge helping of immaturity."

  "It took me nearly six months to track you down," Curtis murmured, "after I left for Canada. I had my parents trying to find Michelle Brown because you didn't write; you didn't answer your cell phone. You had vanished into thin air. They checked out all of the places that we had talked about, your school...everywhere."

  "So how did you know?" Hazel swallowed. A huge guilty shroud was suffocating her.

  "When you found out that you were pregnant. That was when Kenzy panicked and told Patricia about your change of name and modeling gig. Patricia approached my father. She was threatening to sue me and Dad. Let me tell you, his reputation would have been ruined."

  "Oh my gosh," Hazel whispered.

  "She said I took advantage of you because you were just sixteen and Dad photographed you when he had no permission to. It's ironic. It’s only because my mom was sick that she didn't follow through with her threats," Curtis said dryly. "And then I found out that you didn't remember me. God, it hurt. I didn't know what hurt more, the lies or the fact that you were carrying my child and didn't even know it."

  "I am so sorry, Curtis." Hazel cringed at every word he spoke. "My phone was lost the same night I fell and hit my head at the party."

  "I was in the middle of a job in Alaska when you gave birth," Curtis whispered, "and I told my parents to get Sebastian out of there. I didn't want him growing up in an orphanage. They got him out of there with Patricia's half-hearted agreement. She wanted Sebastian for herself, to keep him for you.

&n
bsp; "It’s ironic that you didn't remember me but you remembered that story I told you about my twin brother and how his name was Sebastian."

  "Yes," Hazel closed her eyes. "We went sailing to Lime Cay and I said to you that you and I would name our firstborn Sebastian. You proposed to me. You said that you were going to Canada to start your job and that I should join you after school."

  Hazel's voice hitched in a sob. She could remember everything clearly now—when he had asked her to marry him on Lime Cay. She had been conscious more than ever that she had lied to him constantly for more than six weeks. She had looked at him. The sunset was golden, the sea was calm and she had known that she had to tell him the truth and she had also known that it would be over when she told him.

  Curtis would be horrified that she was a teenager. He would be repulsed by the lies she told. He would hate her. And so she hadn't told him, she had been too cowardly to tell him face to face.

  Instead that evening she had written him a letter and titled it, Just Like Yesterday.

  She could almost remember the letter line for line. I know when I tell you this you will hate me, but I wish that you could love me just like yesterday.

  "Hazel?" Curtis' voice was concerned and Hazel realized that she was just sitting there, clutching the phone.

  "Somebody could have told me," Hazel said hoarsely. "I spent nearly six years of my life plotting to get back Sebastian from who I thought were strangers. And then when I remembered something I assumed that your father was his father."

  "I wasn't going to be the one to tell you anything about your loss memories but I did try my damnedest to help you to remember us," Curtis said. "Patricia warned me that your doctor was against anybody trying to interfere with your memories. She urged me to be patient, that your memory would come back, and I was patient. I waited four years. Not only that, I wanted you to grow up too. And when I decided to approach you had gotten married to a sick old man who was rotten rich and powerful. I had to tread softly."