Everything went still and she lay motionless. She may have fallen asleep and she was willing to bet that Jake had when the ponytailed woman came back. Jess’s face felt crackly in the sun, but there was an energy, too, just beneath it—a feeling of freedom, as though, once she sloughed off this mud, the heaviness that had burdened her for weeks, months, years, would be whisked away.
They were led to a powerful shower to rinse, one at a time. Jess washed the clay from her body. She worked from her legs to her neck, and, knowing he was watching her, she took her own breasts in her hands, clutching them and marveling at how easy it was to make him groan with desire.
When they were dry, and she had slipped on her jeans again, Jake made an announcement. “The next experience I have planned is unlike anything you’ve ever done before. That I can guarantee.”
She swallowed. Please let it be to take me back to the room and have your way with me. But he went on. “We’re going to jump out of a plane, Jess. Together.” His eyes gleamed.
“No we’re not,” Jess said, crestfallen.
“Sure we are. It’s all set.”
“No, we’re really not, Jake.”
“It’s not a big deal, Jess.”
“It’s a huge deal. You have to take lessons before you do that.”
“No, no. We just go with someone. A professional. He’ll do everything. All you have to do is go along for the ride.”
“I hate heights, Jake. Really. I don’t want to do that. Save it for your bachelor parties.”
“What if I told you that you had to?” His eyes danced. “What if I forced you?”
“I’d tell you to go to hell.”
He laughed. “Are you finding your voice all of a sudden, Jess Madigan?”
Was he patronizing her? How she hated that. “My voice,” Jess said, “was never missing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure. But you may not have noticed because you go and do whatever you want. For example…” Jess took a deep breath. “You left me last night. I haven’t forgotten that. I probably won’t ever forget that.”
When he didn’t answer, she went on, “Even Elizabeth says you don’t follow instructions very well.”
“Oh yeah?” Jake snorted. “When did she tell you that?”
“Yesterday. Outside the hotel.”
“What else did she tell you?”
Jess shrugged.
“I would like to know, Jess. What else did she tell you?”
“Nothing, really. And no matter what you say or do, I’m not going skydiving.”
“Tell you what…Let’s get something to eat and we’ll discuss it. There’s something about bathing in mud that makes me ravenous.”
She nodded and he took her hand as they crossed the tiled plaza to the restaurant, which was dark inside and smelled of roasted garlic, chili peppers and freshly cut flowers.
“The blue corn pancakes are the best here,” he whispered, and this is what she ordered, but all she really wanted was a towering cup of coffee and a handful of ibuprofen. Her head was still pounding.
Once the waitress had disappeared, Jake sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. After a time, he said, “You seem different since last night.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. Are you really that upset?”
She nodded. “Kind of.”
“Well, I said I was sorry.”
“I remember you saying that, last night, as well as a few other things, in fact.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Like what?”
“Something about there being things you wish you could tell me. But you couldn’t.”
He laughed. “I think you dreamed that.”
“No, I didn’t.”
His eyes lowered, and he pulled at his collar. “I don’t have any secrets, Jess.”
“If you want me to use my voice, Jake, here it goes: I’m not going anywhere with you today until you tell me what’s going on with you.” Once she started talking, she couldn’t stop. “There is something about you that everyone seems to know but me. You haven’t told me a single thing about your life, and if you want this to work, like you say you do, you’re going to need to spill it.”
He bugged his eyes out at her. “But we talked all night, Jess. The other night, after the wedding. We talked for hours…and hours.”
“No, I talked. You didn’t say a word.”
“I find that’s what most people like. To talk. To have someone listen.”
Jess nodded. “I won’t lie to you. That’s exactly what I wanted. And exactly what I needed. It helped me. It relieved a… sense of burden. So let me do the same for you. Share your world me.”
“There’s nothing to tell, Jess. I’m an open book.”
“No. I vividly remember your hand in my hair, your breath on the back of my neck, and then…okay, first, you said that you were sorry. What are you sorry for, Jake, and what are you afraid to tell me?”
He shook his head.
“I think I deserve to know. Unless I’m not important enough to know. Unless I’m just another girl in an endless parade of girls. Just another conquest.”
“No.” His laugh sounded forced. “You certainly aren’t that.”
“Or are you just saying that because you haven’t had me yet? Because I’m not yet a conquest?”
There was a long pause then. Finally, he said, “You just have to let me have some secrets, Jess.”
“Why? I told you everything. All my deep, dark secrets. It was so healing for me, and I think it would be for you, too.”
“All you told me, Jess, was that you left medical school. Nothing deep and dark about that.”
Her eyes welled with tears, and she blinked them back. How dare he trivialize her problems?
“You tell me, Jess.” His voice was tight. “You tell me something deep and dark, and then we’ll see. Tell me something that’s hard for you to even say out loud.”
“Okay,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper and leaning in. “I owe two hundred and sixty seven thousand dollars in medical school loans.”
He whistled through his teeth. “Wow.”
“Yeah, wow. It makes my throat close up to think about it. It makes me lie awake at night, and it makes me feel I have no options for my life. I either become a doctor and make my life all about earning money to pay off my loans, or… I don’t think there is another option. I’m stuck, and it terrifies me. It makes me want to die.”
“But it’s just money, Jess.”
“Easy for you to say.” Her eyes flicked up to meet his. “If you have money, it’s easy to say money is no big deal. But if you don’t have money, it colors every choice you make. It makes you feel like you’re choking. Like you’ll have to live a life doing what you don’t want to do just to get out of its grasp.”
“Alright, Jess.” His eyes flashed. “There’s only one thing to do then.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to pay that debt for you.”
“No, Jake.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s two hundred and sixty seven thousand dollars.”
“I know.”
“You hardly know me. That’s the last thing you should spend your money on.”
“Why? The way I see it, paying off your debt would accomplish two things: it would allow you to sleep at night; it would allow you to feel free. And it would prove to you that you aren’t just one of a dozen girls. No matter what happens tomorrow, or the next day, Jess, I want you to know that it was always you. It has always been you. For me.” His eyes were bright and glossy.
A woman at the next table turned to look at Jake, a warm expression on her face. How much had she heard?
Jess leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I know you like to live pretty large, Jake, but you shouldn’t be throwing that kind of money around.”
He grinned and looked her straight in the eye. “Jess, there is nothing in this world I would rather spend it on.”
“But you need
that money.”
“No I don’t, actually.”
“If you don’t need it now, you’ll need it for your future. You need to save it.”
He shook his head.
Jess continued. “Listen, I know your book is a hit and all, but I’m sure I’m not the first person to suggest you bank some of these royalties for a rainy day. If you play your cards right, invest it in the right way, you could live in comfort until you’re one hundred years old. But not if you go handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars to every whiny, lost girl you reconnect with from high school.”
“How many times do I have to say that you are more than that?”
“Sure. Yes, I know,” Jess said, “But the reality is, you’ll probably have a family someday. You’ll have kids who will want to go to college.”
“Doubtful.” He shrugged.
“Oh, you don’t want kids?”
“It’s not whether I want them…”
“Okay, too far in the future.” Jess shook her head. “Sorry. Just…what about your mom and dad? Do they have everything they need, as they get older?”
Jake scoffed. “Oh, they…aren’t going to get any of it.” His contorted briefly into a look of contempt, and he reached across the table to take Jess’s hand in his.
“Maybe it’s time I did tell you my secret.” He squeezed at her palm. “Here is what I didn’t want anyone to know… The FBI shows up, on occasion, to track certain things I do. To track where my money goes, so when I wire this money to you, for your student loans, you probably should know a few things. A little background on my family.”
Jess’s throat clutched. “Why is the FBI watching you?”
“To start off with, what have you heard about my parents? What do you already know?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Well, they moved out of Denver right after we graduated high school. They moved to Michigan and my dad started work with a big law firm. He has always practiced real estate law, but this firm dealt with larger projects and, long-story short, it seems he embezzled a whole lot of money.”
“The first I heard of it was the beginning of my second semester of college. My parents had told me they would be traveling, so I couldn’t go home for Christmas that year. And my tuition check was late, and classes were about to start. That’s when I got a phone call from a detective, who ended up interrogating me and telling me my parents disappeared with other people’s escrow funds.
“I don’t know the details because… well, because I don’t really want to know them, but it seems my dad held money in escrow for all of these real estate deals, and then, at the right opportunity, he and my mom just made off with it.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“And you had no idea this was all happening?”
“Nope. The last I saw them, I was hugging them goodbye outside my dorm room, just before the first day of college classes. My mom was crying her head off, but I thought that was perfectly understandable. I thought she was emotional because her only child was leaving home. I didn’t know she was saying goodbye to me for life.”
“So what now? You don’t have any idea where they are?”
“No idea. I don’t even know if they are alive or dead.”
“Why wasn’t this in the papers? Like, why isn’t everybody talking about it?”
“Oh, I think it was. Maybe not in Denver, because we didn’t live there any longer. We never did call a lot of attention to ourselves. We stuck to ourselves, and I think that’s why it hurts me so much. I mean, my parents… we stuck together. My mom and dad were my best friends. They did so many things with me…took me on trips, to ball games. They were fun. And then they just sort of disappeared, and it was all because of money. That’s why—well, one of the reasons, I do what I do with money. If my money can help a person—or a group of people—connect with one another; to have a good time, to actually live and to experience the love of the people in their lives, then I can’t think of a better way to spend it.”
“So what happened to you?” Jess asked. “Did you finish college?”
He shook his head. “No more college fund. The FBI closed the bank accounts, which were more or less empty anyway. I dropped out until I figured out a way to get loans or to pay for it myself. It was a disaster. I spent some time feeling a lot of… darkness. I was all alone in the world, and I was rather ashamed to be a Lassiter. I started doing odd jobs. Construction. Whatever I could find. Then one day, I just woke up and realized that I was free. I was a pretty low-maintenance guy. My needs were tiny. So I decided to start traveling. I took some money I’d saved, which really wasn’t much at all, and I bought a plane ticket to Europe, and I stayed in hostels and hiked all over the place, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I drank whisky in Scotland and watched bullfights in Spain. I just worked whenever I could and I just started trusting, you know. I just started trusting for things to work out for me, and for awhile, they did.”
For awhile? Jess opened her mouth to ask a question, but Jake went on. “After I’d been traveling awhile, my old college roommate asked me to write about some of my adventures. He had started a lifestyle blog where he published some fairly random musings about life. He said he was interested in me writing about why I had decided to live this way, so I just started writing… Writing about how it felt to live with these sense of freedom. To live for the day. And, as you know, I wrote about you and how I wish I had told you how I felt, so many years before. It came straight from the heart.” He closed his eyes and gave a quick shake of his head before continuing. “So my old roommate published my little ‘live for fun manifesto,’ completely as is, on his blog. Long-story-short, the post went viral, and, within six months or so, I was offered two contracts from different publishers, and I took the one with the largest advance.”
Jess nodded. “But your book starts off with all kinds of details about the luxurious lifestyle you were leading, racing cars and meeting women all over the world… None of those sound like activities for a traveler on a shoestring budget.”
“Oh that?” he scoffed. “I didn’t even write that intro, and it definitely wasn’t part of the original blog post. Truthfully, I guess you could say the draft that formed the book was an evolution. The seed was the original manifesto, and then parts were added by my editor, after seeing the adventures I had while spending my advance. The adventures themselves aren’t really what the book is about. You have read it, right?”
Jess’s face flushed, “Not the whole thing.”
He pulled his lips back and shook his head. “Geez…”
“You whisked me off before I had a chance. And, honestly, the opening paragraph kind of put me off.” ‘
He laughed. “Okay, I can see why. My editor though the introduction needed to be a little sexier. So she wrote in a few things, and I approved them…you know, to help sell books.”
She nodded. “So the part about me. The ‘Girl in the Hallway’ stuff…”
“Definitely part of the original. It’s what prompted the writing of the entire thing, in part,” His eyes snapped down toward the table then and he said, low, “I was thinking about you. Wondering where you had ended up. I asked myself, when I sat down to write, when I had been happy. Truly happy. And I remembered when we were sitting in that hallway, pretending to study.”
“You were pretending? Because I was really studying.”
He laughed and met her eyes once again. “I know. It’s just… talking with you that day, you had a certain quality. An acceptance. A peacefulness and a kindness. Being with you, I felt like everything was going to be okay in my life because I was sitting there next to you. It was almost like, I knew you before I knew you.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry. It’s just…it’s true, and I think I built that original feeling into a fantasy over the years that followed. What’s crazy is that you are even better in reality than you were in my fantasy.”
>
Jess rolled her eyes.
“I’m serious.” Jake swallowed. “And so, can you see why I would want to use my money to help you? To help you feel free. To help you embrace your life and truly live it.”
She leaned toward him. “But your book, at least the parts I read, is really all about how happiness comes from experiences. The moment-to-moment fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of life. Not by relationships.”
“Right. I guess you could say that.”
“So where does that leave me? Where does that leave us?”
The waitress arrived then and slid two heaping plates on the table.
Jake exhaled. “I guess it leaves us enjoying blue corn pancakes and sucking the juice out of every moment together.”
Steam rose from the plate and scattered. “I think you know what I mean, Jake. I think you know what I’m asking.”
“Jess,” He lowered his tone. “You have to understand. My parents left my life, overnight, and this gave me a very real sense that the more you think you can rely on people, the more shocked you’ll be when they disappear. You only have yourself to rely on. I mean, think about it, for my parents, money was more important than me. For a while, I couldn’t fathom that they wouldn’t contact me. That they wouldn’t find a way, somehow, to let me know the truth.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s been nearly eight years, and still no word.” He chuckled. “And I laugh, imagining them, living hand to mouth in a tiny fishing village off the coast of Belize or someplace and somehow discovering that I’m worth millions. And there’s no way I could ever share it with them because, the instant I tried, they would be discovered. They would go to prison. So…” Jake laughed wryly. “The moral of the story, Jess, is that the money is mine. I have no one to share it with. Just you. My friend. My Jess. And now,” He popped his eyebrows and raised his fork. “You know all of my secrets, and we can eat pancakes.”
She lifted her fork and sampled a bite despite the sudden knot in her belly. “Does anyone else know about this?”
“Not really. People ask about my family during press interviews, but I’ve gotten pretty good at steering the conversation in a new direction. The odd reporter will dig up something, but it doesn’t usually fit with the light little feature story they had intended to write about me, so more often than not, even if I get asked about the situation, the big scandal, it doesn’t go anywhere.”
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