by Mia Caldwell
Dear Jasmine,
I know that you don’t want to talk to me right now, but this silent treatment is killing me.
I don’t expect you to return my phone call, but if you want to meet so that I can answer all of your questions, I’m willing.
I’m sorry to send in one of my men to deliver this note, but the police have asked me to stay away from you and Greg.
Leave another note in this book with a meeting time and place, then slide it back into the exact same spot on the shelf it came from.
Give me a time and place and I’ll be there.
I promise.
Your’s truly,
James
Tears started streaming down the apples of my cheeks. I couldn’t hold it in any longer. Here I was thinking that I could have a day free of thinking about James, and today was the day he decided to make a serious move towards meeting me. I knew he wouldn’t have been able to be there himself. He was closely monitored and I probably would have kicked him out the second he stepped through the door. I was infuriated at how he had gone about trying to contact me at my work place, and I picked up the lighter from my pocket and lit the letter on fire, throwing it in the empty metal-netted waste bin. To send him a true message that I didn’t want to meet, I checked out the cooking book myself. I would take it home with me that night and try to forget about him. If his butler or whatever he was, set foot in the library again, I would kick him out before I gave him a chance to say a word to me.
The rest of my shift went by painfully slow. I went through the rest of the day acting as if I were a zombie. Any time I customer would come in or check out a book, I would give them the automatic “Hello, how’s it going, okay thanks, have a great day” but I wouldn’t say more. I wasn’t my normal bubbly self, and it was all because of James. He had ruined the one great day I had had in months and my mind couldn’t leave the rage behind. I was bubbling with anger on the inside, I wanted to tear down the bookshelves, and throw a couple of lamps through the stained glass windows.
When 5 pm finally came around, I was out the door by 5:01 pm and flagged a cab from the middle of the street. I made no attempt of small talk with the taxi driver and he seemed to be able to tell that I was having a shitty day because he kept to himself for the most part and kept his eyes on the road.
I was not a joy to be around. When the taxi pulled up in front of my home. I tossed a 20-dollar bill in the front seat, got out, and slammed the car door behind me. I was trying my best not to break down and cry. When I got in these moods, my defense was to act like a bitch around everyone. As I walked up the path towards the door, I kicked over the garden gnome that Keisha had planted and kicked over the flower port next to our mailbox. I scrambled for my keys inside my purse and swiftly unlocked the door, once again slamming it behind me. Keisha was sitting on the old brown couch in the living room watching some chick flick and I didn’t have the patience to talk to her. I stormed past her into my bedroom and closed the door.
With my back to the door, I sunk down to my knees and burst out crying. I was an emotional rollercoaster and I couldn’t get myself to calm down. I began to hyper ventilate and curled up into a fetal position on my brown carpeted floor. I could hear Keisha pounding on the door asking if I was okay but I wasn’t in the mood to tell her the story of what happened that day so I ignored her aggressive pounding on the door. I grabbed the white duvet from my mattress and pulled it down onto the ground with me. I curled up on the floor with my duvet, too frantic to even get to my bed. I wanted to feel this emotion for everything that it was and decided to cry it out until I had no more tears left in me.
When I finally stopped crying, my head was pounding. I felt like I had lost my body weight in water through all of the tears that I had shed. My purse was a few feet away from me and I reached out for it urgently remembering that I still had the book in my bag. I pulled it out and analyzed the cover. An old cookbook from the 1980’s with a cover so faded I could hardly make out what the picture on the cover was. James had always found the most creative ways of getting to me. I couldn’t understand why he had picked a simple girl like me. I took the book and I put it on the under side of my mattress. Hopefully if I had it out of sight, I wouldn’t be thinking about it so much. I fell down onto my bed in exhaustion. Everything felt like a huge effort… I left my work clothes and high heels on and fell asleep. I was too bothered to even get up to brush my teeth of take off the mascara that had streamed down my cheeks and neck. Maybe after this, he would leave me alone. Or maybe, he would continue trying to pursue me. Deep inside, I knew that I wanted the latter to take place but I couldn’t figure out why I was still so attracted to him.
*****
I woke up the next morning at around 5 am so that I could avoid talking to Keisha. I got dressed out of my former workdays clothes and put on a cute baby pink yoga top and grey crop pants with my favourite purple Nike shoes. I packed everything I needed for work in a nap sack and went for a job along the beach.
I sneaked out of my house as quietly as I could, and I shut the door behind me. It had been a long time since I had gone for a run. Keisha had always maintained her fitness, but I went through phases. The last few months I had completely lost it; I reverted back to wearing frumpy dresses to work so that I could get away with eating whatever I wanted when I got into my mopey state of mind when I became unbearably lonely in the evenings. It was a beautiful morning. Despite the gloominess in my mind, the flowers were blooming and the birds were chirping. Summer was coming, and I was nowhere near prepared for it. I took out my iPod from my pocket and put my headphones in my ears to block out any outside noise that could be heard from a distance. I picked my favourite work out play list that consisted of upbeat tunes with artists like Britney Spears and Fergie to really get me pumped to run.
Within 2 minutes of me running, I felt myself already out of breath as my panting became heavier and heavier. I had hardly finished Oops I Did it Again, when I had to stop and take a break. I didn’t remember myself ever being this out of shape. I walked for the next mile and thought about where I was in my life. At this point in time, I had almost everything I wanted. I was independent, I had my dream job, and I had a friend who would always be there for me through thick and thin. The only thing that was missing was a man. Like every woman, I had an internal fertility clock inside of me that was ticking away. When I was a young girl, I had always assumed that I would be married by the age of 22 and have my first child at the age of 25. Well… none of that had happened yet. My 25th birthday was approaching fast, and I was nowhere near where I wanted to be in terms of starting a family. Running was at least something I could control. I decided right there and then that I would start running every day and get back in shape no matter the cost. Keisha would be there to support me and train me if I needed the help. She’d also give me a good ass kicking if I decided to back out and stop running one day. Plus… My body would become super fine. Hopefully within no time, I would have dozens of reasonable bachelors all over me asking for my phone number… maybe one day asking for my hand in marriage. Strolling along with these thoughts, I was having the time of my life day dreaming about what my life would look like one day, but it wasn’t there quite yet. I began to start running again slowly picking up the pace. I told myself that if I could run before the next two songs were up, then I wasn’t a complete failure. Sure enough, I made it through the next 2 songs perfectly fine and decided that I wouldn’t stop there, I would run all the way to work and reward myself with a fresh green smoothie at the café in town before heading back home for a shower and to get ready for work.
I ran down towards the beach and decided to take off my Nike running shoes. As I ran along the coastline, I could feel the sand sinking in between my toes with every step I took. It was so refreshing to walk down this beach and be happy. I felt independent and I felt that I was turning a new leaf in my life.
When I started to get closer to the pier, I could notice a figure sitting at the en
d of the dock. All I could make out from that distance was a dark silhouette of a man. He seemed to be in a crouched position with his hand-resting heavy in his hands. I thought nothing of it, until I started to get out closer and make out the features of James. Holy shit I thought to myself. What is he doing here? I still wanted nothing to do with him and decided that I would ignore him and let him sulk there for as long as he needed.
As I ran past the dock, I couldn’t keep my eyes off of him. I had always been mesmerized by the stature of James from his posture, to his fashion sense. All of a sudden, I tripped on something and fell face first into the sand! I got up and my knee was gushing blood everywhere. When I tripped, I had fallen on a large rusty nail sticking out of the wood on the poorly finished dock and it had scraped me from the top of my knee, down to about half way down my right shin.
I sat up holding my knee trying to stop the blood from flowing but it was gushing between my fingers at that point. I was scared that James had noticed so I slyly looked over. He was still looking far out to sea and hadn’t heard me fall at the base of the pier. I tried to pull myself up, but as soon as I was able to stand on the leg, I shrieked in pain and fell back down on my ass. I wasn’t going anywhere! There was no way that I could walk with this type of injury. I found it funny that every single time the day started out fine and I thought it was a turning point, something terrible would happen. Especially today, I decided that I would start running, and sure enough I was unfortunate enough to gain myself an injury that would not allow me to put strain on my knee.
Sure enough, as soon as I shrieked in pain, James’ head shot around and spotted me. Next thing I knew, he was sprinting from the end of the dock towards me.
“Oh my god, Jasmine! Are you alright?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Piss off. I don’t want to see you!” I replied hastily.
“Look Jasmine, you know that I only want the best for you right? I just heard you scream in pain for god’s sake! I thought someone was dying over here! You can’t expect me to just leave you like this. Even if we had chemistry or past, I would never leave someone helpless like this when I know that I can help them.”
James always did have a way for words. I felt myself swoon from the sound of his voice but I tried to stay focused on getting away from him.
“I’m parked a couple blocks away, I’ll drive you to the hospital. You’re definitely going to need some stitches on that.”
“No! Don’t you dar-“ mid sentence, he cut me off by picking me up and throwing me over his broad shoulders.
I felt my body instantly relax under his warm embrace. I tried to be angry and stay firm in my position to hate him, but I couldn’t.
He carried me across the warm sand over to the sidewalk until we reached his car. He was driving a silver Porsche, exactly the type of car you would expect a billionaire to be driving.
With one hand he opened the passenger door and laid me down in the passenger seat. He gently kissed me on the forehead and combed his fingers through my hair.
“I’m sorry Jasmine. I’m sorry for everything.”
He closed the door and walked around the front of the car to get into the drivers seat of the car. He closed the door behind him and draped his right arm over the headrest behind me.
“You know, we don’t have to talk about anything between us if you don’t want to, but of course I think it’s for the best. I think you need to know the truth about me. I can’t stand the thought of you thinking of me as if I were some kind of money hungry monster.”
“If you’re not a money hungry monster, what kind of a billionaire are you then James?” I replied stubbornly.
“Before I answer your question, at least let me help you clean up that wound.”
He reached behind my seat and pulled out a first aid kit. At least he was well prepared I thought. He pulled out a bottle of antiseptic and some gauze to help clean my wound.
“Now this is going to sting a little, are you ready?”
“Go for it. I’m sure I’ve felt worse pain in my life.”
He poured some of the antiseptic onto the fresh white gauze and pressed it firmly against my wounded knee.
“Ahhh! That stings like a mother fucker!!!!”
“I told you” he said as he said playfully with a wide grin on his smug face.
He pulled a fresh new piece of gauze out from the kit along with some medical tape and applied a fresh bandage to my knee.
“Now that should do it. We’re only about 20 minutes away from the hospital.”
“Yeah okay, thanks. I do appreciate it,” I replied.
“Okay, now let’s get serious. I wanted to get to know you a little better before I gave you my entire life story, but fate had other plans for us when your little friend Greg dug up all the dirt on me he could find. It is true what he said about my father, but I need you to know, that that’s not who I am. Yes, I inherited his business, but that doesn’t mean that I continued his business technique. My father made his wealth through building large sky rise buildings on poor, existing suburbs. It was a rotten thing to do, but him and I never got along. I was his only son, and therefore I was the only one to inherit his practice when he passed away last July. I took over his enterprise but I moved away from what he did. Now, I work developing in developing nations to help bring business to their local economies. I know you might not believe me, but I really care about you Jasmine and I want to introduce you to my world.”
James reached behind him again and grabbed a large black binder, marked CONFIDENTIAL.
“Go ahead and read through this. This is the project I’m working on now in a small sub Saharan African village. I’m building a railroad leading to the port to help their export economy. Our company has arranged for irrigation and sanitation in the system to ensure that the people are healthy. Of course our company makes a small profit off of the work, but we make the money through other companies in China and Europe that want to use the railroad. The rest of the money goes to the local population in Africa and boosts their economy.”
I opened the binder to the first page and was shocked at the images that I saw there. Malnourished children living in shanties spread out in small villages. There was some text there with some sort of stats about waterfall per annual year but I couldn’t understand everything that it was trying to say. The next few pages in the binders were mostly engineered drawings of water wells that were to be implemented in the villages and other plans for the railway.
I had been ignoring James this entire time because I had taken Greg’s word for it. I believed with all my heart that James was some money hungry scumbag that was there to take advantage of me, and in reality, if all of this was true, he was one of the best people that I had ever had the pleasure of meeting. Growing up in a Caucasian dominated society, I had always assumed that people were out to get me. When I was a child, my parents told me to never trust people too easily and I had taken that to heart. Keisha was the only one that I had ever become close with and hadn’t given anyone else a chance. I closed the binder and looked over at James.
“I am so sorry to have misjudged you James. I really had no clue. What was I supposed to think?! I had some beautiful man pursuing me and my reflex told me that you were trying to use me for something. I’m sorry that I’ve been so distant. I was really hurt… I needed some time to get over you, I mean it’s been 3 months and I’m still not over you!”
James leaned over and kissed me hard on my plump lips. I felt an instant rush of butterflies hit my stomach as I kissed him back urgently. I grabbed the back of his neck and leaned by body towards his. I felt the world rushing around me and I felt a sense of completion being there in that moment with James. He sucked on my lower lip and gently bit it as he moved his head away from mine.
“I can’t even exclaim how glad I am that you’re not mad at me anymore Jasmine, but we really have to get you to the hospital.”
“Whoever said I wasn’t still mad,” I said jokingly as I leaned
into him resting my head on his shoulder.
He revved the engine of his car, and we were off. It seemed like a cliché scene from all of the chick flicks I had caught Keisha watching. A couple loves each other, has a big fight, makes up, then they drive off into the sunset blah blah. I smirked to myself when I thought about how cliché we seemed. The only thing that wasn’t stereotypical about our relationship was that he was wealthy and Caucasian, and I was African American. As he drove the Porsche down the highway I couldn’t stop myself from admiring him. I felt all of my self-confidence come back as soon as I knew that he was by my side. I no longer had any doubts about the man that he was. He wasn’t expecting to see me today, and I highly doubt that he would have gone so far to make a fake binder with fake projects in them just to convince me that he was a good man.
20 minutes later we were at the hospital. He turned off the ignition and jumped out of the drivers seat to open the passenger side. He unbuckled my seat belt and picked me up in his strong burly arms. I could catch sight of some of the nurses from the inside of the hospital giving me jealous glares as he carried me into the emergency ward.