by Tina Martin
The women walked over to Vivienne and gave her a hug – well all the woman except for Calista. She was happy for her sister-in-law, but she was struggling with her own issues when it came to having babies. She wanted them, but Barringer seemed to be having second thoughts.
Fighting back tears, Calista left the dining room. Barringer watched as she walked away.
Not feeling in a celebratory mood, Bryson stepped outside to get some air. Being the oldest, everyone assumed he would be the first to have children, especially their parents. After his divorce, he didn’t even want to remarry – let alone have children. He was convinced that marriage wasn’t for everyone. Neither were children…
“What’s up, man?” Garrison asked, stepping out onto the porch. “You good?”
“Yeah. I’m good…just came out here to get some air.”
“Listen, Bryson…Viv and I will host the family next month. I don’t want to put you through that, man. You don’t talk much about it, but I can only imagine how difficult it must’ve been to go through the divorce and all.”
Bryson frowned. It was difficult to talk about. In fact, he hadn’t spoken to anyone about it. All they knew was that it had taken a toll on him. But he kept on working, pretending he was over the affair and divorce when the reality was, those events that threw his life off track, still churned inside of his heart. Still angered him. After all, he did love Felicia. And he was the model husband for her – a provider, a lover, her confidant. Everything. But she apparently needed more than what he could give.
“I wish you would talk about it.”
Bryson slid his hands inside of his pockets then turned around to look at his brother. He knew what the it was that Garrison was referring to. “There’s nothing to talk about, Gary. It’s over and done with. I have no problems having the dinners at my home.” Bryson took his keys from his right pocket. “Tell Barringer I’m out.”
With that, he walked to his car, jumped in, then drove away. He lived ten minutes away from Barringer, in a four-bedroom, two-level brick home. With a two-car garage and an in-ground swimming pool out back – his backyard completely private with an eight-feet brick wall around the perimeter.
And it all meant nothing…
He’d debated selling the house because he couldn’t stand that he’d once shared this home with someone who had betrayed him. Had been unfaithful to him. He had replaced all the furniture, rugs, anything Felicia picked out, or anything that reminded him of her was tossed in the trash. But that still didn’t rid him of her presence.
He pulled up in the driveway, sitting there looking at the house. Some days he didn’t even want to go in. He remembered weeks after the divorce, he stayed at a hotel to avoid the house. It had been easier that way. He shook his head and opened the car door.
I have to get rid of this house, he thought to himself, before getting out of the car and heading to the door.
CHAPTER 9
He’d been staring at her for a good five minutes. Intently. Purposely. He wanted to brand her face into his memory before he peeled back the layers to find out what made Kalina Cooper tick. To help her, he needed to know her. He watched her burgundy lips move as she silently read emails. She was focused on her work, something he admired being a business owner himself. “So is this your full-time job?” he finally asked. They were both sitting on the same side of the table, as he had requested, facing the windows and the front entrance of the café, their backs to the counter. Laptops side-by-side. Legs a scoot away from touching.
“Yes. This is what I do,” Kalina responded.
Bryson nodded. According to what he read about her and The Cooper Files on her website’s About Me page, Kalina had taken the idea of starting a blog, used it in conjunction with her college studies and The Cooper Files was born. She even had over one-hundred thousand followers on her company’s Facebook page.
“Do you play golf?” she asked without even looking up at him, biting her tongue to keep from laughing.
“No. Why do you ask?”
She shrugged. “No reason. You asked me a question so I thought I’d ask you one. By the way, I just sent you an email,” she told him while she was still typing, not missing a beat, her fingers moving impressively around the keyboard while her eyes remained on the computer screen.
“Okay,” he said, refreshing his inbox. “Got it.” He clicked to open the email she’d forwarded to him:
Question: I’ve been dating this guy for a year. He says he loves me, but my friends tell me that they’ve seen him flirting with other girls when I’m not around. So my question is, how can you tell when a man really loves you and not just saying it?
After reading the email, Bryson turned to his right to look at Kalina.
“What?” she asked, feeling his eyes on her.
“Why’d you send me this one?”
“Because you’re a man.”
“I am a man, Kalina. How observant of you,” he joked. “I’m actually surprised you know that, especially since you don’t look at me much.”
Kalina rolled her eyes. She’d gotten two hours of sleep last night and all she wanted to do was get through these emails, not chit chat with Bryson. “I don’t have to look at you to know you’re a man,” she decided to say, even when she knew a response wasn’t necessary. And he was right – she didn’t look at him much. It would be hard to focus on work if her brain was constantly flooded with images of his face – his stately nose, dark eyes, a bone structure that made him overbearingly masculine and a skin complexion that tempted her want to try one of her aunt’s new chocolate-filled pastries. It was bad enough he wore some enchanting cologne that had intoxicated her from the moment he sat down and his hands, those large hands, looked as strong as everything else about him.
“Do you want me to send you a different question instead?” she asked.
“No. This one is fine. I just thought you would want to answer these kinds of questions.”
“If you don’t want to do it, I will,” she told him. “I’ve answered this question a million times before.”
“So tell me what your response would be.”
She looked at him, holding his gaze for the first time, seeing something akin to a smirk on his face. Her eyes rolled down to his lips, then back up to his eyes again. Withholding a smile, she asked, “You like to talk, don’t you?”
He grinned. “I just find what you do very interesting.”
“Why?”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I just do.”
“Okay, well, my answer is, you can tell if a man likes you because he will bend over backwards to make sure you’re happy. He will support you, take care of you, be there for you, be faithful to you and he will not make you feel insecure. Of course I’m only speaking from things I’ve seen. Things I’ve learned.”
“Things you’ve learned…”
“Yes.”
“So you’ve never had a man do these things for you?”
“No.” Focusing on the task at hand, she said, “Let me know when you’re ready for me to read over your response.”
For a moment, Bryson sat there, pondering the question, thinking about all the ways he had loved and devoted his life to making his ex-wife happy. He began typing:
You’ll know if his love his real by his actions, not by mere words. Anyone can tell you they love you. A stranger off the street could walk up to you right now and say they love you, but would you believe them? Obviously not. Why? Because other than the fact that you don’t know the person, they haven’t demonstrated anything to prove they actually love you. My advice to you is to take some time to sit down and think about what love means to you then ask yourself if that’s what you’re getting from your boyfriend.
“Okay, boss,” Bryson said. “Can you check this one, please?”
“Sure. Give me a sec,” she said, finishing her email. Then she leaned over, glanced at his computer screen and read his answer.
Bryson eyes brushed across her hair
, as he inhaled the fruity scent coming from it. It must’ve been the shampoo that had her luscious strands smelling like something he could eat for dessert.
“It’s good, but I need you to go a little deeper.”
“Deeper?”
“Yes. Deeper. Have you ever been in love, Bryson?”
Bryson thought about his ex-wife again. She was the only woman he’d ever loved. Before her, he was a bachelor and was very content with that lifestyle. But when he married Felicia, he didn’t know he had the capability to feel so much love in his heart. Then she broke it – his heart and his trust.
“Well, have you?” Kalina asked, turning to him again, seeing something painful in the depths of his eyes.
“Yes.”
“Then dig deeper,” she said, pushing her chair away from the table. She stood up and said, “I’ll be right back.”
She quickly hurried off to the bathroom, having had two cups of coffee now. When she came out of the stall, she saw Edith standing near the sink.
“So, how’s it going?” she asked all girlishly, not something you would expect from a sixty-year-old.
Pumping soap into her hands, Kalina replied, “It’s going okay, I guess. It’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be. The only downside is, he loves to talk.”
Edith grinned. Yeah, he did love to talk. She knew that all too well.
“Alright, well, I hope you guys get a lot of work done. Let me get back out here. I’ll chat with you before closing.”
“Okay, Edith.”
Kalina dried her hands, walked back to the table and sat down. “How are you doing?”
“I think I got it this time,” he responded. He turned his computer screen her way. “Let me know if that’s deep enough for you.”
Kalina leaned near him to see his computer screen again:
You’ll know if a man really love you by what he does and not what he says. Would he forego his own satisfaction to make you happy? Does he do things for you without waiting for you to ask? Does he ask about your day, tells you how beautiful you are? Does he make sacrifices for you? Do you know that, without a shadow of a doubt, your man would give his life for you? If you cannot answer ‘yes’ to every one of these questions, then your man may just simply like you, but he does not love you. I’ve never been an advocate for listening to what other people had to say about things that concerned another person’s relationship, but sometimes, we have to face the reality that, maybe they’re right.
“Good. I like it,” Kalina told him. “Just make sure you spell-check it.”
“Spell-check?” He read over his email again, realizing his mistake. “Oh…I left the ‘s’ off the word love in the first sentence.”
“Yep,” Kalina said.
Bryson quickly made the correction then asked, “But other than that, you like it?”
“Yes.”
“What do you like about it?”
“I like the questions. Those are very good questions, and they’ll make her come to her own conclusion. That’s typically how I like to respond to questions…they need to be answered in a way which allows the person to formulate their own opinion. We’re only giving them something to work with.”
“Okay. Got it.”
“Good. I’m going to send you ten more emails. Is that okay?” she asked, looking at him, their gazes holding yet again. “What?”
“You seem a lot nicer today for some reason.”
She chuckled a bit. “Just in a better mood, I guess. Actually, I seriously don’t know how I’m in a better mood after only getting two hours of sleep last night.”
Bryson frowned. He had no emotional connection to Kalina, but the fact that she wasn’t sleeping bothered him. He’d had his own issues with sleep deprivation a few years back. It was almost to the point where he had to be hospitalized due to a spike in his high blood pressure. It was under control now, and he remembered how the doctor had pointed to his lack of sleep as a cause of it. “Did you say two hours?”
She yawned. “Yes. Two hours.”
“That’s not good. Not good at all.”
“It’s fine. I’m used to it.”
“You shouldn’t be…lack of sleep can lead to some serious health problems, Kalina.”
“And how would you know that?”
“Because I’ve been there before. I almost had to be hospitalized.”
“Well, I had a physical back in January and my doctor gave me a clean bill of health. I’m fine.”
Kalina proceeded with sending emails to Bryson, then she returned to answering her own emails before hearing her phone vibrate on the table. When she saw it was someone calling from the assisted living facility, she immediately grabbed the phone and answered frantically, “Is everything okay?”
Bryson looked at her the moment he heard the panic in her voice, and while she held the phone, he saw her hands tremble.
“Yes, everything’s fine, Ms. Cooper. We just wanted to inform you that your mother’s walker has arrived.”
“Oh,” she said, releasing a sigh of relief but that didn’t lessen the hard thumps of her heart. The last time she got a call from the facility, her mother had fallen and hit her head. Now every time they called, it sent her into a state of panic. “Thank…thank you for letting me know.”
“You’re welcome.”
Kalina closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, releasing a slow, steady breath. “Let me know what it costs, and I’ll pay for it on Saturday.”
“Um…let’s see…it was sixty-eight dollars.”
Kalina made a note of it. “Perfect. I’ll bring a check on Saturday. Thanks for calling.”
“Alright, Ms. Cooper. Enjoy the rest of your evening.”
“You, too.” Kalina set her phone on the table again, staring absently at her computer screen.
Bryson turned to look at her. He noticed her hands were arched over her keyboard like she was about to type, but she didn’t type a thing. Her hands were still trembling. “Are you okay?” he asked.
Had she heard him? She just sat there, still in a daze.
“Kalina.”
She looked at him this time. “Yes?”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said, in a fake, cheery tone. “I’m fine.”
“Then why are your hands trembling?”
She looked at her hands and said, “No reason. Um…are…are you done with the questions I sent you?”
He took a moment to gaze at her before he answered her question. She wasn’t fine. Something disturbed her to the point of distracting her from doing her job. He’d only spent a few hours with her and he knew she wasn’t a woman who was easily distracted. She was a woman on a mission. A woman who worked to fulfill her purpose of helping people, and the ironic thing about that was, she needed help more than anyone. Deciding to let it go for now, he answered her, “I haven’t completed them all. Let me get back to work.”
Kalina took a few more deep breaths before she was able to start working again.
The moment she began typing, Bryson glanced at her. There was definitely something going on with her and, for some reason, he felt like he needed to know. Who exactly was Kalina Cooper?
CHAPTER 10
“So how are things going at the café with Bryson?” Lizette asked bright and early in the morning when she showed up for work.
Kalina shrugged. “It’s going. Yesterday was the first day we worked together and he seems pretty knowledgeable about relationships.”
“Really?”
“Yes. So far, so good.”
“Soo…is he married?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, was he wearing a ring?”
“No.”
“Aha! So you checked?”
Kalina failed to hide a smirk. “No, I didn’t check.”
“Then how do you know he wasn’t wearing a ring?”
“Easy. He has these massively, muscular, strong-looking hands…none like I’ve ever seen before. You can�
��t miss them.”
“So he’s not married…”
“I doubt it. I’m sure he would be at home in the evenings if he was, instead of hanging out with me at a café.” Kalina didn’t know anything about Bryson other than what she’d learned from her aunt. It seemed weird to be working side-by-side with someone she barely knew.
“Yeah, you’re probably right. I’m just surprised he’s doing this for free.”
“Me, too. He seems to be very—” Kalina stopped mid-sentence when she saw an email in her inbox from Bryson. Why was he emailing her so early in the day? Why was he emailing her at all? He’d already sent answers to the questions she’d assigned to him last night. Curious, she clicked on the email:
From: Bryson Blackstone
To: Kalina Cooper
Subject: You
Have you ever been in love, Kalina?
--
B. Blackstone
_____
She couldn’t hide the frown in her forehead if she wanted to. Why was he asking her that?
“He seems to be very what, Kalina?” Lizette asked.
“Huh?” Kalina said, looking at Lizette. The frown of confusion remained, along with her rapid heartbeats.
“You were saying something about Bryson.”
“Oh, um…never mind,” Kalina told Lizette, returning her attention to Bryson’s email. Deciding to respond with a simple answer, she replied:
From: Kalina Cooper
To: Bryson Blackstone
Subject: Re: You
No.
--
Kalina Cooper
Editor | CEO
The Cooper Files
_____
The disturbance in her forehead smoothed out, and she was back in business mode. “Hey, Lizette, I think we should do an article on what true love is. There seems to be a good number of readers, well women particularly, asking for clues and signs that their significant other truly loves them.”