“I appreciate your honesty, but to be truthful, we don’t owe one another anything. I shouldn’t have pressured you.”
“I’ve been holding this stuff in for months and I think telling a stranger might make it better. So I’m ripping the Band-Aid off. Here on the Narita express, I’m going to say the thing that’s kept me from making eye contact in the mirror with myself. I left town and moved to Japan because I slept with my boss. I had an affair. He’s married. He’s my brother’s best friend. He took a chance on me and I helped to break up his marriage. His wife wasn’t sure who it was, at the time, but he’s been messaging me and I think it’s because she found out. She has to know. All this time I thought they were separated, but Eric mentioned them coming to a family outing together. What I am supposed to do? Pretend I haven’t seen her husband naked?”
Everything became background noise for them. Adrian didn’t know what the appropriate response was in this situation. He certainly didn’t condone cheating, but he knew it took two people and from the look in Leah’s eyes, it appeared she was carrying the lion’s share of the guilt.
“Have you actually spoken to him? You could be thinking the worst for no reason.” Adrian went with asking a question and hoped it gave him time to think of something more substantial to say.
Leah was rubbing her free hand up and down her jean-covered leg. It felt like there were ants crawling right beneath the surface of her skin. This was the most honest she’d been in five months. When Alex decided he wanted to break things off and that his irreconcilable differences could actually be reconciled, he’d cut her loose. The deal was she would take the job overseas and neither of them would ever speak of it again. He swore there was no reason for his wife or her brother Eric to ever find out, and then three weeks ago, she started getting DMs from him. He started liking her posts on social media, which was a bit more telling than she would’ve liked and then his wife friended her. Leah had nearly dropped her phone in the middle of the street when the request popped up on her screen. No chance in hell was she accepting that request. So, for three weeks she left the women in the queue and suffered through seeing the anxiety-inducing red dot that showed she had twelve unread messages from Alex.
“Of course, I haven’t spoken to him. I wake up in a cold sweat every night because I fear that the second I message him or call, she’s going to be the one to respond. What the hell do you say to the wife of the man you had an affair with for over a year? Somehow, I don’t think sorry is going to cut it.”
“I’m going to have to say you’re probably right. Did you love him?”
“I don’t know. At the time, yeah it felt like I did. It was over a year. I must have, right? I don’t know if I was committed to the insanity of what we were doing or if I was committed to him. When I was with him it felt amazingly right. It was like we could teach couples how to make a relationship work. We could be an on hand example of communication 101.”
She sighed. “Prior to sleeping with him, well, up until I left for college, he’d always treated me the way Eric did. I was an annoying, tag along little sister. When I graduated from school with a degree that absolutely didn’t guarantee employment and couldn’t find a job worth taking, he offered a handout. He reached out without any prompting from Eric. It was a godsend. It got me out of my parents’ house. It gave me some financial independence. It was a real job and I worked hard at it, but it was also a rescue and I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that much.”
She didn’t want to be released from the comfort of his hold on her hand, but since she couldn’t pace up and down while she told this awful story, she at least needed the freedom to move her hands.
“I was so grateful and I didn’t know how to show it. Not in a way that wouldn’t make me still seem like a little sister, so I did something that felt more adult. I bought him a gorgeous tie that matched his eyes perfectly and invited him to dinner.”
“He shouldn’t have accepted. Period. That ‘no’ would’ve ended things before they started. He’s a married man. Married men don’t accept gifts that match their eyes or dates. Employee or not, it was wildly inappropriate.” Adrian was emphatic in his assertion.
“Way to be judgmental.”
“Did you ask him intending to make it a romantic evening? If not, then he was only one who was married, he was the only one who needed to check their intent, and he was the one who should’ve said no.”
“I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I wouldn’t have. You don’t understand. I shouldn’t have told you. For some stupid reason, I thought you might be like Switzerland, just a neutral listener. Why couldn’t you do that? Move. I need to get up.”
“No, and don’t you make a scene on this train. You need to check that attitude and tone. I am not going to move and you are going to sit there and be civil. You brought this up and whether or not you can admit it to yourself you didn’t want a listener that was going to sit and passively digest your version of events without question or comment. You’re looking for a reaction, for something, otherwise why say anything?”
“I was looking for you to understand. I’m not some shrew with a bad temper taking things out on strangers. I wanted to apologize and maybe explain my mood. The second I get home, or look at those messages, or admit to any of this, I will have plenty of judgment headed my way. I guess I was testing the waters. Now, I at least know what to expect. Forget trying to make my flight. Maybe I’ll just stay in Japan and never go back.”
“This isn’t some sort of soap opera melodrama. You can’t flee the room and have everything be perfect after the commercial break.”
“That’s really specific.”
“My grandmother loves those things. She watches them on satellite in English and Japanese. Not my point. You can say what you like, you control that. But you don’t get to dictate other people’s reactions. You just didn’t get the reaction you thought you wanted from me. You’re missing the bigger point here though. I wasn’t judging you at all. I was placing conviction on the true culprit. He’s the one that took vows, not you, but you’re the one walking around with a bottle of compressed guilt in your gut that’s ready to explode.”
“You don’t know anything about him or his marriage. She was terrible to him. Ungrateful. He told me. He works so hard and all she did was complain. He was miserable, sad.”
“Really? You know that from first hand experience. You saw her being awful to him. Heard recordings of her screaming at him and making him miserable? Perhaps he had photos or proof of her infidelity. I know you say you’ve known him for years, but people change and men who want to have affairs come up with all sorts of reasons to justify them. Isn’t it possible that there was a bit of little girl hero worship at play and you were so willing to accept his version of things because it fit the narrative in your head? It made something you knew was the wrong thing feel a little less so.”
Her stare was so intense, Adrian wouldn’t have been the least bit shocked if she hauled off and slapped his face in the middle of the train. She wasn’t blinking. This had all the potential in the world of escalating into a scene and he didn’t want that.
“Okay.” He reached for her hand again. It was a great sign that she wasn’t rejecting the contact. “I’m talking and not listening. You need a listener. Please continue. I swear I won’t say another word until you either finish or we reach our stop. Promise.”
Still, no words and that intense stare was boring a hole through his forehead. He was messing this up royally. A few minutes ago, he was setting up an elaborate plan to pitch woo to a stranger he found irresistible and now he’d been thrust into giving a moral opinion on something he would’ve preferred to not think she was capable of at all. How did one train ride get so complicated? He started to think about what his buddy Neal would’ve done. Neal would have had sex with her in the first class bathroom and ditched her on the platform in Tokyo station.
Subconsciously, he felt like an ass. Even Neal wasn’t that much of a fr
eak or a dog. Neal loved loving on a lot of women, but he couldn’t think of one of them that wouldn’t have chosen to be with him. “
No, Neal could never have done that and even though he talked a good game, even in their college days he wasn’t that big of a jerk. He couldn’t simply say the words, he had to put them into action.
“Please finish.”
“You’re about to see why you shouldn’t place all the blame on him. Eric won’t. My parents won’t. Even Juju, whose moral compass stays off course, won’t.”
“Who’s Juju?”
“Oh, Luke. He’s Lucas Julius. Eric and I have been calling him Juju since we were kids. He hates it, but it stuck and he knows we mean it in love. So, that dinner turned something in me. I stopped seeing him as Eric’s best friend or even my boss. He was becoming my friend and he was a great one. Alex is funny and smart and hardworking and he shows up. Whenever I needed something he dropped whatever he had to, in order to make sure what I needed was covered. I’m way more selfish and needy than I’d like to admit, but I liked being the center of his attention and I wasn’t thinking about his wife or the fact that she was the one that spot belonged to. I had no right to enjoy it as much as I did. One day he shows up at my apartment with flowers and a promise ring. We had no right to celebrate an anniversary, but we did and I was okay with it.”
She shook her head. “See? You don’t even know what to say to that, do you? How could you? I hardly know what to say to myself. Now you see why I’m in no hurry to go home and in no hurry to see any messages from him. I could get off my flight and get punched right in the face. I can’t say I would blame her. And Eric, he wouldn’t want to aim for my face. He’ll be so disappointed. He always says I have so much potential, but my choices keep me this close,” she demonstrated with her thumb and index finger, “from reaching it. He was furious that I just up and quit. He felt like I let Alex down, after everything he did for me. While my dad has always found it hard to communicate and interact with me, Eric hasn’t. My big brother was my first knight in shining armor. I can’t stand the thought of him looking at me with shame and disappointment. Honestly, Juju will take too much pleasure in me screwing up at this level. This magnitude of mess is typically his style. I fully believe his need to be out from under the scrutiny is the main reason he moved to the east coast. Smart. I used to tease him, until I moved to a different continent.”
“Facing the music can be tough, but it’s usually unavoidable.”
He really was sympathizing with her. If this Alex was a friend of her older brother than that meant that he was older than her too. Married. Older. A shared history. The whole situation was an emotional cluster fuck that she couldn’t have been mature enough to fully grasp.
“Our stop is next. We should get your bag and get close to the door if you want to make that gate.”
She wasn’t moving. Adrian was already standing up and in the aisle, and she was looking out the window into nature’s void and not moving.
“Leah, we need to get moving, honey.”
“Okay.”
Her ready cooperation held a sound of defeat as well. He hadn’t known her long, but he liked her sassy side much better.
Looking up at him, Leah smiled. “Adrian, how is it that one minute you think you’re on top of the world and the next you’re hitting rock bottom?”
“That’s life, honey. We all go through it. Come on. I think I can help, if you’ll let me.”
Accepting the hand he extended to her, Leah took it and decided whatever his idea was, she was willing to try it. They’d spent the last five hours together and she hadn’t gotten the serial killer vibe from him once. That made her chuckle to herself. That was where her bar was these days. As long as it wasn’t someone else’s husband or a serial killer he was fair game.
Adrian maneuvered to get her bag from the rack system near the door and opted not to let her hand go. He could feel her squeezing his like a lifeline. He hoped she wasn’t on the verge of a panic attack or anything. She’d spent weeks relegating this situation to the back of her mind and now it was all shoving its way front and center and it might be too much for her to handle emotionally.
The train pulled into their final destination. They had to make their way around the crowd. People moving rapidly in every direction. He was getting concerned about her coadjutant behavior. When they stepped off of the escalator he moved her in front of him, single file, and pulled their tickets out of his pocket. You could sneak on a different train in Japan, but you couldn’t get out of the station. Each person had to slide their ticket into the machine to exit and if you were in the wrong location the alarms would sound. It had driven him crazy when he first moved back to the city as an adult. Back in New York once you were on and underground you could move in any direction without a change in fare and therefore you didn’t need to fish around for your ticket before you could actually leave the station.
Getting them through, he pulled her to the side between the pharmacy and the elevator that would take them to the departure floor of the terminal.
“Why are we stopping?”
“Two reasons.”
Holding her face between his hands, with her bulging suitcase between them, Adrian kissed her.
Leah was stunned, but not disappointed. This man knew what to do with his lips. Her arms moved independently of her conscious thoughts. She wasn’t normally a fan of public displays of affection, but it had been five months and she loved kissing.
Coming up for air, but still with her hands on his chest, she asked, “Was that number one?”
“Definitely. Without number one, number two wouldn’t likely get us very far.”
“You have my attention, husband.”
“I’m heading to the States in two days. I have a meeting I have to attend for my father’s firm here on Friday morning, but then I’m on a flight. It’ll buy you a little time, give us a chance to spend some time together off a train and I can guarantee this plane won’t leave you.”
“What about my ticket? It’s paid for and I can’t afford to just waste it and buy another one.”
“You won’t have to. I’m flying home on the company’s plane and I already cleared it to change our flight plan to include taking you where you need to go. Don’t worry about your ticket. I’ll get it changed and you’ll be able to use it to go home another time or someplace else altogether.”
“I hardly know you. I mean the kiss was worth a roll in the hay for sure, but delaying my holiday travel, risking my mother’s wrath… I don’t know.”
“You need to listen to his messages. You have to know what you’re walking into. I don’t think forty-eight hours is going to destroy the holiday, not in the same way that being ambushed with news of an extramarital affair will.”
Leah dropped her head in shameful acknowledgment. He wasn’t wrong. She could call and blame it on the airline. If she let her best friends know where she was and made him talk to at least one of them, how risky could it be? Two days to deal with whatever was waiting for her on the other end.
“You’re right, but honestly I knew Alex better and I got so consumed with him so quickly that losing myself and the ability to make smart life choices went out the window. It’s hard not to see this going the same way. A romp in the sack—”
Adrian was forced to interrupt her. “Can we stop saying that? I’m not interested in just bedding you, Leah. Oh, believe me, I’m very attracted to you and I hope we get to a place where we can explore all of our options, but right now I want to help because I can help. I speak the language, I can help you at the counter, I can fly you home, and I can offer you a quiet space to get yourself settled and ready to face your past head on.”
“What do you get?”
“I got to kiss a beautiful woman in Tokyo station. It’ll be my Christmas good deed. We can do this together. Two is better than one. Will you take my hand one more time?”
“This is the craziest thing I’ve ever done. I promise I�
�m never this impulsive. Eric’s head would explode and Juju would laugh himself into a coughing fit.”
“Let’s get to your gate. We need to take care of this ticket situation, and then I want you to take some safety steps and let someone know where you are and exactly who you’ll be with for the next few days.”
Chapter 6
Leah and Adrian made it to the counter and it didn’t take long before she noticed he wasn’t lying about his charm. Being on the receiving end of the handsome man’s smile and flawless conversational Japanese had the women at the counter smiling back and bowing in accommodation Leah was certain wouldn’t have come her way, had she come in flailing with demands and attitude. She might hold off on letting him know how right he was. Only understanding a handful of the words flying back and forth, she stayed quiet and a bit off to his side, until she saw him reaching for his wallet.
Her hand shot out to grab hold of his forearm and pull it back from the worker. “What are you doing?”
The nice lady behind the counter didn’t let on if she understood Leah or not.
“I’m doing exactly what I said I would, honey. Now, settle and let me, please.”
Putting his hand over hers, Adrian gave her a look that said now wasn’t the time for in-depth explanations. He even capped it off with a little smile to keep that charm in place for the onlookers.
He continued with the mystery transaction, returned the bow and then took Leah’s hand again. Guiding her toward the atrium of restaurants above the departure counters, the two sat down in the corner of a little Italian restaurant with beautiful and intricate molds of the various pizzas they specialized in.
This was one of Leah’s favorite things about going out to eat in Japanese restaurants. Pictures in a menu didn’t hold a candle to the detailed model meals usually housed in display cases outside of each establishment. Every scallion and grain of rice looked real enough to eat.
12 Naughty Days of Christmas 2018 Page 28