She sat up and leaned against the headboard.
Marc sat down next to her and placed the breakfast on her legs. Then he took a rusk with some jam on it and raised it to her mouth, making her smile.
“Why are you so kind?” asked Berenice suspiciously, after sipping some very good coffee with sugar in the right amount.
“Your suspiciousness hurts me,” pretended to be offended Marc.
“No man has never served me the breakfast in bed or spoon-fed me.”
“Why do you think I’ve been nominated the perfect boyfriend two years in a row?”
“Maybe because you paid the magazine to widespread this news!”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You bedded the newspaperwoman then.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Maybe the editor?”
“The editor is a man and he’s hetero,” he clarified sharply, filling her mouth with an emmer biscuit to prevent her from speaking further.
“Why all this kindness, then?” she was able to ask him, before finding herself with another biscuit in the mouth.
“ The fact of the matter is that tonight I awoke prey to nightmares. I dreamed that your alarm clock was going haywire and shooting bullets in all directions, killing both of us. Shocked, I came in your bedroom and switched off the alarm, but then I slipped into your bed, I cuddled up against you and went on sleeping. I think you heard me, because you called my name and then hugged me tightly. You also wrapped up my leg with yours. This morning I woke up early and thought of making the breakfast as a small gift for you.”
“Really?” she asked, blushing at the thought of sleeping with Marc again. Why did not she wake up?
She looked at the alarm clock.
It was 9 o’clock.
9 o’clock?
She had to be at work by 8.30 a.m.!
What did she do still in bed?
“It’s very late! Marc, you’re an idiot!” she barked furiously, turning the tray upside down to get up hurriedly and rushed to the bathroom to wash herself.
“It’s not my fault.”
“Who switched off the alarm, then? Casper?”
“Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts, do you? Berry, they’re just fictional characters and…”
“Marc!”
“Ok, I made a mistake, but I put it right. I sent an email to your boss saying you had car trouble and would delay. I wrote you would be at the workplace by 10 a.m. And to make up for it I’ve made the breakfast.”
“I’m running the risk of being laid off and you make me late for work? What’s wrong with you?”
“Maybe the overcooked and sticky spaghetti you cooked yesterday evening!” he answered sarcastic and angry, since Berenice did not even say thank-you to him for what he had done for her to remedy a stupid mistake.
“For Christ’s sake, Marc! You only have to hope that I won’t be laid off. If not, I’ll come back home and kill you with my own hands,” threatened Berenice, furious.
A couple of minutes before 10 a.m. Berenice stepped into her office.
She saw Sandy straightaway running towards her.
“Are you crazy? Why did you come late just today?”
“I know, Sandy. Just tell me that: have they laid me off yet?
“No, they haven’t. Mr. Footer’s discussing your report with another department head. I don’t think they’ll lay you off. They seem quite pleased with what you wrote. You’ve to tell me how you did it.”
“I did get help,” from an idiot who first switches off my alarm and then wakes me up.
She was going to sit down at her desk when her cellphone started to ring.
“Well, have they fired you?” asked Marc sharply.
“Not yet. They’re examining the report you wrote.”
“And what…?”
“And it sounds interesting.”
“Without ‘sounds’. It’s interesting.”
“Listen, I’ll call you back when I got some more news, alright?” came to the point Berenice while seeing Karen Jordan come to her.
“Call me at once,” ordered Marc, but she had already hung up.
“Oh, Berenice. Good to see you still here!”
“Hi, Karen. Yes, by today the boss should be getting back to me.”
“Sure, I saw he had a look at your report. Interesting… I hope it’s as exhaustive as mine.”
“Did you also have a report to get in?” asked Berenice, taken by surprise.
“Of course I did. But I got it in last Friday,” sniggered the woman, amused by keeping always one step ahead of all others.
At that moment Berenice realized that no report could have ever saved her job in comparison with Karen’s sexual performance Mr. Footer craved for so much.
Shortly before lunchtime, her boss called her down to his office to talk about her future in the company.
“I’m sorry, Miss Collins. However inspiring your report might be, I find myself forced to give up your contribution. Of course you’re entitled to a month’s notice and a severance pay, and I promise you I’ll write myself your letter of reference. However I’ve to ask you to use up all your unused vacation days, since we can’t pay them without overrunning our budget, as you correctly wrote yourself in your report.”
At lunchtime Marc tried to call her three times, but she did not answer.
“Is it Neil? Did you quarrel?” asked Sandy curiously.
“No, it’s a friend of mine. Neil and I split up last Friday evening.”
“I’m sorry. And how is this friend of yours? Attractive? What’s his name? Do I know him?”
You know him very well: he’s the stunning Marc Hailen, the guy you adore too when he played with The Dark Angels!
“I wouldn’t know. His name’s Marc and he’s nothing special,” lied Berenice, drowning her sorrows in the ice cream cup with whipped cream she had ordered at the coffee bar.
“Really? Why have you gotten as red as a beetroot and are your eyes sparkling, then?”
Maybe because I’d like to kill him since I was laid off, even if it wasn’t his fault.
“Sandy, you suffer from hallucinations for too much sugar.”
“Oh my God! You fell in love!” trilled her friend, happy.
“Don’t even say that!” exclaimed Berenice, scared.
“Is it so horrible?” got worried Sandy, seeing her colleague’s sudden paleness.
“You’ve no idea,” whispered the woman with a downcast face, pick at the ice cream that was not so tempting anymore.
“Doesn’t he like you ’cause you’re fat?”
Out of the blue Berenice felt the need to unburden herself to someone. “The truth is that Marc is breath-taking, too much for me. He says that I’m beautiful and has tried to kiss me or hug me several times, but…”
“But it’s fantastic! And have you done it yet?”
“We slept together one night, but we didn’t have sex. I didn’t want to.”
“Why not? Nice, I really don’t understand you! You found a cute boy who says you’re beautiful and it sounds he’s very enthralled by you and you refuse him?”
“This story is futureless. Believe me. And I don’t want to get hurt.”
“Nice, you’ve to learn to get involved or you’ll get hurt anyway.”
“Not this time. Not with Marc.”
“Why?” asked again Sandy, exasperated.
“Because Marc is the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me, and the most terrible one too,” she admitted, feeling a strange lump in her throat.
“Did you fall in love, didn’t you?”
Who wouldn’t fall in love with the ‘best boyfriend of the year’, according to Tabloid ?
“I don’t know.”
“Nice, face it.”
“I don’t want to fall in love with him,” burst out Berenice, feeling vulnerable.
“Pascal said: ‘ The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing’. You can’t act according to your ow
n logic to decide whom to love and not to love.”
“If you only knew all the truth, you wouldn’t talk like that, but you’d be on my side. And besides, I know Marc very little.”
“ It’s love at first sight! I adore this kind of love!”
“Sandy, get in touch with reality and come back to us. Love at first sight doesn’t exist.”
“You’re so cynical!”
11
Once the lunch break was over, the two colleagues came back to their office.
As soon as they stepped in, Kurt Dosen, their older colleague, went closer to them.
“Miss Collins, there’s your brother in there. I told him to wait for you at your desk,” warned the man before going back to his duties.
Berenice had to struggle to keep calm in order to not show her anxiety.
Her brother went for her on the job only once and he did because of their father who hadn’t been seen for two days.
She reflected on what happened in the previous morning. Marc was very hard on her father and now she was afraid that this one could have done something silly.
Scared, she rushed to her desk with Sandy.
“Roy!” she exclaimed, seeing the hooded boy sitting in her chair, but when it rotated she found herself in front of two green eyes with golden specks giving her a black look. “What the hell are you doing here? Are you out of your mind?”
“I called you about twenty times, but you didn’t answer,” got furious Marc, getting off the chair.
“You aren’t Roy,” realized Sandy, since the man did not look like a teenager at all.
She tried to study him, but the hood mostly covered his face.
“You didn’t have to come!” hissed Berenice, annoyed and worried about the consequences of that hazardous move.
“And you had to call me! You had me worried, you fool!”
“You’re the one to be fool ’cause you came here… How did you know my workplace?”
“I accessed your Facebook’s account.”
“This is a violation of my privacy.”
“No, it isn’t. If someone leaves their password stored and as soon as one opens the Facebook website, they accidentally find themselves on this person’s private page.”
“Oh my God, I hate you so much!” snapped Berenice, now ignoring her friend. Sandy was watching the scene with both admiration and excitement, sure of being in front of an engaged couple in love who was up against their first quarrels.
“I’ve just saved your ass and you…”
“No, you’re wrong. They’ve just laid me off,” she revealed, struggling to hide her frustration.
“What? I don’t believe it.”
“Well, it seems that Karen Jordan’s report was better than yours.”
“Impossible,” clarified Marc at once, astonished at his total failure.
“Actually Karen sleeps with our boss, so she had a good start,” intervened Sandy.
“Then you’d have done well to be half-dressed instead of suffocating in those trousers and that very large pullover,” considered Marc furious, pointing at the girl’s unsexy look.
“I’m not like those who put on whorish dresses only to keep their job.”
“And besides it would be all in vain against Karen, Miss XS Size,” intervened Sandy again.
“Well, then let me go talking with your boss,” decided Marc, determined to win that battle.
“Marc, don’t be stupid!” stopped him Berenice immediately, afraid that the situation could get out of control.
“Marc?! Is that Marc you’re in love with?” guessed Sandy triumphantly, making Berenice’s blood freeze in her veins and attracting the attention of Marc who, amazed, did not realize his hood had fallen on his shoulders, leaving him totally open-faced.
His nose was completely healed now, but by way of compensation there was a huge plaster running along his jaw.
“ What on earth did you do?” grew impatient Berenice at once, touching the plastered wound and struggling not to turn to Sandy. At that moment her look could have killed her friend.
“I cut myself while shaving,” he answered absent-mindedly, continuing to gaze the woman who had revealed what he had been trying to understand for some time.
“Are you crazy? Why do you keep hurting yourself?” complained Berenice, exasperated. First the nose, then the shoulder and now the chin. She could not stand it any longer!
“Berry, maybe your friend feels ill,” muttered Marc confused, attracting the attention of Berenice who turned to her colleague. Sandy’s face was blue and she was pointing at Marc with a trembling forefinger.
She was clearly trying to speak, but only strange gurgles were coming from her mouth.
“Sandy, what’s up? Do you feel ill?” got worried Berenice.
“I think she has recognized me,” resolved Marc and Sandy confirmed that with a nod of her head.
Luckily each desk was quite secluded and no one could imagine what was happening.
Berenice and Marc sat the woman down in the chair and Berenice went to take some hot chocolate to hot drinks vending machine lest her friend should have low blood sugar.
When she came back to them she saw Sandy purple in the face and hyperventilated while was trying to pronounce the word ‘Hailen ’.
“Yes, Sandy. It’s him, but nobody has to know it, ok?” begged Berenice, handing the hot drink to her friend.
“But you can’t fall in love with him… You aren’t right for him,” muttered Sandy, still shocked.
“I’m not in love with Marc. I’m just put him up in my house till he recovers from a little car accident we had.”
“Is Marc Hailen staying with you?” asked Sandy barely.
“Yes, he’s. But he’ll come back to his house in a while and we won’t see him ever again,” explained Berenice with caution.
“Is that why you said you won’t fall in love with him?”
Berenice would have lost her self-control at any moment if Sandy had kept coming up with the subject they had broached that day at the coffee bar.
“Yes,” sighed Berenice slowly, struggling to not see Marc in the face.
“I love him instead! Marc Hailen, I love you,” burst out Sandy, strangely euphoric, but Marc paid no attention to her. He was accustomed to hear such declarations from his fans.
“Sandy, you’re in shock,” explained Berenice, frightened by her friend who seemed to have gone out of her mind .
“Nice, you were right. A story between the two of you would be futureless: a guy like Marc Hailen can’t be with a zero like you.”
Sandy was right, but hearing just from her best friend to be a zero in front of Marc made her feel really bad.
“She’s crazy! She must have hit her head,” snapped Marc who hated to hear that someone was a zero, but Berenice nudged him to hush him.
“Nice, what are you doing? You could have hurt him!” was alarmed Sandy at once, getting off the chair to protect her idol from her friend’s violence.
“I did nothing to him!” defended herself Berenice, surprised by her colleague’s reaction.
“But don’t you know that on his body there’s a ten million dollar insurance?”
“Oh yes, I do. He does nothing but remind it to me every day.”
“Well, you should be ashamed of hitting him. I didn’t think you were so aggressive!”
“And I didn’t think you were so stupid!” replied Berenice, offended.
“Nice, don’t take it badly, but you’d better come back home. Alone.”
“What?”
“You’re obviously out of your mind.”
“I’m exactly the one I was half an hour ago. You’ve changed and elected yourself as the famous Marc Hailen’s bodyguard.
“Nice, go back home. I’ll go to bat for your with the boss.”
“I don’t give a damn about Mr. Footer. He laid me off now! However I didn’t think my best friend would have thrown me out of office.”
“I’m d
oing it for you and for Marc Hailen as well. Your feelings for him have clearly clouded your judgment.”
What the hell was there in that hot chocolate? The elixir of stupidity ?
Upset by Sandy’s behavior, Berenice took her personal belongings and made for the exit really and truly.
“Marc, are you leaving with me?” she asked almost entreatingly. She was too depressed to hide what she felt at that moment.
“No!” intervened Sandy still in high spirit.
“ Get out of my way.” Marc moved her aside, carelessly, to go away.
“Mr. Marc Hailen, I beg you. Stay here,” implored Sandy, her voice suddenly reverential. “Berenice could hurt you.”
How could she say that?
“Berry can do anything to me,” he answered sharply, putting the hood over his head again and going towards his berry, who welcomed him with a smile. Berry was happy to see there was still someone in the world who believed in her.
Marc said nothing, only hugged her and kissed her hard while Sandy was watching them horrified.
When they went out the building, it had just started to rain in torrents.
Marc took off his sweatshirt and used it to shelter both of them from the rain.
Without leaving her hand, he broke into a run towards a grey Jeep that was parked on the eastern side of the street.
“Aren’t you slipping into another car, are you?”
“No, you idiot. I’ve the keys,” he informed, taking the car remote control off the pocket of his jeans.
“Where did you take that?”
“Today I’ve rented a car.”
“But didn’t you say you had no money and couldn’t use your credit card, so that nobody could find you?”
“Yes, I did. I used my brother’s credit card. This morning I called him, so I asked him some favors.”
“He must trust you completely to leave you the data of his credit card.”
“Actually he set a spending limit that I’ve already exceeded handsomely, but I know how to soothe him.”
“Really? And how are you remedying?”
“I promised him I’d visit him. I haven’t seen him for almost a year and each time we talk he always asks me to come back home almost for the weekend, but I’ve never done it. And I’ll take you too.”
A Star in My Life Page 9