Writing Our Song (15 page)

Jeremy wasn’t looking up in the branches though, he was looking right at the bottom of the trunk.  When I followed his line of sight, I could see a word quite clearly carved into it, ‘Holts’.  Jeremy was almost misty-eyed looking at it but didn’t say anything for quite some time.

“What is this, Jeremy?” I prompted gently, giving his hand a light squeeze.

“It’s… a special place,” he said.  “It’s the last place my family was complete.  A whole decade ago now, we came out here and had the most incredible day at the beach.  Anna, dad and I swam and played on the sand for hours.  Mom kept Kevin mostly in the shade of this tree, he couldn’t walk yet.  We brought a picnic and ate it right here on the grass, carved the family name there before we left.”

Jeremy sighed and looked over his shoulder at the ocean for a moment before turning back to the tree and continuing.

“We hadn’t been together like that for a while.  Anna was always off boy-chasing, I was hanging out with my friends trying to pick up girls, Dad was busy with work and Mom was busy with Kevin, but we all came along for the ride that day.  A few days later Dad was gone.”

I brought my other arm across and held his one hand with both of mine, moving closer to him until my shoulder was pressed against his upper arm, trying to offer what silent support I could.

“That path we came down used to be a public access-way but I bought both the houses adjacent to it and then had them put on the same title, making the path effectively private.  I rent the houses out to the people that used to live there anyway, on the condition that I have access to the beach and they don’t let anybody screw with this tree.  Ever.”

Jeremy sighed again and walked around me, turning me on the spot until we were both facing the ocean.  I stayed silent, slightly awed by how much he was opening up to me, and very humbled.

“I come out here sometimes just to sit and listen to nothing much.  The waves and the wind are so much better than, I don’t know, the phone and the photocopier.”

Jeremy looked down at his feet for a moment and then brought his eyes up to meet mine.  The butterflies began fluttering in my stomach again, nobody had ever looked at me the way Jeremy did.

“I don’t bring
anyone
here, Bea.  Not a soul.  It’s… a special place.  My family doesn’t even know I bought it.  One day I want to find a new place and make it just as special for the people I love the most, the family I haven’t met yet.  I don’t know where it will be, or
what
it will be.  Another beach?  A cabin in the forest somewhere?  A lake?  Could be anything, but I’ll know it when I see it.  I think.”

The sound of the wind and waves he had mentioned surrounded us as he stopped speaking and I tried to let everything he had told me sink in.  How could I have thought such hateful things about him?  There was a real man with real feelings behind the money and the billionaire lifestyle.  People he cared about, people who cared about him.

“Can I sit with you for a while?” I asked.

Jeremy nodded and we sank to the grass to watch the sun beating down on the sand and sparkling off the surface of the water, sheltering from the heat in the shade of that tree just as his family had all those years ago.  He was right, this was a special place.

From somewhere deep inside I felt that thing that represented all the crap that had happened to me, all the worst parts of my past, teetering on the brink of spilling out.  Part of me wanted to tell Jeremy everything right there and then but, after hesitating for a few minutes, it seemed like the time for talking was done.  Now it was the time for being quiet.

I rested my head on his shoulder and let the urge fade.

Chapter 15

If reality was a flying house, then you could have called me the wicked witch of the east.  It was bad enough when I went back to work only to find that around one percent of the work I would usually have been responsible for had been done and I was expected to catch up quicker than humanly possible.

It was worse when, on Wednesday, a gossip magazine was put on sale that included a picture of Jeremy and I on the beach in New Zealand.  I was looking up at him with goofy doe-eyes and the caption said ‘Can you buy me a car please, Mr. Holt? Tee hee hee’

The rumor-mill started working almost immediately, people started talking.  Never quite to my face, but close enough so that I could hear.  The men said words like ‘gold-digger’ and the women said words like ‘slut’.

People with no idea about the sequence of events concocted wild conspiracy theories about my relationship with Jeremy, things that made no sense whatsoever.  Like I had staged the ‘coffee incident’ to make hassles for upper management and force them to give me paid leave.

I was known as a ‘troublemaker’.  I couldn’t think of how to fight back, yell at them to shove it up their asses, without confirming the very thing they were accusing me of.

Every slur and every whisper hurt and hurt in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time, raw and cutting deep.  I’d spent a long time denying myself a lot of emotions, avoiding this very pain, but Jeremy had torn down my defenses and now I was back on the frontlines.

Jeremy wasn’t helping much either.  He didn’t quite seem to understand that personal calls were strictly against the rules during working hours.  I didn’t know whether he wanted us to have deep and meaningful conversations while people were all around me or what.  Did he expect me to sit there for half an hour saying ‘no you hang up first… did you hang up… neither did you!’?

However, all of that paled in comparison to Friday night.  I was utterly exhausted from the week, desperate to just collapse on my bed and hide from the world, but Jeremy had harangued me constantly about coming back down to L.A for the weekend to visit until I agreed and the tickets showed up faster than I could say ‘what’s going on?’

I had told him it would have to be a late-ish flight because I had something I needed to do.  That thing was visiting my dad’s grave.  I hadn’t had a chance to go to the cemetery since I’d been back and this was his birthday, so I went there straight from work.

I told my dad about my trip to New Zealand, keeping details about Jeremy out.  I couldn’t bring myself to talk about him there at the very spot where I had made that promise all those years ago.  That broken promise.

It was dark by the time I had finished at the cemetery, made my way back to my apartment, packed everything I’d need for the weekend and arranged a taxi.  I was desperately hoping that being with Jeremy would be like stepping out of the real world again.

The taxi company gave me a missed call when they were outside and I caught the elevator to the ground floor, doing my best to banish the awful working week from my mind and think of being with Jeremy.  When I stepped through the front door I was caught completely off guard.

As soon as I set foot outside I was instantly blinded by the dual flashes of two men with cameras who began battering me with questions from the asinine to the offensive, every question punctuated by a flash to capture my reaction.

“Having a nice evening, Beatrice?”

FLASH!

“Look this way!”

FLASH!

“Whose grave were you visiting?”

FLASH!

“Hot date with Jeremy Holt?”

FLASH!

The first jolt of surprise quickly erupted into a flash of heat as if a lightning bolt had blasted away at some bone-dry pile of dead leaves that then scattered on the wind setting little fires ablaze everywhere.  I looked from one of them to the other as the barrage continued, feeling the color draining from my face as an iron band seemed to wrap itself around my chest and my breaths became fast and shallow.

I couldn’t breathe! 
I couldn’t breathe!
  What little air I did get into my lungs didn’t seem to have any oxygen in it and a brown haze began to creep in at the edges of my vision.  Another hot flush almost made me gasp and a sheen of sweat sprang up on my forehead as an unbelievable terror took hold of my heart and squeezed it for all it was worth.

With the most pathetic of whimpers I managed to stumble backwards through the still-open door, backtracking towards the elevator and the stairs as I felt a series of screams that might never stop if I let them out welling up inside of me.  The questions had stopped but they were still taking pictures through the glass of the door right up until I disappeared around the corner beside the staircase.

I kept my hand on the wall as I walked backwards until my ass hit another wall.  My eyes darted all around, trying to focus on something even as the fog closed in, narrowing my vision to tiny pinpoints of washed out color.

To my right I saw a small, dark, space under the stairs and my mind screamed out
HIDE!
  I crawled under and dragged my bag in behind me like a barrier between me and the rest of the world.  In my mind I tried to shout the panic down, tell myself I was safe, but I couldn’t regain control of my breathing and the haze eventually took over my sight completely as all sounds seemed to come from farther away, taking on a strange echo-like quality until I couldn’t hear anything at all.

*****

I woke up to the sound of my cell phone ringing and a metallic taste in my mouth.  My muscles ached like I’d run a marathon the previous day and the pain in my mouth led me to believe I had somehow bitten the inside of my cheek.

My eyes rolled around for a moment trying to make sense of where I was, and then everything came flooding back.  I felt my heartbeat rising for a moment but after a few careful deep breaths, it seemed to come under control.

With a struggle, I managed to bring myself to a sitting position and stared out over my bag into the more well-lit area beside the stairs for a few minutes, gathering my strength.  I gulped and forced my brain to work.

How long had it been since I’d had a panic attack like that?  More than a year at least, maybe two by now, not since before I’d started working at Bloxhamtech anyway.  And it wasn’t like I hadn’t been peppered with questions in that time, or caught by surprise.  A shiver of fear worked its way down my spine and seemed to stir up an emotion I knew all too well.

From the pit of my stomach I felt anger, hot and heavy, rising up and swamping me.  It had been subdued for a few weeks, but not killed entirely.

I let my guard down and
this
was what I got!  I’d been getting by on my own when Jeremy had to come along and rip apart everything I’d built to protect myself.  I shook with the nearly uncontrollable rage, my fists all bunched up with nothing to punch but my bag, which received a couple good shots.

Between my legs and around my ass I felt a strange damp sensation and when I investigated with my hand I found my pants were soaked, but the surrounding ground was relatively dry.  At some point while passed out, I had wet myself.

My face flushed with utter shame and I tried to hide it behind my arms, which I folded over my knees.  The flush of humiliation fuelled the anger even more and I suddenly found the energy to burst out of my little hiding place, cracking my head on the bottom of the steps in the process, and bounded up the stairs with my bag bouncing wildly on my legs as I ran, praying that nobody would see me.

Once back inside my apartment I raced straight to the shower, beginning to disrobe from the very moment my apartment door was safely locked behind me and my bag was dropped on the ground.  I kicked my last article of clothing off and jumped under the stream of water before it had even heated up, pouring shower gel on and scrubbing at my body until the steam finally began to fog the glass sides.

Finally, my skin practically stinging from the heat and scouring now, I sank down to the floor and let the stream of hot water pour down on my head.  I let out a little strangled cry of frustration and beat my fists against the ground a few times, sending up pathetic little splashes on to the sides of the shower.

I couldn’t live like this.  Despite my best efforts at stopping myself, I had grasped at a straw with Jeremy but what had happened on the other side of the world might as well have happened on the other side of imagination-land.  Real life wasn’t all holidays in the presidential suite and no responsibilities.  Around here I had a job I was supposed to do to take care of myself, I couldn’t be just a piece of arm candy.

People knew me and, if the magazine from earlier this week and the paparazzi downstairs were anything go by, more people would ‘know’ me if I continued being seen with Jeremy Holt.  There would be no end to those kind of encounters.  What would have happened if I wasn’t right at the front door of my building?  What if I had passed out and wet myself in public?

A wave of humiliation washed over me again, thinking about what life might be like as a famous laughing stock.  No, I couldn’t live under the constant threat of the kind of terror I had just experienced downstairs.

Life just before I met Jeremy had been cold and grey, but livable.  Those two weeks with him had been like hearing music for the first time and seeing my first sunrise all at once, exhilarating, heart-breaking, terrifying and wonderful all at the same time.

But Jeremy couldn’t be there non-stop.  Having him with me was what got me through those heart-breaking and terrifying parts.  I couldn’t hide behind him all the time, this evening alone was conclusive evidence of that.

At the same time, what had happened tonight wasn’t Jeremy’s fault.  Not directly, anyway.  I’d seen enough to know who Jeremy was, and I knew I hadn’t been used or tricked.  He certainly wouldn’t have wished for something like this to have happened to me again.

As incredible as he was, I couldn’t be with him, there was just too big a mountain to climb.  I owed it to him to treat him kindly though.  I could keep my anger and shame under control just one more time for him.  One more time to let him go.

I swallowed hard against a lump that formed in my throat and if any tears forced their way out of my closed eyelids, they were washed away instantly by the shower.  Once I was calm again I stood and twisted the taps to the off position before stepping out on to the bathmat and drying myself.

With my towel wrapped around me, I backtracked through the house and collected my clothes, holding my pants delicately with a finger and thumb to extract my belongings from the pocket, before putting everything in the laundry basket and sitting on the edge of my bed with my phone in hand.  The screen indicated I’d had seven missed calls from Jeremy, easily the most missed calls I’d racked up since I was fifteen.

I didn’t even know what I was going to say when I finally mustered up the courage to call him, I couldn’t imagine any way this could be a pleasant conversation.  With no real conversational roadmap in mind I pressed the appropriate buttons.  After about one and a half rings, I heard a click at the other end followed by some half-decipherable airport announcement in the background.

“Hello?  Bea?” said Jeremy.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Where are you?  Are you here somewhere or did you miss your flight, or what?”

“I didn’t catch the flight… I can’t come, Jeremy.”

“Do you want me to book one for tomorrow?  What happened?”

“No, don’t.  I can’t come… at all.  This, you and I, it just can’t work.”

“What?  What are you talking… just a minute.”

Through my phone I could hear Jeremy saying a lot of ‘excuse me’ and ‘pardon me’ until he seemed to come to an area that had a lot less background noise.

“Bea?  You still there?”

“Yeah.”

“OK… care to tell me what’s going on?”

“I’m sorry… I am, I
really
am.  You’ve been… I don’t know… perfect I guess is the right word.  It’s not you, it’s…”

“Don’t say ‘it’s not you it’s me’,” said Jeremy.

“But it is.  I wish I could be that person you set free in New Zealand but there’s just too much between us for it to work.  It’s like what happened over there wasn’t real, it was a break from reality… does that make any sense?”

“Of course it doesn’t.  How can you say it wasn’t real? 
How can you say that to me?
”

Jeremy’s voice rose at that last question, the first time I’d heard him utter a single word without complete confidence and control.  I clenched my eyes shut against more tears that were trying to fight their way out and waged my own battle for control of my emotions and words.

“I’m so sorry, please believe me.  You… you barely even know me.  I bet you’d run…”

“What happened to you, Bea?” Jeremy repeated the question he had asked on that first flight on his private jet.

“I… can’t.  Jeremy, you have to forget about me… you deserve better.  Please don’t call anymore.”

“Like hell.  Bea… I know you better than you think.  I’m not giving up on…”

“Goodbye, Jeremy.”

I pressed the button on my phone to hang up and then turned it off before placing it on my bedside table.  After hanging up my towel I returned to bed, pulled the covers up over me and curled up in to a tight little ball in the darkness.