Writing Our Song (9 page)

“Are you reading this off a piece of paper?”

“Yes, cut me some slack.  Furthermore, Mr. Stevens apologizes for any misunderstanding and management has agreed that you should be entitled to some time to calm down until you’re alright with returning to work.  They’ve said you can have the rest of this week and the following two weeks as vacation, on full pay.  It won’t come out of your yearly holiday entitlement either.”

“He couldn’t tell me himself?”

“Beatrice, you know what he’s like,” Antoine said under his breath. “I’ve never seen him even go this far before, a complete about-face.  Maybe he really means it.  So, do you want to accept?  For myself, I’d really hate to lose you.  You’ve never taken any annual leave before, you might as well take this.  Please?”

“Well…”

“Please?”

“OK, Antoine.  Yes, I accept.”

“Wonderful!  I’ll see you in a couple of weeks then and I’ll get Scott to distribute your work amongst the other Sales Support Execs in the meantime.”

“OK, thanks.  Bye.”

I stuffed my phone into my pocket and felt something else brush my fingertips.  Pulling it out, I saw it was Jeremy Holt’s card.  Two weeks starting from next week.  That was a bit of a coincidence, wasn’t it?

After considering tossing the card into the nearest trash, I decided to go back into the library and book another half-hour slot on the internet.  A brief search garnered more information than I wanted to know.

Jeremy was beyond rich.  His fortune was measured in billions rather than millions.  Apparently he was the third-youngest self-made billionaire ever, having struck out in the business world, whatever that meant, in his mid-teens.  These days he was a venture capitalist who had large or controlling shareholdings in a number of companies of wildly differing sizes and industries.

My assumption had been right, he hadn’t been visiting Bloxhamtech for a job interview.  In all likelihood he had been there to buy some or all of it.  Then what?  The website didn’t mention how he actually made money aside from buying things.  Was he one of those people that bought businesses, chopped them into little pieces and sold them off at the cost of countless jobs?  I had no idea.

With a decisive flick, I tossed his business card into the wastepaper basket next to the desk and was about to leave but saw I had ten minutes of internet time left.  Out of curiosity I searched for New Zealand and spent the remainder of my time looking at pictures of empty beaches, mountain ranges, glaciers, forests and lakes.

It seemed so peaceful that even looking at it made me unwind a bit.  My eyes flicked to the business card sitting on top of a bunched up piece of paper, then back to the screen in front of me that showed a beach with strangely dark sand and nobody on it.

I wanted to go there, get away from this place for a while.  Here nothing ever changed except for the worse.  Maybe on the other side of the world I could forget about everything for just a couple of weeks.  I could put the brakes on the train and maybe see something beautiful before hopping back on.  And I could tell my dad what it was like.

Besides, like Jeremy had said, this didn’t obligate me to him.  Although I didn’t understand it in the slightest, he seemed to be under the impression that he owed me something.  It didn’t mean anything besides him squaring up a debt.  I would have to question him further on that but I had agreed to let the detail slide the last time I spoke to him, and I was going to let it slide a bit longer.

My time ran out and I retrieved Jeremy’s business card, dialing the number as I walked out the front doors of the library again.  It rang twice before I heard his voice answer at the other end.

“Hi.  It’s Beatrice.”

“Thanks for calling!  I wasn’t sure if you would.  How goes the job situation?”

“It’s a Christmas miracle!  Colonel Mustard has mysteriously seen the error of his ways and offered me precisely the amount of time off I’d need to come to New Zealand.”

Jeremy laughed, a carefree sound I was mildly jealous of.

“You wouldn’t have had anything to do with that, would you?” I asked.

“Who me?  No,” Jeremy said, drawing the word out with playful sarcasm, “I wouldn’t dare.  People like me only make things worse, don’t they?”

“Yeah.  So… is that offer still on the table?”

“Of course.”

“OK, I’m in.”

“We have a deal?”

“Yes.”

“So say ‘deal’.” I could almost
hear
the smile he was wearing.

“Deal.”

“Deal.”

Chapter 9

The next day a plane ticket from Sea-Tac airport to LAX arrived and by mid-morning on Saturday I was walking through the arrivals gate with my large carry-on luggage slung over my shoulder and that Californian sunshine streaming in through the window.  Jeremy was actually waiting for me himself and waved to catch my attention.

“No checked luggage?” he asked.

“I’m a woman of few possessions,” I said.

“OK, packin’ light, no problem.  Want me to carry that?”

“No, I’ve got it.”

Jeremy shrugged his shoulders and led me through the airport until we arrived at the security screening area.  I looked over at him and noticed that he didn’t have any kind of luggage at all.

“Looks like I’m not the only one packing light,” I said.

“My stuff has already gone through with a couple employees when they arrived to prep the jet.”

“Oh.”

Jeremy stepped up to the woman who was checking flight documents and I saw her glance up at him and then do a double take before a smile that expressed more-than-professional-courtesy graced her lips.

“Passport and boarding pass please, sir,” she said.

“No boarding pass, I’m travelling on a private flight.  Jeremy Holt and Beatrice Hampton,” Jeremy said, giving her his passport.

The woman, who looked to be my age but almost achingly beautiful, sported a name badge that said ‘Madison’ and looked from Jeremy to me as I handed over my passport.  If I hadn’t known better I would have said there was thinly veiled jealousy in her eyes.

Looking at a clipboard resting on her little podium, she compared the names on the passports and ticked us off a list before handing them back and telling us to have a nice flight.  Jeremy walked straight through the metal detector as I placed my bag on the conveyor belt leading to the x-ray.

I caught little-miss-big-smile-sparkle-eyes turn her head and give him a full body scan every bit as thorough as the machines inspecting our luggage, and perhaps just a little more intimate.  She diverted her gaze with a blush when she saw I had noticed and I couldn’t help but shake my head.

What must it be like for a person like Jeremy to go through life with that kind of treatment all the time?  You couldn’t help but get just a bit full of yourself, I bet.  My bag went through without issue, as did I, and Jeremy was waiting for me on the other side.

“You sure you don’t want me to carry that for you?” he asked.

“No, I said I’m fine.  You sure you wouldn’t rather take Madison?  She might be better company.”

“Who?”

I pointed.

“Oh.  Meh.  No.  I’d rather take you.  Let’s go.”

When his back turned I couldn’t stop the corners of my mouth from rising just a little.  It was an unexpected ego-stroke to have so much attention from him when he referred to a girl as stunning as Madison as ‘meh’.

Get a grip, Beatrice,
I thought,
you’re here because he owes you for some reason.  Don’t start thinking you’re anything special, and don’t forget who he is
.

The tiny smile dropped from my face as if it had never existed.

*****

Being a private flight, we didn’t have our own boarding gate and had to cross the tarmac to walk up the steps-on-wheels to enter the aircraft.  It was such a strange feeling to be out there, seeing the other jumbo jets more close-up than usual and be struck anew by the wonder of how things so huge could ever get off the ground.

Jeremy’s private jet was not like the few commercial planes I had been on previously.  While we waited for our turn to roll out to our allocated runway he gave me a quick tour.  It was much more like a house with wings than the flying sardine cans I had been on before.

An office, a kitchen area, a living room and ‘sleeping quarters’ were all present, along with an area that was more akin to the business-class seating I had walked through on my way to the economy-class sections on my previous flights.  When it was time for us to go, the opulence did little to settle my take-off nerves and I gripped the armrests while staring straight ahead and breathing carefully.

“Not a happy flier?” Jeremy asked.

“It’s mostly the take-offs,” I said.  “I don’t even mind the landings so much, and flying is fine.  Oh, and I hate it when they’re circling the airport and they turn so sharply that I’m looking straight down out of my window.  I hate that.”

“Oh, yeah.  I know what you mean.  Like, if the wings are pointing straight up and down, what’s the plane gliding on?”

“Yeah, that might be it.”

The roar of the engines in take-off became a steady drone as the jet climbed to whatever its cruising altitude was and the captain made an announcement over the P.A system, addressing Jeremy and I both by name, saying that it was OK to remove seatbelts and move around the aircraft.  Jeremy immediately took his off and walked to the rear of the room we were in, opening a fridge that was disguised to fit in with the rest of the décor.

“Drink?”

“Yes please, what do you have?”

“Wines, beers, juices, Coke, lemonade…”

“Orange juice?”

“You got it.  I’ll have lemonade.”

Jeremy poured the drinks and handed me my glass before returning to his own seat.  The juice was fantastic, ice cold and refreshing after the heat outside the airport.  I drank half the glass all at once before setting it down.

“What did you mean about owing me?” I asked.

“Hmmm?  Oh.  Well, I was supposed to be having a meeting with just John Bloxham that day but when I turned up there were several spanners in the works, namely the Colonel and those other executives.  I was planning on investing in Bloxhamtech, and there’s always a bit of debate on how best to value a company.  John was being difficult because he built that company from the ground up, and he’s sentimental about it.”

“You think he shouldn’t be?”

“Oh, that’s fine as far as I’m concerned.  I can understand it for sure, I could have dealt with it.  He just needed to be convinced that I wasn’t going to take his legacy and trash it.  Rod Stevens, on the other hand, he’s just plain old greedy.  And an asshole.  You’d back me up on that one, wouldn’t you?”

“No argument here.”

“The others were just worried about their jobs or the projects they were trying to get done, but they were adding a lot of noise to the discussions and kept on putting John, whose decision it really was, back at square one,” he said.

“What did you do?”

“Well, ultimately, I knew John wanted the deal to go ahead and I knew I wanted it to go ahead but the longer things dragged on the more it would cost me.  If I didn’t invest, they knew there was a real possibility the company wouldn’t survive but an agreement wasn’t anywhere near as essential for me, so I had an advantage there.  I needed to give an ultimatum in a way that said ‘take it or leave it, I have got to go now’ without causing offence and making them dig their heels in.  Then you walked in.”

“Coffee is served,”

“Exactly.  Me needing to go to the hospital to tend to crotch-burns is about as hard to get offended about as anything, I told them to take the deal as it stood or I wouldn’t be back.  They took it, you saved me millions.”

“Did you really need to go to the hospital?”

“No, I think I have the milk to thank for that, haha!”

“So I saved you millions and all I get is this lousy trip to New Zealand?”

“And an orange juice.”

“Any food?”

“Only on the flight.  Once we get there I’m going to give you a sharp stick and you’ll have to live on whatever you can catch.”

I turned my head to look out of the window so he wouldn’t see me smiling, to my surprise I was even fighting to suppress laughter.  Why did he have to be so…  I struggled to think of a word.  Non-evil?  Likable, even?

Below the wing I could see occasional snippets of ocean through breaks in the clouds as our shadow raced us across the fluffy surface and I tried to gather my thoughts again. 
Remember who he is, Beatrice
.  I turned back to Jeremy, who was looking at me in a similar way to when he had first seen me in the boardroom.

“Why am I really here, Jeremy?”

Jeremy’s eyes never left mine as he continued just looking at me for a few seconds before taking a sip of his lemonade and putting his glass back down.

“Beatrice, one of the reasons I’ve done so well is because I’ve got this knack for understanding people quickly.  It helps me know what I need to do to get them to come around to my way of thinking.  It’s kind of like a game, maybe I think of it that way because of how young I started.  I’ve done it so often for so long that it comes as naturally to me as breathing.”

“Congratulations.  What does it have to do with me?”

“You’re a tough one to read.  When you walked into that boardroom and I saw you for the first time, my heart almost stopped.  You’re one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in my life, but then you looked around the room and spotted me.  I saw your eyes and I knew something was wrong.  Really wrong.”

I turned my head back and looked into my lap so he couldn’t look into my eyes anymore.  He had no right to go speculating about me, about my life.  Desperately I tried to find my hatred, to wrap myself in it, to stay safe as he continued.

“There’s something about you, Beatrice, I don’t know what it is but my gut told me it was something special, something that was being smothered.  I couldn’t live with myself knowing that you had that look in your eyes.”

There it was, that flash of resentment I could redirect away from myself, I seized it with both hands and looked back in his direction.

“So what am I then?  A game or something you’re just taking pity on?”

Jeremy leaned back against his window and looked like he was going to take another sip of lemonade, but thought better of it and laced his fingers together over his stomach instead.  I stared at him hoping I would spontaneously be given the gift of heat vision so I could blast him away.

“Has anybody ever told you that you’re cute when you’re angry and your hostility is very disarming?”  he asked.

I didn’t answer.

“Why does it have to be either, Beatrice?  Couldn’t I just be being nice?  Is that really so hard to believe?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to you?” he asked quietly.

It felt like he was trying to pick apart my painstakingly crafted walls.  Not violently, just a little tug here and a little prod there, but I’d gone through too much to have some rich bastard poking around them.  To my shame I felt tears welling up.

“Don’t. 
Don’t
.  Don’t you dare,” I said with as much venom as I could muster.

“OK, OK,” he said, “Beatrice, what I said back at your place still stands.  No pressure, no obligations and all that.  We’re going a long way away, I thought you might like to relax a bit.  I don’t mean just sitting on a beach, I mean it in the sense of leaving everything behind.”

Jeremy paused and looked at me as if he expected me to say something.  All I could do was sit there, furious at the audacity of this rich man who had red carpets rolled out for him wherever he went.  Yet what he was proposing sounded so good, like heaven on earth.  Was it even possible though?

“It’s exhausting acting in a way that’s… uh… contrary to your true nature, Beatrice.  Most people I’ve met can’t keep it up during a business meeting that lasts for an hour when they’re trying to bluff me.  Is this who you are?  Or are you actually really tired?  Think about it.”

Jeremy pulled a folder of some kind out of a little drawer and began reading it, leaving me alone with my thoughts.  I turned and stared out of the window, blinking away the tears that hadn’t quite fallen, and watched the clouds and ocean zip by again for a good long while.

Was it possible?  I repeated the question to myself.  Could we be going far enough away that the blamelight couldn’t find me?  What would that be like?  I imagined it might be like temporary relief from a full-body cramp that had lasted for over four years.

Four
years
.  The words hung in my mind like a crushing weight.  That was a long time.  I thought about all the guilt, the pain, everything I constantly tried to defend myself against and almost trembled.

Could I relax a bit, relax the way Jeremy had said, and not have all that overwhelm me again?  I didn’t know.  Maybe.  Maybe for just two weeks I could.

“Jeremy?” I spoke without turning around.

“Yes?”

“Maybe… um.  Maybe… you could call me ‘Bea’?”

“Bea.  I’d like that.”

Somewhere deep inside, a part of me felt a little calmer already.  It was like a towel that had been wrung beyond any more water coming out of it, to the point where threads were beginning to snap and rip, and now it had been unwound a bit.  Just a turn or two, but enough to feel.

*****

Sleeping on a private jet was also a completely different experience to economy class, in that it was actually possible for me.  Jeremy said that it was a thirteen hour flight so we’d be arriving at about midnight our time, but late evening the next day in local time because of the international date line.