The Opportunist (15 page)
“I know,” I say quickly, “I’m thinking that I am not the kind of girl you want to be friends with.”
“I don’t j
ust
want to be friend with you.”
I have a moment; my vision swings in and out of focus and my wretched, evil heart swells up like a balloon.
I am so confused. I should not be doing this to him, but I want to. I rub my temples. This was all too complicated and unfair. After three long years, I have what I want and it isn’t real. He doesn’t know who I am, and if he did, he wouldn’t be sitting in my living room.
I blow air through my nose. Good Olivia is begging me to break things off with him for good. She remembers airport fucking blue and paint on the ceiling and what happens when those memories blow through your empty life and remind you of how cold things are. We turn back to the TV, both of us embarrassed and awkward. Caleb leaves a couple of hours later sucking the hope from my lungs as he goes.
“Lock all the doors, and call me if you need me, okay?” I nod biting my bottom lip. I don’t want to be alone but I am too embarrassed to ask him to stay longer.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.” I will him to stay, gazing up at his beautiful face. He seems to hesitate, and for a moment, I think it’s working.
“What’s wrong?” I whisper.
Please don’t let him remember. Please let him remember.
“Nothing…it’s just that I feel like we’ve done this before—déjà vu, you know?”
I do know, because this is the way our goodbyes went when we were together. He never stayed the night because I never let him.
“Well, bye.”
“Bye,” I say.
I make myself a cup of tea and settle onto the sofa. I lost him once because of my inner rottenness. My lies started unraveling one after another until he was so weighed down by the size of them, he looked me in the eyes and said goodbye forever. I remember feeling numb as I watched him leave, and then for the rest of the day, until I realized he wasn’t coming back.
Ever.
That was when the walls of my emotional dam came crashing down around me. The hurt I experienced was so potent and searing for the first six months, dominating each day like a sore throat. After that, it became a constant ache, an absence that never left your bones.
Caleb’s gone, Caleb’s gone, Caleb’s gone
….
Even now that he was back in my life, I still felt his absence. My time, I knew, was borrowed and soon the fierce pain would start again. It would only be a matter of time when he found out about our past and my sausage link of lies.
I decide to seize the day. If my time is short, I might as well be with him as much as I possibly can. I pick up the phone and punch in the number to his condo. He didn’t answer, so I chirp a message into his machine asking him to call me back, which he does, about ten minutes later.
“Olivia? You okay?”
“I’m fine, just fine,” I wave away his concern like he can see me. “I’m coming over,” I say quickly. “I’d rather not be alone and you promised me dinner anyway.”
I wait, holding my breath.
There is a pause, during which I fold in both of my lips and squeeze my eyes shut. Maybe he has plans with Leah.
“Great,” he says finally. “Do you like steak?”
“I’m all about the meat.” I flinch when he laughs. “Give me the directions.” I jot down the series of highways and streets he is rattling of, and toss my pen aside. I know the building he is describing. It was the type of thing you couldn’t help but look at as you drove across the waterway to get to the string of ritzy café’s and boutiques that lined the beach. It had at least thirty floors, a chunk of real estate that glittered like OZ.
When I arrive, I hand the keys to my Bug over to the valet attendant and step into the chilly lobby.
A doorman greets me. His eyes start at my feet and climb slowly to my face.
I had seen this look a million times from Caleb’s friends. I was among them, but not one of them. Their eyes were tuned into Laboutin and Gucci, so when I showed up in my off-the-rack clothing, their looks glazed over like I bored them. Most of their conversations began, “
When I was vacationing in Italy last year…”
or “
Daddy ’s new sailboat….”
to which I would be the silent listener, having never left Florida, especially not on my dead beat daddy’s toy schooner. My daddy was the guy who threw his empty beer bottles at other men’s good fortune.
When I complained about it to Caleb, he tutored me on the art of snobbery.
“Look at them like you know their secrets and you find them boring.”
The first time I looked down my nose at an heiress, she asked me where I’d bought my shoes.
“Payless,” I replied. “funny isn’t it, that our shoes are identical, yet the price you paid for yours could feed a small country for a month?” Caleb had choked on his shrimp cocktail and the heiress had never spoken to me again. I’d felt a sick power. You didn’t have to be rich and important to intimidate someone, you just had to be judgmental.
I don’t look directly at the doorman, but I blink rapidly in his direction like he’s annoying me. He smiles.
“Are you visiting Miss?” Are you veeesiting, mees?
“Caleb Drake,” I say. “Can you tell him that Olivia’s here?” Just then I hear the elevator door slide open and Ricky Ricardo nods to someone over my shoulder.
“Olivia,” Caleb says, putting his hand on the small of my back. I jolt at his touch.
He smiles at the doorman.
“This guy cheats at Poker. Completely swindled me out of a hundred dollars last week.” The little jerk beams in response. Why was it that attention from Caleb turned people into living glowworms?
“Sir? It was the most honest hundred dollars I’ve ever made.”
Caleb smirks and leads me to the elevator.
“You hang out with the staff?” I ask as the doors closed behind us.
“I play poker with them on Tuesdays,” he says looking at me sideways. “What? I like them. No pretenses. Besides, I don’t remember any of my other friends.” He lets me step out of the elevator first and then follows behind me. I get the feeling he is looking at my butt.
“It’s beautiful—this place.”
He makes a face. “Not really homey is it? It’s a little macho-bachelor.”
“Well, you are both of those things, so it fits.”
“I’m sure I could have bought a house for what I paid for this.”
“And a minivan,” I grin.
He grimaces. “That I’m not so sure about.”
“This is it,” he says stopping at 749. “Do not be intimidated by the eighteen foot ceilings and the plasma televisions—they are impressive, but not to be feared.”
I follow his shoulders into the living room.
His condo is impressive. The foyer, as it turns out, is as large as my bedroom. It is bare except for the massive chandelier that hangs over the butter cream tiles. I feel classy by osmosis. He leads me into the living room which, just as he promised, has impossibly high ceilings. The entire main wall is a window, which shows a view of the ocean.
“Now, tell me,” I say stopping to admire a painting, “did mommy help you decorate or did you just hire someone?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “But word is—I dated a decorator just to get the free swag.”
“Is that so?” I reach out and touch a finger to the cover of a giant atlas that was resting on his mantle.
“This is the kitchen,” he says leading me into a room full of stainless steel. He leads me into a hallway and pauses before opening the door.
“My office.”
I peek around his shoulder into a room that was cased ceiling high in bookshelves. My stomach clenches in excitement and I felt an urgent need to pee.
Books. Wonderful, magnificent books.
“You read all of these?”
“I hope not. That would indicate I had absolutely no life pre-amnesia.”
“I don’t know,” I say, my eyes sweeping over the titles. “I think you’d enjoy a good classic…maybe Great Expectations.” I pluck it from his bookshelf and place it in his hands. He pulls a face, but doesn’t put it back, placing on his desk instead.
A framed picture of Leah sits strategically placed, probably by her, next to his computer monitor. I glare at it. It’s one of those posed studio pictures that the photographer painstakingly tried to make look natural. Leah was looking slightly to the left of the camera, and her mouth was pouty and slightly open. “
Kiss me, I’m a beautiful whore
,” it says in black and white.
“I want to have a huge office one day,” he says, following my eyes to a picture of Leah. “More books-that I don’t read- a fireplace, and one of those big, arched doorways with the heavy knockers.”
“Are you going to hang that picture up in your new office?” I ask. It hurts to see her there, so fixated in his life.
Caleb shrugs and looks at me in interest.
“Depends. The girl in the frame might be different. I do have a thing for brunettes.”
I pull a face at him.
“And my bedroom…”
His sheets are black silk and they lay rumpled and unmade. It makes me sick to think of all the women that have rolled around in his sheets.
“Where’s the bathroom?” I say in weak voice. He leads me to through the bedroom and watches me stare. There is a shower with six different shower heads and sunken bath that could easily fit five people. There is even a small wine bar built in the corner. He laughs at my expression.
“This is my favorite room too.”
“Wow,” I say.
“Well, if you spend the night sometime you can have the privilege of using it.” All the blood rushes to my head.
We land up back in the living room. I slump onto the couch while Caleb goes to fetch a bottle of wine from the kitchen. He comes back with two glasses balanced in one hand and a bottle of red in the other.
He fills our glasses and hands me one, his fingers brushing against mine in the process.
When he disappears from the room to start dinner, I pour the wine down my throat like a shot and refill my glass. I half expect either Leah or his memory to make an appearance at any second and I don’t want to be sober when it happens.
“So, can I see this ring you bought for your sweet little girlfriend?” I say when he walks back into the room. I don’t know why I ask this but I’m sure the wine has made me bolder.
“Why do you want to see the ring?” he looks at me from under his lashes.
Hmmm, because I want to see what could have been mine.
“Curiosity. I’m a girl and I like jewelry. You don’t have to show me, if you don’t want to.”
He disappears into the bedroom and comes back carrying a small blue box. Tiffany’s. How predictable.
“Whoa baby,” I say cracking open the lid. It is a carat past enormous. The most beautiful and obnoxious bauble I have ever seen. Well, aside from Cammie anyway….
“This thing needs its own zip code.”
“Try it on.” He buffers the box at me and my hand automatically pushes it away.
“Isn’t it bad luck to try on someone else’s ring?”
“Bad luck for the bride, I think,” he taunts.
“In that case…” I say reaching for it. “Wait!” I pull my hand back. “You have to propose first.” I hand him the box and sit back waiting for the show.
“Everything has to be a production with you doesn’t it?” he says standing up and turning his back to me. “Ask and you shall receive.” When he spins back around his features are twitchy and nervous.
“Bravo,” I clap my hands.
“Olivia,” he begins. I look at him in mock surprise. Then suddenly he is serious…or he seems so. I catch my breath. “You belong with me. Do you believe me?” I feel my sweat glands open.
Holding my breath, I nod. This is supposed to be for laughs, but it doesn’t sound funny, it sounds like something I will be replaying years from now—when I am sitting alone in a room full of cats.
“Will you marry me, Olivia? You are the only woman I know how to love. The only woman I
want
to love.” He doesn’t lower himself to his knee and he doesn’t need to. I am rocking on the edge of an emotional meltdown as is.
I know I was supposed to give some sort of response. I grope for my wit, but my mind is as dry as my mouth.
The wine speaks for me. I kiss him, because he is close and there is no other response good enough. It is just a brush of lips, warm and hasty. He freezes and stares at me with his eyebrows cocked in surprise.
“I would have given you diamonds a week ago, if I knew it would get me that.”
I shrug.
He lifts my finger and studies Leah’s diamond. “It looks…..”
“Silly,” I finish for him. “Here, take it,” I tug at the band and it rams into my knuckle. I try again. It is…stuck.
“Crap!” I moan. “I am so sorry Caleb. This was such a stupid idea.”
“Don’t apologize. Your fingers are probably just swollen. Give it some time and we’ll try again later.” And then he disappears into the kitchen to see to dinner and I am left on the couch with half a bottle of wine and Strawberry Shortcake’s ring on my finger.
“I don’t get it. How can you think so differently from before?” I ask while we sit eating dinner at his dining room table. I am buzzing from the wine and my tongue feels dangerously loose. “You don’t like the ring you chose, before the amnesia, you don’t like the girlfriend ….or your condo. How can the same person be someone else entirely?”