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I accepted his offer, and we left the restaurant heading toward his car. The ride back home was a little too quiet, and it made me quite uncomfortable. But then there was nothing to discuss. It was obvious we weren't a perfect match. He just wanted my body. I could not be in the same place with Will and not have anything to say; there was always something to discuss except we argued, and most times, our arguments and fights didn't last more than half the day. He dropped me off at home and opened his arm for an embrace, and I hugged him out of courtesy.
“Thanks for honoring my invitation today, Kathy; I hope we have more of this as time goes on," he whispered into my ears. I had nothing to say but, "You're welcome, Mr. Williams." I told him goodbye and then got out of the car. He watched me for a while, making my way to my home before he finally drove off.
It had been a long day today, and I felt very tired. I just needed to have my bath and lay on my bed, and I was very sure I was going to sleep off as soon as I lay on my bed. I was just about to enter the bathroom to have my bath when I heard a knock on the door. Who could that be by this time of the night? Could it be Will? I had last heard from him today during lunchtime when he called me to check up on me and see how I was fairing and to let me know that he would not be able to come over to my place today because he was going to be very busy. Did he change his mind? I would be glad if he did because I miss him already, and I wouldn't mind a cuddle, considering how tired I was already. But what if he wasn't the one? Who could it be?
A cold shiver went down throughout my body as a thought came into my mind. Kidnappers! Are they here again? Oh God, please save me. I am pregnant, and I do not think I would want to lose my child to the hand of kidnappers. I decided not to say a word till the person spoke up. I’ll probably recognize whoever is at the door when I hear the person’s voice. The knock came again, and I remained as silent as I could be. I walked gently to the door so that I could hear properly when the person finally spoke up. The knock came two more times before I finally heard a voice.
“Kathy, are you home? It’s me, Mr. Anderson," he shouted from outside.
I heaved a sigh of relief. Phew! That was so scary. I need a man with me. I probably wouldn't have been that scared if I had a man with me. But come to think of it, Mr. Anderson? Why would Mr. Anderson be at my place this time of night? He hardly ever leaves his house when it's past 6 pm. Whatever he came here for must be serious for him to leave his home by this time of the night. I mean, it was past 11 already. I opened the door gently and stepped outside.
"Good evening, Mr. Anderson. Sorry for keeping you waiting. I was busy with something inside. I just got inside not too long ago." I wish it were true that I was busy with something inside. I smiled within myself.
"Good evening, little robin." I was already fond of that name he gave me, and I was always happy to hear him call me that. "Yes, I saw you when you got back, I saw when someone dropped you off. I'm sorry for coming to disturb you by this time of the day. But I must drop something with you today. It had to be today; it has been with me for too long." I wondered what he was talking about. What could he probably be talking about? I wondered.
"While you were away during your vacation, a young man came looking for you. He claimed to be your long-time friend, and he also said he had lost your contact, which was why he could not contact you before. He gave me this letter and said, you will understand when you go through the content of the letter. It's been over a month already, and I just came in contact when I was going through my stuff yesterday. I'm so sorry I kept it for this long before bringing it to you. I hope whatever the content of the letter maybe will not be something very urgent."
He handed the letter over to me. I wondered who this so-called "longtime friend" was. I hardly had any friends at my young age back at my parent's house and even at Will's home. I was a very private child. And when I finally relocated to France, the few "friends" I had were from my workplace, and I have lost contact with all of them after leaving France. So could this be one of them?
"Thank you, Mr. Anderson. I'll read the letter as soon as I can. Just in case it is something I need to deal with urgently.”
"Please do so. Good night, little robin," he said as he left.
"Good night, Mr. Anderson." I went inside and locked the door immediately.
Even though I knew how urgent this later seemed because of how long it had stayed with the Andersons, I was just too tired to read and assimilate anything for now. I just really wanted to go to bed. I struggled to have my bath and then lay on my bed, and I slept almost immediately.
Chapter Three
Will
The few days I spent with Kathy after the vacation could be counted as the happiest days of my life. I was so excited to be alone with her without having to think about any problems affecting our relationship. The joy of looking at her shy and pretty face while she slept and the joy of having to wake up with her by the side knew no bounds. I wished one more time that it could just be so every day. I guess it might take a long while or probably a very long while before that can happen.
Now the vacation is over, and I have to go back to the business of the day. I must find Wes and talk things out with him. I had no reason to fight Wes Delvin. Any dispute we have today will be due to a misunderstanding; after all, he was the one that left us. I don't even know how the search will begin. I just wanted all this to be over; looking for the bad guys is something I'll love to end very soon- especially because of Kathy. Kathy deserved the best treatment any man could provide for a woman; she was the best thing she could ever ask for. She was glorious—of that, there was no debate.
Kathy had always been pretty, and I had had to admit that tomyself even when she was nothing more than a nuisance following me around everywhere all those years ago. She had grown into herbeauty with time, something else I hadn’t been able to avoid noticing back then either. But there was more to it than that. Kathleen Cruz got under my skin in ways I found hard to wrap my mind around.
The thing that surprised me the most about her was the sheer innocence behind those piercing eyes of hers. The years had certainly given an edge to her tongue and her manner that hadn’t been there in the past, and yet she was still the same girl I had known back then. The more I spent time with her and talked with her, the more it became obvious. The vacation we just bothered about for now made it truer than ever, and to be honest, it scared me. It wasn’t that she was hiding a timorous nature beneath all that stubbornness and that steely and competent exterior.
No—Kathy possessed a genuinely radiant spirit. She saw the world through a lens that was stubbornly resistant to darkness, no matter how close it happened to come to her. That was not to say that Kathy was naïve or gullible. She had certainly had her share of tragedy and jarring wake-up calls over the years, and she possessed a strong spirit that would not be easily fooled or controlled. But it baffled me to no end how she could retain the same childlike purity she had possessed at the start despite everything she had been through or learned since.
This was in stark contrast to what I had become used to seeing in others. In many ways, it felt foolish and dangerous, and I genuinely worried for her sometimes; but in other ways, it felt like a genuine rebuke to my way of looking at the world—as if I and so many others had lost something precious and fragile and undeniablyhumanabout us while Kathy and the few like her had somehow managed to cling to it against all odds. However, unwise it might seem, the world needed people like that.
A smile escaped my lips as it occurred to me that some things never changed after all. This was how we had started in the first place; this was ultimately what had gotten me attached to Kathy so long ago. I was a hardened and jaded weapon of other men’s wars enduring an obdurate disenchantment with humanity and the world born of long and repeated experience behind the curtains of polite society. That was when I had come across the inexperienced fourteen-year-old whose childlike reticence and simplicity nevertheless stood up against me in a silent challenge like an immovable bluff against which the breakers of my cynical soul dashed themselves and emerged from the clash weirdly wanting.
Those innocent blue eyes had haunted me, the youthful dreams had annoyed me for their sheer optimism, and the trusting and relentless fascination she harbored for me was almost unbearable. She took to following me everywhere if she could—timidly at first, then with growing boldness. Soon she was trying to draw me into conversation endlessly, willfully oblivious to my blatant disinterest. For a while, I had been torn between two minds—to shake her awake to the dark reality of the world she was about to enter or to let her alone and guard that childlike purity as much as possible. Whatever else I had felt, it had been impossible to come away from any interaction with Kathleen and not feel the lingering suspicion that something was inherently wrong with the worldly wisdom I had lived by for so long. I had started out hating it—and then I had found myself oddly craving something about what I had been so convinced was nothing more than childish ignorance.
I felt then even more as I did now—that I was about to be in danger of robbing her of that inscrutable purity once again. I felt she deserved something far more than I was capable of supplying, stained as I was by the darkness. Back then, I had become so adamant about preserving her innocence, and then suddenly, I had taken her maidenhead. Seventeen-year-old Kathy had gotten under my skin in ways her fourteen-year-old self had failed to do, and before I knew it, I was completely taken by her. In a moment that shocked me into realizing perhaps she wasn’t as childish or naïve as I had originally thought, she had laid her trap, and I fell headlong into it, never knowing it until the moment itself. I had worried endlessly after it happened whether it hadn’t been my influence that had corrupted her to the degree she would have done such a thing in the first place. By contrast, my worries now were of a different sort. My influence—whatever that had been—and ten years in between had not been enough to rob Kathy of that radiant spirit; that much was clear now. But I could very well rob her of a secure, happy, and fulfilling life after all of that. I could end up robbing her of life itself. She was in danger all over again, and because of me, no less.
Part of me still wanted to disappear from her life even now. She deserved to be married to a good man who did safe and honest work, could take care of her, and give her the large, happy family she had always wanted. Whatever else I could give her, safety and simplicity were not on the table. Besides, I still wasn’t convinced she needed someone as troubled as me around. I would hate to shroud that bright spirit of hers in shadow. I doubted someone like me deserved the simple, happy life that Kathy seemed so naturally suited to. Maybe it was too much to hope that God could ever be willing to grant me that; I had seen and done too much. But Kathy wanted this regardless, and a larger part of me wanted this, too. I wanted it enough to cling to the hope, the bare possibility of it.
And then there was the fact of moments like the one we had just shared. Kathy was truly glorious. The way she felt in my arms, the way she melted for me, the taste of her lips, the feel of her naked breasts against me, the way she wrapped her legs around me and held me inside her, the sweet sounds of ecstasy she made through it all, the tender yet unyielding desire in her touch, the way those innocent eyes gazed into my very soul and offered sweet surrender and promise… There was no way around it when all of that was said and done; I couldn’t bear to let Kathleen Cruz go. The very thought of her with any other was enough to send a sharp spike of anger piercing through to the very core of me. If it was at all possible, I would hang on to this woman, to this dream. And I would protect her to the very last.
I wanted to give her everything she needed. I wanted to make her totally and completely mine. I wanted to lose myself in her endlessly. I wanted to marry her and give her the home and the family she had always craved, make that cherished dream come true. For her sake as well as mine, I wanted to break with the past, close the book on this current chapter of my life and retire into sweet obsolescence so I could finally live a quiet life with Kathy always by my side. To make that happen, I would have to don my soldier’s garb a few more times and tie up the loose ends that might come back around to bite me in the rear.
Nor was it my prospects I had to consider. We were living dangerously in other, unrelated ways. As things stood now, Kathy and I were having to keep our trysts a closely guarded secret. It was both exciting and frustrating in equal parts. We simply couldn’t keep our hands off each other for very long, nor did we want to, and yet to be found out would be to deal a fatal blow to Kathy’s ambitions. A scandal would be disastrous, especially a sexual one. We were not married people, after all, and she was in the precarious position of trying to establish herself against all odds in a field where women were generally not welcome in the least; how fitting for such a stubborn woman as she, I thought. But this mattered to her, and I wouldn’t see her lose it if I could. Yet, here we were again, in the dead of night at my place, lost in the hazy dream of love recaptured.
It was a risk we had willingly taken. I couldn’t marry Kathy now, and yet neither of us wanted to keep our distance until then. So, we have been doing as we pleased for several weeks now. It had been heady and sublime, but I could not ignore the sadness and worry in her eyes. I knew what she was thinking, though she never said a word about it. And her innocence came from somewhere, after all. I had never known Kathy to be particularly pious, but she had always possessed an active conscience, she thought about God often, and she had always cared much about standing by her principles. She was already going against them quite a bit by giving herself to me like this. The teenager who had once hung on my every word and tried to appear mature by climbing into my bed repeatedly had grown up and now had adult concerns.
