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Eva was going to stop her, but Felicia breezed past her desk and walked into Derrick’s office, leaving the door open and a nauseating wave of Chanel No. 5 behind her. Eva closed her eyes and forced herself not to vomit. With each passing moment, she willed herself to breathe and remain steady.
Slowly, she rose from her chair and went to Derrick’s office door. She had to close it. She didn’t want to hear Felicia’s voice or anything that was spoken between them. She could hear Derrick as he spoke the name of his fiancé in surprise and then the sound of his chair as he stood up and walked around his desk.
Felicia cooed out to him, calling to him. There was a quiet moment, and when Eva got to the door to close it, there was no way that she could have avoided seeing what she saw inside for the briefest moment.
Derrick was at the front of his desk where he had met Felicia, and Felicia had wrapped her arms around Derrick’s neck and was kissing him. Eva froze in place as she stared at them, hating what she was seeing and wishing with everything in her that she could undo it or at least look away. She knew that it was a moment between Derrick and Felicia that she shouldn’t have seen, and it was one that she was never going to forget.
Her stomach tightened, and she could not stop the guttural sound that emanated from her, almost as if she had been punched in the midsection and the wind had been forcefully knocked out of her. Felicia startled and broke the kiss she was sharing with Derrick. Derrick did not turn to look at her, but rather looked away instead, toward the opposite wall so that Eva was totally out of his peripheral vision.
Felicia looked straight at her and narrowed her eyes again. “Could you shut that door and leave me alone with my fiancé, please?”
Eva closed the door and barely made it back to her desk, wishing she could vanish from the office altogether rather than having to sit just outside of his office, knowing that the two of them were alone in it and that Felicia was kissing him. She couldn’t remember ever having felt so sickened.
Derrick felt his own stomach turning sharply as the sound of the door closing echoed in his ears. He hated that Eva had seen Felicia kissing him. If there was one moment of all the moments between him and Eva that he could have erased, it would have been that one. He’d have given anything for her to never see that.
He was going to speak, but Felicia pressed her lips to his again, kissing him sensually. He pulled his mouth from hers and turned his head. “Please… we shouldn’t be like this at the office,” he said quietly, trying to stem the wave of ice that was moving through him.
She laughed lightly and touched the end of his nose with her fingertip. “Of course we should; we’re engaged. I’m going to be your wife. I’m sure that you and I will do a whole lot more than just kissing in this office!” She laughed again, and he looked at her in surprise as he felt her hand caressing his groin.
Felicia’s voice went velvety soft, and she leaned forward to kiss him again as she spoke. “In fact, I think we should get a head start on that right now. I want you, Derrick… right here and right now.” She closed her mouth over his again, and he reached for her wrist, pulling her hand from between his legs as he turned his face away from hers and stepped backward.
“I said not now. Not in the office. In fact, I can promise you we’re never going to do anything of that kind in this office. Please don’t come on to me like that again, especially here. This is a place of business, not a bedroom.” He knew that he was being completely hypocritical. He and Eva had made love almost all over his office, countless times, but he wasn’t about to let Felicia come in and change those memories for him, and he certainly wasn’t going to allow any kind of intimacy between him and Felicia while Eva was right outside the door. It was going to be bad enough for him that he was going to have to be intimate with Felicia at all, but it was more than he was willing to do to have that intimacy take place anywhere near Eva. It seemed like sacrilege to him.
He took a few steps away from her and turned to face her shocked expression. She shook her head. “How can you be like that? How can you tell me no? We’re going to be married soon enough. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be lovers now. I’ve waited a long time for you, darling, and I don’t have to wait anymore. I want you. I want to be with you, and I know you want to be with me too. There’s no reason for us to hold back our love, especially since we’ll be married in no time at all!”
She moved toward him again, but he took a few more steps from her and turned his body away. She was still for a moment and then sighed and sat down in the chair before his desk. “Well, I had to come in to talk with you about the wedding. I know that you said that you want me to handle it and that you don’t really want to have any part in the planning, but I want you to be a part of some of it. I mean, we’re going to spend the rest of our entire lives together, and I just feel as if the inception of that is something that you ought to have some say in. Now, I brought some of the things I’ve been working on with me so you could have a look at them…” She pulled her tablet from her bag.
Swiping her finger over the screen, she pulled up several photographs on a photograph site about weddings, and she handed the tablet to Derrick, who took it with a slightly subtle sigh. His mouth tightened into a thin line while she was talking about all of the aspects of the wedding. He didn’t say anything, letting her rattle on for a while, and as she asked him several times for his opinion on different things as she went from screen to screen, he offered as little opinion as he could. He wanted to stay as far removed from the event as he could while being involved just enough that the actual ceremony took place.
When she had finally gotten to the end of the parade of images and items, she looked up at him with shining eyes and a wide smile. “Isn’t this wonderful? I’m so glad we’re doing this together. I know you told me that you don’t want to be involved in it really, but I just knew that if I came over and went through all of it with you that you’d get involved and we could do this together. I wanted to do it together. We starting the rest of our lives as a couple, as a married couple, and I feel so strongly that you should be an active part of the creation of that. Now, I was looking at dates, and you said that you wanted to do this as soon as possible, so I was thinking the end of the week. It seems really sudden to me, but it is the soonest that Father Flanagan can do it, and all of our guests are able to come then, and I think it will just work out.”
She beamed like the morning sun, and he felt as if a massive cold granite wrecking ball had hit his stomach and was dragging him straight down through the floor into the fiery pits of hell. A wave of nausea moved through him, and he turned away from her and walked toward the floor-to-ceiling glass wall at one end of his office.
Derrick slid his hands into his pants pockets and stared out into the city. From the height of the top floor of his building where his office was located, and from the point of view from where he stood nearly against the window, it looked almost as if he was standing at a precipice, staring down into an abyss of the city, and he realized that it was the perfect metaphor for the exact position of his life where he found himself at that moment.
He was at a personal abyss. He felt as if he was staring down into the abyss of his future. One long, dark, bottomless, endless abyss, and Felicia was sitting behind him planning a grand entrance straight into it, ready to jump with him, anxious to jump into it, and he felt as if there was no choice about it at all. No edge to hang on to, to hold tightly to so that he didn’t slide down the slippery walls of it, no chasm’s edge to grip with his fingertips, to grasp so that he didn’t fall, but there was nothing. There was no
stopping it. There was only the ever impending moment when he would step off of the edge and go straight down into it headfirst, knowing full well that that was what he was doing, and not being able in any way to prevent it from happening, but rather making a choice to do it at the speed of infinity.
And just behind him, a little bit further away, was the warmest, brightest light of his life. Just a little bit further away behind him was a woman he had discovered a hunger for, a need for, a craving for that had no end, and he was going to willingly let her go. He was going to turn away from her and face a dark and lonely future for the rest of his life. It was almost paralyzing to him, dizzying to the point that he felt that he might fall into the crevice at the edge of his toes.
“Derrick, honey, did you hear me?” came a voice directly behind him, and he felt her hand on his shoulder, caressing him.
He blinked and turned his head a little to the side toward her, not really looking at her, while still giving her his attention. “I’m sorry, I guess I was thinking about something else. What was that?” he asked in a quiet tone.
She gave him a hopeful smile. “Oh, well, I was just saying that I want you to meet me at the courthouse tomorrow at eleven in the morning so that we can get our marriage license. We’ll get that taken care of so that all of the loose ends are tied up. I’ll take care of the rest of it. I’ll email you the location of the shop where you are going for your tuxedo fitting, and they said that if you go in tomorrow, they can have it made for you before the end of the week.” She sighed with bliss.
“It’s really coming together, isn’t it, darling? It’s finally coming together. I’ve been waiting for this for so long. I know I didn’t make it very clear over the years, especially when we were both dating other people, but I’ve really loved you for so long, since we were kids. I gave you my virginity when we were teenagers because I love you, and I knew that deep down you really love me too, and I knew that if I waited for you to get a few other girls out of your system, you would be ready for me. You’d want to be with me. You’d be ready to share the rest of our lives together, and we could always be happy with one another. I’m so ready for this. I’ve been ready for this since I was eighteen. Now, look… here it is! It’s happening. It’s really real! I’m so happy, Derrick! I know we’re going to be blissful for the rest of our lives. We’re going to have the sweetest family, and we’re going to have a real happily ever after.” She was speaking as if she was in a waking dream.
He swallowed the lump in his throat and stared at the floor, certain that if he stared at it any harder, he was going to burn a hole through it straight to the street a thousand miles below. She had been waiting for him. She was in love with him. She was sure that they were going to be blissful and happy for the rest of their lives, and he knew that he was going to be indifferent at best, and miserable at the worst, for the rest of his life. He knew that he was never going to get over the beautiful woman sitting at her desk in the other room, right on the other side of the door between them. He knew as he stood there gazing off into oblivion that there was never going to be a night when Eva wasn’t in his dreams or shimmering lambent in his thoughts throughout the day. He knew that there was never going to be a true moment’s peace in his life when he would be happy that he had let her go and married the woman hanging on his arm at that moment.
The injustice of it all was sickening to him, but he knew that their fathers had deemed it a necessity. He knew that his own father had wanted it more than anything, and that anything that held a position of that level of importance to his father must have some serious reasoning behind it because his father would not have asked him or required of him to do anything that he didn’t know without a doubt was the absolute best thing for him, for their family, and for the business that he and the fathers and grandfathers before him had all worked so hard to achieve and grow into a mass fortune.
He was tasked with carrying a torch, a legacy torch, and taking it forward for other generations to come. He knew that he had no right to insist on anything so selfish as being with the woman he wanted more than anything as opposed to the woman that would ensure a powerful alliance between two of the oldest, most respected, and wealthiest families on the east coast of the country.
Derrick knew he had no right at all to interfere with that kind of planning. He had a duty and an obligation to the past and to the future to follow through with the plans that his father had made, and the only thing he could do was to make himself get to the altar and speak the life sentence before him, utter the words ‘I do’, and then take his place at the side of the woman who was holding his arm, going on and on about how happy she was in her coming role as his wife.
He shook his head. He couldn’t think about it anymore. He needed a break before the overwhelming prospect of his future crushed him into oblivion. “Felicia, I really have to get back to work. Thank you for coming by.”
