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“You can’t hold it against me if I tell you,” he said, chuckling. “I’m a lawyer. It was my parents’ firm.”
“That’s awesome,” I said, impressed. “Do your parents still work there?”
His face went blank, and I could tell he was guarding himself against me. I sat back and thought about apologizing, but if he wanted to get to know me, then he needed to start opening up, too. I wasn’t upset. I just wanted to know this stuff because it was important. He took a deep breath and softened his face.
“My parents both died in a boating accident in my first year of law school,” he said with an embarrassed smile.
“I’m so sorry,” I replied, feeling like I should have stepped back. “Were you at school?”
“No,” he said with a deep breath. “Actually, I was there. I was the only one that made it out alive.”
“That’s terrible,” I said, shaking my head. “Well, at least we still have you. You saved me from myself last night.”
I lightened up the mood and breathed a deep breath as his face turned to laughter. We spent several hours enjoying our food and talking. This guy had my attention, and he had it good.
Chapter 5
Blaine
I had always been such a guarded person, never opening up to anyone. I kept everything close to my chest, even to some of my closest friends. My inability to open up to people had gotten the best of me on many occasions, but at the same time, I had carefully crafted my walls so that I didn’t allow myself to get close to women, especially ones that were as easy to talk to as Josie. There was just something about her that made me feel incredibly comfortable. She was kind, caring, and extremely empathetic, something I was not used to with the women that I normall
y hooked up with. They were interested in my wallet, not my heart, and they were not looking for complications. I was a giant ball of complications since I found it important to keep people at bay. I didn’t want to be hurt, not after going through what I did with my parents. I also knew these women would expect me to be the bigshot lawyer, something I was not interested in whatsoever. However, sitting across from Josie and staring into her eyes, I couldn’t help the words that just kept spilling out of my mouth. I wanted to tell her everything, and I had little restraint.
“Ever since my parents died,” I said, looking down as she reached across the table and covered my hands. “I don’t know. I guess I’ve just been drifting.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I wish I knew,” I said, smiling and taking a deep breath. “I don’t mind law, but financial law is really boring. I know it my parents’ business, but I have pretty much no interest in it at all. I find myself making excuses to get out of it, not caring that I’m living off the partners and my inheritance. I was so on track when they were alive, though I still wasn’t planning on working for their firm. I wanted to change lives, not wallets, and I hate the big corporate aspect of it all.”
“Have you talked about maybe selling your part of the firm?”
“I could never do that,” I said, looking down. She grasped my hands tighter. “It is really the only thing I have left of them. It was their legacy, the company they built from the ground up. I remembered being a small child and my father working for someone else. When he and my mother split off to start their firm, it was like he changed for the better. I couldn’t sell that off. It was the man and woman behind the name that made it valuable to me, not the actual firm.”
“I’m sorry you have to go through this,” she said with a kind grin. “I am sure, though, once you have worked through this, you will see that you have much more of your parents than just their law firm.”
“I hope so,” I said, looking at her beautiful face.
“I understand that family problems can hit you hard,” she responded. “They can cut you down to the core and really change who you are as a person. My mother left when I was a sophomore in high school. My father, he has a serious gambling problem, and he put our family in a really bad spot. He’s gotten better because he has no choice, but she wanted me to come with her. In the end, I just couldn’t think about leaving my dad all by himself. Sometimes, I think about the what-ifs. What if I had gone with her? How different would my life have been? But I still wouldn’t change anything, except maybe get my father a little bit more help earlier on. He pretty much gambled away everything we had, and now, he is jobless and struggling. I support us on my salary, but I still can’t seem to get through to him some days. It’s like the addiction takes over, and he is another person.”
Everything was starting to make sense, from her comments last night, to the small house in West Palm, and the way her grumpy father sat at the computer, playing online poker games. Her inability to go out on a regular basis was completely clear, and I realized that she was the one taking care of everything. I admired just how kind she was. I went through my life, forcing myself to not care about anyone, just doing what was best for me. All the while, this beautiful girl was across the city, caring about everyone she came in contact with, even me with my sad story. She didn’t know me from Adam, but she sat there and listened to my story, comforting me whenever she could. She had been through hell and back with her family, and I couldn’t imagine having to take care of a grown man while in high school. She’d been just a child.
My mother was a lot like Josie, kind to a fault, and often because of that, she’d been taken advantage of. I remembered talking to her about it, asking her why she continued to do it if she just got constantly hurt in the end. She told me she would rather help one person and be beat up by ten, than appease ten people and let one person fall to the wayside. She would listen to anyone, and she had some really good relationships with the staff of the house because they knew they could go to her and talk about anything. I could see it took a toll on her some days, just as Josie’s plight took a serious toll on her, but I could also tell that neither of them would do anything different.
When breakfast was over, we didn’t race back to the car. Instead, we continued talking, walking along the stone paths that lined the edge of the beach. It was so quiet and relaxing out here, and there weren’t a million snobby girls, making sure to get their perfect tan while clicking a hundred selfies until they got the “perfect angle.” She talked about her life growing up, what exactly she lost through her father’s addiction, and asked me questions about my parents that people so often forgot to ask. Everyone got so caught up in feeling sorry for me, they never talked about the time when they were alive. They never really listened when I said that my parents were good people. But not Josie.
She wanted to hear the whole story. As I talked, I felt almost like I could take in a deep breath and not be stopped by my own emotions. There was something so refreshing about getting these things off my chest, almost as if a weight was lifted from my shoulders. I think she might have felt the same way, as I could see her let out a deep breath as she peered out over the water. She was even more beautiful at that moment than the first time we kissed. It was so different and scary, but at the same time, I couldn’t keep myself from wanting to be close to her. There was something special about this girl.
My heart felt lighter as we walked along, listening to the waves, listening to each other, and listening to our own thoughts. It had been the first time I had ever let anyone in as far as I had let Josie, and I had only just met her the day before. I didn’t know if it was the clouds, the air, the ocean, or just the way that Josie fit so perfectly in my life, but in the short amount of time that we had spent together, she had unlocked something inside of me that pushed me to keep her right there at my side. I didn’t know how she did it, and I wasn’t sure she even knew how she did it, or that she even had, for that matter.
She looked up at me and smiled as we strolled along, and I smiled back. It wasn’t a forced smile, the kind that makes you feel like you were being tricked, but a real, genuine smile, something I hadn’t felt like doing in a long time. I grabbed her hand and pulled it to my chest, lifting it up and kissing the back of her hand. Everything felt so perfect and so right with Josie. She made me feel more comfortable with myself and with her than any person had my entire life. I wanted to freak out, but my heart said no, so I went with it, making sure to keep her as close as I possibly could. I didn’t want the day to end.
I was excited to see that she wasn’t ready to rush off after our walk. We strolled down to the open-air markets and looked at all the goods for sale. We laughed and joked as we walked through the crowds, not looking for anything specific, just browsing and prolonging our time together. They had really neat stuff out there that I had no idea about. West Palm was such a mystery to me. There were all these extremely hard-working people everywhere, but they all wanted or needed so many things. I knew that my privilege awarded me certain luxuries, ones that most of these people would never experience, but I still wanted to understand their lives. Josie was definitely complex, and I wondered if that was a normal thing for normal people. I had been through quite a bit, but it paled in comparison to a lot of the sights and scenes I saw walking along.
We stopped and grabbed a couple of seats at a beach volleyball tournament that we happened to stumble upon. Josie scooted close to me, and I smiled, feeling her arms wrapped around mine. An older couple looked over at us and smiled, thinking that we were a long-term couple, something that would have normally triggered me to take off and run. With Josie, though, it seemed to be the perfect fit. I didn’t want the day to end, which was why when it hit dinner time, I was disappointed that she had to go home to cook dinner.
“My father won’t eat if I don’t make dinner,” she said, smiling. “It’s really the only time he holds a conversation with me anymore.”
“I want to see you again, soon,” I said, not wanting to waste any time. “Can I see you tonight?”
