Chapter 1 #3
I looked at Kai. He received the correction the way someone received irrelevant information. It was odd that he knew Amelie’s maiden name in the first place. Did he have us investigated before this dinner? It was possible his security had concerns about a private dinner with strangers.
Kai turned to me. “I’m curious about your take, Stefan. Do you think someone’s preference in a partner has an impact on their personality, life, and accomplishments?”
I shrugged. “It does paint a picture. Do you have a type?”
He didn’t answer.
“Oh, I know.” Amelie leaned forward enthusiastically. “Who’s your celebrity crush?”
“Hm. I can’t think of anyone. Do you have a celebrity crush, Stefan?” Kai asked, turning the tables on me. “Maybe I can steal yours.”
The table went briefly quiet. I assessed him. I thought we had broken the ice, but his comment was full of innuendos. I glanced at Amelie. She was reaching for her Champagne with very deliberate attention to the act of reaching.
I told myself eccentric moguls spoke like this. It didn’t mean anything.
“I like Ruby Sarafina.”
“Like?” Amelie laughed. “You were obsessed with her. He had a million posters of her when we were in high school,” she told Kai. “When he was fifteen, his only wish in life was to marry Ruby Sarafina. Thank God it was before we met.”
I shook my head as my wife recounted my silly childhood crush.
“Ruby Sarafina, the red-headed singer?” Kai glanced at Amelie’s dark hair. “I didn’t take you for a redhead man.”
Amelie rolled her eyes. “Don’t change the subject. If you can’t think of a celebrity, think of someone from real life. No one ever caught your eye?”
“If you must know, there was a woman.”
“Was?” I asked, realizing too late that perhaps he was referring to a dead wife or girlfriend, and we had invited some unpleasant memories. I closed my eyes. “Sorry. That’s none of my business.”
“Don’t be, it was years ago.” He took a long, slow sip of his Manhattan as if biding his time.
“My company used to recruit new hires at universities. I was invited to give the keynote address at her campus when I first saw her. I was immediately a goner. She was one of a kind, the type that could stop traffic but also looked like the girl next door.”
His eyes slid to Amelie’s face, briefly, just for a fraction of a second. I was looking at him when it happened. By the time I registered it, he’d already looked away.
“What happened to her?” Amelie asked tentatively, also unsure whether he was recounting a dead lover.
He chuckled at her apprehensive glance. “Don’t look so horrified. She’s alive and well.”
“Oh. So—”
“I didn’t pursue her. Back then, we had too big an age gap. She was barely a college freshman, and I was the CEO of a thriving company. The optics were bad, and the media would have had a field day if they thought I was preying on a young, impressionable female student.”
Amelie appeared unconvinced and called him out. “I don’t believe you,” she announced decisively. “What’s the real reason you stayed away from her?”
He gave her a crooked smile as if expecting the very reaction. “She seemed skittish around strangers and men in general.”
“Every woman is wary of strange men,” she asserted. That was the thing about Amelie. She looked like Little Miss Sunshine—bright and optimistic—so no one caught on to her shrewd nature. She never let people off the hook if she saw through their bullshit.
Kai lifted a shoulder. “I couldn’t predict how she’d react to a grown man and didn’t want to start on the wrong foot. I wanted to learn about her first and approach her in a way that wouldn’t scare her off.”
“And did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Learn about her?”
He dwelled on the thought before nodding.
“There’s something to the power of observation.
You’ll be surprised by how much you can learn despite never having a proper conversation with someone.
I watched her interact, and soon, I knew her like the back of my hand.
Cheerful but a straight shooter, hardheaded yet reasonable, compassionate but not a pushover. Fiercely loyal.”
Amelie’s glass had been halfway to her lips for what seemed like a full minute. She hadn’t sipped. She was very still, that specific stillness she had when she was thinking hard about something and trying not to show it.
I watched her instead of Kai. She looked absorbed in the story, I told myself.
“Her moral compass was based on her situation rather than predetermined values,” Kai continued.
“She didn’t stick to something simply because that’s how she was raised.
She adapted to her circumstances. I loved her flexibility because people either died with their archaic values or didn’t have them to begin with. ”
That was how I saw my wife. I glanced at Amelie. She was leaning forward, chin resting lightly on her knuckles, too absorbed in Kai’s story to notice that every word he used could have been lifted from a letter written about her.
“This is all so romantic,” Amelie awed. “I can’t believe she left such an impression on you that you’re still thinking about her after all this time.”
I beamed at her. My lovely wife romanticized things. Even if Kai had told her it was a simple crush, Amelie would have turned it into a Disney fairy tale. But she was on the money in this instance. Kai seemed smitten with this mystery woman.
“Did you ever tell her how you felt?” she asked.
He tilted his head. “She was all I thought about, every second of every day until it became unbearable. I decided it was time to approach her. But that was before—”
“Before?”
“Before I saw her with her boyfriend.”
I blinked, finding it impossible that there was a woman Kai Cavendish couldn’t get. “What happened then?” I asked, wrapped up in the story.
Kai glanced at Amelie. I thought, and not for the first time, that he hadn’t looked at me during the conversation. “She got married,” he replied, voice devoid of emotion.
Silence befell us, and Amelie’s lashes dropped like someone who had just found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real.
In my peripheral vision, Amelie set her champagne flute down.
Carefully. Like she was afraid the sound would shatter the moment.
There was a finality to the word marriage, leaving no hope for a jilted lover.
My sweet wife’s empathy worked overtime.
She collected other people’s heartbreaks like they were hers to carry. She’d always been like that.
“That’s so sad. I-I mean, maybe not for her if she loves her husband, but… It’s just so sad.” Amelie had already built a fantasy around Kai’s love story and didn’t know how to console him or herself.
I inwardly chuckled at the pitiful look she wore. Amelie badly wanted everyone else to be as madly in love as we were.
Kai laughed, catching on to the fact that Amelie was rooting for his love story to come true. “Don’t look so devastated. Otherwise, I’ll have to show up at her doorstep and beg her to leave her husband.”
“Do you think she would?” she asked curiously, surprising me. Amelie was usually all about the sanctity of marriage.
She winced belatedly, realizing the same.
Kai was the only one not to react. “No,” he said with conviction, as if he had run a prediction simulation and artificial intelligence had declared the outcome. Or perhaps he had tried, and it didn’t go his way.
I wouldn’t mind meeting the woman who wouldn’t leave her husband for Kai Cavendish. Now, that was true love.
“You sound certain,” Amelie commented.
“I am. She isn’t that kind of woman, and I wouldn’t have loved her if she were.”
It was a heavy comment. The irony of it made me want to laugh, though the moment was somber. Kai Cavendish loved a woman because she was loyal and honorable. It was also the reason why he couldn’t be with her.
Amelie, the forever romantic, tsked. “What do you plan on doing? You can’t be single for the rest of your life just because she is married.”
“That’s no way to live.” I couldn’t help offering the unsolicited advice.
Kai’s expression softened while his words were carefully chosen and delivered slowly. “I never said that’s what I planned on doing.”
Amelie perked up. “Good. I say out with the old and in with the new. Maybe we can set you up with someone.” She started listing her college friends who now lived on the West Coast, none of whom she’d had the time to meet up with. We worked too damn much for reunions.
Not that it mattered. A man like Kai Cavendish had endless options. If he wanted to date, a girl would be delivered to him within seconds. Hadn’t Amelie noticed all the women staring at him from downstairs?
But I wasn’t about to burst my wife’s bubble. I spoke only after she listed every female she knew in alphabetical order. “Okay. You don’t want to remain single, but you haven’t given dating a chance either. I’m guessing you’ve thought of a third option.”
Amelie’s finger traced the rim of her glass in slow circles. She was thinking. I could always tell when she was thinking; she went still except for that one small motion.
Kai watched us thoughtfully. When he finally spoke, he wasn’t looking at me. “Let’s call that option a work in progress.”
Amelie’s finger stopped tracing the rim of her glass. A beat of silence. Then she smiled, the small, tight expression that wasn’t really a smile, as Kai handed her the dessert menu.
I couldn’t tell you why that bothered me.