Copyright © 2018 by Cameron Collins; All Rights Reserved

Published by Juliana Conners’ .

 

Chapter 1 – Blake

 

I stared blankly at the ceiling as the sunlight filtered in through the blinds.  I wasn’t exactly sure how long I had been staring, but it was starting to become a part of my daily morning routine: stare up at the ceiling until the moment that either my bladder or my hunger won out.  This morning, it was my hunger.

I shuffled off to the bathroom and relieved my bladder.  Then, I headed toward the kitchen.  For the most part, things were exactly as I had left them.  I did notice a yellow envelope on my kitchen counter that had not been there the night before when I had fallen asleep.  I figured that it was Jensen, my business manager.  He had a key to my place and he didn’t use it that often.  So, I knew that if he had left something there, it had to be important.  I sat on a stool underneath the counter, opened the envelope, and emptied its contents onto the counter.  

I picked up each piece of paper and they were covered in red numbers.  Red all over.  I realized that that was probably another reason why Jensen had decided to drop the papers off rather than waiting to go over them face-to-face.  I could almost here him quietly trying to explain the reasons why business had been tanking.  It was the economy.  It was the workers.  It was issues with shipping and manufacturing.  Blah, blah, blah.  A headache was beginning to pulse on the right side of my temple even trying to think about it.  This was a large part of the reason why I had stepped down from the day-to-day responsibilities of running the business and had passed the baton off to Jensen.  The reports that he sent me were the annual reports for the business.

I knew the condition that my business was in.  Hell, my empty bank account spoke volumes about it.  But, seeing it in print almost threw me into a depression.

I couldn’t believe the turn that my life had taken.  

I was happily married.  My wife Sophia and I had been married a decade.  We had finally moved into our house after years of apartment living.  It was our dream house, the house that we were going to raise our children in.

I remember the last day that we spent together just like it happened yesterday.

“You would forget your head if it weren’t attached,” I told her teasingly, reaching out to hand her her keys that she had been feverishly looking for for the past fifteen minutes.  Our bedroom looked like a tornado had passed through it.  I tried to hide my chuckle as I saw her eyes light up with genuine excitement as she snatched the keys from my hands and clutched them to her chest.

“Oh good!  Phew!  I thought that I’d lost them somewhere else.”

“Where else would they have been?” I asked, laughing out loud.  “You would have had to have them when you drove home.”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding absentmindedly.  “You just never know.”

She shrugged, turned, and walked out of the room.  She almost made it to the front door before I called out to her.  She stopped and turned to face me, looking slightly annoyed.  

“Are you going to give me a kiss before you go?”

“Oh yeah.  Sure,” she said.  She gave me a quick peck on the cheek and took off out the door before I had a chance to say much of anything.  

She said that she had plans with a girlfriend in town, but I had never seen her more anxious than she had been that morning.  I just wrote it off as her being excited about seeing her friend.  

Sophia had been mostly a homebody.  Even in college, she had been very introverted.  I joked that if we had not been forced to work together on a project in the Civics class that we had together, we might not have ever talked to each other, let alone ever gone out on a date.

And actually, we never quite went out.  We ended up watching cult classics in her dorm room and having incredible sex.  It was so good that it became a favorite hobby of ours for a good while.  

Right before we graduated, I asked her to marry me.  I didn’t know how it was going to work out, but I loved her and I wanted to start a family with her.  

That’s why when the police showed up at my door to tell me that my wife had been in a car accident, my mind refused to believe it.  I just couldn’t.  He must have been mistaken.  He must have the wrong person.  He showed me a picture of her ID.  Even then, I told him that someone must have run off with her purse.  

“Unfortunately, sir, the remains were so badly burned that we won’t be able to confirm it until the medical examiner checks her DNA.  We just came here because it was one set of identification.  The other set was of a man named Daniel Long.  Do you know who that is?”

I stood in shock, confused, trying to put everything together.  Daniel was Sophia’s personal trainer.  They had been training a lot lately.  But, Sophia had not mentioned going to see him at all.  She said that she was meeting her friend, Sherry, for shopping and cocktails.  

What did this mean?

I pulled up Sherry’s number from the phone record logs on our phone bill.  While I was looking for it, I noticed that there were a LOT of calls that had been made to Daniel.  Before calling Sherry, I decided to look further into the phone records.  I looked at the text messages.

After reading the messages between her and Daniel, I knew that there was no need for me to call Sherry.  The messages that they had sent each other spoke of romantic relationship, one where Sophia talked about wanting to run away from it all with Daniel and Daniel telling her to be patient, that he would put together a plan for them to be together.

The last few messages showed that that day, the day that she had left out in a rush, was the day when all of the plans had been put in place.

When she had walked out of the door that morning, she had not planned on coming back at all.  

She was leaving me to be with Daniel.

The funeral felt very surreal.  Everyone spoke so highly of Sophia.  I couldn’t stand up and say anything.  Everyone assumed that it was grief.  Part of it was.  But, mostly, it was just a general feeling of confusion.  I loved her, but I was angry at her.  I was sad that she had been met by such a tragic end, but part of me couldn’t help but wonder if what happened to her wasn’t karma paying her a visit.

Soon after burying her, I took almost all of the equity out of the business that we had built together and bought my house on the island.  I felt like I needed to be away from everyone and everything.  All of the people that I knew would ask me about Sophia and it was impossible for me to deal with my own feelings about how everything had happened.  

When I got to the island, I remembered sitting and staring at the wall for hours.  This went on for weeks.  I didn’t eat, shower, and slept very little.  I simply sat and stared.  My hair grew like wildfire all over my face.  But, I didn’t care.  I was broken inside and I really wanted to die.  I just didn’t have it in me to hurry it along myself.  

One day, something broke inside me and tears started flowing.  I cried for days.  I cried so much that my eyes hurt.  I could feel myself getting dehydrated.  I cried until there were no more tears left for me to cry.

And then, slowly, I began to put myself together.  Being on the island gave me the chance to really think things through.  As angry as I wanted to be at Sophia, I loved her.  I decided that I did not want to tarnish her memory by thinking about the bad and I would hold onto the good.  I found it in my heart to truly forgive her and started feeling more confident about moving forward in my life.

I just knew that going back to life as I had known it would have been impossible.  Before leaving for the island, I put Jensen in charge.

“This will only be a temporary thing until I figure things out,” I told him.

“Okay, I understand.  I will make sure that things get taken care of.  You take all of the time you need to figure things out.  I am here for you.”

Jensen had proved true to his word.  I had made a great choice in deciding to put him in charge of the company.  He was doing his best to bring things around for the company, but we both knew that it was going to take at least a few years to do that, especially since I had basically drained all of the assets from the company when I decided to move to the island.  Actually, I had almost been surprised that Jensen hadn’t put in his resignation once he saw the condition that the company was in when he took over.  He just sighed and said “oh boy” a few times, but then said that he was the man for the job.

I smiled thinking about Jensen and his can-do attitude.

I gathered up the papers and put them in a pile.  A magazine fell from the pile onto the floor.  I picked it up and saw that it had a sticky note attached to it that said “You need this”.  I looked at the magazine and it showed an ad that had been circled advertising for .  I rolled my eyes and tossed the magazine in the garbage.  The last thing that I needed was more heart trouble, I thought.  I had made it a point not to get involved in any type of relationship, especially after what had happened with Sophia.  I had forgiven her, but I wasn’t quite ready to sign up quite yet to have my heart broken all over again.  

But, then again, I had been starting to feel really lonely.  Plus, I had always had a really big sex drive, so I missed having sex. 

But, did I really want to rent a girlfriend?

I wasn’t sure that I did.  

At any rate, I retrieved the magazine from the garbage and pulled out my laptop.  

Am I really going to buy a girlfriend, I thought to myself.  The mere thought made me laugh.

But, then, I started to really ponder on it.  Maybe it would be exactly what I needed, the remedy for loneliness that I had been hoping for.  There’s no need for anyone to be too emotionally involved because it’s just a business arrangement.  And when it no longer works for one or both of us, we can go our separate ways and move on without any hurt feelings.  The more that I thought about it, the more I started to think that this actually might turn out to be an amazing arrangement.  

I started surfing the web and finding out more about the arrangement in general and information from people who have used the site.  There were stories about men who were too busy to get into relationships who were completely content with being entertained by a sugar baby.  There were girls who promoted themselves on social media who used the site and gave rave reviews.  I tried to find a bad review, someone who had been dissatisfied with the arrangement, but I didn’t find any short of one who had stumbled upon the site looking for love and had only found a sugar baby who was interested in being paid.  Even though it was a bad review, it actually worked to convince me even further that this was just the type of arrangement that I had been looking for.  

 

I went back and forth thinking about it for about twenty minutes.  I started typing and then deleted it several times.

“What are you doing?” I asked myself aloud.

I quickly typed up a generic ad and posted it.

This is how it read:

ISO live-in companion.  Looking for an attractive female companion to live on my island for up to a year (depending on how well things go).  Must be clean and professional.  Privacy is a must. 

There.  It was done.  I would try it out for a few months and see how it went.  If it didn’t work out, then I wouldn’t be any worse off than I had already been.

I decided to talk a walk on the island to distract myself.  I walked along the beach, watching the waves come in and go out.  The sun shone brightly up in the clear, blue sky.  I took a deep breath, letting the salty air fill my lungs.  Each breath of air was like a shot of adrenaline, making my heart beat a little faster. 

After I finished my walk and had enough time to let the air make my thinking a little bit clearer, I started to have doubts about the ad that I placed.  What type of girl would actually want to get into the type of arrangement that I was looking for?  I could just imagine my sad little ad sitting there for weeks or months without so much as one response.  As lonely as I was, that would actually make me very sad.  I decided to spare myself the frustration and delete the ad.

I made a beeline into the kitchen to where my laptop was still sitting on the kitchen counter.  I hurriedly typed in my password and watched my computer come to life.

I clicked on the tab for the  website and my breath caught in my chest.

There was already a response. 

I clicked it open, expecting to see some ugly troll of a woman fitted with nose warts and missing teeth.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a pretty attractive woman named Talia.

Her message read:

“Hey there!  I am interested in coming to stay on your island.  I hope that we can be a good match.  I am an artist and want to spend more time preparing for a showing, so this would be an incredible arrangement for me if it works out.  I look forward to hearing back from you soon.”

I got excited for a minute.  Then, I started thinking about how others had had similarly amazing things happen when they met people online and then, once they met them in person, they found out that the person had completely lied about themselves, even sending a picture of someone else.  I figured that she couldn’t have looked as beautiful as she did in the picture in real life.  But, she did respond, so I figured that I would go along with it for as long as she did.  It would be her who would be making the trip to the island, so I really didn’t have a whole lot to lose. 

I decided to push things a little bit further to make sure that she fully understood the terms of the arrangement, so I messaged her back.

“You do know and agree to a sexual relationship, right?”

I waited for a few minutes and right before I got ready to close the laptop, I heard the ding of an incoming message.

“Yes, I know.  I accept the terms of the arrangement,” was her message back to me. 

Part of me felt shocked.  The other part of me felt intrigued.  I wanted to know more about this beautiful stranger. 

I messaged her back giving her my cell number and told her to call me.

I sat my phone on the kitchen counter and stared at it, willing it to ring.