But lo and behold, early Monday morning there was a message.
“Mr. Sterling, Jenna called,” chirped my secretary.
“Who?” I shook my head mystified. It’d been a long weekend.
“Jenna Walsh, from the party?” parroted Mary Beth. “She said to tell you that she’ll meet you at L’Osseria tonight as planned,” added MB.
Oh fuck. I hazily remembered saying something about getting together when the blonde left but it was a brush-off, the usual thing that you say at the end of the night. How the fuck did this become a concrete dinner date?
But reader, I went to the restaurant that night. I had more free time than I’d had in years and figured I had to eat anyways. Hey, maybe a dinner out would take my mind off the mystery brunette.
But one date with Jenna became two, then three, and pretty soon she was staying over nights, commuting down to her law classes or whatnot in the Valley. On paper, she was perfect. A great student, an environmental activist, sharp as a whip and beautiful to boot. I was roundly slapped on the back after my friends met her, congratulating me on snagging this up and coming beauty with brains.
But it just felt fake you know? For one, I’d been asking around under the table for the brunette, trying to locate her. I’d thought about hiring a private investigator but it seemed too desperate and I was sure that our circle of friends would bring us together again. San Francisco is a small city, we were bound to bump into each other.
But my discreet efforts yielded nothing. Zero. Zip. Zilch. It was like Tina had disappeared into thin air. I even tried asking Jenna in a roundabout way once, only to be met with a stone wall.
“Hey, you remember the night we met?” I began off-handedly, trying to appear casual.
“Oh yeah baby, I remember,” she cooed, toeing my bulge with her feet. Jenna has a bad habit of putting her legs in my lap which I hate because her feet are disgusting-looking, bent and withered like an old crone despite her weekly pedicures. It’s odd how someone so beautiful up above has such ugly appendages down below.#p#分页标题#e#
But I charged ahead.
“Did you see a brunette there? Maybe 5’5”, curly hair, plaid shirt, and those eyeglasses that hipsters wear? She looked like she could be a law student.”
“Why?” the blonde asked curiously. “She someone to you?” Jenna queried.
“Nah,” I laughed nonchalantly. “It’s just that Cade met her and thought she was cute, he wanted to get her number,” I lied through my teeth.
“Oh,” said Jenna. “Well, I have no idea who that was,” she waved her hand dismissively. “Sounds like no one. Why would your brother be interested in someone like that, anyways?” she asked. “He’s got mega-bucks to his name, can’t he do better?”
I shrugged, unwilling to say more. “Just thought you might know. I mean, you knew a lot of folks at that party, you and your law school friends. How did you even hear about the event?” I asked casually. There had been a lot of randoms that night.
“Oh you know, word gets out,” said Jenna. “We’re just poor students and when one person gets invited to a rockin’ party in the city, it’s kind of like an invitation to all of us. We drive up en masse and see what we can crash. Worst comes to worst, we’ll just drive back down or find a bar in the City to party at,” she added.
Yeah, these “poor” students. I’d been on campus once to give a guest lecture at the law school, and fuck that place was a palace. There was wi-fi in every room, every student had a laptop, and the campus was gorgeous – like a giant country club, if you ask me. Of course, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of people on scholarship but at the same time, I could tell a lot of these kids were headed to lucrative careers as lawyers to companies that can pay … like Sterling Pharma.
I dropped the issue. Jenna could be a jealous bitch and I didn’t want to pique her suspicions with more probing into the whereabouts of my missing brunette. It was sad, but sometimes I lay awake nights thinking back to our explosive coupling, the curvy body, the feel of Tina cushioning me between her virgin flesh. I shouldn’t have left her alone after fucking that delectable body. Fuck me, what had I been thinking?
But it was too late to cry over spilled milk. After several more fruitless attempts to identify the brunette, I gave up and now here I was, months later, engaged to be married. The sparkler on Jenna’s finger was a total shocker, for one. I’d seen a charge on my credit card statement from Harry Winston and thought what the fuck? Jenna bought herself a piece of jewelry costing a cool hundred thou? I was going to speak with her about it, but she beat me to the punch. At a dinner party that night, she pulled it out during appetizers, the females oohing and ahing like a fucking Greek chorus. I’d practically choked when I saw what it was.