Chapter Five
The charity auction was going off without an issue; nearly everyone had arrived already and they were already perusing the items up for auction. At the start of the event, Samira had given a small speech about the various charities that were involved in the evening and then thanked the guests for their attendance, but there had only been a fraction of the guests in attendance then, which was all the better because she had been distracted by Elliot’s potential arrival. Fortunately, he did not arrive until after the speech, once she had retired to an upper balcony to watch the event unfold beneath her. Since his arrival, Samira had been watching, and at first she had felt a pang of jealousy at the emerald-dressed plus one that Elliot had following him around the charity auction.
This woman was beautiful in a modern way: she was hard lines and a slim figure. Her dress was perfect for her body and looked amazing. The necklace she wore, adorned with a perfectly green emerald, was exactly the right accessory. However, there was nothing elegant or sensual about the way she moved. She was attractive, but she was not magnetic. The men would look and their eyes would linger on her form as she passed them by, but as soon as she was a few strides away, they would go back to what they were doing.
If Samira were on the floor, if she were the one at Elliot’s side, those eyes would linger on her classically beautiful form for much longer. Samira’s judgement was cold fact, not jealousy. Her breasts were fuller, her hips swayed more elegantly when she walked, and she had the kind of backside that men couldn’t help but watch walk away. This woman that he was with was gossamer, light and delicate. She was beautiful in the way art would be appreciated but forgotten once passed by. Even Elliot was not drawn to this woman like Samira knew she would draw him in.
As she watched, Samira realized that the woman attending as Elliot’s plus one was not romantically involved with Mr. Dowling on any level. The way Elliot regarded her was the same way he regarded anyone that worked for or with him, distant but attentive at the same time. He was truly in his own world as they walked the auction floor. The woman, on the other hand, was pleasant and bordering flirtatious with most of the guests that she came into contact with.
Samira began to realize that Elliot’s plus one was not a date. She must’ve been some kind of lawyer or accountant, and she was simply there to make sure that Elliot toed the line of whatever limitations he set for himself and to pick up new clients if the opportunity arose. Samira was certain by watching that the opportunity had presented itself several times, and Elliot’s plus one took advantage of it, gathering up contacts and planning meetings within the split-second of the meet and greet.
Samira’s eyes returned to the true object of the game. Elliot Dowling wasn’t doing anything in particular, which was so very unlike him. As she watched him laze about the event, Samira was becoming truly confused by his actions. If Elliot wanted her to leave, why was he now here making his presence known? If he wanted to make her jealous, why bring someone that he had absolutely zero chemistry with? If he wanted to catch her eye, why was he doing absolutely nothing? For that matter, why was he lazing about so uncharacteristically? If he pushed her away, why was he now searching through the auction for something more precious than charity?
The items that he eventually placed bids on meant nothing to him, they were a means to an end that was spurned by his plus one more than his own desires. With her phone, Samira watched the tracking app that IT had put together for the auction. Dowling Holdings had placed bids on more items than any other company, but Elliot had not gone back to any of the items that he had been outbid on already. In fact, it looked more like he cared little for the auction at all. If he wasn’t there for the auction, what was he looking for? Samira found herself wondering if he was there for her and, if so, why hadn’t he inquired about her or done anything other than wander around?
She watched as Elliot and his plus one stood by a refreshments table. Elliot placed a drink order and then began looking around as if he heard someone call out his name. His eyes darted back and forth, but then eventually found Samira staring at him. Samira’s breath caught in her throat as they shared a gaze across the auction floor. Even from here, his eyes were perceptive. As if in that moment he saw through everything she stood for and everything she wanted. He had the same fire in his eyes that he did when they were young; it was easy to see, even from where they were now. Samira wanted him just as badly as she used to; if he appeared next to her right now and asked her to come away with him, she would.
She had to fight to remember their time together. Her favorite times were with him, at the cabin on the lake out east. They had spent one night together, and nothing had happened beyond a little bit of kissing and exploring, but she could still remember the feel of his skin on her fingertips. It had been electric, but it was just a few days later that he vanished from her life completely. Samira had fought with herself night after night for weeks, wondering if she had driven him away somehow, if that night they got too close and he realized that she wasn’t what he wanted. That couldn’t be true, Samira knew for a fact now; she could see that same desire in his eyes.
Just when Samira regained her composure, Elliot took a step forward as a waiter stepped past him. Samira lost sight of him and looked around, but couldn’t find him again. Elliot’s plus one was also searching for him, so Samira settled in on watching her, to see if she could find him. Despite the fact that he had definitely been there moments before, Elliot was simply gone now. His plus one, his attorney, slowly accepted it and began to talk to those around her, plying for contacts presumably. Minutes had passed before Samira realized that someone was humming a playful tune, a tune she had not thought of for so many years. Turning to find the source, Samira was startled to find that she was no longer alone on the balcony.
Elliot Dowling was leaned up against one of the granite columns, turning a silver dollar over the tops of his knuckles, humming and smiling like he used to when they were young. This close, Samira could see through the professional facade that he’d put up for everyone down on the auction floor. This was still the man she’d run into at Persimmon’s Spirits, but she was not entirely sure this was still her Elliot.
The song itself was proof that it was her Elliot, however; only he would remember the only song ever able to quiet her mind and help her sleep when stress overwhelmed her every thought and anxiety strangled her. Samira felt her mind settle down as the song winded down. Even as she watched him, he kept turning the coin over his knuckles and humming until the song reached its end.
Chapter Six
The charity auction was still bubbling with activity dozens of stories beneath them. There were two hundred guests in total and, without a doubt, no one had noticed that they were absent. The well-oiled machine would spin itself for a few more hours until all of the guests would look at the clock, see the time, and start to make their exits while still pandering to the important people in the room. That would be when they noticed Samira’s absence, but they would assume she was busy with other guests, they would never assume she left.
Elliot and Samira had stolen away from the party for a chance to talk. An hour had passed since Elliot had surprised Samira by appearing behind her, and since then not much had been accomplished as far as conversation was concerned. It was clear to both that the other had something that they wanted to get off their chest, but neither wanted to start the conversation. Even though it was his actions that put them in this position, poised for him to reveal his heart’s best intentions, he still faltered. He had come this far, worked as hard as he had, and he could still mess up and lose Samira forever.
Standing playfully close to the edge, Elliot was reminded of how life had been before his fall from grace. Samira stood a few feet behind him, and he could tell that she wanted him to step back away from the edge but she hadn’t said anything about it yet. This was what it had been like for them before he left, before everything changed. As interns at their fathers’ companies, they oft
en crossed paths at events such as this, and they often stole away to the secluded sections of the buildings to pass the time in deep conversation rather than the monotony of the meet and greet. One escape from monotony turned into a regular occurrence, and those regular occurrences of meeting up at work functions turned into carving out time outside of work to get together.
At first, it had been difficult to find the time to be together. The only moments they had were when work brought them together. For Elliot, he was preparing for college in the spring and interning full-time at Dowling Investments. He had doubled down on his workload during high school and graduated two years earlier, but instead of carrying straight on to college, he interned for a full two years before he was allowed to enroll in Brooklyn Law, where he would pursue a legal career for his father’s benefit. It was what the family required of him; Elliot didn’t have the kind of freedom that others had when it came to their career. He was being groomed to take over the family business, but his father had early on decided that another stockbroker at the table was not what Dowling Investments needed; what they needed was a clear head that could see the path through the rules and regulations to ensure profitability.
For Samira, she was still finishing out her senior year of high school while also interning for her father. She was more than the apple of her father’s eye and the successor to the company he built from the ground up. She was his legacy and, to that end, he deemed it necessary to pass on everything he had ever learned to her by filling her schedule with all manner of extracurricular activities. By the time she had met Elliot, she was already multi-lingual, trained in ballet, ballroom dancing, swing dancing, fencing, and karate.
With each passing day, however, it became easier and easier to eke out a few hours for them to get away. At first, they would spend an afternoon in the park, walking the pathways and watching families play and picnic while they talked about anything other than their day to day routines.
As time pressed on, the afternoons at the park were joined by morning drives out into the country, where they would have breakfast as nobodies in a small cafe where no one knew Elliot from Adam or Samira from Eve. The breakfasts grew further away from the city, until they were at the foot of the mountains and incorporated a post-breakfast hike. What had once been a struggle to make time for each other became a healthy obsession with spending every passing moment thinking of when they would next see each other.
Summer nights were spent lakeside, fall mornings were spent hiking before the snow set in. Anywhere within a hundred miles had been adventured by the pair on Saturday mornings, evenings, and Sunday afternoons. Having never been in a relationship before, Elliot knew how things were supposed to progress, but he took everything painfully slow. He didn’t want to mistake infatuation for love. In his soul, he truly loved Samira and she loved him, but in his head, doubt clouded the mind of the overworked and inexperienced boy. He had tried to talk with his father, but Mr. Dowling only had time for work. He had no time for his son’s heart.
That had all come crashing down when the end of Samira’s senior year was quickly approaching, and Elliot decided it was time to become more than a weekend obsession. He approached her father, John Foster, with the intent of getting his blessing. Unfortunately for Elliot, the day got away from him, and he had stared down the sun as it fell toward the horizon, knowing that would not make a good impression.
Despite his tardiness, he knew that he would make Mr. Foster see the truth. The truth that what Elliot more than anything in the world wanted was Samira Foster, and that she wanted him just as madly.
He straightened his tie, fixed the sleeves of his shirt and made sure that his vest was crisp, before he rounded the corner to face the doorman. It was a Friday evening in the late summer, and Elliot knew that Mr. Foster would be at his midtown studio going over financial reports. The doorman recognized him and let him through without a question so that Elliot could deliver the packet of documents from Dowling Investments.
The studio was cleared of furniture, except for the single chair and glass table near the window where Mr. Foster was sitting when Elliot came through the door. Mr. Foster didn’t stand up; he didn’t break his gaze from the window.
“Dowling Investments, usually proper and on time, in recent days has turned from a mild-mannered, middle-aged man with intelligence and a respect to match into a…” Mr. Foster paused and looked at Elliot with disgust in his eyes, “...young boy dressed like he is going to a prep party, running nearly an hour late without sending word ahead. Come on now…Let’s have the documents.”
“Yes, Mr. Foster,” Elliot said as he set the folder down in front of Samira’s father.
Mr. Foster’s eyes lost their disgust as he grabbed the file and flipped through it. Elliot spoke up. “Excuse me, Mr. Foster, but there is a matter I wished to discuss while I was here.”
Without looking up from the file, Mr. Foster ruined everything that Elliot had hoped for and then after he left that night, Elliot learned that, not only had he lost Samira, he had lost everything.
Now, almost ten years later, Elliot stood on the roof of Foster Acquisitions with Samira in arm’s reach and no one to tell him to back away. The world around them fell away as Elliot turned his back on the those beneath them and focused solely on her. His struggles meant nothing now that they had brought him here, and hadn’t this been the reason for it all? Every nickel and dime he had scraped together, every deal he had flown across the world to seal, and every last-minute decision that had netted him immense profits meant nothing if he could not have her as well.
Samira seemed to notice Elliot staring and she smiled, fixing her hair as she spoke. “Do you remember the last time we were up here? It feels so long ago.”
Elliot nodded but didn’t take his eyes off hers. “It was colder that time; if I remember, it was nearly winter. You were wearing that gray parka we found for you when we went to Rhode Island. It was just us, our picnic basket, and the table we carried up the stairs.”
“It was perfect.”
Elliot smiled. “It was simpler back then…”
“It is simple now.” Samira pressed, “We can go back to that moment, right now, hold my hand and tell me how you feel, just like then. Share your heart with me, Elliot.”
“I don’t know if I can, Sam.” Elliot frowned and looked away, out at the city beneath them. “I’ve been away for so long that it feels wrong to even stand here.”
“Does it feel wrong to be here, or to be here with me?”
“A little bit of both,” Elliot admitted.
“Tell me what happened, Elliot.”
“You were right when you accused me of being afraid of your father. He was an important and powerful man that could have and did ruin everything at the drop of a hat. I went to him to ask for his blessing in our relationship. I wanted to be more than just two overworked teenagers finding solace in the fact that we could get away together. I wanted to be together, not just when we made time. I told him as much and he said that if and when his daughter was ready to find a man, she would pick a real man. He told me to leave, and if he ever saw me again, he would have security evict me from the property.”
“I’m sorry, Elliot. I always assumed it was something like that…either that or you didn’t actually care for me.”
“Of course, I cared for you…” Elliot sighed. “I remember heading home after talking with your dad. I was trying to figure out how to let my own father know what I’d done; your father wasn’t even going to let me on the property for business reasons…I had to find a way to tell my dad that one of his biggest clients refused to deal with me. I never got the chance to come up with an excuse or even tell the truth, because when I got home it didn’t matter. There were government men in the house waiting for me. My father was already gone, taken away and put in some hole for the time being. They wanted to find out what I knew, and I wish I could say that I wasn’t completely caught off guard, but I was. Even with my work at the company, I
had no idea it was all a delicately maintained house of cards. It fell over with one soft nudge from the feds.”
Samira was silent after Elliot finished talking. He could tell that they had not been magically transported back to how things were before. Instead, they were in terrifyingly uncharted waters. The world at their fingertips, the heavens the only thing higher than them; it was just the two of them on that rooftop, and to each other that was what mattered, but there was still something between them that was keeping them apart.
“Where did you go?”
Elliot sighed. “After the trial, I moved in with an aunt down in Richmond. She got me set up with an accounting job. I didn’t have the degree, but I had the skills and the motivation to work. I stayed there for a few months, but eventually they figured out who my father was and asked me to leave. From there I bounced around, until I opened up a shipping company with a stranger and built it up a few hundred thousand dollars before selling it out for a profit, which I then bought into another business with. From there I clawed and scratched my way back here, back to you.”
Samira frowned. “Then why didn’t you come to me? After all of that effort?”
“I was a coward.” Elliot reached out and held Samira’s hands in his. “I was afraid of what your father had forbidden, I was afraid there would be consequences. I was afraid after everything that I did, that I didn’t deserve you. I’m not the boy you knew, Sam — I’m not even the man he was going to be. If that is what you fell in love with, I was afraid that you wouldn’t recognize me anymore. I’ve done things that wouldn’t have crossed my mind back then, all so I could get here. Now that I am here, I am sorry I didn’t come sooner…I realize it now, none of it meant anything.”
Samira’s smile came back like a solar flare. “I never wanted your money; I have my own. I never wanted what you would become, because I knew that I would be there with you. I only wanted you, Elliot, and no matter what you’ve done, I would have taken you back penniless and wretched.”
Reclaimed Page 3
