Me Tarzan, You Jewel

by Titania Ladley

  “It was days on Carnal Island—two-and-a-half, in fact. And you call seeing the woman you love ridiculous?”

  He paused, staring up at her for a long moment. It had to be a trick question. She’d mentioned love in the beginning, when she’d first popped into his life. Now here it was again.

  “Love?”

  “You love her. Why else do you think you’ve been putting yourself through all this shallow torture the last four years?”

  “Shallow torture?”

  She nodded and stretched out on her side, planting her fist against her temple. “Yes, like with your Lucy or Lacy, and Candy or Katy.”

  “Laurie and Kelly,” he corrected.

  “Whatever. And then there’s all this…stiffness you continue to surround yourself with. Now,” she said, sitting up so quickly, he had to jerk his head up. “Do you want to see her or not?”

  He leapt to his feet. The chair toppled over behind him, cracking on the wood floor. “Goddamn it, I said I do, and you know I do, whether I tell you or not!” He glared at her and yanked the chair up, righting it.

  “Then admit how you feel, Vince. I know where she is. I know exactly where she is. And this is just getting downright ludicrous how you’re both only able to speak clearly to each other with your bodies. Nonetheless, I’m not spilling any jelly beans until you finally let go of that pig-headed pride of yours and admit that you can’t admit you love her because you’re still pissed at her after four years!”

  He stared at her for what seemed like eons. How was it that he was standing here arguing with a fucking genie when he totally agreed with every word the sneaky wench spoke?

  Pride.

  Had he really been feeding on his damn pride for four years? A vision of Jewel swam before his eyes, both new and old. He thought of all those days, weeks, months and years he’d been miserable without her, trying to talk himself into this rich, playboy lifestyle to forget her. Shallow torture, Jennie had called it. He snorted. And she was right. What a better way to bury her, to forget how she’d shredded his heart to pieces by walking out on him? She’d demanded he state his intentions of marriage to her before he’d even gotten the nerve up to ask her to move in with him. She’d hurt him beyond what he thought a man should ever have to feel or be forced to admit to. She’d walked out on him and hadn’t returned his calls, the rejection further fueling his obstinacy. That goddamn male pride of his had been the sole obstacle all these years. He could have easily gone to Celeste and demanded to know Jewel’s whereabouts, or called her brother in Colorado Springs. But instead, he’d allowed his stubborn vanity to torture him into a shallow lifestyle that completely negated his past relationship with Jewel.

  How self-deprecating was that?

  “Oh, fuck me,” he groaned and buckled back into the chair.

  * * * * *

  “Jewel, honey…are you all right?”

  Warm flesh pressed against her forehead. Jewel opened her eyes slow and cautious. Her vision blurred momentarily, and she inhaled the convent’s familiar scent of mustiness and mothballs. The light of afternoon sun poured in behind the nun, making her glow angelically. “Sister Neoma?”

  “Yes, dear.” The wrinkled face with the sharp blue eyes stared back at her amid the black circle of the habit. “We’d begun to worry about you. I know it’s Saturday, but normally you come down for breakfast. When you didn’t show for lunch, too, I thought I’d best check on you. Hmm…” Her silver eyebrows dipped. She blotted Jewel’s face and neck above the gown with a washcloth. “You’re drenched. Yet you don’t appear to be running a fever. Do you feel ill, child?”

  Ill? Yes, quite. Everything came rushing back to her in a whirlwind that made her head spin with sudden nausea. Carnal Island, being stranded and reduced to a heathen…Vince. God, please don’t let it be only a dream!

  “Jewel?”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “I said do you feel ill?” She scowled. “Hmm, your skin, it’s…it’s almost as if you’ve been out in the sun.”

  “Oh, no,” she assured Neoma, sitting up to prove her point. Brief dizziness washed over her, but she planted her hand on the hard mattress determined to right herself. “I’m…I’m fine. And my skin…I must have gotten some sun when I took the children on that field trip into the woods. Whew. I had a very long, strange dream, and I guess I was extra tired and—”

  She cut herself off, unable to believe her eyes.

  “What’s the matter, dear?” Neoma hooked an arm about Jewel’s shoulders and drew her into a grandmotherly embrace, leaning to peer into her face.

  Jewel swallowed, unblinking. Her eyes held hard and tight to the bottle sitting on her dresser. She stood slowly, very carefully so the apparition wouldn’t disappear. “Where did that come from?”

  Neoma swiveled her head as sharply as she could in the confining habit. “Why, I don’t know. I assumed you’d bought yourself a fancy bottle of wine to share during communion. It’s not yours?”

  Jewel, you know very well where it came from. Now get rid of her so we can talk.

  She gasped. “Luke? Is that you?”

  “Luke who?” Neoma asked, her eyes clouding with confusion. “Child, are you sure you’re all right? I could call the house infirmary and see if the doctor is still about.”

  “No!”

  Neoma startled and backed two steps toward the door. “Why, Jewel, honey, you’re really starting to worry me. I’ve never seen you act so bizarre and look so wild-eyed. Lord God, I pray you’re not coming down with something”—she tapped her temple—“of the mind-sort.”

  You’re wasting time, Ms. Dublin. Precious time.

  “Oh, just shut up for one moment, would you?” Jewel darted her gaze around the tiny room, up to the ceiling, into each corner, behind her. She could hear Luke as clearly as if he stood right next to her, but he had yet to materialize.

  “I beg your pardon?” Neoma gasped.

  “No, not you, Sister. Do you hear that? A man speaking to me?”

  “God is speaking to you?” Her face brightened with hope.

  Jewel couldn’t help but laugh. “No, he’s most certainly not God.”

  A swift breeze blew in, tossing the curtains wildly. I am too a god!

  “Okay, a god, but not the God.”

  Neoma stumbled backward until she crashed into the wooden door. Never taking her eyes from Jewel, she fumbled behind her back for the doorknob. “Lord God in heaven, you’re possessed!” She crossed her chest and mumbled something Jewel couldn’t discern. Her hands shook as she held them pressed together before her mouth in prayer. “Jesus, help us all.”

  Luke chuckled. Possessed with a voracious sexual appetite, maybe.

  “Luke, if you don’t shut up so I can explain to Neoma—” The slam of the door severed her words. “Now look what you’ve gone and done. She thinks I’m a crazy woman possessed by the devil. How am I going to explain that? I have to work here, you know.”

  Quit delaying and open the bottle. We have some very important things to discuss, which I despise doing from inside this damn bottle. Now let me out of here.

  She snorted, even as she rose to go do his bidding. “Ah, the control I have. How I’d love to make you stay in there for eternity.”

  Don’t even—

  Jewel yanked the stopper, watching unfazed when a poof of gray smoke filled the room. As it dissipated, the flesh and blood of Luke Slayton appeared before her. She let out a sigh of relief. Maybe, just maybe he could do some of his hocus-pocus and put her right back in Vince’s arms.

  “Think about leaving me in there,” Luke finished his statement, his thick arms crossed over his chest. He wore one of those silly-looking Greek togas again, yet there was nothing silly about the way it emphasized his physique. But the only man’s build she was interested in was that of a man who’d dumped her in the most emotional time of a woman’s life. The thought of it still pained raw and fresh in her soul.

  “Well, now that you’ve succee
ded in most likely getting me fired, then probably followed by involuntary commitment to a mental institution, and a grueling exorcism, please, feel free to talk all you want,” Jewel replied saucily.

  He stepped nearer and she caught the scent of coconut and forest. It immediately brought back memories of her stay on Carnal Island…and Vince’s fiery lovemaking.

  He didn’t waste time with the topic. “You want him, Jewel. You know you do.”

  She tossed her head, trying desperately to rid her heart of the wistfulness that invaded it. “You got me there. I can’t deny it. You saw yourself how he turns me on, how he makes me feel. The physical attraction between us can’t be denied. That’s never changed, obviously, and never will. But that isn’t a good enough basis for a relationship—for forever, which is what I wanted from the start.”

  He rolled his eyes and hitched himself up on the dresser next to his bottle. Dangling his feet, bumping his sandals against the drawers, he gripped the edge and leaned toward her. His aqua eyes snared her, making her think of a tropical breeze, a kiss, a stolen moment of passion. With Vince.

  “Didn’t you learn anything on Carnal Island?”

  “Okay, so you tried to teach me some sort of lesson there. Well, I’m sorry, but I fail to see where you’ve gone with this. I fail to see how throwing Vince on an island with me—when he didn’t want me in the first damn place—is helpful to your cause. Love cannot be forced. That’s all there is to it, Luke.” She paced before him, now and then snapping her gaze back to him. She didn’t care that he stared at her with that smug look. She needed to get it all off her chest. Now.

  “I want him to love me, but only of his own free will. That’s why I walked out on him in the first place. I couldn’t stick around trying to finagle a drop here and a smidgen there of love out of him. It had to be genuine for what I was about to spring on him, and love and what all goes with love, weren’t part of his big plan. Just sex and a little fun until the next woman came along. That’s what his big strategy had been all those years ago. And I found that out when I was forced to ask him his intentions—which I needed to know before I dropped the big bomb on him.”

  “You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know, Jewel. But I can tell you some things you don’t know. Here.” He snapped his fingers. “First, you must watch your past, right here on the Xanthian Big Screen.”

  She abruptly ceased her steps and stared at him with incredulity. “Xanthian? What are you…?”

  Luke’s voice began to echo in her head. Her eyes widened when a huge, flat panel appeared before her. Like a giant video screen, it showed her her life with Vince, in horrid, emotional details that it seemed she’d missed at the time. Luke confirmed to her in movie-fashion on the screen, what had really happened. And this time, she listened, she watched closely and she finally understood.

  “See there how he hounded you with messages that entire week you were hospitalized after the accident?” A picture of Vince, handsome, his brow worried, filled the screen. “Now, you didn’t return his calls, of course, because you couldn’t. But he was frantic, heartbroken by what he thought was your blatant, permanent rejection of him for not proposing a future with you, for not telling you what you’d wanted to hear during that final argument. But your best friend, your roommate Celeste…watch there as she deletes all of his messages.” And Celeste did, indeed, appear before her, her jaw set with anger on Jewel’s behalf as she punched angrily at the delete button. “On your erratic drive home from Vince’s apartment in Denver, before the accident, remember you called her on your cell phone?”

  “Yes,” Jewel whispered, her eyes filling with tears as that scene played out before her. She watched herself tremble, the tears pouring from her eyes as she dialed the phone while driving in a rainstorm. The car swerved, she jerked it back on the road. All she’d wanted was to die if she couldn’t be with him anymore.

  Luke went on. “You relayed to Celeste how you’d dumped him right before he’d dumped you, how much of a jerk he was, how you never wanted to see him again, how you were done with him forever. And you cried with the pain of lost love.”

  Yes, she remembered all too well the pain of it, the stubborn determination to punish him for rejecting her. For not wanting to marry her right away. She watched herself pour out her heart to her friend over the phone as she drove in the thunderstorm, sailing too fast over slick roads.

  All along, she realized, she’d been punishing them both. How could that possibly be love? she thought, hating herself for not seeing it before now. You cannot expect to gain someone’s love and a lifetime commitment if you’re making such demands out of the blue and not explaining your motivation. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Why had she always made him out to be the cad, when all along, she’d been the one to suddenly disrupt a blooming relationship?

  She shook her head, focusing on the screen. Tears blazed in her eyes. In horrid detail, she watched herself pump on the brake as an unexpected sharp curve loomed before her. Rain spattered on the windshield too quickly to clear her line of vision, even with the wipers on high speed. Her headlights sliced through the forest to her left, and suddenly, she was screaming, the car plunging over the cliff into a ravine. She could feel the sharp sensations even now as she studied the movie. There was the crash of shattering glass, the excruciating pain ripping through her abdomen and the final burst of agony in her head as her face hit the windshield and she blacked out. She watched herself slump against the wheel, blood spattered in a sickening shower over her mangled face, her shattered nose, throughout the interior of the car.

  “When you had this horrible, disfiguring accident, you were unconscious for many, many days. You couldn’t return his calls, and in fact, you didn’t know about them. Celeste had informed your family of Vince’s supposed rejection, so they, in turn, rejected him by not notifying him of your condition. And Celeste, meanwhile, also deleted those messages and refused, for your sake—or so she thought—to take the initiative and call him to report where you were. She never told you what she’d done, and not done, as well. She loved you and thought you’d be better off in your oblivion without the man you’d painted as an ogre in her eyes.”

  The scene flipped to Celeste, her brunette head lowered in anger, as she once again punched the delete button on the machine. Vince had told her the truth. He’d called time after time, but she never knew. And he hadn’t known she’d had the horrible accident. During that emotional confession session in the tree house on Carnal Island, she’d thought him to be a liar, a heartless asshole. And she’d silently claimed to love him?

  The screen switched then, to Vince, his frustration and bewilderment clear on his handsome face as he lowered the phone to the cradle for the twentieth time that week. He closed his eyes on a heart-wrenching sigh.

  “Jewel, sweetheart… Where are you? Why are you doing this to me? I miss you. I…I have to see you. We need to talk. Y-you don’t understand. I just need time, but not without you.”

  And he hadn’t gotten one word from her. She hadn’t returned one call, and he’d obviously been as devastated by her rejection as she had by his.

  “Had you just trusted him more,” Luke went on, almost in a rush, Jewel thought, “and gone on to tell him about your secret news that night, he’d have come around. He was already toying with the idea of letting go of his bachelorhood, of possibly settling down, and marriage, after a trial run of living together, of course. True, your sudden interrogation of him had scared the shit out of him, but that’s just Vince Santiago. He needs time to come to his own terms in his own mind, to be sure it’s what’s best for everyone, and what he really wants—without being influenced by persuasive tears, accusations…and a woman’s allure. Vince has his faults, and his pride certainly hadn’t allowed him to pursue you beyond that first week, but to him, you’d walked out on him for good. Forever. Once he came to terms with that, his own stubbornness took over, followed by a playboy lifestyle he’d rather have been spending with you
.”

  Tears streamed down her face. She watched as the movie screen flipped to Vince in his apartment. Jennie hovered nearby, and Jewel listened to their whole exchange. She stared agog as he leapt up from a richly upholstered dining chair.

  She heard Jennie chastising him. “Then admit how you feel, Vince. I know where she is. I know exactly where she is. And this is just getting downright ludicrous how you’re both only able to speak clearly to each other with your bodies. Nonetheless, I’m not spilling any jelly beans until you finally let go of that pig-headed pride of yours and admit that you can’t admit you love her because you’re still pissed at her after four years!”

  Vince’s face went pale. He stood there stunned, then dropped back into the chair. “Oh, fuck me,” he groaned. For a long moment, he held his head in his hands, rubbing his face raw. “I am a stubborn bastard. All this time wasted. And all I probably had to do was go find her and tell her I love her. That I’ve loved her all along.”

  Jewel stumbled backward and collapsed to the bed, the room spinning around her. All those years, all those long years of hating him, wanting him, loving him yet refusing to contact him, wasted. Months and years of keeping that tormenting secret buried and to herself, and fleeing to another corner of the country. She’d wasted all this time in this place, practically holding herself prisoner. She’d even considered pursuing a lifetime commitment to the nunnery in order to finally cleanse Vince from her soul. Nausea swirled in her gut and she pressed a hand to her belly. Glancing around at the drab, tiny room, listening to the deafening silence beyond that rickety door… Holy shit, how had she endured it? All those years lost and so very lonely, when all she’d had to do was reach out to Vince, to tell the truth and be honest just as the nuns always preached. And just as she had preached countless times to the children in her classroom.

  This whole mix-up was all her fault, all due to her stubborn pride and childish need to punish him. And he’d loved her all along!