by Cece Monét
His eyes narrowed at her and his jaw clenched as he managed to eke out a barely audible, “then break up with him. He’s not right for you.” Cheng had said it without any hesitation, because of his absolute certainty that the words he’d spoken were the truth. Speaking up when he was absolutely convicted about something was still his MO. Besides, he already knew that this was definitely a time where he had to say what he really felt right here and right now, or forever hereafter hold his peace on the matter.
Now Angela looked offended. “How are you gonna say that? You don’t even know my fiancé. Hell, you barely even know me.”
Without putting much thought into it, he just reacted. Cheng stepped closer to her and took her hand in his. He put her fingers up to a place on his forehead that part of his hair had been styled to conceal. She gasped in surprise as he pulled the hair away from his face with his left hand. Simultaneously, he used his right hand to touch her fingers to a scar on the right side of his forehead near his hairline. A scar she knew for a fact hadn’t been there when she’d been kissing every inch of his skin in Hong Kong.
“Five years ago, I promised I would call you when you returned to the states. I know you remember that, and since I didn’t do it, you want to punish me now and I get that. You’re assuming that I’m a liar and untrustworthy. I get that too. First, hear me out as to why I never got to call you. I landed in Tokyo as scheduled that day, went to my business meetings and left late in the day to get to my hotel. I was traveling light and decided to take the train to my hotel instead of getting a taxi.
“As I was leaving Shinjuku station, some yakuza members mistook me for a rival triad member who had double crossed them on some criminal deal during the days in which they were supposed to have had an alliance. I still don’t know all the exact details about that, but what I do know is that they decided to teach a lesson by making me an example. So they proceeded to beat me until I was almost dead, ignoring me when I tried to tell them they had the wrong guy. They even hit me on the head with a glass bottle which caused a gash here where this scar is now,” he emphasized the point, by lightly pushing down on her fingers over the scar.
“That blow to the head must’ve knocked me out, I’m not really sure because I don’t remember anything else after that from that night. Then they must’ve stolen everything I had on me while I was unconscious. When I finally did wake up again, I was in a hospital with only the bloody clothes I’d come in with. My phone, carry-on bag, wallet, passport, everything were all missing. I ended up being there for a few weeks, recovering from internal bleeding, broken ribs and other broken bones, and all the other injuries that I’d sustained.
“Once I was finally well enough, I had to go to the Chinese Embassy and it took a few more weeks for me to get legal documentation so I could leave Japan. The only reason it didn’t take longer is because some of my father’s connections came through and got me the hell out of there, especially once they’d found out what happened to me. When I did get back to Hong Kong, everyone in the office knew what had happened, but I’d missed so much work that I had lost my ‘golden boy’ status there. They shipped me off to the Shanghai office as soon as they possibly could and I started over.
“What got me through a lot of the worst parts of that time in my life was thinking about you. The time we spent together meant a lot to me and I became obsessed with finding a way to locate you. I didn’t know your last name, there were way too many Angela’s that came up on social networking sites. I remembered you mentioning something about being from California, so I thought I’d eventually start my search for you here and even hire a local private detective if needed in order to track you down.
“For work, I decided to go ahead and make my money and renew my career at the Shanghai branch, which was alright because my mother’s family was from there anyway. So I also spent much more time getting to know my maternal family. When the opportunity finally came around, I made the first available transfer here to the US. So I’m pretty sure my situation was not what you thought. I never would have gone back on my word to you if I’d had a way to keep it. If I had known you were already the mother of my child, I would’ve found another way to get to you both sooner.
“To answer your question, I don’t have to know that guy you’re engaged to in order to know he isn’t the right man for you, because he could never love you the way I do. Would likely never be willing to give up everything just for the possibility of being with you, especially not the way I already have.”
Cheng hoped Angela could hear how earnest he was right now. Maybe he was being more honest in this moment than he’d ever been about anything else in his entire life.
Chapter Five
Angela couldn’t believe it. Cheng had come to the US to find her. He’d left behind his friends, family and his entire way of life to risk everything by placing all his bets on her. Wow. It must be amazing to live with that kind of certainty. To want to be with someone so badly and know so fully that everything was going to work out in the end. Angela couldn’t take this. Her head was swimming from the glass of wine that was really starting to kick in right now of course, her emotions were in a jumble, and her hormones were in a knot as he stood so close she could smell Cheng’s cologne.
It was a heady mix of a citrusy, masculine fragrance that suited him interwoven with his own intoxicating essence and pheromones that had combined to call out to her like the sirens. She remembered this scent all too well. It triggered a memory that drew her right back to their night together in Hong Kong. The memories of their bodies interlaced came back vividly, in full color as they assaulted her mind. Angela had the kind of explosive chemistry with Cheng that she couldn’t deny or control, no matter how conflicted and confused she felt right now. He was also still holding her hand up to his forehead, looking at her with the kind of yearning she personally knew and understood all too well.
Angela felt too overwhelmed right now. She couldn’t take this all in at the moment. She needed time to digest everything and find a way to sort through all this new information and her feelings about it before she could figure out what to do next. Cheng was gently stroking his fingers over her hand and she knew before she got completely sucked in that she had to do something. Right. Now.
So she did. She finally found some common sense and pulled out of his grasp, in a move that was firm and definitive. What the hell was she doing anyway? They were standing at her front door where any one of her nosy ass neighbors could be, and one of them probably was out there, spying on her right now. Angela knew some of those old biddies were just salivating over the opportunity to tell her fiancé that she was having an affair behind his back. Damn busybodies.
Actually, Angela really thought deep about that for a few lingering seconds. Hadn’t she been having a long distance emotional affair with Cheng all this time anyway? That thought made this whole situation even more difficult to deal with right now. Ironically, she needed time, space and some distance from Cheng so she could think and get herself together, because being so near to him right now was wreaking havoc on her brain as well as her body. So Angela wasn’t paying much attention, but she was vaguely aware of Cheng pulling something out of his pocket and putting it into her hand at that point.
“I’m not sure what to say. I had no idea you’d suffered so much personal loss and in such a short period of time. I feel bad for you. It’s unbelievable how so much has happened since we spent time together in Hong Kong. Honestly, I just don’t think I can deal with all of this right now. It’s too much to take in at once… and… and… I gotta go put Jayden to bed. I can’t. I just can’t handle this.”
Seeing the disappointment and dismay clearly etched across Cheng’s facial features made Angela feel even worse. She didn’t know if this conversation was going to end up being a strategic retreat or if she was just completely running away from this whole situation altogether, and quite possibly forever. This of course only made her pained heart clench even tighter in her ches
t as she somehow managed to close the door in his face.
~
Cheng was a businessman, so he did have some occasional experience with dealing with rejection in his life. However, this situation was becoming unbearable. By what he’d hoped was some stroke of luck or even fate, he’d finally found the one woman he’d ever truly been in love with in his entire life again. Somehow though, everything was turning out twisted, distorted and as far from how he’d envisioned this situation going as he could imagine.
He’d wanted to be with Angela, but she was already betrothed to another man. He wanted to spend his life with her and have a family with her, and they already even had a child together. Yet she’d been making plans to have another man stand in his place as Jayden’s father.
Cheng couldn’t breathe as he clenched the steering wheel of his rental car so hard his knuckles turned white. “Fuck!” he shouted to the top of his lungs as he slammed his head back against the headrest. Now what?
~
“What’s that mommy?” Jayden asked Angela as she absently made her way back to the den of their three bedroom, two and a half bath, new construction townhouse. She visually followed Jayden’s line of sight as well as his pointed finger down to her hand. It was then that she realized she was in such a daze that she was still tightly clutching the object that Cheng had given her. Peering down to get a good look at it, she finally saw that the item was a USB flash drive.
“It’s something that goes to the computer. Now it’s time for you to be off to bed. I’ll race you to the bathroom. Last one there’s a rotten egg!” She smiled brightly for her son’s sake and hurried for a few steps until he lost interest in asking about the flash drive and rushed off, screeching with laughter out of the room, down the hall, all the way up the stairs and into his bathroom.
Angela gently laid the USB drive down near her laptop on her desk in a corner of the den she’d sectioned off with walls to create a home office space for herself. Then she went upstairs and got her young son ready for bed. When Jayden was finally down for the night, with the whole bedtime routine seeming to have taken even longer than usual tonight, she went back downstairs. In the den, she powered on her computer and reached for the removable drive from Cheng.
She wasn’t sure what she’d find as she went to open the digital content on the flash drive. The files had been arranged in the order in which Cheng had obviously wanted her to view them and were numbered accordingly. The first file was a Word document. Angela opened it and discovered that it was a letter to her, or at least what had started out as a letter and turned into an ongoing journal of sorts. In it, Cheng had been updating the letter, adding various entries at different times throughout the last five years. It was like a personal blog he’d written just for her. Each section was dated, with the initial entry starting about two months after their night together in HK and it ended with the current date.
In his first entry, Cheng related in more details his time in Japan that kept them apart and told her how sorry he was for them losing touch, but vowed someday, somehow he would find her again. Throughout his later entries, there were plenty of comical stories of him with his family in Shanghai and somber moments of him telling of the distress he felt at not being able to find her, talk to her or hold her. Of him worrying he would end up alone because he sometimes had such a difficult time relating to other people personally, which he felt was ironic since he seemed to know how to interact with them when it came to business.
In short, Cheng spoke of his accomplishments, his isolation, his joy, fears, hopes, and desperation over the last few years. He’d spoken of missing his parents, who were both now deceased. Cheng also told her how he spent a lot of his time learning discipline and self defense by doing tai chi, Buddhist meditation, and learning mixed martial arts, particularly after the incident in Tokyo. He spent a lot of the rest of his time outside of work by helping some of the elderly people from his maternal grandmother’s community. He did a lot of the manual labor and maintenance around their homes that they were getting too elderly to continue doing themselves, especially for those without family members who could assist them.
Cheng even had a section in which he mused about what a biracial child they had together might look like or be like. In his last entry from today he again referred to Angela as “tian shi” utilizing the Mandarin characters as he did throughout many of his entries. He had written more about his hopes for their future together once she realized he wasn’t the bad guy in all of this. When she finished reading his extended letter, she went on to the next file, which was a picture file.
It was a digital photo though it didn’t have great resolution and was likely taken from a last generation camera phone. The image was definitely from the time he was in Japan. In it, Cheng’s entire face was covered in dark, purplish black bruises, his jaw looked to be wired shut and she was sure his nose had been broken too. There was a gash where his scar was now that had been sutured closed with a number of stitches. Angela gasped. Now she could understand and feel the full impact of what he’d suffered and it made her want to vomit. She couldn’t believe anyone could do such a foul, horrible thing to such a remarkable man, attempting to destroy such an exquisite wonder of natural male beauty.
At times, the depths of human cruelty astonished Angela. It was almost inconceivable to her the kinds of things she knew human beings could do to each other. With shaky hands, she closed the chilling, disturbing image and felt sad that she hadn’t been there to help him in his times of need either. That feeling that they’d missed out on so much together again haunted her, but she did her best to suppress it as she clicked on the next few files which were also images. Both the photo labels and the pictures themselves showed the transition Cheng had made from his high rise life in HK to starting back at the ground floor where he’d ended up in Shanghai. Angela couldn’t help but feel proud of Cheng for all that he’d accomplished in such a relatively short period of time, rebuilding and then quickly improving his lot in life in just the last few years.
Opening the next digital file from Cheng, she saw that the next image was actually an artist’s rendering of her. Angela was startled. Cheng had either drawn it himself or commissioned someone to do it, but since she knew he hadn’t had any photos of her, he’d done it from his memory. It was done in pencil or maybe charcoal so the image was in black and white, but it was a lovely, flattering piece of artwork and surprisingly accurate, capturing nuances that she wouldn’t have thought Cheng knew or remembered from their brief time together. Especially since it was dated from about a year after they’d met.
Then in the next file she opened, were images from one of those online “baby maker” photo games where he’d utilized a picture of him and his drawing of her to create a boy baby and a girl baby that both looked like a combination of them. The images made Angela laugh. The babies were cute, but the boy baby didn’t look much like their Jayden, especially since every day that he got older, Jayden looked more and more like his father. Angela sighed.
There were two files left for her to open now. The next to last one was another Word document. This one was titled “Get to Know Cheng” and was clearly some Internet social networking website survey. Full name: Cheng Hung Liu. Favorite color: red. Siblings: none – only child. She found out some other fun and interesting facts about him too, including that he’d spent time being educated in England as a child, which would explain his UK accent when he spoke in English. Though Hong Kong had previously been under UK colonial rule, Cheng hadn’t been born there. He’d been born in Shanghai. She saw too that he had left a blank survey for her to fill out as well in this Word document.
Next, she made her way to the final file on the flash drive. It was a MP3 playlist that had been compiled today. The first song was Aaliyah’s “I Don’t Wanna Be.” Track two was J. Holiday’s “You Should Be With Me,” while track three was Alicia Key’s “Unthinkable (I’m Ready).” Next was Tamia’s “I’m So Into You.” The song on track fi
ve turned out to be a Chinese and English duet by a duo of singer’s Angela had never heard of before – Dawen and Sha Sha Jones and it was done to the tune of Drake’s song “Marvin’s Room.”
Angela didn’t understand all of the Chinese parts word for word, but got the general gist of the song. It was a heartbreaking song about two ex-lovers who still loved each other, but couldn’t work their relationship out due to long distance. Now, the former girlfriend had a new man in her life but the ex-boyfriend wanted her back. Angela sighed and thought about how art imitated life and life imitated art as the last track on the playlist began to play. It was Cheng sending her a spoken message that kind of reminded Angela of an extended voicemail recording.
“Tian shi, I remember how you told me that you really like American R&B music, so I put together this play list for you. Each of these songs reminded me of you for various reasons; mostly the song lyrics or contexts were specific to us, because I don’t want to be without you. I do think you should be with me. If you ask me, I am ready whenever you are for the next phase of our relationship and saying that ‘I’m into you’ is definitely an understatement.
“So while I hope you aren’t with anyone else right now, I mean really, really hope you aren’t, the last song was an AMBW duet that I found on YouTube with a Chinese man and an African-American woman singing. AMBW stands for Asian Men Black Women by the way. I really like the song since it makes me think of you and how long we’ve been separated by uncontrollable circumstances every time I hear it.
“Anyway, I’ll explain more about why you haven’t heard from me in so long when I see you later tonight, since I’m on my way to drive out to your house in a few minutes. I hope you can forgive the intrusion as well my absence. I really do hope we can work everything out between us.”
