Looking at Charles with the hope that he would either support me in what I had planned to do or he would come with an even better way out of this weird situation that we were going to land in if I continued to stay here now that he was in love with someone else.
In my mind I had this thing going on that how could a player like him fall in love. He had at least been a lover boy, and that was something which I had known from all the stories that the house manager, James, had told me. He wanted a new chick every day, and if he ever felt that he started to love a girl, then he would be with her for a week maximum before he realized it was all too much for him to put up with.
It felt very special to me to be chosen by the richest guy in town to live with him and that too not to please him but in a completely platonic way. I had my doubts on why would someone let a stranger stay with them, but then if someone as settled as him asked me to live with him, it was a risk worth taking because my intuition gave me a green signal with the way he had been talking to me and treating me.
“Leave that to me,” he replied in a very calm manner after he took his time to wash away the frowns on his forehead which grew with every question that I asked him.
“But –” He cut my sentence that I was going to put forward.
“Hush,” he said and made me stop talking. I listened to him because anybody would have loved the way that he was helping, and I tried my best with him, so be it.
All of a sudden it came to my mind that I should leave it to him to decide what he wanted and who he wanted to have living in his house. I wasn't anyone to decide anything for him. It was good for me to keep staying here because I didn’t have a job at present and wasn’t spending a dime for either my living or my food.
Even though I kept tracking down the expenses, I knew that it might take my full life to repay him for everything that he did for me. Thinking about which brings me back to the present, and I still haven’t been able to pay him back in the way that I had thought of. But now when he comes back from his official tour this weekend, this is going to be the first thing that I am going to do. I will ask him for a mini vacation so that I can repay him in my way.
As I started to search for that one thing which I found very captivating, it happened to fall on me when I got into the store room by mistake. At that time, I had just moved in with Charles, and so many doors in such a big house confused me for many days. I would open any door, and it would confuse me even more. So, one day I thought of checking all the doors on the first floor to see where they led.
There was one small door on the side where Charles’s room was, that is our room now, which is the master bedroom. With the house being huge, the small door caught my eye. Also, everything in the house looked as if it was brand new, but that door was a little rusty, and that seemed to be incompatible. So, I walked to it and made sure no one saw me.
The moment I opened the door, something fell on me, which scared me. I stepped out of the confined space. When I took a step back, it fell to the ground with a thud. With so much dust that got unsettled, I still tried to see what the thing was even though it was difficult. Once the dust settled, I was surprised to see something that looked like a diary which was not that big but was definitely not thin.
It looked old, and the edges of the pages inside were yellow. Since I wanted to know what exactly it was, I immediately took a step into the cramped space, and I picked it up. Now because it was dark inside that little room, and I didn’t know where the light switches were, if there were any, I thought of getting back into my room in order to see whatever this was.
Usually, something that is not mine doesn’t interest me, and neither do I check other people’s personal stuff in their personal space, but, thankfully, I did it that time. It is only because I took that diary to my room about two years ago, I got to know a different side of Charles that no one knew about. A side that was very normal and which was just like all of us; very normal, very cute, very innocent, and yet so big.
After I had taken the diary back to my room with me that had fallen on me, I settled in on the chair and made sure the door of the room was shut for no one to walk inside and catch me with this diary to know what I was doing. I knew it was sick of me to be doing something like that secretly, but as I think of it now, I am able to form a nice plan because of it for the break that I want to take.
On opening the diary, the very first page had Charles’s name written on it. It was handwritten with a black ballpoint pen, and it looked as if Charles himself had written it down. That made me curious to flip the pages to see what that diary was used for since I understood that it belonged to Charles when he was still a kid.