Charles looked confused at the question that I asked him. After seeing his expression, I bothered to explain to him the context which was referred to. So, I took a deep breath because it was going to be an explanation I thought would not come out right, and I felt that I would fail to do justice to the clarification.
After much deliberation, I gathered courage to ask the billionaire who I was living with the question that had been on my mind since the very start. The first day at work with him couldn’t make me hold on to that question in my mind any longer. Especially after seeing the perfect women who he dealt with on a day-to-day basis.
“Why me?” I asked one more time before I continued with the proper description of the reason I was asking him that. I explained, “You are a big man with so many contacts with people closer to your status, living standard wise and also financial. You can reach literally any woman you want, and she will die to be your friend. Living with you under one roof is a dream for so many of them, I am sure. Then, why me?”
Charles looked away from me and ran his fingers through his hair and gave a crooked smile while he was still looking away from me. I was waiting impatiently for him to answer what I asked him because it had been forever that I wanted to hear him tell me the reason for it, but I never really had the courage to question him upfront.
Otherwise, I would ask him a lot of questions that would not be related to me or anything about us living together. He even got irritated many times with the random questions that I would throw at him. But all of those used to be very generic which I wanted to know only as a friend, unlike in the car when I was intruding into his private space.
The time that I was almost giving up hope for my question to be answered, and I did not want to put it out to him again because I wanted to avoid pressurizing him for answering it, he started talking. He said something but then stopped and maybe considered whether he should answer that, it seemed to me. But then, he assumed, “You really don’t want to know.”
“If I didn’t want to know, then I wouldn’t have asked,” I mentioned it almost immediately for him to know that I was serious about it.
“Olive, it is a long story. How about we go somewhere for dinner?” He stated.
“I am all game as far as you are going to tell me the reason for what I asked,” I commented and turned my head to look outside the window.
He told the driver to take us to his favorite restaurant instead of taking us home, and I knew I was going to feel out of the place because even dining etiquettes on an extreme level were new to me back then. I did not know how every expensive food was supposed to be had because I never had the opportunity to live that kind of luxury in life.
We reached the restaurant in no time and, as expected, it was a luxurious fine dining place. It was beautiful, but I was slightly worried if the menu had something that I would be able to eat comfortably. The thing which distracted me after Charles and I entered the lavish place was the way he was moving his hands around me. It looked like that he wanted to either hold me and walk, or he wanted to pull me closer to him while we were walking.
I walked quietly beside him and ignored his hand because it was only my assumption, and nothing was certain. If he wanted to hold me or do whatever else, he could have easily done it or at least said it to me. Neither he mentioned his interest to me nor asked about mine to initiate a conversation between us on those grounds.
He didn’t let the waiter do anything to me, and he himself pulled the chair for me when we reached the table with royal-looking sofas kept on either of its sides that looked like the whole living room of the apartments that I used to live in sharing. The fabric was thick yet shiny and the softness of which could not have been compared to anything that I touched.
We had the menus on the table and he ordered a drink for him. He didn’t even ask me if I wanted to drink or not, he directly ordered two drinks of his choice. That was a little better because it saved me from the trouble of reading the full menu and understanding what to order from all kinds of things that would have been mentioned.
As the drinks were served, he gulped down half of the drink that was his. I let him do whatever he was doing because in order to get emotionally naked sometimes, you have to be intoxicated. After just the last sip of his drink was remaining in his tall glass, he said, “I knew this day would come when you would ask me this question, and I would have to be honest about it.”
“So, listen.”
“I have been alone for a very long time now,” he revealed.
“With time a lot of things change for the good, and it is best to accept them that way. You will never get exactly what you want. Instead, you will be getting a couple of options. Anything that you choose will naturally lead you to a different path, and every option that you have in front of you is bound to have certain repercussions. And this was the path that I wanted to choose,” he adds on.
I was paying complete attention to him not to miss out on any point which he would mention as it would help me relate to other things that I had in mind. I didn’t utter a single word so that he didn’t get disturbed and then maybe got a chance to change his mind or his words. As he was doing the talking, I was only listening to him with full concentration.