Dark Secrets

Chapter 4

     That's how it all began. If I hadn't been so head-over-heels infatuated with Jasmine from day one I might have heard the alarm bells ringing. Drop-dead-gorgeous girls don't go after geeky guys like me and make them their boyfriend in four days. They just don't! Even Nikita had picked up from day one that something was not right about her.

But I was in love. What was that expression about fools falling in love? I think I must have been the biggest fool of them all!

After that drink at the bar on her first day of her job she came back to my flat and spent the night with me. We didn't get much sleep that night!

The next day at work I yawned my way through the day much to the amusement of my work colleagues. I didn't see Nikita at all that day.

Jasmine and I had lunch in the park. We sat on the seat where I had first met her the previous week. While we were eating and talking several attractive girls walked by, but I ignored them, my girl radar was turned off. I didn't need it anymore, I had my own beautiful girl right there with me.

After that things moved fast. We had lunch every day in the park or if the weather was wet we would go to a café. She often stayed overnight at my flat, she brought over some of her clothes and personal effects, and soon she was spending more nights and my flat than at her own place.
The following weekend we enjoyed the sights of Sydney together. We went on a harbour cruise, visited the observation deck of the highest building in the city, walked along the sands of famous Bondi Beach, and on Sunday we drove out of the city to the mountains in the west where we wandered around tourist towns and went to lookouts to admire the views of waterfalls and the vast gorge* country which dissected the plateau known as the Blue Mountains.

The following weekend Jasmine surprised me by suggesting that she move in with me.
"My place is just a tiny bedsitter," she explained, "barely big enough for one person. So what do you think Josh? Would you like to have me all to yourself all the time?"

Would I? I course I would! I enthusiastically answered in the positive. It was all rather soon of course, we had known each other less than three weeks, but I assumed she was so much in love with me that she couldn't bear to be away from me. And me, the crazy besotted man that I was, felt the same way. There was another saying about fools here. They rush in where angels fear to tread! More alarm bells ignored!

This sudden suggestion of Jasmine's came the day after a curious thing happened. She had suggested we go to The Inferno again. We got there at ten o'clock on the Saturday night, and soon we were dancing to the strobing lights and loud music. After half an hour we had a break and she shouted to me over the music that she was going to the toilet. I went to the bar and got us a drink each, but when she returned a few minutes later she looked agitated.

"Let's go home," she shouted, "I don't want to stay any longer."

"What?" I shouted back to her, "We only just got here. Are you okay?"

"Yes, but I want to go now."

"What about our drinks?" I asked. 

She took her drink from my hand and downed it in three gulps.

"Okay, now let's go," she said, and started walking towards the exit. She turned and looked back at me. "Are you coming?"

"All right, all right," I said as I quickly drank most of my drink. I left the glasses on the bar and ran after her.

As we drove home I tried asking her about her sudden decision to leave the club and she practically bit my head off.

"I just felt like going home. Do you have to nag me about it?" she snapped.