Dangerously Tempted

Chapter 8: Workout Routine

Isabel

With Jecko's absence, I was left to find other means of gossiping. It didn't seem like a difficult task, finding someone who wanted to talk about literally nothing at all with me, yet it was. I didn't know what Jecko was up to, he hadn't called or responded to my text and though I was riddled with worry I deemed whatever he was drawn back to deal with had to be rather important.

My father once told me that his silence was his way of holding it all together. Maybe that's what Jecko was doing—trying to shield me from something worse by keeping his distance. But it didn't make it any easier to accept. Like my father, Jecko had always carried the weight of things without complaint, but at least my father came home at the end of the day. Jecko just left

Even with that acceptance in play, it was driving me mad. I had grown so used to his company over the years that being without it made me feel slightly empty. He might be seen as my servant or butler or whatever, he was my best friend and I missed him.

It wasn't just worry gnawing at me—anger had crept in, too. Why couldn't he just pick up the phone? A quick call, a simple text, anything to stop me from spiraling. I hated that I missed him so much, even though I was mad at him.

Odile wasn't with me all the time, the majority of it yes but not always. It took me a while to understand her schedule and how her work even played into it. One thing I had learned from my parents was to not bother them about their work unless they volunteered information. It wasn't a secrecy thing, more or less escapism from it all. When I was a teenager and my parents would return home, I made the mistake of pestering them with their attempt of escapism and it was only later in life that I understood that.

My father made it clear to me that he had little to nothing growing up. That everything he did was for his family and the younger image of himself. As long as by the end of the day he could put a smile on our faces and heal whatever he had gone through in his earlier years he was okay. But I knew his work was draining. With him in the legal field and my mother in the medical one, they had had enough on their plate. That's why the second I was able to get a job, I found out soon afterwards that it was a scam, that modeling company was just a facade for something diabolical and disgusting. My father didn't let me get a job again until I was nineteen years old. I was late in the game compared to my peers who had been working since sixteen, but I was just happy to be helping out. It was silly though. We didn't need the money, my mothers papa had blessed us with everything he owned before he passed. He was a very affluent man, who adored us kids and regardless of his internal feelings towards father, respected him enough to put aside his prejudice. Grandpa had left millions of old money that had been with his family for centuries. My mothers siblings weren't all that pleased to find that grandpa had left everything he had to her, being that she was the only one who decided to marry a man of lower status and in their eyes, lowered the value of the family name.

She didn't even keep the family name when she married, she was so eager to change it to Perez, they were disgusted and turned their backs on her, but not grandpa.

I never quite understood the relationship between grandpa and my father, I was too young to grasp the complexity of it. It seemed as if he wanted more out of a son in law, but at the same time I could never shake the feeling that grandpa really did like the simplicity that my father brought to my mothers life.

A few days after Jecko left Odile decided to inform me that there was a gym here. It was a little shocking to think of a gym in her home, it didn't quite fit the set up of the whole place but sure enough there was.
It was engulfed with light from the windows that spanned out all around it. It had to have been the most light filled room in the whole house.