Don't Hate Da Playa

Chapter 8

I woke up to the sight of her naked standing in front of me. Her perfect body was soaking wet, and she was wiping herself off with a towel. "The shower is all yours," were the first words she said to me that morning. "I trust you will be able to let yourself out after I leave?"

"What time is it?" I asked as I removed the one sheet covering me.

"Eight o'clock. My first class starts at nine." She finished using the towel on her hair. "In case you were wondering what day it is, today is Wednesday, April eighteenth. "Thanks for the update, Alexa." Just then, a small low-key beep came from the kitchen.

She laughed before throwing the towel at me. "Go on, get. I have to get dressed."

I pulled my body out of the bed and took full use of the bathroom I had all to myself. She had used up most of the hot water, but I didn't care. I was just thankful for her trust and for the night of passion she had given me.

As I stared at the small white tile squares surrounding the show as they did the kitchen floor, I started to wonder why she trusted me so much. I mean, I wasn't anybody special, and I knew she had been hit on by men who had been far more attractive and far richer than I could ever be, what made me so special?"

I got out of the shower and proceeded towards the bed I had spent the night of magic. There was a yellow sheet of notepad paper on the unmade made and it said, "Josh, please lock the bottom lock to the front door on your way out. Thank you for a wonderful night, despite all the tragedy. S"

Even though she was organized in her professional life, I could tell she wasn't the slightest in her personal life. The bed going unmade for probably more than the second day in a row as well as the lack of material possessions in her home told me that.

The hunt for my clothes led me to a large wooden bookcase against the wall in her room. I had always been fascinated by what people keep on their bookshelves because bookshelves are like a mini-story of a person's life. They told the story of a person's interests and how the person spent their time. Scarlet's bookshelf was filled with black paperbacks of classic novels. The non-fiction works on her shelf were books on the subject of feminism. The titles alone gave me a summary of what was in between the covers.

Leaving the bookshelf to the desk in the air, I searched around the room for my scattered articles of clothing. My tan trench coat wasn't too far away from the bookshelf, and the pieces to my three-piece gray pinstripe suit were easy to find as well. My white dress shirt, white undershirt, black tie, and the gray pinstripe pork pie hat I always wore were a little bit more difficult to locate. My underwear and socks were the most difficult articles in my outfit to find, especially the socks. Those two hidden black socks of mine did lead me to an interesting discovery. I found my final sock underneath her bed, next to a tote my curiosity convinced me to pull out and take a look at.

In the tote were photo albums containing pictures of Scarlet's past. I pulled each album out and flipped through them fast, spending no more than a minute or two looking at each one. Only two photographs got me to stop and take a closer look at them. The first was a photo of Scarlet as a newborn baby being held in her mother's arm. A big part of me wanted to believe her dad was the one who had taken the photograph, but a small part of me didn't think it was the case. In all the albums I had flipped through, there was not a single picture of Scarlet's father to be found anywhere. The other photograph that convinced me to stop in my tracks was a picture of a woman in white on the happiest day of her life with her left arm wrapped around Scarlet and her right arm wrapped around two people I had just met yesterday: Ivan Irving and Jennifer Drexel.

I knew what I had to do next. I returned the photo albums to the tote and returned the tote to the spot it was underneath the bed. I got dressed in a hurry and locked the bottom lock on the front door as Scarlet requested of me.