Writing Our Song:A Billionaire Romance

Chapter 14


It was the first day going back to school after my dad’s car accident and I was walking up the steps to the front doors once more. I knew what was going to happen in the hallway, the flickering fluorescent light, the crowds, the questions, and I wanted to stop and just run away but for some reason I couldn’t. I kept on walking through the doors.

When I turned the corner and saw the hallway things were most certainly different though. Instead of the usual hubbub of early morning high school, the yelling, the pushing and shoving, everybody was deathly quiet and almost completely still.

As I threaded my way through the nearly motionless crowd my sense of impending doom grew rather than shrunk. I’d been afraid of something, but this was beginning to look a lot worse.

Everywhere I looked, people’s faces were hidden from me. Behind open locker doors, behind folders held up in front of their heads, backs turned to me. I couldn’t see a single set of eyes, but then I started to hear that sound, the sound of the flickering light and I looked up to see it.

It was mostly the same but every time it flickered it wasn’t because of a bad connection or being old, or whatever normally makes those lights start blinking on and off like that. This one seemed to be acting like those bug zappers you see hanging outside people’s cabins in the woods.

Every time a fly would hit the light it would buzz and flicker and the charred remains of the fly would fall downwards. After watching a few of them, I wondered why there were suddenly so many flies in my school and watched as one fell to the ground.

There on the floor in the middle of the hallway was the dead body of my father, eyes open and looking at me. One hand was extended in my direction with a single finger pointing at me as if in accusation.

I screamed and dropped my school books, which I hadn’t even realized I was carrying, and took several steps backwards until I bumped into somebody. They turned around and I froze in horror when they smiled because instead of a normal human grin they sported a mouthful of those tangled needle-like teeth I’d seen in pictures of deep-sea fish. They didn’t look fully alive either.


One by one, everybody in the hallway turned in my direction, smiled the same horrible inhuman smile, and began advancing on me, pale clammy hands reaching out. There was nowhere to go, I crumpled to the ground and covered my head.

I didn’t scream again until I felt them biting me…

I woke with a gasp and stared wildly into the darkness. For a moment I thought my eyes had been eaten and whimpered fearfully but the nightmare began fading as fast as any dream does and I regained my senses.

Underneath me was not the cold hard tile floor of my school’s hallways, it was a firm but comfortable bed. The arm draped over me was not cold and dead, it was warm and protective.

Behind me I could hear the steady breathing of Jeremy and the regular puffs of air that wafted against my hair every time he exhaled. I wiped a single tear away from my eye, the only remaining evidence from my nightmare, and took a deep breath.

Shuffling backwards, I snuggled right up to him and pulled his arm even tighter around my upper body as if it was a new piece of armor. Maybe it was better armor than I’d had previously. With that hope at the forefront of my mind, I let myself drift off to sleep again.

*****

The next few days in Wanaka were like a vacation on a different world as a different person, a person I vaguely remembered but thought had disappeared forever. Jeremy and I went for long walks, laughed at the stupidest things and took every opportunity to explore each other’s bodies in the most intimate ways possible.

I’d never had a vacation like it in my entire life, it felt like two weeks that had changed everything. Everything. I was free for the first time in years.

It was with a heavy heart that I had to say goodbye to the mountain-lake-town when Jeremy and I were due to head back to Auckland. A car arrived for us on Saturday/ morning and I could barely bring myself to carry my bag out the front door.

Jeremy relieved me of it with an understanding smile while I took one last look back at the living room and the stairs that led up to what had been mine and Jeremy’s separate bedrooms, and then become the bedroom that we shared plus a spare room. With a sigh I closed the door, bringing with me nothing but pictures and memories.

We were driven to a place called Queenstown, where we stopped for lunch, and were flown out of there on the domestic airline back up to Auckland, arriving in the domestic terminal that the driver, Conor, had told us about on our very first night. Once more I found myself staying in the Hilton, but this time I was in the Presidential Suite with Jeremy and this was our last night.

Surrounded by luxury, and even with Jeremy there, I found it difficult to sleep that night. Somehow, against all odds, I really had been able to leave everything behind just like Jeremy had said when I came out here. But… was it all still waiting for me back home? It was a question that plagued me long after Jeremy was sleeping peacefully beside me.

*****

We boarded Jeremy’s private jet again in the early evening on Sunday and we were officially on our way back to LAX. Once the plane was safely in the air and I could release my white-knuckled grip on the armrests I turned to Jeremy.

“Catching up with family for a late birthday party when you get back?” I asked.

“Yeah. In fact,” Jeremy looked at his watch, “I’m having dinner with them right now. It’s always weird crossing the date line.”

“Who’ll be there?”

“My mom, my sister, Anna, and my brother, Kevin. It’ll just be a little thing at my place.”

“What about your dad?”

Jeremy’s face darkened slightly and he waved his hand dismissively.

“He’s not in the picture anymore. He walked out on us not too long after Kevin was born.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it, I’m over it. I should thank him, in a way. It was him leaving that gave me the motivation to become an entrepreneur.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“I was so cut up when he left, when he didn’t even say goodbye, desperate for him to come back and sort out whatever differences he and Mom were having. I don’t know why but I thought maybe if I could show him I could do something really great, be really successful at something, he might think our family wasn’t so bad after all and he might come back. Like, ‘hey, look, we’re not just trash, dad’ or something like that. It’s stupid, I know,” Jeremy cast his eyes down to the floor by his feet.

“It’s not stupid, Jeremy,” I said.

“Well, anyway, it didn’t work. But, on the bright side, I found something that I actually was good at, something I enjoyed. Everything else just kind of came with the territory.”

“Now you don’t even have to fly your own private jet, you can hire somebody for that,” I said.

Jeremy snorted a quick laugh, “Yeah, now I feel sorry for those people who only just had enough to get the private jet but didn’t have enough left over to staff it. They just have to park it in a hangar somewhere, sit in the cockpit and make airplane noises.”

I laughed. “Yeah, it worked out OK for you.”

“I don’t think I’d ever want to fly something this big, it’s like an entire house with connected office. I’ve been looking into learning how to fly a helicopter though, that seems a bit more like a car-of-the-sky, a bit more my speed.”

“Ugh, you’d never get me in one of those,” I said.

“Hmmph,” said Jeremy in mock indignation.

“So you’re the oldest child?”

“No, Anna is. She’s a year older than me. I’m the forgotten middle child, and Kevin is the baby. He’s only eleven.”

“Wow, that’s quite the gap,” I said.

“Yeah, I gather he was a bit of a surprise for my parents to say the least.”

“Well, don’t keep him up too late celebrating with you, it’s a school night.”

“Noted, thanks.”

All traces of New Zealand were soon lost to view out of my window and the nagging fears about returning home were poking around the edges of my mind again. The last two weeks had seemed surreal even while everything was playing out before my very eyes, now without the weight of current visual testimony, it seemed more dreamlike than ever.

Eventually, after dinner, Jeremy and I retired to the ‘sleeping quarters’ area of the jet and cuddled up on one of the ‘beds’. Each one was really only designed for a single person, but we found that two people willing to spoon could just fit. The steady drone of the jet and the occasional light rocking of turbulence lulled me into a reasonably peaceful sleep that lasted until breakfast time.

*****

After making it through customs I slung my bag over my shoulder and stood awkwardly in front of Jeremy. Every single step I’d taken since leaving the Hilton in Auckland had felt like a step towards the end of something good, but right here when it seemed like Jeremy and I would be parting ways was the last and most difficult.

My flight back to Seattle wasn’t until the late afternoon, but I presumed he had to get going to organize his family get-together. I was filled with doubts, about myself, about everything that had happened. How could he possibly know what the last couple of weeks had meant to me? What had they meant to him? Was it all just a holiday fling for him? A good deed that had gone further than he had intended perhaps?

“So… I guess this is…” I began.


“You’ve got some time to kill. Would you mind if I took you somewhere?”

“Back to New Zealand?”

“Not quite. There’s something I want to show you.”

“What is it?”

“It’s… can I just show you?”

“Uh… well… OK, I guess.”

“Great!”

Jeremy pulled out his phone and made a call to somebody named Stan saying he was ready to be picked up, then we waited in the pick-up/drop-off area until a large black car rolled up and Jeremy waved to the man behind the wheel. The driver, who turned out to be the one Jeremy had called, put my bag in the trunk for me.

“Stan, this is Beatrice. Beatrice, this is Stan, my driver.”

“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said.

“You too, Stan.”

“I’d like to go up to San Angelica beach, Stan,” said Jeremy.

“No problem, sir. Good trip?”

“The best. Did you miss me?”

“Cried myself to sleep most nights, sir.”

Jeremy opened the rear door for me with a chuckle that I couldn’t help but share and then hopped in himself before Stan closed it and took his place in the driver’s seat. I almost felt like a foreigner again, getting used to seeing cars driving on the right side of the road once more, the faster pace of life in general.

Stan drove us north and I looked out of the window with interest, having never been to L.A before aside from the airport. For some reason I thought I’d be seeing a celebrity on every corner carrying lots of shopping bags with designer labels on them, plus little dogs in handbags, but if anybody I saw was a movie-star, they were well disguised and flying under the radar.

We were just about out the other side of Malibu when Stan pulled over in front of a pair of large houses that seemed to share the same gated entrance. Jeremy asked Stan to wait and then we walked up the little driveway and Jeremy pressed a code into the number pad beside the gates.

With an electric whir, the gates swung inwards. He led me along the driveway and then down a path that ran between the houses. It was a strange set-up, the houses were clearly worth multi-multi-millions and yet they shared the driveway. Neither of them was noticeably bigger or smaller than the other, so it wasn’t like one of them was an outbuilding or something.

Regardless, such debates were soon cast from my mind when the path led us through a gap in a hedge and then opened out on to one of the most picturesque beaches I had ever seen. The sand was blindingly white, the sea was a rich blue and when I looked in either direction as if I was crossing a road, I saw that it was as empty as any beach I had seen on the tourism site promoting New Zealand.

“Wow… where is everybody?” I asked.

“It’s an inconvenient beach to get to. Some of it is public property, but there’s several… uh… bands of it that are private property down to the average high tide mark. So people technically can get to it but they have to wade or swim most of the way to avoid trespassing. This part here is private.”

“Yours?”

“Yes. There’s something here I wanted you to see. Will you come take a look?”

Jeremy held out his hand and I didn’t think twice about taking it, though he was looking uncharacteristically nervous. The handsome billionaire seemed to gain some confidence from my lack of hesitation and offered me a weak smile before leading me to our right along a thin band of grass between the hedge and the sand, soon stopping beneath a tree.

I’d never been much of a botanist and I had no idea what variety of tree this was. It was quite big, with smooth bark and the branches above still held on to enough leaves to offer plenty of shade, though they were mostly various shades of orange and yellow now.

Jeremy wasn’t looking up in the branches though, he was looking right at the bottom of the trunk. When I followed his line of sight, I could see a word quite clearly carved into it, ‘Holts’. Jeremy was almost misty-eyed looking at it but didn’t say anything for quite some time.

“What is this, Jeremy?” I prompted gently, giving his hand a light squeeze.

“It’s… a special place,” he said. “It’s the last place my family was complete. A whole decade ago now, we came out here and had the most incredible day at the beach. Anna, dad and I swam and played on the sand for hours. Mom kept Kevin mostly in the shade of this tree, he couldn’t walk yet. We brought a picnic and ate it right here on the grass, carved the family name there before we left.”

Jeremy sighed and looked over his shoulder at the ocean for a moment before turning back to the tree and continuing.

“We hadn’t been together like that for a while. Anna was always off boy-chasing, I was hanging out with my friends trying to pick up girls, Dad was busy with work and Mom was busy with Kevin, but we all came along for the ride that day. A few days later Dad was gone.”

I brought my other arm across and held his one hand with both of mine, moving closer to him until my shoulder was pressed against his upper arm, trying to offer what silent support I could.

“That path we came down used to be a public access-way but I bought both the houses adjacent to it and then had them put on the same title, making the path effectively private. I rent the houses out to the people that used to live there anyway, on the condition that I have access to the beach and they don’t let anybody screw with this tree. Ever.”

Jeremy sighed again and walked around me, turning me on the spot until we were both facing the ocean. I stayed silent, slightly awed by how much he was opening up to me, and very humbled.

“I come out here sometimes just to sit and listen to nothing much. The waves and the wind are so much better than, I don’t know, the phone and the photocopier.”

Jeremy looked down at his feet for a moment and then brought his eyes up to meet mine. The butterflies began fluttering in my stomach again, nobody had ever looked at me the way Jeremy did.

“I don’t bring anyone here, Bea. Not a soul. It’s… a special place. My family doesn’t even know I bought it. One day I want to find a new place and make it just as special for the people I love the most, the family I haven’t met yet. I don’t know where it will be, or what it will be. Another beach? A cabin in the forest somewhere? A lake? Could be anything, but I’ll know it when I see it. I think.”

The sound of the wind and waves he had mentioned surrounded us as he stopped speaking and I tried to let everything he had told me sink in. How could I have thought such hateful things about him? There was a real man with real feelings behind the money and the billionaire lifestyle. People he cared about, people who cared about him.

“Can I sit with you for a while?” I asked.

Jeremy nodded and we sank to the grass to watch the sun beating down on the sand and sparkling off the surface of the water, sheltering from the heat in the shade of that tree just as his family had all those years ago. He was right, this was a special place.

From somewhere deep inside I felt that thing that represented all the crap that had happened to me, all the worst parts of my past, teetering on the brink of spilling out. Part of me wanted to tell Jeremy everything right there and then but, after hesitating for a few minutes, it seemed like the time for talking was done. Now it was the time for being quiet.

I rested my head on his shoulder and let the urge fade.