Waving her hands in the air, she shrugged. “Too clingy. Too easy. Too much of everything. I didn’t even want to sleep with him. He was acting like such a bitch I was afraid I’d get down there and realize my balls were bigger than his.”
Tilting my head back in poised laughter, I marvelled at the absurdities of love. Her reasoning was thinner than her two petite arms. It was kind of sad, wasn’t it? We needed fear. It motivated us, even when it came to loving other people; we must fear the loss of them to inevitably want them in the first place. I think in more common terms it’s referred to as “the chase.” While no one wanted to chase or be chased too long, no one wanted to catch or be caught too suddenly. It was a delicate equation that lovers in the dating game couldn’t seem to solve. Leaving us to continue playing Russian roulette, blindfolded in the dark, with our relationships.
“It’s nearly one. I need to get back to the office. I’ve got an appointment in thirty minutes,” I said with a reluctant edge to my voice, standing from my seat and shimmying up the black denim hugging my thicker thighs.
Dropping her napkin on the table, she nodded in agreement. “I should get back, too. The partners will have my hide if I don’t bag this up-and-comer by end of day.”
Leighton was a little shorter than me, standing at around five foot five or so, with dark hair, a slender figure, and dark green eyes. She was also smart as a whip. That was how we met, actually, my second year of college at The University of British Columbia. She was a literary agent now for Hill & Decker Publishing House, specializing in the closing of romance novelists, which suited her personality somewhat perfectly. Her job title was expanded on the rise of what people were now calling The Fifty Movement, and she couldn’t have been riding the wave any harder.
I, on the other hand, stood at a very curvy five foot seven, sans heels, with ash blonde hair that was becoming less mine and more salon as the years crept toward my thirtieth birthday, but hey, what doesn’t kill you makes you blonder, right?
“I’ll see you on Saturday,” Leighton said as we exchanged a quick kiss on the cheek moments before our heels descended in opposite directions of the Burrard Street sidewalk.
Joining the flow of pedestrians, my longer than average legs moved me quickly up to Robson Street in the direction of the offices for Smith & Co. Productions, my office.
I guess you could say circumstances led me to become your typical overachiever, the poster child, if you will, for a disheartened workaholic who did so to avoid having to spend too much time alone in the other, less than stellar, areas of her life. That being said, part of me simply chalked it up to my addictive personality and the fault of singledom that brought with it an occasional abundance of free time.
Truth is, when you got burned, you learned to be strong. You make it out alive, or you don’t. I chose to claw my way up from the gallows and use what I got. My heart was weary, but my mind was strong and my face was pretty; the two combined were somewhat of a lethal combination.
In my professional life, I was a sniper. In my personal life, I was a mess.
I graduated top of my class from The University of British Columbia with a bachelor’s degree in Business Management before finally finding my stride at Simon Fraser University, where I garnered a degree in Event Planning. As busy as I remained during the course of my academia, my addiction would still rear it’s ugly head from time to time, and my need to soothe the loneliness inside me would have to be remedied. It was in those such instances I often chose to attempt to develop something with a suitor in my life, thus finding a handsome man to deliver me to heaven and return me to hell.
I had no delusions of grandeur. I didn’t believe being the recipient of a man’s attention garnered me a better person, but it was where the steel in my spine was forged. Without it, my vulnerability grew through the cracks like weeds on a broken sidewalk.
In the summer following the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, on the eve of my twenty-fourth birthday, I founded The Halo Foundation. This charity blossomed from the very core of my heart, where it eventually bled into a well-funded and well-sponsored organization that supported the education of post secondary children on the effects of addiction, as well as the “clean teens” program that aided young users in getting clean and rehabilitating them back into society. It was my heart and soul, my passion project, and yet it paved the way for the development of my company, Smith & Co. Productions, which was formally founded less than a year later.