Petty Games

Burn it. Bury it. Both. I eyed it back as it eyed me. The little black book sitting on the nightstand across the room from me in its unrelenting righteousness. I sat in my chair drumming my fingers on the wooden arm rest. Making random rhythms of the rapping sounds.

I hated it. I hated him. God I hated him for doing this to me. Fuck him.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

But it wasn’t just what was written in the book. It was what was shoved under the front cover. The ultimatum. No, the cowardly bribe. Ugh, he was pathetic.

I had already picked up, put down, fervidly read and deciphered the book fifteen times since I woke up, alone. Everything in the book was illegal, condemning, incriminating. The book itself was a ledger. He had recorded every transaction in it. Every damn one. Even the personal ones. That was what hurt me the most, I think. Or maybe it was that he was testing me. Would I hand it over for immunity or destroy it and escape into Chobe with him? He had left everything I would need. A fake passport for Hannah Elizabeth Jackson. I wondered if he had picked that name himself? Two hundred dirty one hundred dollar bills. Twenty thousand dollars. It was how much I would need to get to him. The new clothes, the taxis, the plane tickets, fees, more taxis, hotel rooms, bribes for the “inspections”, taxis again and flat whites. But I didn’t want his money. What a joke. He had always been cold, controlling and calculating. Things I used to love about him. Now I used them against him. He really believed I needed that money. That I would use it to run away, back to safari with him.

In three days marked six years. The timing of all this was no coincidence. Our first three months together were spent secluded in Botswana’s Chobe National Park. We had met while I was on safari there and he swept me away. Literally. He was on his own private safari. Six tents so deep in the park only his guide knew the way to them. For three months we were tangled in billowing white sheets every night and sipping my safari version of a flat white over tantalizing conversations every day. I haven’t spent a day away from him since then. Until today of course. I was one of three people who knew the coordinates of those tents six years ago. And I was one of three people who knew that is where he was now. And I knew he was expecting me there in three days. So predictable.

In the shower now I was decided. Admittedly, I was panicking two hours ago. But I had planned for something like this all along. He didn’t know that though. He didn’t know that I had taken two thousand times the amount he had left me over the past two years. He would find out soon enough but it would be too late. And just like the game he had left me on the nightstand I had left him one too. But mine would take him days to figure out. By the time he did, he would never be able to find me. My plan was Indonesia. With no extradition and seventeen thousand islands to hide on, good fucking luck. I already had my first boat picked out and waiting for me. An Islander 32 by McGlassen. Just like the one my dad and I had dreamed about but ran out of time for. She was a dream boat, a classic. Even though I would have to sell her and move on to something else in a few months, I was still excited.

I went over to the night stand and flipped the front cover over with my pinky finger. I looked at it all. The money. The passport. The ledger. I wanted to puke. I would leave the money. I didn’t need it. And I especially didn’t want it. He had always used it to control me. And here he was doing it again. Thinking it was my only option. What a narcissist. I would leave the passport too. I didn’t need that either. I had ten of my own. And better quality. I had a passport for every continent that mattered and then some. I would leave the little black book, the ledger. Because in just three hours Interpol would find it here. Then, in three days they would be meeting him in Chobe. Maybe in three decades they would find me.

An inexplicable calm washed over me in the twenty minute ride to the airport. Followed by massive, crashing waves of relief. My body had never felt so relaxed. The bubbles from the champagne tickled my tongue. I wouldn’t have any trouble sleeping for the next sixteen hours even if it was in this airplane seat. I pictured his face from last night. The last time I would hear him say he loved me. I hated that I had to wipe a tear from my eye. So I pictured the face he would make in three days while being handcuffed. The face he would make when they told him what they had found in our room. A smile made its way across my face because he would know then.

I took the money.