Leather Journal

I haven’t looked at the journal or the envelope enfolded between its pages since the moment I tossed it in the corner of my bedraggled apartment. It sits there day after day, collecting dust and guilty glances. I should read it. I really should. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t read it.

And yet.

I’ve paced for hours. Back and forth, running calloused hands through unbrushed tangles, worrying my lip between teeth until eventually a bead of blood forms. I stop. I look at the book again. It almost seems to stare back at me, it’s leather exterior begging to have fingers roam over its smooth surface, tear open the cover and avidly devour the contents inside.

I go for a drive.

There’s no work today, the office is closed, which means there’s no assemblance of meaningless papers to review and distract me from the papers I should be reading. Instead, I decide to go visit Roasted Delights, an old coffeehouse nestled into the corner of our little nothing town. I’m not much of a coffee-drinker normally, but I figure the sudden hit of caffeine might make my situation clearer. Not to mention, Nixon worked there Saturdays and it would be nice to get an outside opinion.

The place is packed when I finally pull in, and I have to wrestle myself in-between what seems to be a thousand moving bodies just to get to him. Nixon is helping an old lady with a cup of dark roast, calmly trying to explain the difference between the different coffee blends. His eyes widen when he sees me and I wave, exhausted from hours of mental torment.

It takes nearly fifteen minutes until he gets a free moment, and when he does he has a mug of something black and disgusting in his hands that he pushes over the counter to me. “Got you something.”

Nixon is a tall man with a rail-skin frame due to a metabolism that burned through anything and everything within seconds of consuming it. Combined with the shock of blond hair sticking out in wild directions atop his head, and his scarily pale blue eyes, he closely resembled a ghost or an extremely pasty scarecrow.

I examine the cup, swirling it around and watching the steam rise into fancy spirals in the air. “Disgusting.” I take a sip.

“How are you holding up?” Nixon asks, knobby elbows fighting for space as he leans on the surface top. “I see you’ve showered.”

I had. I hadn’t wanted to, but a nervous energy had forced me into it. “Nix, I haven’t been… I haven’t been completely honest with you. About what happened.”

One eyebrow arches in waiting expectation. I blow out a breath of air and even though I was the one to come to him, I suddenly find myself very reluctant to speak the words out loud. It’s almost as though speaking them will make them actually real. “She didn’t just leave me.” A pause, glancing down quickly before flitting over to the left wall. “She left a note.”

“Jesus,” Nixon mutters. He shakes his head, grabbing the coffee he had brought for me and downing it suddenly in one gulp. “What are you guys, in high school? She left a note?”

“Well… it’s more of a journal really,” I say, tapping my fingers anxiously against the tear in my jeans. I remember making plans with her to go out and buy some new ones with the bonus I’d received recently. I also remember the guilty nod she had given then, knowing already that she wouldn’t be around when that happened. “It, uh… it talks about what happened. Everything, I assume.”

“And she gave this to you?” Nixon repeats incredulously. In the back, someone calls out his name and he holds up a finger for them to wait.

I nod. I hold the empty mug in my hands now, liking the concrete feel of it more than the coffee it had previously contained. “She handed it to me a day before she disappeared. Said it was a present. Then she told me to wait until the next day to open it. I keep thinking about what would have happened if I had opened it then, if maybe I could have caught her before she left and… and—”

“And what?” Nixon asks. “What would you have done, Sam? Asked her not to leave you? Or asked her to love you again?”

I shrug miserably. I want to be mad at him, but the emotion simply isn’t there. I know he’s right, but I want to believe I could have done something. Somehow that assurance makes me feel better about the whole situation, as if giving me back some semblance of control.

“Did you read it?”

It takes me a second to realize he means the journal and not the situation. The answer is no to both. “Not yet. I was going to, but then—”

“Nixon Parlexxi, if you do not get back to work in the next two seconds I’ll—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Nixon calls back, irritation coloring his tone. In all the time I had known him, Nixon had never seemed to grasp the concept that you had to work to work. His parents had named him Nixon in the hopes that he might turn into something great one day. Thus far, their experiment had failed.

He turns back to me, pouring himself another coffee. “Then?” he prompts.

“I found an envelope. I assumed it was a letter, presumably to me, so I opened it and found a check instead.”

Nixon’s brow wrinkles mid-pour. “A check? For how much?”

“$20,000.”

Nixon nearly drops the pot, but luckily he manages to support it with his other hand just in time. “$20,000?” he hisses, glancing around anxiously as though someone might overhear. I’m not sure why. Who cared if someone found out? The money was meaningless to me anyway—good riddance. “What the hell? Why? $20,000?”

I hadn’t understood it either at the time. My first reaction had been anger, assuming it was some form of retribution for leaving suddenly in the middle of the night. There was no form of note inside the envelope, and so I turned to the journal, the little, black book, for answers.

“So I flip to the first page,” I recall, shaking my head and chuckling incredulously. “And there, on the first entry, was a date postmarked exactly one year ago from the day I found it; the first time we ever met each other. She talks about meeting some ‘wild and handsome stranger’ at a bar, and the first words he ever said to her.”

Before either of us can say another word, a firm hand grasps Nixon’s upper elbow and a short, pudgy woman with eyes that could cut glass jerks him suddenly away from the counter. “You listen to me,” she says in an accent I can’t place. “You either work or you get out of my shop and go find another job somewhere else. Is that clear?”

Only after she receives a terrified nod from Nixon does she release him.

“Sorry Sam,” he apologizes once she’s gone, wincing as he rubs his arm. “You’re gonna have to tell me some other time or Madge is gonna have my head. Maybe after work?”

“Sure,” I say, biting back my disappointment with an easy smile as I shove off the counter, leaving my second mug steaming and untouched. “Maybe.”

The drive back home is even more dismal than the drive over. When I open the door I purposefully avoid the book, which almost seems to glare at me from its hidden corner. I start going about my normal routine, a routine that has become so familiar to me that I no longer need to think about it before my hands are moving to put the kettle on and start bath water in our—my—tiny, vanity bathroom.

In the middle of this process, however, I am seized by some crazed, primal urge. I drop the towel I’m holding in my hands and rush out to the living room, snatching the book off the ground. I collapse on the couch, my fingers fumbling for the latch. It clicks open with a satisfying burst and the envelope falls to my lap. Previously obscured by the envelope, the first entry remained, a delicate scrawl that I knew like the back of my hand. I breathe out a sigh of relief, the need to give into my pain finally fulfilled.

Tuesday, March 11th

A man approached me today. Wild hair, unhinged eyes, the kind of crazy that can only be performative. He was dressing up for tonight. Everyone is. It’s the only way you have a modicum of a chance to win.

He slid into the seat next to me, ordered us two drinks without asking me (I don’t even know if he spared a glance at the menu) and smiled at me. It was a nice smile. The lopsided, bare-toothed grin that crinkled his eyes at the edges. I smiled back, waiting for the offer I knew was coming. They all had offers. I was a prize, a possession to be won. It was a game I had been playing for years; thus far, I remained the sole winner.

“You look beautiful,” he said, the words flowing practiced off his tongue. He was slightly drunk, enough to give him courage but not enough to mess this up for him, not yet. He had been here before. “How about I offer you a drink, you tell me your name, and we let the night take us where it will?”

I pretended to think about it. “How about I take the drink, give you a fake name, and politely make up an excuse to leave by the end of the evening? How does that sound?”

“You’re funny.” His answer was dry, brimming with sarcasm. “I have a feeling you get offers like this often?”

I shrugged noncommittally. The answer was, of course, yes. But he already knew that.

“How about this?” He reached for my hand and I let him take it. “One year. That’s all I’m asking. One year to make you fall in love with me.”

Interesting. No one had ever taken such a direct approach before. “And what do I get for my troubles, hmm?”

“A bet,” he answered, excitement ringing through his words. “An amount of…” He trailed off blankly, alcohol tumbling his mind. He turned to the bartender as he handed us our drinks. “How much do you make in a year, sir?”

The man examined him with the blank stare of someone who is used to dealing with strange, unexplained questions. “$20,000. Approximately. Two whiskey’s on the rocks.”

The man grabbed the drink, gulping it down suddenly. “One year. If you don’t fall in love with me in one year, I’ll pay you that man’s salary.”

“And if I do fall in love with you?”

“You pay the same.”

I laughed, shaking my head incredulously. It was a ludicrous idea. I’d never fallen in love with anyone before. Why start now? “May I inquire your name, mysterious suitor?”

“Samuel,” he said, crinkly grin stopping my heart once more. “Samuel Broadstone.”

“Well Samuel,” I said, shaking his hand. “You have yourself a deal.”

There is four words written at the bottom of the page, edited in hastily long after the entry was written. I clutch the envelope tight in my hands, forcing myself to read them once more.

Congratulations, Samuel.

You won.