Cake Cafe

CHAPTER TWENTY

"For the love of a rose, the gardener becomes the  slave of a thousand thorns."

                                          ~~Turkish Proverb

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NAJIB
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By the time I got home, I'd almost forgotten about the call. Almost. My time with Hidaaya had taken most of the weight off my chest,  leaving in its place a feeling of glee. My mind was still reeling from it, my hands still feeling the slight weight of her fingers when I held them. Heck, I could still hear her voice in my head and I could still feel what it made me feel, as if someone was gently massaging my heart.

But now that I'm here, inside four walls with no Hidaaya, the phone in my hand brought back old dormant memories crash landing on my brain.

Jamila. Jay Jay.

For the duration of our time together I'd called her Jay Jay. Got her friends calling her that too. It was a sudden kind of thing, really felt like a 'fall' but in the wrong direction of love. No one had seen anything coming except Hisham. And even he didn't know exactly, he just never felt comfortable around her.

By the time we found out, I was knee deep into trouble that lasted longer than we'd all thought it would.

The lady had lured me in, with what I now know was a bucketful of carefully planned and pretended tactics. And I'd been an utter fool to have fallen for them.

Now, years after the whole thing, right when I was having the time of my life, she called. Once a thorn, always a thorn innit?

And I'd had to lie to Hidaaya about the call being nothing. It wasn't nothing. It couldn't be nothing. Paramount on my mind was why? Why would she call me after all this time? How in God's name did she get my contact? And what right did she have to call herself my Jay Jay? I had only one person to refer to as my own, and the proper phrase would be my Hidaaya.

Despite hoping fervently for it not to happen and even taking measures to prevent it, I'd thought deep down, that when this moment came one day, if it came one day, I'd feel down or anxious. But now, I had to keep my phone aside to reduce the chances of me slamming it on the wall in anger.

I hadn't seen or heard from Jamila since after the incident. In fact, I'd followed Mami's advise and changed my contact information to help with the therapy process. For a number of reasons which very much included this Jamila lady.

Whatever she meant by calling me today, I didn't want to know. And I refuse to allow her get to me. She spelled trouble for me in the past but never again. Never again.

Telling Hidaaya about this is something that I plan to do, at the right time. But not when she seems still skeptical about our relationship, not when we haven't any solid foundation to stand on. When I have full confidence in her feelings for me as I do in what I feel for her, that's when I'll tell her. That is, after finding the softest of ways to tell her that due to a number of deliberated circumstances, I almost ended up in jail. And that I was once a...

Stroking my hands over my head did little to sooth the crawling thoughts inside, memories bringing back unwanted flashes of an erratic man shaking madly in a room without air conditioning, in March.