Lemon Truffles - Love Instantly (6 page)

He’d wanted to be with Angela, but she was already betrothed to another man. He wanted to spend his life with her and have a family with her, and they already even had a child together. Yet she’d been making plans to have another man stand in his place as Jayden’s father.

Cheng couldn’t breathe as he clenched the steering wheel of his rental car so hard his knuckles turned white. “Fuck!” he shouted to the top of his lungs as he slammed his head back against the headrest. Now what?

~

“What’s that mommy?” Jayden asked Angela as she absently made her way back to the den of their three bedroom, two and a half bath, new construction townhouse. She visually followed Jayden’s line of sight as well as his pointed finger down to her hand. It was then that she realized she was in such a daze that she was still tightly clutching the object that Cheng had given her. Peering down to get a good look at it, she finally saw that the item was a USB flash drive.

“It’s something that goes to the computer. Now it’s time for you to be off to bed. I’ll race you to the bathroom. Last one there’s a rotten egg!” She smiled brightly for her son’s sake and hurried for a few steps until he lost interest in asking about the flash drive and rushed off, screeching with laughter out of the room, down the hall, all the way up the stairs and into his bathroom.

Angela gently laid the USB drive down near her laptop on her desk in a corner of the den she’d sectioned off with walls to create a home office space for herself. Then she went upstairs and got her young son ready for bed. When Jayden was finally down for the night, with the whole bedtime routine seeming to have taken even longer than usual tonight, she went back downstairs. In the den, she powered on her computer and reached for the removable drive from Cheng.

She wasn’t sure what she’d find as she went to open the digital content on the flash drive. The files had been arranged in the order in which Cheng had obviously wanted her to view them and were numbered accordingly. The first file was a Word document. Angela opened it and discovered that it was a letter to her, or at least what had started out as a letter and turned into an ongoing journal of sorts. In it, Cheng had been updating the letter, adding various entries at different times throughout the last five years. It was like a personal blog he’d written just for her. Each section was dated, with the initial entry starting about two months after their night together in HK and it ended with the current date.

In his first entry, Cheng related in more details his time in Japan that kept them apart and told her how sorry he was for them losing touch, but vowed someday, somehow he would find her again. Throughout his later entries, there were plenty of comical stories of him with his family in Shanghai and somber moments of him telling of the distress he felt at not being able to find her, talk to her or hold her. Of him worrying he would end up alone because he sometimes had such a difficult time relating to other people personally, which he felt was ironic since he seemed to know how to interact with them when it came to business.

In short, Cheng spoke of his accomplishments, his isolation, his joy, fears, hopes, and desperation over the last few years. He’d spoken of missing his parents, who were both now deceased. Cheng also told her how he spent a lot of his time learning discipline and self defense by doing tai chi, Buddhist meditation, and learning mixed martial arts, particularly after the incident in Tokyo. He spent a lot of the rest of his time outside of work by helping some of the elderly people from his maternal grandmother’s community. He did a lot of the manual labor and maintenance around their homes that they were getting too elderly to continue doing themselves, especially for those without family members who could assist them.

Cheng even had a section in which he mused about what a biracial child they had together might look like or be like. In his last entry from today he again referred to Angela as “
tian shi
” utilizing the Mandarin characters as he did throughout many of his entries. He had written more about his hopes for their future together once she realized he wasn’t the bad guy in all of this. When she finished reading his extended letter, she went on to the next file, which was a picture file.

It was a digital photo though it didn’t have great resolution and was likely taken from a last generation camera phone. The image was definitely from the time he was in Japan. In it, Cheng’s entire face was covered in dark, purplish black bruises, his jaw looked to be wired shut and she was sure his nose had been broken too. There was a gash where his scar was now that had been sutured closed with a number of stitches. Angela gasped. Now she could understand and feel the full impact of what he’d suffered and it made her want to vomit. She couldn’t believe anyone could do such a foul, horrible thing to such a remarkable man, attempting to destroy such an exquisite wonder of natural male beauty.

At times, the depths of human cruelty astonished Angela. It was almost inconceivable to her the kinds of things she knew human beings could do to each other. With shaky hands, she closed the chilling, disturbing image and felt sad that she hadn’t been there to help him in his times of need either. That feeling that they’d missed out on so much together again haunted her, but she did her best to suppress it as she clicked on the next few files which were also images. Both the photo labels and the pictures themselves showed the transition Cheng had made from his high rise life in HK to starting back at the ground floor where he’d ended up in Shanghai. Angela couldn’t help but feel proud of Cheng for all that he’d accomplished in such a relatively short period of time, rebuilding and then quickly improving his lot in life in just the last few years.

Opening the next digital file from Cheng, she saw that the next image was actually an artist’s rendering of her. Angela was startled. Cheng had either drawn it himself or commissioned someone to do it, but since she knew he hadn’t had any photos of her, he’d done it from his memory. It was done in pencil or maybe charcoal so the image was in black and white, but it was a lovely, flattering piece of artwork and surprisingly accurate, capturing nuances that she wouldn’t have thought Cheng knew or remembered from their brief time together. Especially since it was dated from about a year after they’d met.

Then in the next file she opened, were images from one of those online “baby maker” photo games where he’d utilized a picture of him and his drawing of her to create a boy baby and a girl baby that both looked like a combination of them. The images made Angela laugh. The babies were cute, but the boy baby didn’t look much like their Jayden, especially since every day that he got older, Jayden looked more and more like his father. Angela sighed.

There were two files left for her to open now. The next to last one was another Word document. This one was titled “Get to Know Cheng” and was clearly some Internet social networking website survey. Full name: Cheng Hung Liu. Favorite color: red. Siblings: none – only child. She found out some other fun and interesting facts about him too, including that he’d spent time being educated in England as a child, which would explain his UK accent when he spoke in English. Though Hong Kong had previously been under UK colonial rule, Cheng hadn’t been born there. He’d been born in Shanghai. She saw too that he had left a blank survey for her to fill out as well in this Word document.

Next, she made her way to the final file on the flash drive. It was a MP3 playlist that had been compiled today. The first song was Aaliyah’s “I Don’t Wanna Be.” Track two was J. Holiday’s “You Should Be With Me,” while track three was Alicia Key’s “Unthinkable (I’m Ready).” Next was Tamia’s “I’m So Into You.” The song on track five turned out to be a Chinese and English duet by a duo of singer’s Angela had never heard of before – Dawen and Sha Sha Jones and it was done to the tune of Drake’s song “Marvin’s Room.”

Angela didn’t understand all of the Chinese parts word for word, but got the general gist of the song. It was a heartbreaking song about two ex-lovers who still loved each other, but couldn’t work their relationship out due to long distance. Now, the former girlfriend had a new man in her life but the ex-boyfriend wanted her back. Angela sighed and thought about how art imitated life and life imitated art as the last track on the playlist began to play. It was Cheng sending her a spoken message that kind of reminded Angela of an extended voicemail recording.

“
Tian shi
, I remember how you told me that you really like American R&B music, so I put together this play list for you. Each of these songs reminded me of you for various reasons; mostly the song lyrics or contexts were specific to us, because I don’t want to be without you. I do think you should be with me. If you ask me, I am ready whenever you are for the next phase of our relationship and saying that ‘I’m into you’ is definitely an understatement.

“
So while I hope you aren’t with anyone else right now, I mean really, really hope you aren’t, the last song was an AMBW duet that I found on YouTube with a Chinese man and an African-American woman singing. AMBW stands for Asian Men Black Women by the way. I really like the song since it makes me think of you and how long we’ve been separated by uncontrollable circumstances every time I hear it.

“
Anyway, I’ll explain more about why you haven’t heard from me in so long when I see you later tonight, since I’m on my way to drive out to your house in a few minutes. I hope you can forgive the intrusion as well my absence. I really do hope we can work everything out between us.”

Angela looked up and saw that it was already 2:00 am. She’d been so engrossed in all the files Cheng had given her that she hadn’t paid any attention to the fact that she’d been down here for more than four hours going through everything. Angela chewed on her bottom lip trying to decide what she should do now.

She felt wide awake and she didn’t feel like going up to bed yet. So instead, she filled out the blank survey with information on her and Jayden. Name(s): Angela Louise Hawkins and Jayden Cheng Hawkins. Favorite color(s): ALH – blue, JCH – orange. Siblings: ALH – one brother named Nathan, JCH – none, only child.

Angela completed the other survey questions and saved the new file to her desktop. She then retrieved her diary and scanned some select pages into a new PDF that she also saved to her desktop. Then she created a new folder that she called “Cheng” and put the files she’d just created in it before she started dragging and dropping photos she wanted to share with him into the folder as well.

Some pictures were of her throughout her life, especially when she was pregnant with Jayden. She put in ultrasound shots from when she’d been carrying Jayden too. She even included some videos of Jayden taking some of his first steps, some footage from her and Jayden’s vacation to Hawaii a couple of years ago. She added videos of her and their son at Disneyland as well as Jayden learning to ride his tricycle and even his first swimming lesson. Then Angela decided to record a voice message too.

“
Hey Cheng. So I’m sure, as you can imagine, that today has been a whirlwind, rollercoaster ride of emotions for me. I’m not feeling as overwhelmed right now as I did during our conversation earlier tonight. Look, I really need you to understand my position. It took me a while to find a guy who I thought would be good for me and who would also accept Jayden as part of a package deal. That being said, I don’t want to make promises to you that I don’t know whether or not I can keep right now.

“
What I mean is that I’m starting to feel like no matter what I ultimately decide, someone is going to end getting hurt. Brian has been really good to me and Jayden and we’ve been seeing each other for about the last year and a half now. I don’t think I can just throw all that away and break our engagement based on some random one-day re-acquaintance with you. Plus, I had felt so much hurt and resentment towards you for so long, thinking you’d abandoned me, even though of course you didn’t even know about Jayden then, that I can’t just pick up where we left off before like nothing ever happened.

“
I need time still to figure out how I want to proceed from here. However, I do want to give you the opportunity to get to know our son, if you want to do that. Understand too that I don’t want our baby stuck in the middle of any drama. I’ve worked damn hard to make his world as stress-free as possible, but I’m sure we can work out something reasonable.

I also wanted to say thanks for taking the time to reach out to me and share the good, the bad, the ugly and the wonderful from your life adventures and misadventures over the last few years. Having some of these chronicles archived will probably also make a world of difference to Jayden when he’s older too and we can share some of these things with him. So anyway, it’s getting late and I need to get to bed.

I saw the contact page you included in your letter slash journal slash blog, so I’ll send these files to your personal e-mail address before I go to sleep in a few minutes. Oh and by the way, I think it would be best if I work from home tomorrow. Clearly you know where to find me if you need me, but I will be checking my work e-mail and I’ll be connected via my VPN access so I’ll be able to connect to our intranet portals, SharePoint, network drives and folders and Basecamp projects. So I’m all set. I’ll talk to you later in the week. Good night.”

Angela sent all the files over to his g-mail account and tried to get her overwrought mind to calm down so she could get some sleep tonight.

~

Cheng was currently living at an extended stay executive corporate housing location, but it was basically a luxury hotel. Which fortunately for him meant that they had both a fully stocked mini bar in his suite as well as twenty-four room service. Cheng had been too upset to eat when he’d first gotten back here after having driven around for a while, and paced around the room for what felt like hours.