Page 22 of Rejection Overruled

17 - Brooke

I could kick myself. As Jamal reacted to the stunt I pulled on the drag road, I recalled something I saw in his file – the background I had Sophia secretly done. He’d met an accident when he was in college. I ventured the subject hoping to discover if his reaction had something to do with that.

“Does this have anything to do with your accident?” I asked.

“How did you know about that?” he asked. “Don’t tell me you did a background check on me.”

“I won’t tell you I ran your background.”

“You’re a piece of work, you know that?” he said in a disbelieving tone. “It’s been fifteen years. Why can’t you let it go? Look at you, a successful lawyer, you have everything most women would die for and yet, you are still hung up what happened when we were in high school.”

“What about you, Jamal?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you forgotten? Have you ever wondered about how you and your friends made me feel?”

“Of course I have, I’m not completely made of steel you know.”

“You could start making up for that by telling me about the accident.”

There was silence for a moment as I waited for him to tell me. I knew from the tick in his jaw that this was a sensitive subject. I wasn’t sure why I wanted Jamal to bear his soul to me at that point. All I knew was that there was something interesting happening between us that caused me to set aside my need for revenge – even for a little while. A few minutes passed and I thought he was never going to say anything. Then he surprised me.

“It was a weekend of partying. All of us had too much to drink, but no one was man enough to admit that we were drunk. I’d just got a brand new second hand Harley which I hadn’t finished paying for. The other guys were in Ricky’s Ferrari and Botham decided to ride with me.”

“That name sounds familiar.”

“He was one of the guys from our high school team.”

The name was familiar alright. Botham Garrick was the one who made the bet with Jamal. His face loomed before me as my mind went back to the locker. I could still hear the conversation as though it was yesterday. That Botham and his friends were bad news and Jamal had got caught up in their company. We listened to the silence for a few minutes while all those terrible memories came back to me.

However, one memory was prominent over the others. The night of our date when Jamal kissed me. Something about that kiss resonated with me and I was under the misconception that he’d felt something. His lips on mine, that soft growl in his throat was not a man who was disgusted by a kiss, but rather a man who was excited.

Jamal’s voice brought me back from the past as he shared his accident with me.

“It was stupid. We all had been drinking, against the advice of our coach. We had a practice match with another school the following day so we should have been in our dorms resting.”

He paused and looked out his window, his fist tightly folded and resting in his knee. Unwittingly, I reached over and covered his fist with my hand. Jamal’s head whipped around. He stared at my hand and then glanced over at my other hand on the wheel.

I withdrew and placed both hands on the wheel, realizing just how much he was affected by that accident.

“It’s my fault he’s dead,” he declared.

I stepped on the brake and pulled over on the soft shoulder of the road. My heart thundered while I tried to understand what he was talking about.

“Who’s dead?” my voice squeaked.

“Botham,” he said quietly. “He insisted on riding with me and I didn’t have a spear helmet. I should have given him mine.”

Guilt washed over me as I realized just much I had hated Botham throughout the last fifteen years. Now hearing that he died in that accident made me realize just how short life was.

Then it hit me. Jamal also could have died in that accident. What would I have done then? I would definitely not be plotting my revenge against a dead man. But here he was, sitting beside me and my revenge suddenly became insignificant.

There was only one truth that remained. I wanted Jamal Styles. That crush I had on him in high school never went away. In fact, since meeting him again, those feelings had intensified ten-fold.

The pain of that incident was evident on his face. His eyes had that faraway look of someone who was hurting deep inside. I leaned over, unclasped his seatbelt and pulled him to me, holding him close. I held him for a while until he gently extricated himself.

“You’re not going soft on me now, are you Brooke?”

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