Vain

“You’re leaving.” I nodded in acknowledgement. “In a few short months, you’ll be gone, back to your life in America. I didn’t want to be your friend.”

I sighed loudly. “So that whole bit about knowing who I was, what kind of person I was. Was that bull?”

His eyes cast down. “No, I, uh, it wasn’t.” His eyes met mine again. “I’m just-I was quick to judge. I was wrong when I thought you couldn’t change. So few can do it.”

I brought my hands down and wedged them between my crossed legs.

“You think I’ve changed?”

“Sophie,” he offered as if in explanation, his brows pulled tightly across his forehead.

Tears sprang silently and cascaded down my face.

“Soph,” he said quietly, reaching for me, but I refused to budge. “You’ve been transformed for a while.”

I choked back a sob. It meant so much to me to hear those words.

“Then why?”

“I told you. You’re leaving. I feel like an idiot admitting to this but I confess, I don’t do well when people leave. I promise myself I won’t get attached. It’s a defense mechanism in my line of work,” he admitted with a slight smile.

“And now?”

“I-I would be honored to call you friend,” he said succinctly, with an odd finality, as if he meant this as more a fact than an opinion.

I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted to be his friend. I’d never been respected by a man before, not truly.

Click.

And this was my new epiphany. Men wanted me. They all did, however briefly, but none of them wanted to keep me. That’s what I needed. I needed to be owned, loved. But not by a man. I knew then that I never needed to be kept by a man. What I needed was to love myself, to want to keep myself around. And in that revelation, I knew that if I wanted to keep myself, that a man wanting to keep me would just be a by-product. Who wouldn’t want to keep someone who respected himself or herself?

“And I would be honored for you to call me friend,” I finally told him once I’d collected myself.

His expression softened and he grinned at me.

“Your heart is startlingly beautiful, Sophie,” he stated after a brief moment of fixed gazes.

My breath sucked into my chest at an alarming rate. There was no mention of my face, my legs, my ass, my breasts, my hair, my clothing, the way I carried myself, what I wore or how I wore it. There was no mention of me other than the part no one could even see. I’d been called beautiful so many times. It gratified me, validated me, but it was all empty, a facade. This was the first time someone had called me beautiful and it actually meant something to me. The praise slammed into my skin and permeated my body, leaving me flushed and overwhelmed.

My hands clenched on the table. I wanted so badly to rush him in that moment, to run my hands through his straight, silky, black hair and memorize his mouth with mine but something stopped me. I ignored the instinct, told myself that Ian was different. I decided I’d let him take the reins because I had never let anyone do that before. I was going to let him set the pace, let him discover me on his own. Giving him control gave me more power than I imagined I could own. Letting him worry about the next move was incredibly liberating and I knew with absolute certainty that the ride was going to be the best of my entire life.

Sophie Price had just learned self-control.

“Thank you,” I told him softly, “very much. That has to be the best compliment I’ve ever gotten.”

“Surely not,” he said, puzzling over my quietude.

“It is.”

“Curious,” he said simply.

He leaned forward and rested his forearms farther up on the table, closer to my hands, gripping the edge. I removed one hand and picked up my cup, taking a small sip. The tea was surprisingly good. “Tell me what your life back home is like,” he asked.

I sighed loudly. Adrenaline shot through me. Be honest, I told myself. “I lied to the children,” I began.

His brows pinched. “What do you mean?”

“That day, when Oliver asked me about my parents, I said they were nice.” I gave him a small smile. “They most definitely are not.”

Ian studied me carefully. “How?”

I braced myself. I knew I was about to unload on this guy. This perfect, unselfish boy who would probably want nothing to do with me after what I was about to reveal to him, but it didn’t matter. It was my past. I couldn’t just brush it under the table. “My parents are the epitome of self-involved. They are beyond wealthy, uninhibited, unwise, shallow, every combination of terrible you can think of.

“Since I was an infant, I was raised by a nanny. I was indulged to impossible levels and to my own detriment, I can admit now. At fourteen, I fired the nanny and my parents decided I could raise myself, so I did.” I hesitated and Ian squeezed my hand. I was mesmerized for a moment as his fingers rubbed the tops of mine. Butterflies took over and my breathing became labored. I looked up at him and lost control of my thoughts.

“And?”

I was startled back to the present. “And I gave myself no boundaries. If I wanted to sleep with a boy, I did. If I wanted to try a drug, I did. If I wanted to drink to the point of excess,” I began and trailed off.

“Go on,” he said.

“My goal in life was to rule my tiny, elite world, so I did. I manipulated, used, disrespected and took advantage of every person I called friend. Don’t get me wrong, none of us were saints by any means, but I led them all. I influenced them all. I pulled and played with their puppet strings. I was the ultimate puppeteer. I was cruel and unrelenting. I was no better than my parents.”

I continued on with details of past indiscretions, ending with the day Jerrick died, the day I was caught with cocaine, my interaction with Officer Casey and even Spencer and his father. I confessed it all, spilled it at his feet and the sum of all my actions surprised even me. Humiliation filled my cheeks and I tucked my chin into my chest when I was done.

Ian sat back against his chair and his hands released mine, leaving them bereft of the boiling heat I was becoming so addicted to. The air left his chest in one whoosh and shame inundated me. My eyes burned. I steeled myself for rejection, for a reaction of disgust, pinching my eyes closed and turning my face toward the window of passersby, but it never came.

Eventually my gaze returned to him and he was staring at me, hard. “My parents are high-ranking political officials in Cape Town,” he began, astonishing me. “I was raised by boarding schools during the school year and nannies in the summers. My parents only had time for their professions, so my brother and I found solace in many vices.”

I was taken aback at this admission.

“What’s his name?” I asked, suddenly and outrageously curious to know everything about Ian’s life.

He half-smiled. “Simon.”

“Go on,” I said, borrowing his phrase.

“When I was seventeen, at a party, we were all drunk and I was caught in a compromising situation with another official’s daughter. Smartphones were involved. Needless to say, lots of pictures were also involved. And the media had a field day with it. The girl was labeled a whore, I was labeled Cape Town’s bad boy. My parents were not amused.

“I lived an utterly selfish existence up until that point, but when I saw Mel, the girl involved, when I saw her name in the headlines and the stigma it ended up attaching to her, I was thoroughly ashamed of myself. It had been my fault. I should have been looking after her.

“Poor Mel had to transfer to America to finish university. She’s still there, from what I’ve heard.”

I was shocked silent by his confession. I never, in my wildest dreams, thought Ian could have been defined as anything else but perfection, anything other than infallible. He was human after all.

“So how did you end up at Masego?” I asked him when he seemed to have trailed off into his own thoughts.

He took a deep breath. “My parents kicked me out. I was done with school. They’d done their part, or so they said they did. They cut me off after too many follies and I was shoved out. I had a friend named Kelly who worked with a gorilla rescue in the Congo. I joined her and one day we were called to Uganda, near Lake Victoria. Turned out, the police had confiscated three baby gorillas from poachers and they needed rescuing.

“I’d been with Kelly for six months and really enjoyed what I was doing. I felt like I was accomplishing some good, and I was, but while I was in Uganda, on our way to get the babies, the strangest thing happened.” I was riveted and found myself leaning toward him. “We stumbled upon a little girl, no more than seven years old, walking by herself on the side of the road around two in the morning. We stopped to inquire if she needed help but she waved us off.”

“Kelly was ready to keep going, but I insisted we help the little girl. I got out of the truck and approached her. She was obviously dehydrated and starving. I could see her ribs through her skin and my stomach wretched for her. I picked her up and put her in the cab with us. I asked her questions, but she was despondent, too distraught, too hungry, too unable to speak.

“We took her to Kampala with us, about an hour from where we’d found her, and where we were expected to retrieve the gorillas. While Kelly readied the truck to transport the animals, I took the little girl to get something to eat, to get her to drink and even paid some women at a nearby restaurant to bathe her while I fetched her something decent to wear. Her clothes were threadbare.

“When everything was done, the little girl looked brand new, happier. She finally spoke to me and told me her name was Esther. She told me her parents had died and her grandmother was only able to take care of one of one child, so the girl chose to have her grandmother look after her three-year-old brother.”

Tears I’d been collecting fell in unison at the proclamation and Ian took my hand. “It has a happy ending,” he said, smiling and I smiled back.

“We had stumbled upon her trying to walk to Kampala for help. I took the little girl and found out through the locals Charles’ and Karina’s names and number. I called them and they came to pick her up without hesitation. I never went back to the Congo with Kelly.”

“Amazing,” I whispered.

“They are,” he answered.

“No,” I balked. “I mean, yeah, they’re amazing, but I was talking about you, Ian.”

“Sophie, anyone would have done what I did.”

“No, they wouldn’t have, Ian.”

He playfully rolled his eyes and shrugged off my compliment.

“Why Ian?” he asked after a few minutes of silence.

“Because,” I offered without further explanation.

“I like it,” he said, staring out the window.

“Why?”

“‘Dingane’ makes my heart ache to hear it.”

I sat up a bit at that. “Why let them call you that then?”

“It means something to me every time they say it. It reminds me of who I am and who I never want to become again.”