Wrapped up in despair

Today Caspar and I did the rounds of the various events he was organizing although usually he sent out Claudia with her vicious angles to scream abuse at whomever messed up her incoherent orders but today he seemed to need to evade the office. I thought perhaps he wanted to avoid another day of Ladonna insanity but he appeared to be nervous where ever we were. It was our last stop at Sedero’s that had me very confused. Caspar did not use Sedero’s as a function room, even though they had one, they generally rented to Cameo Larsen as most people were not prepared to deal with Chantal and her overbearing presence. I didn’t want to go into the restaurant and tried to stay in the car but Caspar insisted that I come in.

This was the first time I had stepped inside the place since I left and I wished the carpet would open up and swallow me from view. I didn’t want to deal with Chantal, the possibility of Jojo, the sniping of Nadia, or the reproach of Jazz so I slunk in behind Caspar doing my best to hide behind him. We went upstairs to Chantal’s office and to my surprise she completely ignored me which if I thought about it should not have been a surprise. I was no longer of interest to her so she would have swept me into the street like everything else that did not concern her which was pretty much everything outside the restaurants as Chantal didn’t care for much outside work and her family.

She and Caspar started droning on about a function I had never heard of, it must have been something new he had organised without telling me so I could have stayed in the car as I was no help to him at all here. Halfway through the drone Chantal starts searching through her files for some papers and then tells Caspar that she left them at one of her other restaurants at the other end of town. She said she would send someone to go pick them up but then Caspar decided to be all chivalrous and offered me for the job. I wanted to thump him with the laptop then and there but he was oblivious to the black looks I was sending him. The last thing I wanted to do was go to another Sedero’s and risk meeting any of the family, which really means meeting Jojo. Caspar tosses me the keys to the car and off I go leaving them to gossip or whatever they pass off as working.

I find myself Northside yet again this time at the smaller Sedero restaurant which is almost identical except without the stage as every café has performers down this end so they decided not to bother competing so I went inside to find the manager who was someone called Cynthia. I was in a hurry and wanted to get out of there as soon as possible, Sedero’s, any Sedero’s was not the place I wanted to be in at that moment. I see someone fussing behind the bar so I walk up and ask for Cynthia but no one answers me, cranky at their rudeness I go right up to the bar, see it’s some guy and think how stupid does he have to be to ignore people. I ask him again for Cynthia but he doesn’t do anything so either he is deaf or stupid and I am about to throw something at him when he stands up, turns around and I am face to face with Jojo Sedero.

Of all the people I never wanted to see again he was second only to Gervais Dubois. I might have been frozen with shock but Jojo was entirely the opposite. His face went dark, he scowled at me with folded arms and it was like walking barefoot across a pile of broken glass.. I told myself to keep to business, if I just keep to business I can get in and out but Jojo was having none of it. He glared at me and asked if I was enjoying my new job with Gervais’s lap boy and I felt my face redden with anger. Ok Caspar might be a strange, sleazy person who manages to sleep with everything he meets, but at least he leaves me alone but of course I didn’t tell Jojo that. I told him I loved it, best job I ever had as I was not always covering someone else’s ass. He glared at me even more, if that was possible and then he sniped that it must be nice to have a boyfriend who gets me jobs.

I could not stand that he would lump me with Gervais when he knew damn well I hated him so I gave him a frozen stare of hate and started to walk to the back of the restaurant asking where Cynthia was. He strode after me, grabbed my arm and swung me around. I told him to let go as I was not his to push around and I did not belong to Gervais, I belonged to myself and he should look at his own behaviour before questioning mine. He was the one who ran off with a soap tart, he was the one who did not turn up at work, he was the one who did everything wrong. Jojo stood there holding onto me and his face melted at my tirade, he looked sad and angry and hurt all at once and I knew somehow we had both gone terribly wrong.

I wasn’t angry at him anymore I was just hurt and I told him. “You hurt me.” He looked ashamed and said “You hurt me too.” It was a terrible moment because I wanted to tell him I was sorry that I didn’t support his dreams even though I thought he needed to approach them differently, and that I was sorry I did not tell him how I really felt, in fact I didn’t tell him anything because I was put in a hole by Gervais. Instead I just stood there like the fool I was and it wasn’t until he wiped my face that I realised I was crying. As suddenly as he had grabbed me to stop me, he pulled me into his arms and was kissing me as wildly as he had in the car and I knew I wanted to be with him, I had to be with him but I had to get rid of the Royce and Coco issue. I also knew if he found out what I had done he would go after Gervais with his idiot hot head temper so I had to buy myself some time.

I pushed him away and looked at the floor for if I looked at his face I would be lost forever and to save myself I lied, I told him that the way he had flaunted Lynx was too hard for me to get over and that he had changed for her but ignored me. He pulled me roughly to him again and said he had done that only to hurt me and I started to cry again, hating myself for falling apart the second I needed to be strong. I told him that he should be proud because hurting me is the one thing he had managed to do well.

It was at that moment Cynthia decided to show up so I broke away from Jojo, got the papers and ran for my life before he could stop me. Once back Southside I sat in the car park for ten minutes trying to get myself together and as soon as I got my breath back I went into the office and gave Chantal her papers. She and Caspar stopped talking the minute I entered and she gave me a weird sharp look as if expecting me to say something. Caspar and I left soon after and on the drive back to work he casually asked me what had held me up. I looked out the window and said nothing, I was just unfamiliar with the Northside of town if I was not so aware of him being such a lackey to Gervais I would think he and Chantal had arranged what happened. My life manages to get into a more tangled ball each day.

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