The Woman in Red: Chapter 4















4. The flowers
           
           Sometimes the morning after a great evening you get the feeling as if you’ve dreamt it all. That was how Jean-Pierre was feeling. Did he imagine the woman in red? Was she a creation of his mind? He wasn’t a real ‘Don Juan’ when it involved women. Yesterday he had stepped out of his frontiers. When he closed his eyes, he could feel the sensation of the dance, the wild retreat out of the banquet-hall and the passionate kiss before her house door.
            He looked at the card with the phone number. Would it be appropriate if he should call her? What would he say? Thank you for an unforgettable evening! Maybe she wouldn’t like it if he called her too early. No, patience is a virtue, and he would practice it, even if it was against his will.
            Jean-Pierre was no early bird, but when he woke up at six o’clock in the morning, he couldn’t stay in bed. On other days, he would just turn on his other side, cuddle himself in the warm nest and still snooze for a while. But today was different. He was awake now.
            He jumped from one memory to another. Had he been too enthusiastic? No, Katarina had gone with him all the way in the getting acquainted with each other. If he was honest, he had thought for a minute that eventually they would end up in his bed… or hers. An image of two people who ripped off each others clothes popped up in his imagination.
            Jean-Pierre felt an increasing sexual tension building up in his body. What an adolescent behavior he thought. He got away to the bathroom to splash some water on his face. He looked at himself in the mirror. Without exaggerating, he could say that he looked rather handsome. Not unpleasant to look at, but without being mothers finest. His brown hair went well with the color of his eyes. His face was rather symmetrical, and the dimple in his chin gave him something youthful, somewhat disarming.
            When he eventually was startled out of his daydream, he realized that it was high time to go to work. A job as there were many, a position that didn’t give much pleasure or satisfaction what, in fact, should have been. As an accountant with a leading IT-company, he filled his days up with numbers and balance sheets. Debit and credit didn’t have secrets for him, but the flame of the first years was extinguished. Maybe he had to try something else?
            When he hurried, he could stop at the flower shop and ask to deliver some roses to the address Katarina lived. The idea has risen in his mind while he was cooling down in the bathroom. It would be a fine gesture, an aromatic thank you for the pleasant moments he had passed in the presence of the woman in red.
            To put his money where his mouth was, he drove with a speed to the address of the flower shop and ordered a nice bouquet of twenty red roses and asked to deliver them to Katarina’s house. On the card that went with it, he wrote: ‘These roses are far from as beautiful as you.’ Jean-Pierre had not expected the phone call he received four hours later from the shop-assistant of the flower shop.
            ‘We couldn’t deliver the roses sir, because there’s no Katarina at that address. Maybe you had it wrong?...’ What followed, Jean-Pierre hadn’t heard. He closed the mobile his home phone had passed through to him.
          ‘Strange!’ Jean-Pierre thought he had read the right street name on his GPS when he left Katarina the night before. Was he so distracted at that moment? He checked the internet on an itinerary planner and saw that he hadn’t made a mistake. Would he still call her?
            Nothing ventured, nothing gained; he decided with a semi smile. He took the card out of his wallet and determined that it was a mobile phone number. After he had pushed the number, he waited tensioned on the voice of Katarina, who would explain everything.
            But no one answered and after a few moments a voice asked him to leave a message and so he did. ‘Katarina, I… I like to see you again. Maybe we could arrange… a dinner or so. Call me on this number if you want this too.’ The silence on the other side was almost unrealistic. Would she call him back quickly?

© Rudi J.P. Lejaeghere 22/11/2014

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