Valentine’s Day.
He did not know if it had, in the past, meant much to him. For the last couple of years it had meant a token of some sort from Asuka, a special dinner, a night of love making. All good things, to be true, but it had not meant, until this year, the gift of flowers.
The scribbling of his pencil stopped. Again. He was distracted. Couldn’t focus, couldn’t finish the figures his boss had requested by day’s end. His gaze constantly strayed to the arrangement of red roses and lavender orchids. Cattleyas, he knew. Only he didn’t know why he did.
The card was unsigned, impersonal save for the unmistakable sentiment. The pencil clicked against the desktop as it was dropped; his long, slender fingers picked up the card for perhaps the hundredth time. I will love you always. The words had yet to change, but still he read them again to remind himself.
Last year, he might have thought them from Asuka; a deviation in the routine of their holiday pattern, or even the precursor to some kind of larger surprise. Certainly there had been hope of that, once upon a time. But not this year. He knew they were not from his wife because there was no wife. Only divorce papers sitting on the table of the apartment where he now lived.
The card was tossed against the vase as he sighed, leaning back in his chair, eyes closed. The papers accused him of infidelity; it was easier that way in the grand scheme of divorces. Certainly Asuka believed him to be unfaithful, but the truth was he never had been, not physically. Mentally... well, much of that was hardly his fault.
Permanent amnesia. That had been the verdict. He had come to accept it, until the idea of permanent had to be redefined. Little more than blurred images, his memories filtered through first in dreams, then sometimes while he was awake. There were names too. Asuka, already familiar to him everyday, but he suspected more meaning. And Aya. Another woman’s name, fallen from his lips in his sleep. Night after night.
His wife understood it was someone from his past. At least, that is what he thought. Hadn’t she encouraged him to buy the sketchpad and pencils in effort to give the images more detail? Only, he’d come to find out, she hadn’t really wanted him to reclaim his past. She had fallen in love, not only with him, but with the idea of what he represented. Pure and clean, untainted by disappointments and sorrows – an ideal. Go figure.
So, she had left. She went to live with her parents and to take a job at their local hospital. It had hurt, at first, but that was nearly six months ago and the memories were coming back stronger now that he’d been living alone. He knew enough now about the images to understand that Aya was not the woman he had remembered. That woman was someone else entirely. No, the dream-laden glimpses of red and purple, of hard pale flesh, of lean muscle told him another story, despite the femininity of the name.
His gaze was drawn to the flowers…
Itou Ryo was shaken from his reverie by a hand on his shoulder and the comment of “nice flowers.” Glancing up, he nodded back to one his coworkers, smiling.
“From the wife,” Ryo lied. It was easier that way.
“Wish mine would do something like that. She heard about how the Westerners celebrate and now she keeps after me to bring her home chocolate instead.” His coworker scratched the back of his head. Ryo kept smiling.
“Oh,” the man said. “Meant to tell you, the boss wants a word before you go home for the day.”
A glance of his watch demonstrated that such time was at hand. To his chagrin, he’d wasted most of his day staring at the damn flowers. With a sigh, he got up from his desk.
“Thanks. I’ll go see him now.”
**********
Ryo let himself into the apartment, tossing his keys, coat and mail to the couch. The vase full of roses and orchids he placed on the kitchen table, beside the papers that told him he was no longer married. He pulled a beer from the refrigerator and sat down, relaxing.
He would be leaving tomorrow as scheduled for London, England. The boss had confirmed the details with him at the end of the day before stressing, yet again, the importance of the client, an English bank chain that would be upgrading their security system to one of his company’s. Ryo had made the sale. He always did.
It was all routine, or had been until the drive home. The origins of the mysterious flowers preying on his mind, he made an unplanned visit to the shop of the florist whose name was on the card. He smiled and charmed the woman running the shop in hopes of finding out the name of his secret admirer. He had been disappointed in that. Her records indicated it was an order made from another location. Overseas in fact. She had, at least, been able to provide him the name of the florist from which the order originated.
Ryo tugged the piece of paper out of his pants pocket and glanced at it again.
Kitten’s House.
London, England.
Perhaps for most people,
such a thing would be called a coincidence and considered nothing more. For
someone like Itou Ryo, whose past was nothing more than a chaotic jumble of
puzzle pieces, there was no such thing as a coincidence.