A SELF DISCOVERY NOVEL

Lost & Found

Chapter 8: Jordan has a visitor

“I threw his framed picture off my balcony just to hear my heart break.”― Kimberly Novosel, Loved

Jordan could hear the door opening and someone entering. The voice sounded familiar. Jordan kept his eyes shut even though he was curious to see who it was. The medication had turned his chaotic life into a slow-motion showcase for him to experience in finer detail. Everything took soo much longer to do. He heard some rustle of paper, and then a chair pulled up, and someone sat down. Then he felt a hand on his arm. Jordan opened his eyes and saw a face he had not seen for more than five years. It was Liz!

Elizabeth Zak. His ex-colleague & ex-lover.

“Hi Jordan,” Liz spoke with an emotion-laden voice. Jordan could tell Liz was shocked to see his state.

Jordan could manage a slow and lispy, “Hi, Liz.”

“Don’t try to speak. The doctors told me about your injuries and that it's difficult for you to talk”. Liz began, “I heard about your accident from Marco, and I rushed here. You look… I won’t deny it, quite a mess.” She could not hide a slight smile as she said it. She meant to cheer up Jordan and not make him feel worse.

Jordan smiled back even as he winced while doing it. The fractured ribs made it excruciatingly painful to feel any humor.

Liz was her usual Lizzy self. Rarely mincing her words and saying it as she saw it. Jordan was pleased but a bit surprised to see her. She was the last person he expected to see first in hospital after how acrimoniously their affair had ended three years ago.

Liz, short for Elizabeth, was a woman with a challenging life history similar to Jordans’. She was born to a Polish dancer turned violent alcoholic man and an English trapeze artist mother who slowly developed schizophrenia.

Liz ran away from home when she turned 18 and came to London, and after a few stints as a waitress and after-midnight side hustles as a prostitute, she managed to collect enough money to get into college. She got into advertising as a postal delivery assistant and then became a team secretary in a well-known London ad agency within a year. But in just three years, Liz had impressed her bosses enough to join the executive team and become a new business manager. When Jordan and she met at a competitive pitch meeting, she was already in her late twenties and had risen in rank to an Account Director. Jordan was impressed by her clear thinking, sharp tongue, and her athletic body.

After Jordan lost that client pitch to her team, he headhunted Liz and made her the Business Director of one of his prestigious local clients. Their story did not end there. Liz started spending a lot of time with Jordan, helping him prepare for new business pitches, and worked late nights and weekends in the office and at his place preparing the decks and campaigns for the meetings. Her initiative and drive impressed Jordan and brought them closer to each other.

Liz was never scared of showing how she truly felt—or asking for what she wanted. So it made sense when she made the first move to confess to Jordan that she had feelings for him.

It happened one late night at his place over a bottle of celebratory champagne after winning a new business. Liz told Jordan that she had bought him a present. Jordan smiled and asked what it was. She ran bare feet to the dining table at the end of Jordan’s fashionable loft-style flat and took a small gift-wrapped pouch out of her bag and gave it to him with a small kiss on his cheeks. Jordan was taken aback by the gesture and the gift, and upon opening the present, he saw it was a pair of engraved silver cufflinks. The left cufflink read, “It’ll take time.” And the right one read, “But I think it’ll work.”

Jordan looked up and saw Liz sitting on the barstool next to the island kitchen table top blushing nervously and unsure of his reaction. He stood up, walked up to her, looked sternly at her face, and then lowered his head and kissed her on her lips. She smiled as he kissed her, and then she wrapped her arms and legs around him and started passionately kissing him back.

That night Jordan and Liz did not sleep. They had a lot of pent-up sexual energy that needed exhausting. Jordan loved having sex with Liz. She was everything he had secretly imagined sex with her to be. It had a rhythm that swung from slow, curious, and luscious to charged, demanding and unrelenting. Liz was surprised and loved how quickly Jordan unsheathed all her wild fantasies in a matter of hours. When they did go to sleep, exhausted, it was already dawn, and they both had a meeting with his boss in four hours.

Their secret, torrid affair lasted six months.

For the first month, Jordan met Liz every night after work at either his place or hers to have frenetic, unspeakable sex. They had no taboos in bed and their nights were a carousel of carnal passion. She introduced him to tantra, and he coached her into role play. By day they were squeaky clean, role model Boss and subordinate. By night Liz was Jordan’s dominatrix.

But by the second month, Jordan started to stay at the office later than average and not land up at Liz’s place. Liz also noticed that he was traveling to client conferences more and more and stopped asking her to join him.

By the last month of the affair, Liz had grown wary of Jordan. She suspected that he was having an affair with another girl who had just joined the agency. Whenever she asked Jordan about their future, he would brush it off as something they should not plan for but let it evolve. The final straw was when Jordan called her from New York, a bit drunk with a lot of music and laughter in the background, and told her that he was seeing another woman and that they needed to end the affair.

Liz hung up on him and resigned the next day.

Unknown to Jordan, she had accepted an offer to become the Deputy Managing Director of a competing agency.

To be continued…

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