Zara's Safari

Chapter 8

There are several different types of regret.

The kind you feel when you see someone wearing the same outfit as you, the kind you feel when you shouldn’t have had that last drink- or made that late night call, the kind you feel when you knew you shouldn’t have cut your hair but did anyway and the kind you feel when you wake up in a strange bed the next morning with a strange man lying next you.

There should be some kind of universal regret-o-meter, where regret gets categorized and assigned a number out of ten, depending on their severity. The outfit thing weights in at 6, whereas the stranger bed scenario comes in at an 8.

But then there’s the other kind. The worst kind. The kind that comes in at a solid, resounding double figure 10. It’s the kind you get after you spill your guts to a total stranger about the most intimate parts of your life. Stuff you don’t want anyone to know. Stuff you don’t want to think about let alone talk about. The kind of stuff that shows people where that chink in your armor is located.

A regret rating of ten was how I was feeling right now when I woke up and saw Riaan sleeping on the couch. It all came flooding back to me in torrents; the thorns, the make-up wiping, the kiss (the slow, meaningful kiss that hadn’t lead to sex) and worst of all, talking to him about my mother. Letting him see me like that. Vulnerable.

Naked.

Without my camouflage.  

If I’d been in a stranger’s bed, I might have made my notorious escape. Messaging Clay with the address, slipping out in the dead of the night and speeding off before he had a chance to realize I was gone. Not before I’d done a full forensic sweep of the place though, removing even the stray eyelash that was clinging to the pillow. 

But Riaan was in my place- so there was no escaping.  I lay there like a corpse, as if not moving would make it all better somehow, except it didn’t. It made it worse, because the stiller I was, the more I could hear his breathing. Why did he have to breath! It was so, so real.

Of course I blame it on the Champagne. There was no other logical reason that I would have invited this bundu-bashing-bumpkin to stay with me, let alone kiss him and tell him my deepest, darkest secret feelings. I was clearly out of my wits. My endorphins were probably going crazy from the pain of the thorns, perhaps such things were contraindicated with the use of alcohol.

Not that I have a problem with alcohol or anything. Despite what some of the less than flattering gossip magazines have said, and despite my fathers mad ideas.

Charles had had the audacity one evening to suggest I had a drinking problem. I’d never heard anything more amusing in my life. It had been several months ago, I’d come home late to find him waiting in the lounge for me. He never waited up for me. But apparently someone he knew had called him that night, very concerned because they’d seen me drinking and then climbing into my car. The "Good" Samaritan had somehow thought it was a "good" idea to tell my father.

He launched in with some crap about drinking and driving and how dangerous it is. How he was worried about me. But I knew he was probably more worried that I’d land up embarrassing him and putting a dent in his political career.

I’d actually laughed out loud when he’d used the ‘A’ word. I wasn’t an alcoholic. Alcoholics where vagrants with holes in the shoes that slept on park benches with cheap brandy in brown paper bags. Alcoholics where those men with red noses that pissed in pot plants and went to the bottle store in their slippers with a cigarette hanging out of their mouth. I was none of those things. I didn’t smoke. None of my shoes had holes in them. I’d never drink cheap brandy and wear slippers in public and I hadn’t been to a park in years- I hate pigeons.