Khaleel chuckled, his gaze on her face warm as he drank a sip of his own tea. “You made me realize something, Aurora,” he said slowly, setting his cup down. “Nobody can do it on their own; all of us need a little bit of help.”
Aurora considered that for a moment, then smiled in realization. “You did put the watch in the jacket on purpose, didn’t you?”
Khaleel laughed out loud. “Of co
urse I did!” he said, shaking his head. “If you hadn’t needed a jacket, I'd have found some other way to get it to you. I wanted to be able to track you, so I could help you take care of the silly problem you got handed. I knew you'd turn me down if I offered to help you directly, but I hope you'll forgive me for helping via surreptitious means.”
She smiled and took another sip of her tea; whatever it was made of, it restored something in her, and the alcohol fuzzed the edges of her adrenaline high. She relaxed more and more, thinking about the problem that Khaleel had just solved for her; Aurora wasn’t sure that Jon would let himself go unpaid, but as long as she was in Khaleel’s company, she was certain it wouldn’t matter. “At least I won some time to get the debt off my plate,” she said.
Khaleel shook his head. “No,” he told her. “Your days of worrying about that debt are over. I don’t intend that Jon will ever have the opportunity to get you alone again,” Khaleel said. “And whatever belief he has about you owing him is not really my concern.” Khaleel smiled slightly. “Besides, I'm fairly certain that he’s too scared to come after you again, after he ran he away like that.”
Aurora laughed, shaking her head, thinking of their previous conversation about running away from things. She finished off her tea and realized that there was another thing in her life that she had been running from, for much longer than she’d been avoiding the loan shark.
“Can you excuse me for a minute or two? I need to make a phone call,” Aurora said.
Khaleel looked at her intently for a moment, as if trying to divine whom it was she needed to talk to so urgently. “I have something I want to talk to you about,” Khaleel said with a grin. “Hurry back soon.”
“I will,” Aurora promised, standing. She eyed a sliding glass door leading out to the balcony and gave Khaleel a quick smile before leaving the room, phone in hand.
She took a deep breath, swallowing down her misgivings as she unlocked the screen and scrolled to her parents’ home phone number. Aurora tapped ‘call’ and brought the phone to her ear. She listened as it rang—once, twice—and then connected.
“Hello?”
“Mom? It’s Aurora.” Aurora smiled slightly to herself as she heard her mother call out for her father to come into the room.
“I’m going to put you on speaker, okay honey?”
“Sure, Mom,” Aurora replied. She walked further out on the broad balcony and looked out on the city. The view was amazing; she could see the marina, glittering with the streetlights and the moon, down below.
“Are you okay, sweetie? Your father and I have been so worried about you.” Aurora felt a lurch of guilt, remembering that she had gotten a text from her father a few days before.
“I’m okay,” she said. “More than okay, in fact. But there are some things I need to tell you.”
“All right,” her father said after a moment’s silence. “Go ahead, sweetie.”
“Well you know I sort of…dropped the ball on med school a while back,” Aurora started. “I left the school when the semester ended, on good terms, but…” she sighed. “I had already decided by that point that I wasn’t going to go back.”
“We started to think that might be the case when you ran off to Asia,” her mother said. “We’ve been hoping you would get back to us with some kind of alternate plan, or that you might get it out of your system and go back later on.”
“I’m not going back,” Aurora said quickly. “In fact, I’m not going to get a post-grad degree. I’m done with school.”
“That sounds very decisive,” Aurora’s father said.
“It is,” Aurora said. “I realized I was only ever doing med school because I knew that it was what you both wanted for me. I know—I know you’ve both got my best interests in mind, but that just isn’t reason enough. You both love your jobs; I never loved studying medicine.”
“So what have you decided to do, then?”
Aurora smiled, glancing at the door leading back into the penthouse.“I have something else lined up,” she said slowly. “I have…I’m going to be trying this adventure. I met a guy, actually.”
“A guy?” Her father’s voice sounded uncertain.
“He’s a great guy, and he’s definitely in a position to help me do what I really love: travel.” Aurora’s smile grew as she thought about it. “I don’t have a whole lot of details for you yet, but I hope you can both trust me to know what I want to do with my life, and to know how to keep myself safe.” There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and the silence threatened to deafen Aurora for a moment.
“If this is what you think is going to make you happy, sweetie, then I support you,” her mother said finally. “You sound so much more excited about this than you have about anything else you’ve done.”
“If you feel strongly enough about it to actually tell us,” her father added, “then we have to trust that it’s something you’re doing what's right for you.”
“Thank you both,” Aurora said. “I just…I was kind of at a loss for a while. Ran into some troubles. I’m sure you’ve both suspected that I