Every Rose Has Its Thorns

Chapter 3

        When Jo finally found her purse, tucked away in the coat room beneath a mass of shawls and dinner jackets, something white caught her eye. An envelope had been tucked into the front pocket of her bag, her name scrawled across the front in elegant calligraphy. Thinking it was from her brother, Jo tucked it back into her bag and continued into the kitchen. 

        Jo's best friend, Michelle catered the wedding and as the maid-of-honor, Jo was tasked with distributing the tip to the waitstaff at the end of the night. The kitchen was a whirlwind of activity as they cleaned up from dinner. The wedding cake, now half eaten, stood gloriously in a corner of the room just asking to be eaten. Jo wandered over, keeping an eye out for Michelle. Just as she was about to put a finger into the frosting, a voice behind her shouted, "Hands off!"

        Jo turned, her hands in the air and a big grin on her face as Michelle glared at her menacingly. "Don't let me catch you licking the frosting off the cake, you know better than that!" 

        Jo draped an arm across her friend's shoulder, looking at her with mock innocence. "I haven't a clue what you mean?" When Michelle was in work mode, Jo knew better than to get in her way. She was laser focused on her job and Jo pitied the fool who got on her bad side. 

        "Your own brother's wedding and you can't act with a little more grace?" 

        "Come on Michelle, they're leaving tomorrow! What's going to happen to all that cake anyway?" 

        "If you would just exercise a little patience you would know I've already taken care of you." Michelle moved across the room to a large industrial refrigerator where she pulled out a large platter, covered in plastic wrap and filled with leftover food and a generous slice of cake. 

        Jo gasped, jumping onto Michelle who struggled to hold the platter up under the assault. 

        "Careful, Jo!"

        "Michelle, you are a god send. You are my best friend and I will never question you ever again."

        Michelle cracked a smile, handing her eager friend the tray of food before snapping back into work mode and shooing her friend out of the kitchen. "Come on, Jo, you've got to get home and I've got a kitchen to clean!" 

        "Thanks, Michelle. Talk to you tomorrow?" Jo called over her shoulder but Michelle was already back to work, her attention focused on some poor employee who had dropped a tray of leftover hors d'oeuvres in a panic. 

        The quiet of the street engulfed her as the door shut. Nothing but a dull thud of the music inside could be heard. Cool air from the water blew through the now empty street as Jo picked her way across the cobblestone street in her heels, balancing the tray of food in one arm and her bag in another. She hailed a taxi, sliding into the backseat. As the car began to move the same feeling of being watched came over her and she turned to look out the back window. 

        A dark figure stood in the shadow behind the street lamp. Though she couldn't make out their features she had the distinct sense that they were looking her way. When the taxi driver asked for her address she turned to tell him and by the time she moved her gaze back out the window, the figure had vanished. 

        She shook her head, thinking she had just one too many glasses of champagne. All she needed now was a hot bath and a good night's sleep.

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        Jo lived in a third floor walk-up studio apartment. The apartment was the first place she could call her own and she had grown quite attached to it over the years. Though she could now afford a bigger space, she enjoyed the sense of security she found here and was loath to restart the process somewhere else.

        Growing up, Jo's home life lacked stability. Steve was the only thing she could rely on. They were a single-income family that moved from place to place, at the mercy of their mother whose precarious mental health prevented her from keeping any job for very long. When Jo was sixteen, her mother died in a car accident and Steve, though only eighteen and fresh out of high school, became her legal guardian. They both had to work to support themselves and Jo, while working part time in a café, practiced her music until her fingers bled, earning her a scholarship to one of the most prestigious music schools in the country - Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA. 

        When she graduated she immediately moved back to the West Coast with the promise of a career at the San Francisco Symphony and a portfolio of compositions she planned to use to score films on the side.  For the past two years she had lived a happy, quiet life moving between her studio apartment and work at the symphony. She socialized with her brother and his friends but kept mostly to herself, spending any free time reading and composing music. She was happy with the life she managed to build for herself. Jo and Steve had beat the odds, together. 

        Jo dumped the tray of food on her bed and moved to the bathroom, leaving her purse on the floor. As the bath filled she worked to remove all the bobby pins that held her hair in place, brushing it out into a frizzy mass to be dealt with in the morning. She washed her face at the sink and stripped out of her dress, sinking into the tub with a deep sigh. Alone for the first time that day, Jo finally had a minute to reflect on everything that had happened in the last twenty four hours. 

        She remembered getting a panicked call from Lauren as she was heading to the venue. The florist hadn't shown and she was going to be left with no bouquet to walk down the aisle. Jo had tried five different shops before that man had offered her the last bouquet of roses. She thought back to him - her panicked mind had been racing too quickly to process it at the time, but he was handsome, if not a bit intimidating. Something about him seemed too good to be true - appearing at the last minute with the exact flowers she needed, bought and paid for, that glint in his eye as he looked at her. 

        Jo, for the third time that day, shook off the uncomfortable feeling that filled her veins like ice. Something about that man screamed danger, and she could only hope her paranoid mind was inventing things to be worried about.

        Remembering the letter she had found in her purse, Jo reached with a wet hand to dig through the pockets of her bag. Pulling it out she settled back in the tub, smiling at the thought of Steve or Lauren writing her a letter. The stationary was expensive, grainy-paper, deep red ink spelling out "Jo" in beautiful sweeping letters. Careful to open the envelope without tearing the beautiful paper, she pulled out a single thin piece of paper, folded in half.

        Tucking the envelope back in her bag, she opened the letter and read: 

       "Mio amore, Il mio cuore batte solo per te. I've waited for you so long. Soon we will be together. xx"

        Jo furrowed her brow, confused. She couldn't read Italian and she had no idea who could have left this letter in her bag. Ignoring the Italian words, she focused on the English. Who would write this? Why didn't they sign their name and what did they mean "I've waited for you?" An uneasy feeling settled in her stomach as she stared at the beautiful script. The blood red ink seeped through the page, as though whoever had written these words had carved them into the paper with a violent hurry. 

        It had to be a joke. Some guest at the wedding, maybe one of Steve's friends had left it for her. Who else would have been able to find her purse among all those coats and jackets? Jo folded the paper carefully, tossing it away from her onto the bathroom floor as she sunk back down into the warm water. She let the heat envelope her as she closed her eyes and hummed the tune that Steve had always used to sing her to sleep as a child. She let the song soothe her, moving the letter and the worry it caused to some distant part of her brain - a worry for another time, another day. 

A/N 

Italian translation: "My love, my heart beats only for you."