Bought For A Baby, Kept For A Lifetime-Chapter 276: Sunshine Rose

That evening, Jasmine returned to her apartment wearily but with a smile on her face. She had missed spending time with Anne terribly, she almost couldn’t remember why she had been so scared and kept a distance from Anne until she saw the red object under her door.

It was a fiery red rose, with wide petals so large and beautiful. Attached to the stem of the rose was a small note.

Jasmine felt her heart make a resoundy thud in her chest.

She picked up the rose with shaky fingers and furiously walked into her apartment, there was a separate trash can she had kept at the side and as she opened it to toss the rose with it’s attached letter, several other similar roses with a note on them could be seen inside that special trash can.

Jasmine dumped the newest rose in there and turned around throwing her bag on the couch before furiously grabbing the plastic bag in that special trash can as if making to get rid of it, but she could no longer move.

It felt as if something was stopping her, she had tried to toss them all away several times, tried to get rid of them all even though something inside her was burning with curiosity to read what was written in the notes, but neither could she throw them out, nor could she bring herself to open a single one of those attached notes.

So she ended up with an accumulating trash can filled with wiltering roses.

When she had gotten the first rose, Jasmine had been shocked.

The rose and the note had been slid down her door, and she had rushed out but didn’t find anyone outside.

Seeing the shape of the rose she knew who it was from, she was named Jasmine but her favorite flowers were Sunset roses, with wide brim petals and a beautiful blood red color.

She knew it was him.

So she had tossed the rose and note in a drawer and refused to open it, but everyday after that she received one, she had wanted to toss them all in the trash, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so, she she made a special trash can for the roses, yet she had never once emptied that special rose trash.

Even now something in her told her to read a word, just a single word from that note but she adamantly denied herself, just like she had denied her own heart the feeling of those warm flutters months ago when she realized that her heart was...

She didn’t read them, but she was mentally counting them. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

She had ninety four...there were ninety four roses she had gotten and this was the ninety fifth.

When Jasmine walked away from the trash can, her mind kept drifting to it repeatedly.

He had said he would let her go, and he let her go, but he had also said he didn’t want to see her again, if he did he wouldn’t let her get away again.

At the time it had sounded like a threat to Jasmine, and she had known that the minute she got the chance to leave, she would definitely never see him again. Was the world that small or was her fate tied to him? Repeatedly dragging her back to him, repeatedly pulling her world to be intertwined with his again?

She had never believed that her relationship with him had anything to do with fate, not when it had started with him being like the warden of her life’s personal prison.

When her mother had sentenced her to that prison, tied her like a price for the highest bidder, Jasmine had thought it was the start of her hell. The start of her misery, but that prison surprisingly had never once brought her pain, had never once brought her misery, surprisingly that prison was never hell.

A thud sounded in her chest and memories flowed into Jasmine’s mind. She closed her eyes, her breathing growing heavy.

"You will marry him!" She heard her mother’s voice echo loud and harsh in her mind.

"Mom, why are you doing this to me? I told you I would do anything to help our family, I’ll never let everything you and Dad worked for go down the drain, I just need you to trust me!" Jasmine had fought for her freedom because she knew her freedom was what her mother would sell away, not just her freedom, she herself would be sold away.

"Don’t look at me like the bad guy in your life Jasmine, I am your mother. I was just like you too back then, I had to marry your father when my heart belonged to someone else. I cried and yelled but I had to fulfill my responsibility to my family, what kind of child would I have been if I turned my back to my family. I came back to my senses and stood up for the people who raised me. You’re nothing like me Jasmine, you don’t have that sense of responsibility that I do, so if I have to tie you down and make sure you walk down that aisle, I’ll do it."

"Yes I’m not like you Mom, my responsibility is to love and care for you, not to sell myself off to some sixty five year old man just to save our company."

"So what if he’s older? You’re not the first twenty one year old to marry an older man. You should consider yourself lucky, if you pray hard enough, you’ll only be in that marriage for less than ten years and he’ll be gone, you might become a widow but you’ll have all the money in the world to support you."

A look of pained disbelief shone on Jasmine’s face. She stared at her own mother as if the woman in front of her was a stranger she was seeing for the first time.

"I can’t believe you would say this to me." Jasmine’s voice sounded broken and for a moment, just for a single moment she thought she saw pity in her mother’s identical light blue eyes, she thought she saw remorse, but it vanished and the cold woman her mother had become surfaced again.

"If you don’t think about me Jasmine, think about your father who is currently lying sick. Do you think he’ll be able to survive knowing everything he worked hard for is slowly crumbling and his beloved daughter could have saved it, but she chose to be selfish instead? She chose herself over her own family. I might not be a perfect mother, but I did not raise a selfish brat. If you really don’t care about us, if you really don’t care about anything that happens to your family, if your happiness matters more to you than anyone else, walk out that door right now." Jasmine watched her mother’s finger pointed at the door,

"Go, and never turn back. Go now and never ever come back here again but know that you leave with my hatred and I swear to you Jasmine, a mother’s hatred will only cause you pain till the very end of your life."