The Promise of Love: Book One

By Nicole Rose

A parable about the search of the soul, the quirks of destiny, the power of love, and the thin
line between truth and madness, love and hate, and good and evil.

Who doesn't know this yearning … for love, adventure & astral bodies, for charm, chutzpah
& champagne, eroticism, exoticism & extravaganza, love, lust & luxury, music, magic & millions, roses, romance & rock'n'roll, sense, soul & sauvignon blanc – a home for your heart?

Nikki Rose, the capricious heroine in high heels with a restless soul, makes her way through
the world of luxury and fashion. She is without a home ever since death claimed her beloved.
In a fateful moment, she falls head over high heels in love with a manic and musical magician.
She follows him on the highway of love all the way from cloud nine to hell.

Be careful, if your dreams come true.
Nothing will remain the same!

• Language: English
• Publisher: N. Rose Verlag
• Release date: Nov 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9783982043913

Book preview

Rilke

The Promise of Love

PART 1

MAGICAL MOMENTS

EROS IN MUNICH

A FATEFUL ENCOUNTER

THE TANK OF HUMAN SHARKS

THE MORNING WITH EROS

HEARTS GIVEN AS A GIFT

THE PROMISE OF LOVE

THE MILLION-DOLLAR BEER WOMAN

THE CORSET OF CONVENTION

THE CRAB FESTIVAL

OSTERIA BAVARIA

COOING SOULS AT THE BAR

FORBIDDEN FRUITS

FROM THE GUTTER INTO HEAVEN

THE COLORS OF JOY

THE POWER OF MUSIC

THE SINGING SOULCATCHER

CASTING THE PEARLS BEFORE THE SWINE

THE MUSICIAN’S HELL

ADDICTED SOULS

THE TEMPTATION BY THE MAN OF HEARTS

THE TERROR IN THE MORNING

THE WRONG PICTURE

OH HELL: MONDAY

SKINNY MODELS & POTATO SALAD

EVERYTHING FOR LOVE

MAGICAL MOMENTS

There are moments in life that set our hearts on fire like sudden lightning does to the sky. The universe shines. The earth quivers. The world stands still. These moments change everything! Eros’ arrow instantaneously throws us off our trodden paths of daily life and onto a rollercoaster ride of passionate love and lust.

After such magical moments, nothing is as it was before. Fate dares us to follow the voice of our hearts, to put love above everything else. However, fate is not always sugar for the soul; Eros often appears as disruptive destroyer and Cupid infrequently as seducer of our own imagination! These encounters between Eros and fate are precious and one-of-a-kind. Full of beauty and danger …

Who does not experience this deep longing for encountering true and everlasting love? For the great love story to continue after the magical moment that forces us to escape the average propensities of daily life? Who does not yearn to break free into the ecstatic blissfulness of the great emotional movies, and burn to exchange meaningless trivialities for the perfection of passion?

Yet don’t forget that risks and side effects are part of it …

Love is a beautiful and at the same time a dangerous drug. It puts our hearts on fire, clouds our senses and lures us into a bewildering maze of emotions. We lift off the ground. Hover in a sky full of pink clouds. Get intoxicated on the cocktail of love and passion. We lose our hearts and sometimes also reason! In one moment, you fly high and in the next fall into an abyss. Often, there is only a heartbeat between rise and fall. The fall into the abyss of our emotions can break our heart and burn our soul. Love has the power to turn good into evil.

One who follows the call of fate hands over the steering wheel of life into unknown hands. He chooses the path of risk and romance – the life style of rock and roll and the highway of the heart. Very unlike the worn-out sloppy path of people that wear long johns, his life transforms from the jaded mindset of What if? to a frolicking painting of I AM! Yet … where there is light, there is also darkness.

If you tread on the path of danger, you might easily be swallowed by it.

Thus heed the poison from Eros’ quiver – it could prove to be deadly.

EROS IN MUNICH

It was a comfortably warm late summer evening. Crowding the beer gardens, the urban desperados of the upscale suburb of Schwabing were warming themselves in the soft autumn sun and enjoying the gossip and talk of Munich’s high-society. Most recently, a new bar opened up on Clement Street. Run by a charming fop and former barkeeper at Pick6 that donned sleek black hair and a non-stop winning grin, the Grub Room quickly became famous as meat-market and attraction for the people of Schwabing. A rather petty-minded crowd, these people turned toward flirting, alcohol and rabble-rousing speeches concerning present and absent VIPs and wannabes.

After the third beer, champagne or wine, the gazes that were exchanged got bolder, the comments riskier and flatter. All over the establishment, drunk people gossiped, argued and laughed. They escaped the worries about their own well-being. The dark shadow of the impending economic crisis did not spare the well-to-do circles of Schwabing either. Together, the mostly puffy and from frequent indulgence in beer and roasted pork knuckle blush-pink faces of the Bavarian men, and the either sturdy-happy or wrinkly-fragile faces of the females created a cocktail of euphoria and ennui, happiness and dullness, sympathy and apathy, as well as pleasure and vexation. After another glass, the general mood rose and the men competed for the skirts of Schwabing. In the course of the evening, as the quality of the verbal exchanges decreased, the female attraction rose proportionally quickly. With every sip she took, the local hairstylist looked more and more like Elizabeth Taylor. Even the uptight Gertrude with her neat office bun – and despite her puffy features – came slightly closer to the looks of a Catherine Deneuve.

The usual drunkards were sitting around the regulars’ table. One of them was Tommy Steerneck, a red-faced choleric conveniently married to the heir of the Little Nest-Empire. He bought the rounds at the table while simultaneously listening in a disparaging as well as solemn manner to the tales of his neighbor, an older man with a walking stick named Heinz Brushbully. The frail old man was already talking to his fourth glass of vodka. His stick had fallen to the ground. With trembling hands and a nasal tone in his voice, he was lamenting about his mean existence as an unsuccessful painter. His pencil drawings that had a characteristic Prussian stringency simply did not find an eager market. Next to him, Horst Gambler, the local senior casanova, added his cooing voice to the contest. He was a white-haired, aging playboy endowed with a tired yet still attractive dandy-like face of a Gunther Sachs. He lamely slobbered into the ears of his lady of the evening. I am as soft as pudding, he wooed a rather average yet decent looking brunette. Evening after evening, Alexandra Snag presented her dull beauty at the Grub Room, hoping she would find the love of her life, or at the least someone to buy her dinner. Rosy Racy, the local hairstylist, indeed bore a faint resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor. Even today, her outdated status as a hot devil surrounded her with an aura of arrogance. Disdainfully she scanned the neighbor on her left, Gertrude Goose. The elderly looking secretary with the blond bun whined about having lost her job as her double chin quavered. All the while, Rosy let her sassy gaze graze the streets to look for a potential suitor.

Just then, an eye-catching Casanova dressed in an antiquated gray suit buoyantly tottered around the corner, his dirty rock voice smattering Here I go again. Under the dim light of dusk, an air of wildness, importance and craziness hung over him. A cross between Keith Richards and David Coverdale, he evidently seemed out of place in the conservative landscape of Schwabing. As if playing at Saint Albert Hall, he rocked his guitar rock in the streets of Schwabing. The Eros short of his electric guitar turned the edges of his straight thin lips scornfully down as he tipsily staggered past the regulars’ table. In the sweeping style of the great Zampano, he headed directly to the cigarette machine. Equipped with four complete packages of Manboro, he took his seat at the regulars’ table of the Grub Room. Dense, gray curls framed his long and chiseled face. These were messy and looked like they were made out of guitar wire. Up close, he strongly resembled an aged rebel version of the TV host Hugo Egon Balder. Cynically, and with intentionally intellectual facial expression, he greeted the group of regulars. Have you reached the low cognitive level of the Daily Gazette again? he sarcastically asked as he was lighting a smoke and greedily took a drag as if his life depended on it. You can consider yourselves lucky today to have the honor of my company. I had planned to spend the evening on my high cognitive level together with the writings of Plato. However, I ran out of cigarettes. Expecting appraisal, with a grin as wide as Iggy Pop’s jaws, he looked at the group – his male rivals staring with animosity at him, while the women met him with dreamy-admiring looks.

Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, and click-clack – it sounded across the old uneven cobblestone street of Clement Street. The crowd around the regulars’ table looked up from beer and wine, and lost the thread of their chit-chat. Their mouths gaping open and their eyes wide open under the influence of alcohol, they stared at the curious event happening in front of them. A remarkably different appearance on 8 inch high heels carefully balanced across the cobblestone, that really was not made for these kinds of shoes. The being in the elegant black designer dress seemed to be from a different planet. She looked like a movie star from the Hollywood fifties, who had lost her way in provincial Schwabing. Under a perfectly styled brunette hair wave, her sensual-pretty face blushed from the tender effort of making sure her high heels would not get stuck in the foot traps of the cobblestone street, the lady radiated glamour and glory. A rock-style attitude that manifested itself in her full red lips, the Elvis-like hair wave and black net stockings interestingly countered this style. Despite her stunning exterior, she appeared vulnerable as she fought her way across the pavers highly concentrated. Tightly pouting the lower lips of her lovely shaped raspberry-colored mouth, she stared at the foot traps of the pavers while she bravely faced the curious looks of the staring crowd across the street. As she finally arrived on the other side of the street, she sank onto an empty chair and, smiling free and easy, ordered a Sauvignon Blanc.

Nikki Rose felt awkward about the attention that she so obviously aroused and that exposed her to the stares and comments of the wooing Bavarians and the drama bitches, as well as isolated her in the internal exile of her uniqueness. And yet, she could not stay in her even lonelier apartment, alone with the shadows of the past. Shielded with her Blackberry and Sauvignon Blanc and her netstocking-donned legs gracefully crossed, she started to feel more secure. She curiously looked around while she sipped at her wine in a ladylike fashion. Her gray-green eyes reflected a cocktail of adventure and girly shyness as she was typing messages into her Blackberry with an air of melancholy dancing around her mouth.

Rrrrrrrringgggggg, the startling sound of the electronic device stopped her train of thought. Startled, her body cringed. Similar to a meadow rose that was hit by lightning. Who dared disturb the magical intimacy of this moment? Blablablablabla – an almost unidentifiable flood of words came from phone, the jabbering chewing gum voice of a real American. Erica Winestone, her American marketing colleague, chewed off her sensitive ear with her broad American accent. Loud and noisy. Without a break. Finally, after ten minutes the essence of the wordy jabber crystallized. The American