“You have to fucking live with this,” I said. “You knew me. You knew me well. You want to be the kind of woman that manipulates men for money? Go be a fucking gold digger. It’ll be a lot easier than the shit you put me through.”
“Chance...”
I didn’t let her say anything else. I hailed a cab and ripped open the back door so hard that I thought I might pull it off its hinges. I turned back one more time to see Layla in tears, looking at me.
If I was being perfectly honest, I could see a bit of hurt in her eyes. I could see that her care for me was genuine. She truly seemed pained by what she had done.
But she also wasn’t exactly apologetic about it. Regardless of if she actually loved me, she clearly loved money more than me.
“Go fuck yourself,” I said, flipping her the middle finger as I got in the car. “Just drive me south five blocks. I’ll figure it out from there.”
I stewed in the back seat, my rage rising in an uncontrolled manner, the better to suffocate the sorrow and pain that I felt. I had always sworn never to take out my anger in the form of destruction and hurting others. Even with Sarah, I had done a good job.
But this... I had been played so hard. I had fucked myself over. I had lost everything.
No one would ever give me a job after this. No one would ever see the name Chance Hunt as anything other than an embarrassment to the Hunt family—who would in turn disown me for being such a fucking idiot. No woman, upon hearing this story, would see me as anything more than a boy toy, someone to be manipulated and played with.
I had fucked up so bad “fucked up” didn’t seem like a strong enough verb.
I knew I risked getting hurt when I decided to say I loved Layla Taylor.
I didn’t know I risked getting destroyed.
I didn’t know I risked my career and my family life dying before my very angry eyes.
Chapter Nineteen
When I came to, the first thing I noticed was how much my goddamn head hurt.
I tried to move, but immediately, the feeling of nausea overwhelmed me. I leaned over to the side of my bed—which, in the half second before I puked, I realized was not mine—and hurled my guts out. All of the pain of last night, all of the agony of the last ten years, all of the terrible decisions, heartbreak, and self-loathing—it all poured out onto the carpeted floor for what seemed like a hellish eternity.
When I finally finished, I looked around. I had no idea where I was, probably in some sort of hotel, but it was easy to see what I was in—a shitload of trouble.
The room was destroyed. I had turned up one bed and ripped it into a million little pieces. The window had cracks on it—a miracle, considering that I was almost certainly more than a couple of stories up. Alcohol littered the ground, and some white powder that I didn’t want to guess at was on the counter.
“Fuck me,” I groaned to myself.
I never blacked out... but I had now. I couldn’t remember a goddamn thing after I stumbled into a bar and ordered three shots of tequila, which I killed in about ten seconds. Everything after that...
Who the fuck knew? I guess I should’ve been grateful that I had not woken up in jail cell and I hadn’t woken up to the sound of police banging on my door, but other than that, it looked like I had done a good job really fucking myself over.
Oh, and I realized, it was a Friday, not a weekend. I still had to go to work.
I looked at the time. 8:30 a.m. I would be late, but that somehow seemed the absolute least of my concerns.
For one, I had no idea what the fuck I had done last night. The possibilities ranged from utterly self-destructive physically but isolated otherwise to sending out a fury of angry phone calls and texts, ruining every single relationship I had. I pulled out my phone, the pounding headache unending and the suffocating self-loathing still omnipresent, and checked my message history.
By some miraculous outcome, I had only texted a few casual hookups from my past asking for a good time and a quickie. One never responded, two were curious, but as far as I could tell, none had come to the room. I didn’t see any stray purses or clothing. In fact, I was still in my tux.
My tux... which I had rented... and ruined... which I now owed thousands of dollars on.
And that said nothing about the extent of the damage I’d done to the hotel room. I didn’t like to rely on my family’s resources, but given the extreme amount of damage I had caused, I was looking at some hefty payments. And that was just from the visible damage—who knew what kind of shit I’d caused at bars and places before this, and who knew how many bills I had racked up on my card from the night before?
I didn’t want to go into work. Not only did I feel like shit, I had made Mr. Burnson look like a jackass. I had made myself, no, I had made everyone associated with that firm look like a fool, getting to witness Mr. Hunt receive the prize investing opportunity while we all had to watch because of my inability to keep my fucking mouth shut in front of a hot woman. To say that I would get reamed today or whenever I next showed up was an understatement; I just had to hope that my punishment ended at being fired, because it wasn’t out of the question for more punishment to come my way.
I dragged myself slowly to the mirror and looked at myself. I honestly didn’t look that bad, other than some cuts on my hands, considering how I felt. My face looked a little pale, but I hadn’t gotten in any stupid fights judging by the lack of scars or bruises on my face. And if I had, well, I’d won them all.
Hey, I needed some victory, no matter how made up it was.
And, fortunately, the tux did not look as torn as I had thought based on the one sleeve.
Still, I had to go. And I was not in a position to clean up or take care of myself. So I turned to the only person from last night who didn’t seem interested in fucking me over or taking advantage of me.
“Hey, had a rough night, need to pay the bill for a hotel room... can you cover me?”
I sent the text to Morgan and tried to make it as innocuous as possible, the better so that it wouldn’t incriminate me if it came back around somehow. Mr. Hunt had also drilled that into us—cover our asses whenever we wrote something, because it would always be traced back.
“Of course,” Morgan wrote back immediately. I saw a text bubble forming and kept my eye on my phone as I left the room, every step a fucking struggle with the headache. “I had no idea Dad was going to do what he did. I really didn’t. I’m sorry, Chance.”
I bit my lip. I believed him.
I had to believe someone in this world.
“I know. Thanks bro.”
I put my phone down as the elevator came up, leaning against the wall, and sighed. I should have known that I could only trust Morgan. He was there for me when Sarah first broke my heart, and he was here now when Layla did the same to a much stronger degree. He may have been a little clueless about the way things worked outside of the world of billionaires, but he was a good man all the same.
It’s too bad it seems like he’s one in a billion of a different kind.
I hailed the cab and gave the directions to Burnson Investments. My only hope, my only prayer for today was that everyone else was equally hungover and just wanted to avoid me. I could handle being yelled at and criticized on Monday. But I just prayed I at least got until then—the idea of adding insult to my own injuries today was just too much.
At first, when I walked in the office, it seemed I got my wish. I got death glares, quick glances away, and all the other tell-tale signs of an ostracized employee, but I kind of liked being ostracized. I could go into my little office, throw my little bundled up ball, and kill time until 5 p.m.
Unfortunately, one man was waiting for me to intercept that plan. And it was the worst man possible.
“So you decided to show your goddamn face,” John Burnson said. He at least had the decency to shut the door behind him when I walked in. “I should’ve known better. Let a goddamn intern take the reins on an investment deal like this. Wh
at the fuck was I thinking? No, better yet, what the fuck were you thinking? Don’t answer that, it doesn’t matter.”
Thank God. The less I have to talk, the better.
Burnson ranted like this for what felt like a good ten minutes, explicitly stating multiple times not to talk. I’m not sure if he ever realized how happy I was to acquiesce to that request, but it didn’t stop him from talking.
Unfortunately, what came at the end was too scathing for me to feel anything other than shame.
“This will stick with you for the duration of your career, Chance Hunt,” he said. “You will remain an intern for as long as you are here. You will never, ever, ever work any higher up. You made me look like a daggum moron out there, and if there’s one thing in life I do not take, it is humiliation. You will do nothing more, NOTHING MORE, than clean my office and supply our staff with coffee as they request it. Absolutely. Positively. Nothing. Clear?”
I nodded. It was the only thing I had done besides listen, but it was the only thing I could really muster at that point. All of my dreams, all of my ambitions, all of my hopes... gone. Taken.
Because I couldn’t think with my mind instead of my dick.
Because I trusted when I knew better.
Because I couldn’t compartmentalize business and love.
Fuckin’ Layla.
And the worst part of it is... she did what she had to. I was stupid. I was foolish. This is the fault of no one but me.
The entire business world is mocking me right now, I’m sure. Chance Hunt, the...
No, I don’t deserve that last name anymore. Fucking worthless. I’m just Chance Givens, foster child who needs others to get anywhere in life. What little chance I have, I’ve wasted.
This... this was the end.
Chapter Twenty
A week went by in which, for some bizarre reason, I chose to stay at Burnson Investments.
The honest reason was probably I had no desire to face the outside world and I needed something to do to fill my days, even if that meant getting ridiculed by John Burnson repeatedly. At least I wouldn’t have to think about the prior Thursday night and Leyla.
How had it gone so wrong? How had I missed the signs?
Every part of me told me to stop dwelling on it. It was unhealthy for me to think about the past.
But when this created a fresh wound that had not yet settled into a scar, I couldn’t ignore it. I had to care for it and tender to it until it had healed, if not disappeared entirely. I just had to be careful that the wound didn’t turn into a scab.
I fucking hated admitting it, but I couldn’t help but think of the good times with Layla. Our first hookup at the bar. Watching Netflix with tacos. Talking about how I loved her. Every time I tried to imagine her as a lying, deceitful bitch, I came back to the fact that she was probably under enormous pressure to make her uncle... father... whatever he was happy. It didn’t excuse her actions, not in the least, but...
Honestly, I wanted to hear from her again. I wanted a sober, rational explanation for what the hell had transpired over the last couple of months. I had a strange feeling I would get it. I didn’t think she was about to disappear from my life completely.
But boy... it would hurt like hell having that conversation. I wasn’t sure I wanted to have that conversation for what all it would entail.
The only silver lining that all of this produced was that Morgan and I began to tighten our relationship. Work had brushed it aside to some degree, and our age had also begun to separate us as Morgan would become the heir of Hunt Industries while I would do my own thing, but something about this, I could tell, had shook Morgan to the core. Maybe he would compel his father to renege on the deal; unlikely, but given how often we texted and how sincere he seemed in making it right for me, it was at least not impossible.
But work, despite being better than the alternative, still sucked horribly. Every day, Burnson came in, dressed me down, and reminded me how awful of a businessman I was. I held it in pretty well for a while.
If, of course, you accounted for the fact that time moved extremely slowly during this period, so a week really did feel like “a while.”
By the end of the week, though, I was ready to snap. I had moved past from “quietly accepting Burnson’s critiques as being better than the alternative” to “silently stewing as the unattended anger began to fester.” I could handle a few days of being his and the office’s bitch, but there was something else of crucial importance. My internship technically ended today, and while I would have happily extended it had my world not come crashing down for a little bit, there was no way this was lasting any longer.
Trying to do my duty, I brought his morning cup of coffee into his office.
“Promise me you didn’t get this coffee from Hunt Industries,” he said, barely looking up.
I snapped.
I grabbed the mug and slammed it on the wall.
“I should have for how little fucking work you’ve done here.”
This is career suicide. This is so fucking stupid.
But fuck it. I’ve already killed my career. Might as well send a message on the way out.
“All you ever do is go play golf. I’ll bet you have a tee time set up on your calendar already, or at least time you can sneak out to play golf. Maybe if you kept an eye on us once in a while, you wouldn’t have had to pass off something like this to your so called ‘intern.’ Maybe you would’ve done diligence and kept in touch with the Taylors. Instead, we all got fucked.”
“Chance Hunt, if you think—”
But I stopped.
“Chance Givens. I’m going by my birth name now. But you won’t have to worry about that, John. Today’s the last day of my internship, and if you think I’m coming back even if you gave me a seven figure salary, you’re out of your mind. I busted my ass to get a deal done with no support from anyone here. Yes, I made some mistakes, but I’m 22 and an intern, what the hell did you think was going to happen?”
The look on John Burnson’s face was priceless. No one had ever spoken to him like this as best as I could tell. But no one had also ever lost so much as I had—no one was so willing to attack him as I was.
“I know I’m cutting myself off from the world of finance forever with this, but I don’t give a fuck,” I said. “I’ll make my billions elsewhere. Here, you want to seem me make a deal? Watch!”
Without another word, I grabbed my coat, walked out the door, headed to my office, grabbed the few essentials I had, and stormed out of the office and onto the streets of New York.
I didn’t know where I would go or what I would do. I felt incredibly alone and isolated from the world. I had not just burned all my bridges, I had nuked them.
But I had one thing I didn’t have before.
Freedom.
And what I would do with that, only time would tell.
Six Months Prior
GRADUATION SEEMED ALMOST too close for comfort. I had an internship lined up with Burnson Investments despite Morgan begging me to come to Hunt Industries. No matter how much I told him I didn’t want to do it, though, he never listened. Nor, for that matter, did he ever get it.
At least he was a great guy to be around. And at least he recognized working for his dad would suck.
“You know, you could just not go to Hunt Industries,” I said after Morgan bitched for about the hundredth time that day, having wrapped up all of his finals, our graduations now officially requiring nothing more than the ceremonies. “You do have a choice. We live in a country of free will, ya know.”
Morgan just laughed sarcastically at that statement. It was a nice little dance that we did—I would remind him he had a choice, he would say I’m crazy, I would say he was crazy, and we were like 12 year olds again, mocking each other and calling each other names without really meaning it.
“And now how the fuck is that supposed to work, ya fool?” he said. “Just imagine me telling my dad that everything he had worked for over the las
t twenty-two years with me had suddenly devolved into... nothingness. He’d have to find a business heir elsewhere. Oh, sorry Pops! Yeah I’d be banned from the family faster than the old man would kick out a clown at a business meeting.”
I laughed, but there was something to Morgan’s answer that made me think about something in a way I had not yet to that point.
For all my life, I’d criticized Morgan as naive and unaware as to how 99.99 percent of the population lived. I told him there was just no way I could easily follow in his footsteps like magic.
But I had never considered the reverse—maybe I could never understand the pressures and tough challenges that Morgan faced. I could never know what it was like to expect to follow in the footsteps of Edwin Hunt. I could never know what it meant to be in your father’s shadow for your entire life, even after Edwin Hunt would pass away.
It was a thought that shook me a little bit. It also surprised me I had never considered this before just now.
... But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to give him shit for it all the same.
“Sucks to be you,” I said with a smirk. “Guess I’ll just make my own money with my name.”
“Hah!” Morgan chuckled. “Well, I suppose if anyone could do it... it would almost be you. But no one is as good as Morgan Hunt.”
“At getting their ass kicked, maybe,” I said. “You have money and I don’t, that’s the only difference.”
“The only?” Morgan said. “You know how much I would kill to do without the family business that money wouldn’t matter in? Travel, romance, learning... the list is endless. What about for you?”
What about for me?
Well, I’d like to heal my heart someday.
I’d like to find myself, to understand myself, and not feel so defined by the name Hunt.
And I’d like to be successful on my own terms.
Flawed (Hunt Brothers Saga) Page 13
