by Max Monroe
Sincerely,
Kline Brooks
President and CEO Brooks Media
From: Georgia Cummings
To: Kline Brooks
Subject: I think my boyfriend will be very happy…
Mr. Brooks,
Thank you for your utmost concern. I will be sure to leave work early tomorrow and wait for my boyfriend at his apartment. I will also use your suggestion about my attire. Although, I think my boyfriend would prefer me to be wearing the sexiest pair of heels I own while I wait.
Sincerely,
Georgia Cummings
Director of Marketing, TapNext
Brooks Media
P.S. I’m crazy in love with my boyfriend.
From: Kline Brooks
To: Georgia Cummings
Re: I think my boyfriend will be happy…(YES, he will)
Ms. Cummings,
I think your boyfriend would love that. Actually, I bet he’d insist on that.
Sincerely,
Kline Brooks
President and CEO Brooks Media
P.S. He’s crazy in love with you too. For the sake of everything that’s right in the world, don’t forget the fucking heels tomorrow.
Eyes tired, I set my phone in my lap and rested my head on the seat. My mind replayed last night, highlighting everything from Kline stealing kisses between asking me my favorite bands, movies, and vacation spots, to him making love to me, over and over again.
My fingers touched my lips, hiding my ridiculous smile.
“I know that look,” a woman softly whispered beside me.
My eyes blinked open, finding an older lady with salt and pepper hair and a rounded, smiling face in the seat next to mine. “You’re thinking about someone special, aren’t you?”
“Am I that obvious?” I laughed, my cheeks flushing.
“Don’t be embarrassed. Love is a beautiful thing when you find it. It’s something to be happy about, something to cherish, something to wear on your face every single day,” she said, genuine happiness in her voice. “Is he a good man?”
I nodded. Kline’s handsome face flashed in my mind. In that moment, I could picture every one of his smiles—happy, teasing, playful, loving. It was an endless list and one that I wanted to memorize and keep with me forever. “Yeah, he is. He’s definitely one of the good ones.”
“Is he your husband?”
“No.” I shook my head. “He’s my boyfriend.”
She grinned, her cheeks puffing out in soft delight. “By the looks of your glow, I’d say you’re headed in that direction.”
Were we? My rational head wanted me to slow the hell down, but my heart was already picking out invitations and flowers. Even though we had just started exchanging I love yous, there was no denying I’d fallen hard for Kline. I was in so deep I honestly couldn’t picture myself without him. Ever.
Before I could respond to her statement or ask her something about herself, she was adjusting in her seat, placing a pillow around her neck. “I wish you the best of luck, dear. I hope you and your wonderful man get a very happy ever after. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to rest my eyes. I can feel my Xanax kicking in.” She flashed an apologetic smile. “It’s for the best, though,” she added. “I’m a very nervous flyer.”
She closed her eyes, and within seconds, soft snores fell from her lips.
I made a note to tell my doctor I was a nervous flyer too. The long flights I often took for business trips would have been much more tolerable with the magic that was Xanax. I’d much rather have slept through a four-hour flight than toss and turn without getting any rest.
“Sorry for the delay,” a woman’s voice filtered through the speakers. “We will be taking off shortly.”
My phone buzzed in my lap, catching my attention.
It was a picture message from Cassie, with the words, “I’m so sorry, Georgia.”
Huh?
I tapped the photo and it filled the screen, zooming in so I could figure out what she was talking about.
It was a screenshot of a TapNext conversation.
TAPRoseNEXT (7:00PM): You’re a very nice guy, but I can’t continue talking with you anymore. I’ve gotten more serious with the man I’m seeing and this just doesn’t feel right. I’m sorry. Good luck with everything, Ruck.
BAD_Ruck (6:45AM): I get it. I do. But I think we should meet in person, just the two of us. Please, Rose.
I white-knuckled my phone as I stared down at the screen in disbelief.
I don’t think I breathed for an entire minute. I felt like someone had reached down my throat and pulled my heart straight out of my body.
My eyes closed of their own accord, my mind in self-preservation mode. My heart roaring in my ears, I took a cavernous breath and found the strength to open my eyes again, hoping—no, praying—I had missed something along the line.
But I hadn’t. I fucking hadn’t. The screenshot, Kline’s response, it was real. One-hundred percent real.
I scrubbed a hand down my face, pressing into my lids to stop the tears wanting to spill down my cheeks. A shaky sigh escaped my lips as I tried to focus through the blurry mess of emotions.
His message was timestamped from this morning at 3:45 a.m. Pacific.
My throat constricted, cheeks straining in agony to stop myself from losing it.
I won’t cry. I will not sob in front of a plane full of strangers.
This morning. He sent that message in between playfully asking me questions and making love to me. Or was it faking love to me? Because that was what it felt like now. I’d never felt so betrayed, so utterly devastated in my entire life.
The pain built in my chest, burning like I had swallowed hot coals. I was hanging by a thread, my free hand gripping the armrest in a pathetic attempt to hold myself together.
“Miss, we’re about to take off. You need to turn your phone off now.”
I pulled my eyes from the screen, finding a flight attendant with long blonde hair and a pink smile standing above me.
All I could do was stare at her. Honestly, I didn’t even know what she was saying to me.
“Your phone?” She nodded to my hands.
I followed her eyes and realized what she was asking. “Oh, sorry,” I mumbled, and with shaky hands, turned it off.
I felt like I was a passenger in a crash-and-burn landing, going from the highest high, only to be catapulted into the lowest of lows.
Memories flooded my mind.
The night at the Hamptons, when I had given myself to him.
I choked on a sob as a few tears slipped down my cheeks. I swiped at the liquid emotion, telling myself I could do this. I could get through this flight.
A man across the aisle glanced in my direction, his head tilted to the side in concern.
Oh, God, don’t look at me like that! I wanted to scream at him. I did not want pity. I couldn’t handle someone recognizing that I was falling to pieces. That would for sure make it impossible to hold this in until I was somewhere private.
Long, slow breaths were inhaled through my nose and exhaled from my lungs. I stared down at a nonexistent piece of lint on my pants, plucking at the material just because it was something to do, something else to focus on besides my heart falling out of my chest.
More memories drowned me.
Last night, with each kiss, each touch, each soft caress, he had silently been asking me to fall the rest of the way with him. And I had. I had followed his lead, and on the way down, he had made love to me until my heart was beating like he’d wanted it to. Like I’d wanted it to. My world had changed. Inside, my walls had fallen down and he was all around me. All I knew. All I wanted to know.
Kline had gone from being my boss to my best friend, my lover, and my intoxication until he let the needle break off in my skin. This wasn’t a little cut that would scab over and flake off. No. He had cut me so deep I hadn’t even bled.
The pain was so unbearable that all my emotions fled the scene. I sw
itched from distraught—fighting the sob threatening to bubble up from my lungs—to robotic.
I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to ask him why, after the night we had shared together, he would still want to meet someone who wasn’t me. Initially, when I’d found out Kline was Ruck, and he had been chatting with TAPRoseNEXT without knowing it was me, it didn’t upset me. I looked at the entire situation with a rational, understanding head. Because I had done the same thing.
But the second I had met Thatch, the guy whose picture was on Bad_Ruck’s TapNext profile, I’d known I needed to stop. I knew I wanted Kline. I knew I was falling in love with him, and I didn’t want anything to ruin that. Which was why I had told Cassie to take the reins. Who would’ve thought that the whole time I was chatting with Ruck, I was actually talking to Kline?
It was the ultimate mindfuck.
Unfortunately for me, that mindfuck had just gotten a whole lot worse.
This was different from a simple response to another woman on an online dating profile. He was requesting to meet someone that wasn’t me, someone he knew was my best friend.
What on earth did he think he was going to gain from that? Was he planning on being in a relationship with me while screwing Cassie on the side?
God, it didn’t add up, didn’t seem like the Kline I knew, but the proof was right in front of my face.
I felt so devastated. Knowing what we shared and all of the possibilities of what we could have been, why would Kline have risked that? In a matter of a few sentences, he had just ruined everything. Destroyed us. Destroyed me.
I felt sick. Nausea coiled my stomach, constant and unrelenting.
The minute the seatbelt lights went off, I made a beeline for the lavatory. My breakfast filled the small metal toilet within seconds. It took a good five minutes before I could stop dry heaving. I held myself up over the sink, staring at a woman I didn’t even recognize. I did my best to clean up, splashing cool water on my face and rinsing my mouth out, before I made my way back to my seat.
God, I had never felt so cold, so fucking alone.
I didn’t want to feel like this. I wanted the pilot to turn the plane around so I could talk to Kline. I wanted to forget that TapNext conversation had ever happened.
But I wasn’t going to be that woman who couldn’t step back and face the facts.
Even though it was going to kill me, I was going to be the woman who knew when to end things. The woman who could end a relationship with a man—even though she loved him—because she knew she didn’t deserve to be treated like that.
He had told me he loved me, he had touched me and kissed me in ways a man would only do when he was in love. But while he had been doing that, he had also found time to request to meet another woman. These were not the actions of a man I wanted to be in a relationship with.
For the entire five-and-half-hour flight, my mind raced. Every memory was a picture in my head, his betrayal scratching across the surface of each photograph and tainting it forever.
I was fucking miserable, stuck on an old airplane with no Wi-Fi after finding out the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with was going behind my back and requesting to meet other women on the side.
If he did that knowing it was my best friend, what else was he doing behind my back?
I knew it was crazy to go in that direction, but who could blame me?
Trying to talk this out with him was pointless. I could only take so much, and a nasty breakup would push me over the edge. I was afraid of what I might say to him. Hell, I’d have to hold my breath if I was in the same room as him, because breathing the same air meant breathing him in.
And my heart couldn’t take any more.
I walked off the plane, my mind fogged with heartbreak and anger. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to curl up in the fetal position and sleep for forty years.
Pre-life-altering screenshot, I would’ve sent Kline a text message telling him I had landed, but I didn’t even bother turning on my phone. What was the fucking point? I had nothing to say.
Eventually, I found baggage claim and grabbed my suitcase.
I had options. Either I could let this drag me down and turn me into someone I didn’t want to be, or I could find a way to get past this.
My decision was made and there was no going back to what we had.
There was no explanation he could give that would fix this, save us.
Steadfast in my choice, I hailed a cab and threw my bags in the back before the driver could even get out of his seat.
“Winthrop Building, Fifth Avenue,” I instructed without a second thought.
When he pulled up to the building, I tossed money in the front seat and hopped out, grabbing my suitcases from the trunk. It was afternoon and everyone would be there. My coworkers would be roaming the halls. Dean would be waiting for me to attend the meeting.
Fuck.
No way could I handle sitting through a meeting. I had to go in, do what I needed to do, and get the hell out of there with as little interaction as possible.
I was striding off the elevator within minutes. I offered a few small waves to Meryl and Cynthia as I passed them in the hall before ducking into my office. Leaning against the closed door, I shut my eyes, biting my cheek to hold back the tears.
God, I didn’t have time for a breakdown. I had about twenty minutes before Dean would stroll in, ready to escort me to the conference room.
I sat behind my desk and booted up my computer. My hands shook, and my foot tapped against the tile as nervous energy radiated off of me in unpredictable waves.
A letter of resignation was typed out at a quick, efficient pace. I sent a screenshot of the TapNext conversation to my email and printed it out.
And then I was walking down the hall, toward the one place I didn’t really want to be.
“Oh, hi, Georgia!” Leslie stopped me as I rounded the corner. “Is Mr. Brooks back? I forgot to give him a few messages last week about some meeting…” She scrunched her eyebrows, her pea-sized brain trying to remember. “I think it was important, but, like, I’m not really sure.”
“He won’t be back until tomorrow.”
“Oh.” Her huge mouth jutted out into a pout. “Are you feeling okay? You look, like, really terrible today.”
Wow. As if my day wasn’t already fantastic.
I didn’t even have the energy to form a sarcastic retort. I just nodded, because she was right; I looked like shit.
“Hey, do you mind going into Dean’s office and letting him know that I had to go home? Tell him I’m sick and I’ll call him later.”
He would be crazy pissed at me but would understand. Plus, I was betting on the fact that Leslie would ramble on and on about my haggard appearance. It was the first time I could use her obsession with being the prettiest girl in the room to my advantage.
“Uh…okay,” she begrudgingly agreed.
You’d think I was the intern in this scenario, asking my superior for a favor.
The second I stepped into Kline’s office, my heart clenched. I glanced around at the familiar surroundings, taking everything in. Knowing I wouldn’t last long, I pulled open a drawer on his desk in search of paper. My eyes got blurry when they caught on a photograph of us in the Hamptons resting on top of everything else. We were sitting on the porch, his arm wrapped around my shoulder. I was looking into the camera, grinning, while he gazed down at me, a soft, smitten smile on his lips.
What should have been a happy memory only made me want to throw up again.
I was starting to wonder if I ever really knew Kline Brooks.
I had to get out of his office and back to my apartment. The impending breakdown was sitting in my throat.
Slamming the drawer closed, I wrote out a simple note on the top edge of the screenshot Cassie had sent me, placing it on top of my resignation letter.
Walking out of his office and getting on the elevator, I was certain I’d never be the same after this
. I knew getting myself to a place where I even felt like smiling was going to be the hardest thing I ever did. I knew there was no getting over Kline.
But I also knew I deserved better.
I’d find a new job. I’d find a way to move on.
And I’d be just fine pretending that I was.
I shook the ice in my glass, watching as the cubes moved from side to side and melted into one another. One water droplet plopped from each surface to the next until it finally disappeared into the shallow amber liquid at the bottom.
I’d taken to drinking scotch on the flight to pass the time, the bouncing of my knee having grown old within the first fifteen minutes. Georgia was still on a plane too, having taken off precisely two hours and seventeen minutes ahead of me—according to the FAA—but every minute felt like a lifetime, and it took real concentration to keep myself from bombarding her turned-off phone with a stream of sappy messages.
Last night—the last few weeks of nights—had been the best of my life. Everything I’d worked for, built for myself, and strived to keep healthy felt like a drop in the life-bucket. Finding someone who made me anticipate each day and crave her company—someone who made me feel even more like me—well, that was what made a man realize the truth, the importance, in working to live rather than living to work.
I wanted my days to start and end with her, and I wanted the privilege to have even more of her in the middle.
Put simply, I was in love.
And it was irrevocably clear why I never had been before. None of them were her.
“Gemma?” I asked like the pathetic shell of a man I had become. I’d told Georgia I loved her, but it hadn’t been enough. I needed some kind of confirmation. Some kind of peace. Some kind of promise of forever.
Gemma had the grace to smile. “She should be landing sometime in the next five minutes, sir.”
