I bulldoze on, ignoring her. “I want a good man who knows what he wants and who loves me.”
“That’s not what you want.”
“Yes it is.”
“What you’ve just described, that was all of your ex-boyfriends.”
“No it wasn’t.” Or was it? Maybe she’s right. They all blend together.
“Your problem is that you don’t trust guys anymore. You don’t let them in.”
“I don’t let them in on the first date like you do, but I let them in eventually.”
Not only am I trying to deflect; I’m not even saying anything that’s true. Guys follow Jamie around like puppies with boners, but she’s a good girl and always makes them wait. One more thing to prove her obnoxious discipline.
Jamie rolls her eyes. “Are you going to be serious and listen to me?”
“I am listening to you.”
“You’re being stupid.”
“No, you’re being stupid,” I counter.
Jamie sighs and shakes her head. “I really wish you’d stuck it out with Mike.”
“And this is your business why?”
“It’d just be easier on you, is all. I didn’t know you’d broken up.”
My suspicions from earlier return. There’s something we should talk about. She got off on this tangent about Mike, how I don’t trust guys anymore and how I put up a wall with my unmeetable standards, but now I’m remembering what she sat me down in the first place for: to talk.
About what? And what do my standards, my lack of trust in guys, and Jamie’s frequently stated assertion that someone ruined me in my youth have to do with it?
Then I see it in her eyes.
This is about Onyx.
“What’d be easier on me, Jamie?”
“I heard something. From Anthony. I thought it might not be true, because why would it be? There’s just no sense. But then I talked to Riley James, who’s in my western class at Ticket To Ride, and she said her dad said that someone’s looking to rent that mansion right by his place, you know the one, with all the covered porches?”
She’s stalling the inevitable, but I’m already putting two and two together. I know the house, all right. It’s enormous and overlooks the valley. If I had to guess, it’s worth ten million at least. Nobody could handle rent that steep. Except for a multi-millionaire. Or a billionaire.
“You’re kidding.”
“About what? I haven’t said anything.” But I can see the truth in her eyes.
My old flame is back in town.
The one who set my too-high standard.
The one who ruined me, and made me unable to ever love again.
CHAPTER THREE
MIA
It’s fine.
I’ll just avoid him.
I’m thinking this while I take my shower at the gym. I’ve been in here for ten minutes, and already that feels like a day. I heard footsteps outside the stall, but nobody knocked. I’m sure it was Jamie. I imagine she knows the turmoil I’m in, despite the way I blew it off after her confession.
I’ve tried to forget Onyx and what he did, but it’s been hard. He hit it big after teaming up with Aiden to create the Forage search engine, and now all of its spin-off tech services. Everyone knows that. You can’t not know that. Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs, Aiden and Onyx. They’re mentioned in the same breath. Geniuses to many, powerful to all, loathed only by me.
Nobody understands. They try, but fail.
I knew Onyx when we were kids. He was just Onyx Scott, not The Onyx Scott From Forage. I don’t see why I should be punished just because he screwed me over and left me broken, then went on to stratospheric success. But I am. I’m punished, because I have to keep hearing about him. Because I have to field jokes about how I missed landing the golden fish, cracks about how I could have been a billionaire myself, and good-intentioned (but hideously inappropriate and offensive) suggestions that maybe I should look him up now that he’s rich and try to rekindle that old spark.
Jamie didn’t knock on my shower stall to ask if I was okay, because she knows I’m not. She’s probably in the lobby, clean and dried, waiting for me to emerge. There’s still twenty minutes left in our lunch hour, but she’ll stay there until a half-hour has passed and we’re officially late. She’ll stay hours beyond. She’ll get fired if she has to — not just because she’s a friend and wants to help, but because this is her fault. Jamie dropped this bomb, and I know she feels a need to gather the pieces. She didn’t want to tell me that Onyx was back in town, but must have felt I was too near to discovering it on my own — maybe by running into the old flame himself.
I stand under the shower, stark naked and head down. I shouldn’t wash my hair midday; it’ll be wet through the afternoon. But this is the only position that feels right. If I move, I’ll have to think about this. If I stay put, there’s only the water and the drain. That’s my world right now.
That, and the fist clenched tight in my gut.
“Mia?”
I guess Jamie decided to interrupt me after all.
“I’ll be out in a second.”
“Are you okay?”
No. “Yes. Of course. I’m just taking a shower.”
There’s a long pause, in which Jamie probably decides not to call out my bullshit. Then: “I’ll be out here waiting for you.”
Knowing she’s actively waiting finally breaks my paralysis. I clean up, towel off, then get dressed, moving the towel to my head before leaving the cubicle. Wet hair gives me something to focus on, so I move to the mirror, remove the towel, and start combing.
Jamie comes up beside me. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“About what?”
She meets my gaze in the mirror.
“If it helps, the campus they’re supposedly building is outside Inferno. Near 275. He may not even come into town.”
“Who?” I ask.
“Stop it, Mia. Just stop.”
“Oh. You mean Onyx.”
“Of course I mean Onyx.”
I say nothing, working out a knot.
“You seem—”
“I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“That’s fine. I just thought you should know.”
“I don’t want to talk about it — same as how I’ve never wanted to talk about it.”
“Fair enough.”
“That’s why I was confused.” I’m watching myself carefully, working on untangling my hair. I see Jamie from the corner of my eye but I refuse to look at her. “You know. Because we said we’d never talk about it. About him. That’s why I was so confused when you started talking about it.”
“Mia …”
I finally turn. There’s a smile on my face, but I have literally no idea where it came from. It feels like a joker’s grin — pasted on. The words on my tongue are kin to a joke, but I can’t imagine laughing.
“Don’t you remember? We code-named the whole thing — put it in a box, wrapped chains around the mess, and buried it in a hole. I didn’t want to talk it out, and you said that’s fine; everyone represses things these days. We laughed about it. We decided laughter was better than reality, even if it wasn’t really healthy laughter.”
“It was fresher then. I just wanted you to—”
“Fresher, sure,” I interrupt. My voice must have a manic edge because people in the locker room are starting to glance our way. In the mirror, I’m wearing an uncomfortable smile. I look like someone about to slip — about to lose her false face and brandish a knife. “Fresher for me, but nothing for you. You weren’t around. I’d just broken up with him. Or he’d just broken up with me. Whichever way it happened, I don’t know because I put it in a box! I buried it in a hole!”
I laugh a little. I’m scaring myself. I see what I’m doing, but the words keep coming. My smile is still there, but I see that my eyes are watering, too.
“I know how you feel,” she says.
“You do? You do?” More people look.
I’m a quarter of the way toward screaming.
“I wouldn’t have said anything if I’d known it’d upset you this much. It’s just that if Onyx—”
I hold up a hand. “We said we’d never use his name, remember!” It’s not a question; it leaves my lips as a tiny, panicked shout. “We called him ‘Voldemort.’ Remember that, Jamie? We made a pitcher of margaritas and we laughed about it. We got so drunk!”
I’m losing it. There’s a slippery slope, and goddammit if I’m not sliding right toward the lip. I can see it, but can’t stop.
Jamie looks around. She puts her hand on my arm. “Your hair is good enough. Let’s go. Let’s get some air.”
I sniff hard. No. I won’t be escorted from a building — not without so much as an event to traumatize me. Jamie merely mentioned a happening. I wasn’t assaulted. I didn’t witness a murder.
I must be exhausted by the running, and now my defenses are down.
I haven’t had lunch. My blood sugar is low.
I shake my head. “I’m okay.”
“We’ll take a full lunch. It’s okay; Simon is supposed to be talking to Anthony on the phone at one o’clock anyway. He won’t notice we’re not back, and if he does … well, Anthony. I hate to use my Get Out Of Jail Free card, but hey, why not.”
“I don’t need sympathy. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.”
“I’m fine.”
But I’m not. It’s all back now, all of it. It’s like I’m eighteen again and no time has passed — all that repressed emotion finally rising to the surface. I didn’t face it then, but it seems I’ll be forced to face it now. I wanted to forget all about Onyx but the world wouldn’t let me. He made billions and created a tool everyone uses daily. Now he’s one of the world’s darlings. I can’t avoid him. Every time I do an Internet search, I’m reminded of all that hidden pain.
The hand on me increases its grip, suddenly alarmed and urgent. Jamie grabs my bag and says, hurriedly, “Let’s go.”
I don’t see the other people in the locker room or the gym as Jamie drags me out. I’m too focused on my own downward spiral to notice them.
But I do catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror before I’m yanked from view.
And I see that I’m not just crying. I’m actually bawling, out of control.
CHAPTER FOUR
ONYX
Part of the lie I told my PR gal Alyssa about coming to Inferno involved Mia. Of course it did. It was Alyssa’s job to safeguard my public image, and Mia has always been this potential landmine in my past that I’ve carefully avoided. Being Forage’s good cop to Aiden’s bad, I’ve had to keep my womanizing hidden. People expect me to fuck around —and I do — but a big, fat bomb like Mia’s could certainly injure some of the connections Forage is trying to form.
Away from Inferno, danger from The Mia Factor was minimal. She was a nest of bees; if I didn’t bother her, she’d keep on ignoring me. That’s why Alyssa was so angry when I casually announced I needed to move back to Inferno for a while — ostensibly to build Forage Education on the fertile soil of up-and-coming Falls talent. Soon, Inferno will be another Portland, another Seattle, another Austin, Texas — one of those places people mention when they talk about hip trends, bright minds, and unlimited futures. It only made sense to build there.
At least that’s what I told Alyssa.
The truth is, we do like Inferno for our Education branch, but it’s far from the only option.
The truth is, I won’t be able to avoid stirring Mia up during my visit. Because Mia is half the reason I’m here — or, more accurately, Mia’s friend Jamie and her father-figure Anthony Ross are.
Mia’s LiveLyfe profile is private. She shares nothing outside of her friends circle, and I’m hardly one of her friends these days. I could have hunted around for someone inside that circle, but Mia turned her world against me. It was easier to call Evan Cohen and ask for backstage access to her profile. Yes, it’s private. But not when you know LiveLyfe’s CEO, and know how flexible his morals can be.
I spend an hour searching her profile, trying to see what Mia’s been up to in the six years we’ve been apart. Scrolling backward through time, I see a few photos of Mia with guys. Each one makes me angry, but none of the guys last long. Jamie’s profile — also private — is far more helpful. She seems to have taken many pictures of Mia with her beaus-of-the-week, and Jamie isn’t shy about captioning such photos with many hearts and declarations of love. But then those guys stop appearing, and there’s a period where Mia isn’t mentioned at all.
In Mia’s profile, there’s nothing between the ages of sixteen and nineteen.
It’s strange. It’s like she didn’t want to erase just me, but the entirety of the time we knew each other. In Mia’s LiveLyfe, those years don’t exist. One day she’s blooming toward her Sweet Sixteen, and the next she’s a college sophomore. For a little more than three years, it’s like Mia Stover didn’t even exist.
I close my laptop and stand. I don’t know why, but I’m completely hard. It doesn’t exactly make sense, and it’s strange that I didn’t notice it happening. There was nothing hot or sexy in the research, but I’m turned on anyway, stimulated by the past. And even though it was mental stimulation rather than sexual, my cock got confused and rose to the task.
I want to yell at it. Hey. Relax. There’s nobody to fuck.
But even wondering at my hard dick makes matters worse. I’d been considering how I could approach Mia and do the least damage, but now my mind is spooling back through our chest of mental treasures. I have an advantage here that Mia doesn’t want me to have. She’s erased me entirely, but she couldn’t delete my memory. She hates me for sure — but I can close my eyes and fuck her whenever I want.
That’s what I’m thinking, now that my cock is in charge.
Memories spill into my mind like a tipped over bucket. Confused by the fear of what Mia must think of me today, my fantasies find a dull edge. I’m turned on not just by thinking of Mia’s most intimate times, but of how taboo it is for me to think of those times at all. The lewder the memory, the hotter it feels. The more I know Mia would hate me for thinking of something, the more it throbs my balls.
Right now, she hates my guts.
So it’s really fucking hot to remember the time she put whipped cream on my cock and licked it clean.
Right now, if Mia saw me, she’d claw my eyes out.
So I can’t stop thinking of how she looked that one time on Spring Break, when we fucked in a Subway bathroom, her bent forward over the sink with her bare ass toward me and her panties pulled down just far enough to give me access.
I remember her sucking my cock on a road trip.
I remember talking her into trying a vibrator rather than her hands for the first time, and how before it made her come three times, it made her laugh so hard she almost peed.
Mia, who hates me.
Mia, whom I wronged.
I remember her slowly removing her bathing suit beside a hotel pool, off in the corner but where anyone might see her. I remember the fall of her dark hair, the glint in her mischievous cat’s eyes. I remember how I backed her into our room after that, and she rode me until the lamp shook off the end table and broke.
I was nervous about seeing her again, but the animal inside me won’t lie down. When it’s all about sex, emotions stop mattering as much.
I unzip. I think of Mia.
It’s her hand on me. It’s her lips about to wrap around my shaft, then suck me until I come inside her.
She must hate me.
But our times together were hot, and I wonder if some way, somehow — when the chips are down and the clothes come off — she’s not as immune to me as I’ve always imagined.
Maybe. I hope so.
Tomorrow, I’ll see her for the first time in six years.
I grip my cock, imagining my hand is Mia’s pussy.
And I fuck her in my mind.
CHAPTER FIVE
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MIA
The next morning, after Jamie calms my hysterical shit down, she comes to me with two cups of coffee and a muffin. I find this so sweet I almost cry. I’m not normally a crier and Jamie knows it, so we both pretend we don’t see my almost-tears.
Jamie wouldn’t let me go back to work yesterday, but it would have been obvious if she hadn’t gone back either. So she took me home, then texted me later and said she’d told Simon that our jogging session set off some Richter Scale menstrual cramps that left me unable to work.
Mention periods, and guys stop listening, she replied when I pointed out that her excuse for me didn’t make sense.
But things between us are still a little strange. Jamie is a great friend and she’d never judge me, but I still feel like a blubbering asshole after yesterday’s display. The whole walk home, everyone was staring. I probably have a new reputation downtown, as Crazy Breakdown Lady.
And now here I am, almost crying again.
I’m clearly not back to normal, if there ever was such a thing. But I’m not sobbing, and that’s worth something.
“You brought me a muffin,” I say.
“It was either a muffin or weed.”
“I don’t smoke weed.”
“That’s why I got you a muffin.” She takes a bite of her own muffin as we move into my small kitchen, then with a full mouth says, “But if I could make a suggestion?”
I nod.
“Start smoking weed.”
I laugh a little. It’s nice. The laugh is welcome, and so is the joke. She’s nodded at the elephant, acknowledging its presence in the room. “Was I that bad yesterday?” I ask.
“You were pretty bad.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just be less bad.”
Another laugh. I know she’ll talk me through this and won’t rush my healing — if there’s any to be had. But the jokes at my expense are a breath of fresh air after my emotionally turbulent night. Sarcasm for the win.
“Seriously,” Jamie says, settling onto one of my tall stools and setting her coffee on the raised counter. “How are you?”
Trillionaire Boys' Club: The Internet Giant Page 2
