Hate the Game

by Holly Hall

“I’ve wanted to write content for you for years. Since I wasn’t doing that, I would play around with posts I thought were relevant. Can I show you?” I propped my laptop on the edge of the sink and clicked the power button.

  Leigh sighed. “Fine. But let’s move this to my office. I need to bathe in hand sanitizer.”

  I spent more time alone with Leigh that day than I had in all the years I’d been at LoveLeigh combined. She was resistant in the beginning, but after I paged through my ideas and explained the reasoning behind the inclusive titles and mock captions I’d come up with for images, her defensive front began to crumble.

  LoveLeigh had thrived on the elitist-style content popular in the early days of the blogging world, where the target audience was one type of woman, everyone strove to impersonate that image better than everyone else, and social media was all a game of proving it. But when other influencers started developing more diverse content for a wider audience, LoveLeigh stuck with what it was good at. And the readers noticed.

  Unbeknownst to me, the social-media team had been blocking accounts and deleting negative comments from Leigh’s platforms for years. So when the rest of us would check on how our posts were doing, all we’d see was glowing praise. It was like an extra-forgiving filter had been placed over the lens we viewed the company through. And it was all bullshit.

  Three of my archived blog posts later, and I saw glimmers of acceptance in Leigh’s expression. She acknowledged that she’d feared cutting ties between her and certain members of her staff, most of whom she’d known personally before employing them, more than she feared the damage they were doing to her company. Her priorities, as she’d said, were screwed.

  I returned home that day before 7pm for the first time in a long time; I don’t think Leigh could’ve handled any more revelations. And when I rounded the elevator to traverse the long hallway to my apartment, I spotted a man-sized lump in front of my door. That was all I registered before I spun and stepped back into hiding on the landing.

  It was Theo. I hadn’t looked long enough, but that was the only thing that made sense. And although begging for forgiveness from the floor seemed romantic in movies, it was downright terrifying in person. Because Theo had shaken the stronger woman I’d been trying to build atop a precarious foundation, and the heart doesn’t bounce back from that in a matter of days.

  Mentally arming myself, I adjusted my bag on my shoulder and proceeded to my apartment as if Theo wasn’t sitting beside my door. I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but by the hunch in his posture I guessed it’d been a while.

  He looked up as I approached, but I couldn’t bring myself to meet his eyes. The same energy reserve I’d tapped into during the confrontation with Leigh was drained. Instead, I unlocked my door and prayed he’d let me pass without interference.

  “Ava.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. Ignore him, ignore the apology in his tone, ignore everything. And do not look for sincerity in his eyes. I couldn’t trust myself just now to see things as they truly were.

  “Please let me explain.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Ava—”

  “Stop saying my name!” I pressed my hands over my ears to make my point and wondered if I was truly losing it.

  “I’ll give you time, I’ll give you space, I’ll leave you alone for as long as you want if you let me say my piece.”

  “You should do those things anyway because they’re the least I deserve.” I wanted to applaud myself for that one, but I was tired. Even my voice was thin, like I was that much closer to my breaking point.

  “You do deserve that. But you saw and heard a very small portion of this situation before making your judgments. Just let me at least explain everything so you have the whole story.”

  I pressed my forehead to the door and the memory of our first encounter in the hallway resurfaced. If only we could go back to that day. Maybe I’d change things; maybe I wouldn’t have spoken to him ever again.

  Or maybe I would’ve.

  Because although the sting was still fresh in my heart, I couldn’t confidently say I regretted the last few months.

  “Okay,” I relented. “But when I ask you to leave, you leave. No arguing.”

  “Sure.” He rose to his feet and somehow, at full height, he was even harder to look at. His arms had seemed like they’d been made for holding me. His chest had always been a warm, solid place to land. And that mouth. . . God, that mouth. It always knew what to say and when to press a kiss to my head.

  This felt impossible.

  I turned away from him and went into my apartment. I dumped my bag and kicked off my heels without worrying where they went. I thought about all the days he could’ve come clean about Pierce and didn’t. That was what I had to hang onto.

  Theo waited in the entryway, like he knew allowing him in was allowing him to poke the soft, raw scraps of my trust. I faced the sink and gathered myself, and then, when I felt I was ready, turned to him.

  “I’m sorry,” he breathed. “It was only a conversation, between Pierce and me, but it was a petty thing to even talk about. There’s no excuse for it.”

  Well, at least he saw it like it was.

  Then he took a step toward me. “But I can guarantee you’ve had similar conversations with Holland—how you wished things had happened differently between you and your past boyfriends. How if you could go back in time, maybe you’d have been the ones to break their hearts instead.”

  “Don’t compare me to Pierce. He’s a serial cheater and a sociopath. I didn’t take on my client with the intention of tricking him, nor did I encourage his fiancée to do the same.

  “And I never hurt him. My responsibility is to help my clients promote the best parts of themselves to whomever they want to attract. That’s it, and that’s what I did. What Janelle chose to do with my guidance wasn’t my business.”

  “You and Pierce are nothing alike, I realize that, but you know how it is when you’re hurt.”

  “You mean, when your ego gets bruised. Or when an entitled asshole loses his favorite plaything.”

  “Sure. All of the above. But that’s not how I saw it. He seemed genuinely heartbroken, and I commiserated with him. Getting to know you was something I agreed to in passing but never intended to carry out.”

  “And yet you did.”

  He took a step toward me, and I shook my head to ward him off. “Meeting you in the hallway happened by chance. Seeing you again in the laundry room happened by chance. Pierce’s and my conversation happened in the middle of those things but didn’t affect, in any way, how I saw you.”

  By chance. That statement didn’t sit right in my mind. It clashed with what I knew to be true and cozied up to what I suspected. “There seems to be a lot that happened by chance. Pierce being a member of your gym. You, the guy who happens to live right across the hall from me, someone Pierce thought he’d been fooled by and wanted to return the favor to. Isn’t that a little too coincidental?”

  “What are you saying?” he asked. His tone had turned melancholic. Defeated.

  “I’m saying maybe I wasn’t the only one who was deceived. Take a closer look at your friend, Theo, before you find yourself in the same position. Maybe it’s already too late.”

  He avoided my gaze then, staring through the window across the room. A muscle pulsated in his jaw as resolve settled in. Then his eyes found mine. “I am sorry. I should’ve never started a relationship on those terms. I didn’t know that you were you.”

  “You didn’t think you’d fall for me. So you decided to keep that little tidbit about Pierce to yourself to see what happened. To feel me out.” I crossed my arms, hiding the nails I’d been chewing. I needed to be assertive—I’d allowed myself to be the victim of unfortunate circumstances for too long. “And you did feel me out, didn’t you?”

  Theo’s forlorn expression said he knew where this was going and had no hope of stalling it.

  “You took what
you wanted, and you knew that revealing Pierce’s little revenge fantasy would’ve put a stop to it. You kept it up, thinking I wouldn’t find out. Because when would I ever make the connection between someone like Pierce and someone like you?” A tear trailed from the corner of my eye. “But you’re not all that different, are you?”

  His shoulders visibly sagged. “All I knew about you was the image someone else created. So, no, I didn’t think I’d fall for you. But you were everything I never expected. And once I fell in love with you, because I did, I never thought to mention that you had come up in conversation months prior. I was already so far from the man I’d been then, and you were nothing like the woman I’d thought you were.”

  “You had so many opportunities to tell me the truth.”

  “I know.” He massaged his forehead with one hand. “But you wouldn’t have seen me for who I was after that. You would’ve judged me by a drunken conversation that happened before I really knew you.”

  “And that would’ve been my choice to make.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

  I knew without digging too deep that he really was sorry. But I didn’t know what he was sorrier for: what he did or that I’d found out.

  “You can say you didn’t want to leave it up to chance. You can say you didn’t want to be as powerless as you were when you found your fiancée hooking up with her boss.”

  I saw his throat bob as he swallowed. “You’re right,” he said, his voice hoarse. “And I wanted to tell you I love you.”

  Somehow, that hurt more than anything else. I didn’t want those words served cold on the tail-end of our relationship. “Too late.”

  Theo took another step forward, and at the rate he was going, he’d be right in front of me in another second. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t smell the shower-fresh scent I’d come to associate with the feeling of safety, of assuredness. I couldn’t look into his irises, the exact hue of which I’d committed to memory but was always more intense in person. I knew if those things happened, if my senses were full of him, it’d be harder to send him away.

  And I had to send him away. I needed room to breathe. To deal with myself.

  “I think you should go.”

  His next breath was so deep I could see his chest rise and fall. And when his lips parted to speak, I held up a hand. “Please. You said you would leave when I asked, and I gave you the grace to hear you out first.”

  “Okay.”

  I didn’t watch as he left, but the door clicking shut behind him was enough finality to bring on a fresh wave of emotion. Because thinking back to the day he’d fixed it reminded me that even then, he’d known. He’d known Pierce wanted to hurt me by using someone else to betray me, and he’d tested my boundaries and sidestepped my defenses anyways.

  Theo might’ve had good intentions when he finally got to know me—like he’d said—but I wasn’t sure how you repaired the trust in the very person who’d broken yours.

  Chapter 25

  Theo

  I was going crazy in my apartment. I couldn’t be there too long before I felt the buzz in the air—the spiky awareness that the woman I loved was right across the hall. The woman who was so close yet slipping further from my grasp every day.

  It’s ironic that the harder you try to keep someone close, the faster they drift away. When I did everything I could think of to prove to Quinn I could support our life together, she leap-frogged me and went for the bigger fish. The way bigger fish. And when I threw those three important words in Ava’s face, she threw me out of her apartment.

  Another fun nuance about life, I guess.

  Anyway, I was avoiding our building. Not out of shame, or because I didn’t want to see her. God, did I want to see her. But because I knew if I didn’t, I’d go to her place and try to mansplain my way out of this mess, which so far had only succeeded in digging me a deeper hole. The only thing I could do was lay in that hole I’d dug and hope she’d drop a ladder eventually.

  “Morning, boss,” Ralph said, popping his head into my office.

  I quit rubbing my eyes and blinked a few times. “Mornin’.” My eyes flicked to the cot I’d yet to fold up. “You’re early today.”

  “I wanted to do a deep clean out on the floor.”

  I nodded and turned to the darkened computer screen like I’d been in the middle of something. “Right. Well, let me know if you need help moving anything.”

  “Sure thing.” I was about to breathe a sigh of relief, when he caught himself on the doorjamb. “Something wrong with your apartment?”

  “Huh?”

  “The cot.” He jutted his elbow that direction. “I figured your apartment flooded or something.”

  “Yeah, uh, the apartment above mine. Bathtub issue.”

  “Shit.” He shook his head. “You’d think the maintenance at these places would be a lot better, for what we pay in rent.”

  “For real, dude.” I made a mental note to hide the damn thing better so my staff and members wouldn’t start thinking I was homeless.

  “Let me know if you need a couch to crash on. Sometimes repairs and replacing shit takes forever.”

  “Yeah, I will. Thanks.”

  With a final nod, he set off down the hall toward the supply closet, and I breathed a sigh full of equal parts frustration and relief. If there was anything I hated worse than the situation I’d gotten myself into with Ava, it was having to explain it to anyone else.

  The situation in question could’ve gone a lot differently if I’d fessed up three months ago. Maybe then I would’ve only been an asshole instead of a liar.

  I knew what it felt like when your trust was broken. Being lied to, even by omission, wasn’t just a betrayal by the other person, it was like a betrayal to yourself. Because your judgment had been wrong. Your safeguards had failed you. Now, I was facing the consequences of those things.

  I woke my computer and clicked over to the training schedule. I only had three sessions on the calendar, which wasn’t near enough to keep my busy mind occupied. I was amped, and I’d probably have to squeeze in a cardio session later to work off my frazzled energy. Then my gaze caught on something.

  12pm-1:30pm: Pierce Pressinger

  Fury pumped through my veins at an alarming pace. One of the last things Ava had said to me echoed in my mind. A little too coincidental.

  It’d seemed unlikely at the time, that Pierce had sought me out on purpose because of my proximity to Ava. But he had the resources. With his money and influence, hardly anything was out of the realm of possibility, and finding out where Ava lived and who resided in the same building wouldn’t have taken much effort. I needed the truth, if only for my own peace of mind. And there was only one way to find that out.

  “What’s up, guy?”

  I dropped the pen I’d been chewing on just as Pierce strolled through my office door.

  “I thought you’d be out there on the floor already.”

  “Just taking care of a few things. Have a seat.” I kicked the office chair across from me out from under my desk. Pierce regarded it with a raised brow before striding in and dropping into it. He did that thing rich people do: reclined in a seat not meant for reclining and crossed an ankle over the opposite knee. Making himself at home in my territory.

  “What can I do you for?”

  “I wanted to ask you about Ava.”

  “Ava who?”

  “Ava Wynn. Janelle’s Ava.”

  “Janelle’s—” he stared off in the distance and hummed the name, as if he had a dozen Avas to go through. “Oh. The dating girl.”

  I crossed my forearms on my desk and leaned closer. “Did you know I lived in her building, when you brought her up that night in the bar?”

  Pierce cocked his head. “What are you implying?”

  “Just saying, it’s a little coincidental that you befriended the guy who lives in the same building as the woman who helped your fiancée dump you.”

  “I
t’s a small world.” He shrugged, his foot bouncing.

  “In a city of almost three million people? Not that small.”

  “So what you’re saying is, I figured out where she lived, and then cared enough to track her neighbor down?”

  “Desperate times.”

  “Desperate,” Pierce scoffed and steepled his hands against his forehead. “I didn’t track down anyone. The information fell into my lap and I did something with it, so what?”

  “Fell into your lap?”

  His hands dropped, revealing a shit-eating grin. “I have friends in low places. Isn’t that what you say down in Texas?”

  I bit back a retort. He was trying to provoke me, and doing something rash out of anger, although enticing, wasn’t constructive.

  Pierce waved, as if batting away an annoyance. “What’s got your panties in a wad? What does it matter to you?”

  “I kept running into Ava in our building. We hit it off. We started dating.”

  “No shit?”

  “Imagine my surprise when she showed up at the gym and saw me training you, then ran out in a hurry without saying anything to me on my birthday. I mistakenly assumed she’d put two and two together.”

  His eyes were almost glittering as he waited for the story to unfold. My hands flexed in my lap.

  “I started to explain that it wasn’t what it looked like, that I wasn’t meeting with you for the purpose of getting back at her. I didn’t know she had no clue what was going on. I basically laid it out for her.”

  “Wow. Good move.”

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  “I’d say it worked out for the best, wouldn’t you?”

  My chair went hurtling into the wall when I stood up. “This was your agenda, all along.”

  “Which I explained to you, in detail, at the bar that night. As I recall, nobody forced you to comply.”

  I slapped my palms down and leaned as far as I could, getting in his face. No matter how close I got, I couldn’t find any remorse there. “You don’t see how fucked up this is? How diabolical?”