Chapter 27
Noah
Six Weeks Later
My phone was ringing. Again.
I closed my eyes and let the annoying sound go until it finally stopped. Then I opened my eyes and stared up at the night sky again.
I was on my back deck, on a chaise, looking up at the expanse of sky. Staring at nothing. Thinking about nothing.
No, that was a lie. I was thinking about everything. I just wished I could think about nothing.
Emma had left a week ago. She’d found a recruit for Catharine Knowles. She’d trained the woman, and then her work here was finished. She’d gone back to New York, back to her life, like she’d planned to all along.
I’d wanted to stop her. To beg her not to go. I’d opened my mouth a dozen times to say the words: Don’t go back. Just stay her forever, with me.
But how selfish was that? I wasn’t going to ask any woman to give up her life because it was better for me that way. And I definitely wasn’t going to ask this woman to do it. Emma was successful and confident and competent and gorgeous. She had a life to go back to, a company to run. To ask her to abandon it would an asshole move.
I’d been a lot of things in my life, but I’d always tried not to be an asshole.
So I’d let her go. Every nerve in my body, every part of my gut had screamed that it was the wrong thing to do, especially when she got in her rental car to go to the airport at the end. I’d wanted to drive her to LAX myself, but she’d insisted, saying it was better that we say our goodbyes at my front door. She’d looked pale but determined, without any waver in her voice. We’d had fun, but we were over and done with. She wanted to be gone.
The night before she left, we’d had our first argument. It was over something stupid that neither of us could remember afterward, an argument picked out of thin air. It had been tense and harsh, but the fight had almost felt good, because I wanted to tell her not to go and I couldn’t say it. Emma had fought me just as hard, and I wondered if she had something she couldn’t say, too. I didn’t ask.
When we finished fighting, we’d made up in spectacular fashion—specifically, by fucking. On the kitchen counter of all places, and then finally in the bed. The makeup sex was spectacular, raw and passionate, and for me it had an extra edge because I still couldn’t say what I wanted to say to her. Emma had been equally wild, and I’d wondered if she had things she couldn’t say, too.
Maybe we should have said them. But in the end, we hadn’t. We’d fought, we’d fucked for hours to make up, and the next morning, she packed her bags and left for the airport.
Now I couldn’t look at my kitchen counter anymore without remembering Emma on it, opening her knees and pulling me between them. I couldn’t look at my tidy, clean bed without picturing how I’d bent Emma over the edge of it as her hands twisted in the covers. I couldn’t look at my shower without picturing Emma saying Thanks for the office and sinking to her knees.
I pictured her out here, too, that very first time on the chaise on my deck, when I’d tasted her and felt her come. But it was a little easier out here, not quite as drenched with the scent and the memory of her, so here was where I lingered when I came home in the evening, where I sat to have my coffee in the morning. Alone.
It was fine. I was fine. I was a grown man, not a silly kid mooning over the hot redhead he couldn’t have. We’d agreed we would move on. So after she left, I kept going.
Except now, a week later, I realized I hadn’t exactly kept going. I’d skipped both basketball and soccer. I hadn’t dropped by any of my usual haunts. And work, of course, had practically been forgotten. It didn’t take much to make me ditch a nine-to-five schedule on the best of days, but the past week had been pathetic. I’d barely checked my email, and today I’d blown off a meeting with a tech startup who wanted to create the new way of matching producers with potential scripts. It was edgy, it could be game-changing, and it had a high probability of failure. In short, it was a project that was right up my alley.
But I’d postponed it. My head wasn’t in the game. My body, either. The only normal thing I’d kept up this week was running, and when I went to Griffith Park I doubled my usual route, running so hard I’d nearly been lightheaded at the end.
But for that brief period of time, with my feet hitting the running trail, I’d stopped thinking. So I’d run, and run, and run.
My phone rang again. There were people trying to get a hold of me, I knew. My usual basketball buddies and my soccer team. My partners, chiding me about blowing off today’s meeting. The tech startup guys, wondering when we’d reschedule. Christ, my mother was probably in those calls somewhere, looking to threaten me about wasting her money.
The one I knew wasn’t calling me was Emma Riley.
We’d agreed not to call each other after she left. We didn’t talk about why, but I knew. Talking would make it harder. Talking about our days, our plans, our everyday details, would be dishonest when the only thing I wanted to talk about was the fact that we were on opposite coasts instead of together.
And what about if she moved on and went on a date with some other guy? We sure as hell weren’t going to talk about that.
I picked up my phone and glanced at the display screen. I blinked in surprise. It was the one person I didn’t expect: Dane.
With the brief thought in my mind that there could be something wrong with Ava or the baby, I answered it. “What’s up?”
“You wouldn’t answer when Aidan called,” Dane said. “He made me call you instead. Looks like it worked.”
I scrubbed a hand through my hair. “Are you really calling me to nag me on Aidan’s behalf?”
Dane laughed. That in itself was weird, because in all the years I’d known him, Dane wasn’t much of a laugher. Being with Ava was making him happier and a lot less grumpy. “He doesn’t really want to nag you, you know.”
“I know I blew off the meeting. I’ll reschedule, I swear.”
“It isn’t that. Aidan is worried about you. He says you’re in a shitty mood, and you’re never in a shitty mood.”
“That’s usually your domain.”
Dane laughed again. In my current mood, this was going to get old fast. “I see that Aidan’s right,” he said. “So in my official capacity, I am asking you what’s crawled up your ass and made you so miserable.”
“It’s nothing. I’ll get over it.”
“Really? Dude, I’ve known you since we were fifteen. Even when your family kicked you out, you weren’t in a mood like this.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I’m overdue for a mood like this.”
“Just tell me what’s wrong, asshole.”
I was going to say no. I was going to brush him off. And then I thought: Why not tell him?
Why didn’t my best friends know what was going on with me? Why didn’t I ever talk to them about it? What the hell did I think was going to happen if I talked about it?
I loved my friends like brothers. But somewhere along the way, I’d stopped trusting them.
So I told Dane about the trust fund, the legal battles. My liquidation of the money. My mother’s angry phone calls.
When I finished, Dane grunted like the old Dane used to. “Your parents are useless pieces of shit,” he said in his blunt way.
“No disagreement here.”
In the background, I heard clicking on a keyboard. Dane didn’t bother talking for a minute, which was his usual way when he was doing something on the computer.
“Dane,” I said warily. “What are you up to?”
“Looking up what you spent the money on.”
“You can’t. It wasn’t company money. It was my own money.”
“You don’t know me at all.” A few more clicks. “Well, this is an interesting mix. A restaurant? A women’s shelter? What’s Shakey’s?”
I sat up. “Dane, did you just hack into my personal financial records?”
“I admit nothing,” he said. “Katie’s Surf Shop in Zuma Beach? Who is Katie? A woman you’re sleeping with?”
“No. Katie is gay. Her shop needed some new rental equipment. What the hell, Scotland? You can just look up my finances like this?”
“You can see why Okada tried to hire me away from the company.” He sounded so casual about it. Dane’s computer skills were what launched Tower VC, and last year Okada, one of the world’s top tech companies, had tried to hire him. He’d said no to the gig and only agreed to an occasional consulting contract so that he could stay in the country and be close to Ava and their soon-to-be baby.
“This is insane,” I protested as Dane kept clicking.
“You’re so fucking secretive,” Dane shot back. “I have to figure out what’s going on somehow.”
“Oh? And what have you figured?”
“That you took your parents’ money, which they would have spent on themselves, and spent it on other people. People who are trying to build something. People who aren’t rich.”
That sounded stupid when he said it like that. “Yeah, I’m a regular Robin Hood.”
“It isn’t a bad thing,” Dane argued. “Just ask the students who benefited from the small business program and the tuition grants. Nice work, Pearson. Really nice work.”
For some reason, the compliment really meant something to me. “Thanks. My parents consider it ‘losing money.’ It turns out losing money is my life’s work.”
“Or it would be, if your investments for Tower weren’t so profitable.” There was a pause as Dane thought that over. Even the clicking stopped. Dane had always been too smart for his own good. “That’s it, isn’t it? These off-the-wall investments you pick. You’ve been trying to sink the company.”
“Not sink it,” I argued. “I just figured if I lost us enough money, you’d all kick me out.”
“What the hell, Pearson? If you hated it so much, why didn’t you just quit?”
“You quit,” I reminded him. “How easy was it?”
“I had to shut down my life in Chicago and I nearly lost my best friend,” Dane said. “But I figured most of that was because I knocked up his sister. You don’t have that option.”
No, I was just sleeping with Aidan’s sister-in-law. Or I had been until a week ago. “You just met the right woman,” I said to Dane.
“You should try it. Finding a woman to get serious about, I mean, instead of screwing around. When it happens, it makes you re-evaluate everything. You start wondering, What the hell have I been doing all this time? It shakes you up. Nothing else matters so much anymore.”
I cleared my throat. “Falling in love does that?”
“Yeah, it does. You know how I feel about Ava. If I had to walk across the Sahara Desert for her, I’d do it.”
My throat felt thick. I missed Emma; that was what was wrong with me for the past week. It was dead simple. I missed her, so much that I didn’t want to work or play sports or do any of the things I usually did. I missed her so much I ran for hours just to stop thinking about it.
Not just sex, or companionship, or fun.
Her. Just her.
“Sounds nice,” I said, scraping the words out of my throat. “I’ll think about it. In the meantime, you can report back to Aidan that I’m fine.”
“That’s it?” he asked. “The only thing bothering you is the fight with your parents?”
“Sure. What else would it be?”
“I have no fucking clue,” Dane said. “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”