Chapter 64
T he walk back home took less than fifteen minutes, and for all the times that I had walked the streets of New York City, I had never really felt threatened about being robbed or mugged.
Part of it was because I didn’t dress in stupidly expensive clothes, trying to draw the eyes of the envious and the wrathful, but part of it was just because the streets weren’t as dangerous as the city’s reputation was to be believed, although certainly some parts were worse than others.
But having a check for literally a million bucks in your pocket has a way of making you pick up the pace and become a hell of a lot more paranoid than normal.
I suppose that I should have already been this level of paranoid with everything Edwin had done to me, but this level of suspicion would have left me burned out within a day.
Just the walk back home was enough to stress me out quite a bit—I couldn’t imagine carrying on all day with this.
When I returned to Layla’s apartment—this time, without the front desk trouble, thankfully—I found a clear surface, deposited the check with my phone, and took a couple of steps back.
The money would take a few days to clear for obvious reasons, given the enormous amount of money in there, but the money was now out of the hands of physical thieves and evil-doers.
I didn’t have anything to worry about other than Edwin lashing out with some legal babble about how it wasn’t his wife’s—soon to be ex-wife’s—money to give out.
Enough was enough, though. That shit could wait another day.
I plopped down on the couch, exhausted and a bit overwhelmed by all the positives that had happened today.
I really had to take caution to make sure this didn’t go to my head, as today’s high would eventually create a steeper cliff to fall into tomorrow’s low on.
I didn’t want that cliff to go too deep, either, as it would make getting up and out of it a bitch to deal with.
But still… a fucking million dollars. Even if I allocated half of that to Claire’s company, five hundred grand was more than enough to keep me going for a couple of years.
Mom really had come through—now I just felt like an asshole for always calling her Mrs. Hunt all these years, never giving her the love and trust that she deserved.
Better late than never, I suppose.
At least someone in this world still cared about me. At least someone in this world, through thick and thin, through the good and the bad times, through everything would be there for me to help as needed.
At least—
The door to the apartment opened seconds later, and in stepped Layla, in the same outfit she had worn the first day I ever saw her.
The sight brought back a rush of memories, taking me all the way to when I’d first laid eyes on her and knew that I had to have her.
Though it had only happened maybe a couple of months ago, that whole experience felt a lifetime away, like I had experienced it in an alternate dimension.
Still, the feelings were quite so far fetched, and when I saw her in her garb, I couldn’t help but think of the way her pants curved around her ass…
how her breasts both seemed to pop way out of her chest, yet seemed “respectfully” restrained by the business outfit…
how her smile just somehow seemed too perfect for that outfit, even though she didn’t flash it nearly as much these days and I knew when she had given it to me then, it came under the guise of extreme pressure from her uncle.
No, I wasn’t about to get up, kiss her, and lead her to the bedroom. But yes, the outfit she wore made it pretty damn difficult not to think about doing that.
“Hey,” she said, sounding tired but subtly invigorated by what may have been a great job interview. “What have you been up to?”
“Not much.”
“Not much?” she said, suspicion in her voice. “Surely you must have done something.”
It wasn’t an aggressive suspicion. It wasn’t like she was accusing me of doing nothing when I should have done something. But it was certainly a suspicion that wouldn’t let me off the hook so easily.
“Well, saw Mom and Claire.”
“Mom?” she said.
She picked up on it too. That I only would call her Mrs. Hunt before.
“Yeah, you’ve met her before, right?”
“Yeah, at a couple of gala events. Edwin and my uncle are close, remember?”
“True. Anyways, apparently, she’s getting a divorce.”
“Really.”
That was not the tone of voice someone took when they had just heard a long-married couple was getting divorced after decades of marriage. That was the tone of voice someone had when they knew from beforehand what had happened.
“Did you know?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You don’t sound very surprised by it.”
Layla shrugged as she dropped her purse off on her kitchen table and sat on the other end of the couch from me, also putting her feet up—very close to touching mine, as they were.
It was almost like she knew nothing was going to happen, but there was absolutely no harm in making apparent her desire for me.
It wasn’t so much flirting as it was pushing the boundaries of what we both knew our limits to be.
“I knew that Edwin and Melanie were never that close,” she said. “It was like watching an arranged marriage play out until the day someone could break free, and the second that they did, no one was surprised.”
“I see.”
I didn’t think that was all there was to it.
I started to suspect that the source my mother was getting her information from was Layla, which…
well, it was helping me, wasn’t it? My mom had taken the news Layla—or whoever—had given her and decided to give me a million bucks and the news of the divorce before Morgan or even Edwin himself…
so it wasn’t like her being a source to my mother was a bad thing, per se.
But there was something potentially dangerous about it. I couldn’t pin my finger on it, other than to say that the idea of someone feeding my mom information behind my back felt like a game that could go bad very quickly.
There wasn’t anything to say about it so far, though, especially considering that it had only benefited me so far. I decided to play dumb and drop the subject with all that I had known.
“And the job hunt?”
“It’s OK, I guess,” she said.
“OK?”
“Yeah, just OK. Nothing big yet.”
“That outfit should help some,” I said, the closest thing I had come to flirtation since stepping through her apartment doors.
But instead of eliciting a pleasant reaction as I had expected—perhaps even hoped—it instead just seemed to fluster Layla, who crouched up and faced her body forward.
“You OK?” I said, wondering what I had said to cause her to act this way.
“Honestly?”
Well, I knew what the answer was now. I just had to wait to see why the answer was.
“No, I’m not OK. I’m trying to make right by you, Chance. I feel like I’m still paying for the sins of what I did when I was working for your uncle.”
“No, you’re not—”
“Then why do you keep pushing me away?”
I sighed.
“Because, as cliche as this sounds, it’s not you. It’s me. I’ve got—”
“And that prevents you from being with me?” she said, not bothering to hide the exasperation in her voice.
“When is ever a good time, Chance? So you get your shit together and find a job or you start successfully investing again. But then you have to focus on your job or your investments so it’s your work.
Then you feel settled in and want to explore your options, but then Mom gets sick.
Or Morgan breaks a leg. Or whatever. The point is… ”
She sighed, collected herself, and folded her arms.
“I don’t want to sound like the desperate former lover, even though I realize that’s what I’m doing right now,” she said.
“But it’s more a desperation to feel like everything is OK between us.
Even over the past bit, after everything went down, we were building up to flirtation.
The only thing I know of you, Chance, is passion and romance.
I don’t know what friendship is like. So it feels like everything that’s happening right now is just…
I don’t know. That you want to, not use me, I don’t think you’re that kind of guy, but keep me at arm’s length while passively having the fact that you can sleep here. ”
“If you want—”
“No, that’s not why I said that, and you know it,” Layla sternly said. “Just… I don’t know.”
I felt like I was having the exact same conversation as yesterday. And yet, strange as it was for me to admit, something about this particular conversation just felt a little more vulnerable, a little more open, a little more… like maybe I would want to date her again.
A million bucks in the bank had a way of making the mind settle a bit.
“Look, I’ll say what I said yesterday, I think you’re attractive and I think, knowing what I know now, could something work?
Sure, it’s definitely possible. But there’s just so much shit for me to figure out right now.
I had a lot of weird shit go down today, between my mom’s news and Claire coming to me.
Back to back. As if fate had set it up.”
Fate, of course, being the operative and cover word for what I really suspected.
“You really didn’t know that my adopted parents were getting divorced?”
Layla let out a long sigh, looking straight ahead, seemingly refusing to answer. That, in itself, seemed to give me the affirmation I had long suspected.
“No,” she said. “Not… no.”
I cocked an eyebrow at her, but just as I was about to say something more, my phone buzzed with a news alert. I grabbed my phone and snorted at the headline.
“Mogul Edwin Hunt getting divorced; billions at stake.”
“Someone leaked the news,” I said, having a pretty strong suspicion the leak had not come from Edwin or anyone in his camp.