Total pages in book: 84
Estimated words: 79040 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 395(@200wpm)___ 316(@250wpm)___ 263(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79040 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 395(@200wpm)___ 316(@250wpm)___ 263(@300wpm)
I spread my palms. “At first, I was thinking of being a loyal friend and a good leader of my company.”
Cleo winces. As usual, she’s put together in a trendy outfit with high heels, long eyelashes, and looks like she’s ready for some kind of photoshoot. “I think,” she says slowly, searching for how she wants to voice her thoughts. “If loyalty to a friend requires deception and lies, it might make you want to question the friendship.”
Kate just points to Cleo as if to say, what she said. She turns to me, waiting for my response.
“Yes. I agree with you. In retrospect. But in the moment, that wasn’t how I saw things.”
“What were you thinking in the moment, then?” she asks. As usual, Kate is obsessively trying to collect a full report of every detail of what happened. I know any little nugget I provide is going to come back like a punch in the gut when she crafts her final argument against me.
“That the needs of hundreds of employees and my best friend probably came before the needs of a woman I just met.”
“So you were thinking with your brain instead of your heart,” Cleo says.
“I was just doing the best I could in the moment. I fucked up. I’m aware of that, now. I should have found another way to handle our problem. Instead, I latched on to the first usable idea I came up with, and it was a shitty, mean idea. But maybe I was trying to prove to myself that I wasn’t getting carried away with my feelings for this girl.”
“Like you wanted to prove she was like all the girls before?” Cleo asks. “A diversion, but ultimately nothing that would get in the way of your ambitions?”
“Something like that,” I say.
Kate is still pacing, fingertip rubbing her lower lip as she stares at the floor. “Here’s how I see it,” she says, and now I know it’s coming. She’s about to pass judgment on me. Guilty or not guilty. “You are my big brother. I’ve watched the trainwreck you call a love life for a long time now, and I’ve never known you to have any trouble cutting someone loose when they start to take too much of your time away from work. I’ve also never known you to end things messy like this.”
“Things just got complicated. It was bad luck,” I say.
“And,” she continues, glaring at me as if to say shut up and let me finish. “The fact that it got this messy tells me you had really strong feelings for this girl. I’m not ready to watch you throw that away, because she must have been something special to get through your thick skull and make you screw up so magnificently.”
I grin. “She is special.”
Cleo clutches her hands over her heart and gives an “aww”.
“So what are you going to do?” Kate asks.
“What do you mean? I already fucked it up. She made herself pretty damn clear. She doesn’t want anything to do with me now.”
“But what if she does?” Cleo asks. “I mean, she came and talked to you like right after she found out. Sometimes people aren’t ready to hear an apology right away. They need time to digest it and cool off.”
“She’s right,” Kate says. “In your defense, you only held the truth from her for a couple days. Yes, you made a heartless plan and you took the first step toward following through. But you said you argued with Nolan before she found out, right? That means he can vouch for you. He can tell her you really were planning to tell her the truth.”
“Yes!” Cleo claps her hands together once. “That will go so far. I mean, without that, it’s just your word, which probably doesn’t mean a whole lot to someone who has been through what she has. Would Nolan tell her the truth for you?”
I consider. “She knows Nolan is my friend and business partner. I don’t know if she’s going to believe anything out of his mouth, either. Besides, he admitted he’s the one who asked legal to call her after our conversation. The bastard made this blow up before I could tell her because he was pissed at me for putting a woman before the company.”
“Holy shit,” Cleo says.
“Seriously? You left that little detail out?”
I shrug. “I can’t say I fully blame him. She’s nobody to him. I also spent the whole time we were together downplaying how much I like her to him. I didn’t want to deal with him giving me shit about it. As far as he knew, I was just messing around with her on the side. So when he heard me say I was going to tell her everything and ruin our little plan, it made no sense to him.”