Had it been incredible?
Absolutely.
Finally turning on the car, I pulled out of the parking lot and started driving. I remembered telling Reece I had to go home for something, but I couldn’t remember why anymore. Had it been clothes? I glanced down to see that I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Boring for me, but fine. Nothing else seemed important enough to matter.
As I drove through the streets, slowly making my way over to Reece’s apartment, I tried to imagine how their conversation had gone and how they’d patched everything up. My brain wasn’t up to it, though, and it just circled back around to Roman.
My mind was starting to clear from the fog that had taken over by the time I arrived at Reece’s place, but not by much. Crazy things kept rolling around in my head, and I couldn't decide how I felt. Nothing made sense.
I didn’t even realize how emotional I was until I saw Reece open the door. His clearly well-fucked expression and the love shining from him were too much to bear. I wanted that. And for just a few minutes, I’d thought I’d found it.
Throwing myself at Reece, not bothering to hide the drama and emotion any longer, I cried out in sadness and confusion. “Preston fired Roman!”
Chapter 9
Roman
“Would you like to tell me what you’re doing in my office on a Monday morning when you should be working? Even if you don’t have a shoot today, I’m sure you have better things to do.” The fact that Devin had waited almost thirty minutes to ask me that showed his self-restraint.
If he’d shown up at my place with coffee way too early on a Monday, I’d have asked questions a hell of a lot sooner. He also liked people more than I did, though. That might have had something to do with it. But that still didn’t help me figure out how to answer him. Lying seemed wrong, but the truth was still raw. “How’s that fundraiser going you were telling me about?”
“It’s like that, huh?” Devin gave me an understanding look before he continued. “Okay then. It’s going great, actually. We already raised everything that we need and then some. A big donation the other day really helped.”
“I thought you said this one would probably be close and take a few more weeks before you knew if you’d met your goal?” I didn’t really care about his work at the moment, but it was a better conversation than why I was there, so I kept pushing.
Devin shrugged. “I thought it would be. We’ve already had all the big corporate donations I was expecting for the year. I’m just glad everything worked out.”
“That’s good.” I wasn’t sure what else to say, and I still wasn’t sure why I’d even shown up there to begin with. No job meant I really didn’t have the extra funds lying around to pay for overpriced coffee, but that was what I’d found myself doing after I’d stumbled out of bed.
With the shitty night’s sleep I’d had, I should have slept half the day away. But I’d been up at the crack of dawn instead, staring at the ceiling. My brain had been startlingly empty, so it wasn’t like I was obsessing, but staying home hadn’t seemed like a good idea.
So I’d found myself at Devin’s office at a ridiculous hour, offering coffee but no explanations. He’d humored me through questions about his family and even the goddamned weather, but it was starting to look like his curiosity was at its limit.
He tried again with a slightly different tactic. “I’m assuming there’s a reason you’re not working?”
That was easy enough to answer with a nod, but it probably didn’t give him enough information. Devin shook his head and leaned back in his chair. “You and Eli get into it again?”
“Yes.” That was an understatement.
Somehow my anger had just boiled over every time I’d seen him. I’d thought with some distance from that night it would get easier, but it’d just gotten harder. Every time I’d looked at him, I’d felt a sickness inside of me that wouldn’t go away.
I was an idiot and pathetic to boot.
How I could keep picking such losers was beyond me. If there was a self-centered asshole in a hundred miles, I either picked him up, or he threw himself at me. Deciding I might as well get it over with, I forced the words out. “I got fired. Preston said we argued too much, and it was starting to affect the other employees.”
He’d also apologized and said he’d wished things had gone differently, even giving me a look that said he knew more than I’d thought he had about what had happened. I knew Eli’s description wouldn’t have been anywhere close to mine, so he had to have found out about it another way, but I didn’t really care.
Devin winced and shook his head. “Eli’s a handful, but I personally thought you guys would hit it off.”
“Just because I’m drawn to brats does not make them functional people. It simply means they’re harder to deal with than the average person and most of the time, assholes.” I wouldn’t sugarcoat it.
I wasn’t going to blame Eli for everything, though. “I shouldn’t have taken the position to begin with. Once I met Eli, I knew it wouldn’t work. The money was great, and it was a steady job and a chance to rebuild everything, but it wasn’t a good fit. I knew he was too much like my ex right off the bat. I should have looked for something else.”
Devin’s eyebrows shot up. “I don’t know. From everything that I saw online and from what you said, I think that they’re very different. Sure, Eli likes to be the center of attention and probably needs a good spanking once in a while, but he’s not an asshole or malicious.”
Were we talking about the same guy?
“I’d say calling me a two-bit hack and saying that monkeys could take better pictures is bordering on malicious.” And those weren’t even the cruelest things he’d said about my work.
