CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Devin

“Devin? Devin? Dude, are you listening to me?” Ben was standing at the white board in the Paradiso conference room with a red marker in his hand and a frustrated look on his face. He had been scratching out ideas on the board with Amy and Beth, two girls from our marketing department who handled our social media campaigns.

Personally, I don’t know Facebook from Facetime, so I let Ben handle all that stuff. The only reason I was in the room was that he had been trying to get me more involved in the day-to-day operations since I said I wanted to leave.

Now that Cassandra Casey was out of the picture—she hadn’t answered my calls in two weeks—the talk of leaving had fell by the wayside. I no longer had a reason to leave. Or a reason to do much of anything else.

“I’m sorry,” I said, rubbing my hands over my eyes. I stared at the whiteboard through my fingers. “Yes, whatever, that looks great.”

Ben took a deep breath and put the cap back on the marker. He worked up a smile for the girls and said they could go on about their day. He followed them to the door, then closed the door behind them.

“Okay, what’s going on?” he asked, slumping in a chair across the table from me. “You’ve been dragging around here for the last two weeks like a man who’s lost his best friend.”

“I’m staring at my best friend,” I said.

Ben sighed. “That’s what I mean. You don’t treat me like your best friend anymore. Hell, you don’t treat anyone like a friend. You don’t even speak to anyone. You just lock yourself in your villa and only come out when I drag you out.” He shook his head and gave me a desperate look. “Jesus, Dev, we have a new session starting in a week. You’ve got to pull yourself together.”

“I’m fine,” I said, even though my tone hinted otherwise. I sounded far more pissed off than fine. With a dash of self-loathing and self-pity thrown in for good measure. “Look, don’t worry about me. I’ll show up, I’ll do what’s expected, and everyone will go home happy. May the cash registers continue to ring.”

He studied my face for a moment, as if he might find the truth tattooed there. He leaned his elbows on the table and cocked his head to one side. “This is about that woman,” he said. He picked up a blue marker and tapped it to his forehead. “Cassandra Casey. You’ve been moping around like a little kid ever since she left.”

“Leave her out of it, Ben,” I said. “She left, so whatever I thought we might have had together was just my mistake. She was a good fuck. Let’s leave it at that.”

Ben rolled the marker between his palms and watched it spin. “You really liked her, huh.”

I blew out a long breath and leaned my head back on the chair’s headrest to stare at the ceiling. “Yeah, Ben, I really liked her. She made me… feel…”

The marker went still. I could feel him staring at me. “What, Dev? She made you feel what?”

“She made me feel,” I said, my voice cracking a bit, like a kid hitting the first screech of puberty. “That’s it. And I haven’t felt anything in a very long time.” I suddenly felt tears stinging my eyes. I’m not one to cry—I dislocated my shoulder during a high school football game and didn’t miss a play—so it was a bit of a shock to me and Ben when the tears came. He had never seen me cry, not even close. I didn’t blubber or anything like that. I just had tears streaming down my cheeks. I wiped the tears away and sniffed back the snot that came with them.

“Dude, are you… crying?” Ben asked.

“No, motherfucker, I’m leaking,” I said, pressing my palms to my eyes.

“Shit, Dev, I had no idea you felt that way about her,” Ben said, stammering out the words. “I mean, I never would have agreed to… I mean... holy shit…”

I rolled my head to the side to look at him. I could tell he had something on his mind, something he wanted to say but wasn’t sure he should. I swiveled toward the table and held out my hands. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re not going to be happy,” he said with a heavy sigh, his head swiveling from side to side. He rubbed his hands over his cheeks, then looked me in the eye. “Okay, look… I know why Cassandra Casey left.”

“You do?” I laced my fingers together and squeezed until my knuckles were white. The tears were gone, burned from my eyes by the anger I felt smoldering in my brain. “Why did she leave, Ben? What did you do?”

“It wasn’t me,” he said quietly, hands out, finger wagging. “I didn’t know she was going to do it, Dev, I swear.”

“Ben… don’t make me come over this table after you,” I growled. “Tell me what the fuck did Genevieve do?”

He took a deep breath and confessed it all.

I had never been so angry—or so relieved—in my entire life.