Twenty-Eight

Patrick

Snow fell all around me.

It blanketed the world in a clear, crisp white.

It covered the remnants of that fatal argument.

It erased any trace of Morgan’s tire tracks as she’d peeled out of the parking lot.

I couldn’t even comprehend what the hell had just happened. Everything had been going so perfect. Too perfect, but who was I to question it? This was everything I’d never known I always wanted, and I wasn’t going to get off the train. I certainly wasn’t going to jump off the train while it was still moving at full speed. And the aftermath of that conversation felt like hurtling off the train and the searing pain after the fall.

The first snowfall of the year couldn’t have had better timing. Now, I was cold, wet, and freezing inside and out.

I stood there for who knew how long. Until I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes or ears. Until Julia came rushing out the back door and to my side.

“Patrick, you don’t even have a jacket on! You’re fucking freezing. Get back inside,” Julia said, actually pushing me back toward the building. “Tell me what happened.”

I didn’t say anything until she dragged me back into the warmth. I shook the snow off myself and then blankly stared at the wall.

“Patrick!” she said, snapping her fingers at me.

“I think Morgan just broke up with me.”

“Oh, shit! What happened? The contract?”

“She told you?”

Julia nodded. “She told me not to say anything, but she looked like she needed you.”

“Morgan doesn’t need anyone.”

“That’s not true. Morgan’s strong but not invincible.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah,” she muttered. “Do you want me to try to talk to her?”

“I don’t think anyone is going to get through to her right now.” I shook my head in frustration. “Fuck, I am such an idiot.”

“I don’t know all the details, but I think maybe you guys need to talk about it once she’s calmed down. Speaking from experience, nothing good comes from discussions when you’re angry.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head. Fucking fuck fuck. I couldn’t believe this had happened. I should have told her about my boss. I should have told her about what Bailey had wanted me to do. I should have just fucking confided in her. Instead, I had been so worried about piling more bullshit on top of her that I ended up making it worse. Now, she didn’t trust me. She didn’t even want to be around me.

“I need to leave,” I told Julia.

“Okay. Will you be all right getting home?”

“Yeah. Just…don’t tell anyone what happened. I’d rather deal with this before I have three Wright brothers breathing down my neck.”

Julia zipped her mouth shut. “I won’t say a word.”

“Thanks,” I said in a hollow voice.

She frowned in dismay and looked as if she wanted to say something more to me, but I didn’t give her the chance. I grabbed my coat and got the hell out of there. I couldn’t be around her happy family in the midst of Jensen finally proposing to Emery and the ribbon-cutting and all that. So much happiness. And then there was me.

I didn’t think I’d been broken up with since high school. Since that dick Travis Jones had taken my girl out from under me. I’d played it cool since then. Never gotten too close. Never really been interested in a relationship. Definitely not interested in girls who wanted to be in a serious relationship. I’d had a good life.

And then Morgan had happened.

Everything had changed.

Everything.

Suddenly, the life I’d been living before her felt meaningless. The world I’d found myself accustomed to didn’t matter. The casual sex, the late nights of drinking, the fake relationships—it all meant nothing.

Until Morgan, I hadn’t realized what I was even doing with my life. Austin’s drinking problem and rehab had been the wake-up call. But I’d turned it all around for Morgan.

Now, that was gone.

I crashed back into my house in a daze. My body felt leaden. My heart, an empty hole in my chest.

She’d said she loved me.

I couldn’t get over the words. The three words I’d wanted to say to her. That I’d traced against her skin and said in my mind every night before she went to sleep and kissed against her lips. But I hadn’t said them. Even after I realized that was what I was feeling. I’d been afraid to say them to her. Afraid it was too soon. Afraid she didn’t feel the same. Afraid I’d fuck it up.

Like I just had.

I turned the shower onto boiling and stripped out of my clothes. My fingers were still stiff from the cold. When I got under the spray, they stung from the heat. I curled my hand into a fist and threw it into the tiled wall.

“Fuck!” I cried.

I shook my fist out in anger and then slammed it into the tiles again and again. I could feel the knuckles split open. Red seeped between my fingers and ran down to the drain.

The pain didn’t help anything. It didn’t fix what had happened with Morgan. It didn’t bring her back.

I stuck my head under the water and stayed there until the water began to run cold. Then, I stayed a little longer, lost in my own thoughts. My own idiocy.

After I got out, I changed into sweats and moved into the kitchen. I found the bottle of top-shelf whiskey Austin had left me and poured myself a knuckle’s worth. I drained it and then gave myself another, ignoring the pain in my hand along the way. I knew I was probably going to regret what I’d done when my hand was swollen and painful tomorrow, but what else was new? I already regretted a whole hell of a lot more than that.

Morgan had said that, if something was too good to be true, then it probably was. She had said that about our relationship…and she was right. But not about me. About her. Morgan Wright was too good to be true.

I’d known that she was entirely out of my league. That I couldn’t possibly deserve her. But, once she had been mine, I’d done everything I could to make sure she never realized that.

Yet here I was with a busted hand, an empty whiskey glass, and a broken heart.

I looked like shit. I felt like shit. I was a piece of shit.

Because I had suggested that Bailey give the contract to someone else. I’d named three other companies she could use instead of Wright Construction. Even if I explained to Morgan that it had been because Bailey wanted to use our relationship to get to her or that I’d said it in conjunction with the fact that Wright was the best and that these other companies weren’t even a real option, it wouldn’t matter.

I hadn’t pulled the trigger, but I’d loaded the gun and aimed.

No, there was nothing I could do to change her mind right now. Not when that contract meant everything to her. I knew what she hadn’t said in her anger. That she could lose her job over this.

She was already on thin ice. A crack big enough to split the ground would surely send her floundering…drowning.

And, if I were the reason that she was no longer CEO of Wright Construction, our relationship would be doomed. The company was the most important thing in Morgan’s life. It always had been.

I didn’t hold a candle to her love for her job. I’d been okay with that. I loved her passion. Her fire. The way she handled everything with poise and dedication. The stress that only fueled her forward. The insanity and obsession that just screamed Morgan. She did everything with an unrivaled intensity.

Being with her and in her undivided attention was like being trapped in her orbit. You moved with her force and found steps with a new gravity. And she flung you out of orbit just as quickly as you had been dragged in.

I stared at the empty glass in my hand with a sigh. It was a sorry state of events of my life that I was hungry and actually didn’t want to cook. Cooking was my happy place. The one thing I always reserved for myself. Fuck, I hadn’t even really cooked for Austin much, and we’d known each other forever.

But, now, when I thought about cooking a meal for one, it felt pretty depressing. Cooking had been for Morgan. It had been the break in her day where I could take care of her. Slow her down and give her something she couldn’t do herself. I’d been cooking for us for weeks. And I didn’t want to go back to meals for one.

I shoved my glass away from me and exited my kitchen. I couldn’t do it. I was too frustrated. Too pissed.

I ordered pizza and sank into my couch, wanting nothing more than to forget all of this.

The best thing that had ever happened to me had just walked out of my life. I’d ruined everything. And I wasn’t sure that I deserved a chance to fix it.

The doorbell rang.

“Finally,” I muttered under my breath.

I was still starving, and pizza had taken forever. Sometimes, I hated where I lived. You would think it would be faster to get pizza to a centrally located area of town, but I suspected the pizza places near here were all busier.

I pulled the door open and sighed. “Austin.”

“Man, you really fucked up, didn’t you?”

“Julia tell you?”

“Are you fucking kidding? Of course she did,” he said, shoving past me. “As if you and Morgan running away from the ribbon-cutting wasn’t suspicious enough.”

“Yeah. Didn’t really think about that.” I was about to shut the door when I saw the pizza car pull up. I waited until the guy reached my door. “Busy night?”

“It’s snowing,” the guy said as way of explanation.

“Right. No one wants to be out in the weather.”

“Yeah. Lucky me.”

I handed the guy an extra twenty for a tip. My life was shit enough. Might as well make someone’s night.

“Hey, man, thanks!” the guy said, brightening.

I nodded at him and then brought the large supreme pizza into the living room.

“Perfect,” Austin said. “I’m hungry.”

“I was going to eat this whole thing by myself.”

“And, now, you’re sharing, dipshit.”

“Fair enough.”

We each grabbed a slice of pizza, and I flipped on SportsCenter. It was all Bowl Game talk and National Championship hopefuls. I didn’t really care about any of the teams in the finals, but it was mind-numbing. And that was what I needed.

“So, are you going to tell me what happened? I only got the hysterical version from Julia.”

“Her version was probably right.”

“Probably.”

“Morgan lost the Tech contract. She didn’t know that the contact at Tech was actually with my boss.”

“How did she not know?”

“Because I never told her.”

He gave me the look that said I was an idiot. “That was smart.”

“Look, I knew she was negotiating the contract with Morgan, but I wasn’t involved. I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

“Until…” Austin guessed.

“Until she asked me to use my relationship with Morgan or you or any of your family to help her get ahead.”

“And you said?”

“I said, of course fucking not,” I said, sitting up angrily. “I would never sell y’all out. I’ve known you my whole life. I don’t want to be involved in business deals. It would be a conflict of interest.”

“Did you tell Morgan that?”

I sighed and tilted my head back. “No.”

“Yeah. That’s where you went wrong.”

“I didn’t want to burden her with more bullshit. She’s been so tense lately.”

“I don’t know if you’ve met my sister before, but she’s always high-strung.”

“Not always.”

Austin gagged. “Please do not ever put that mental image in my head again.”

I choked out a laugh. “I didn’t mean…that. Whatever. Let’s not talk about that.”

“Fine by me.”

“The shitty thing is that, when my boss was trying to convince me to help her out with this, I made the mistake of suggesting other companies that she could use for cheaper.”

Austin smacked me upside the back of my head. “What the fuck, bro?”

“Ugh!” I groaned. “Thanks for that.”

“What were you thinking? Suggesting other companies?”

“It isn’t how it seems or how it was portrayed to Morgan. I said the companies would be cheaper but that Wright would always be better. I said the company was local, loyal, and quality business. That choosing someone else would be idiotic. Apparently, that didn’t get conveyed to Morgan when my boss threw me under the motherfucking bus.”

“Okay. So, say that’s all fucking true.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “It is.”

“I’m just saying…say it’s true. I don’t want to believe that you fucked my sister over, Patrick. You’re like my brother. We’ve known each other forever. You’re family. But, fuck, you have some incriminating evidence against you. So, I’m going to believe you fucked this all up until you prove me otherwise. How are you going to fix this?”

“What do you mean?”

Austin smacked me again. “I said, how the fuck are you going to fix this? You can’t fucking make this right by sitting around your house, watching football, and eating pizza.”

“Fuck.”

“Oh, I see the lightbulb.”

“Fuck you, dude.”

Austin laughed in my face. “It’s not like you to wallow and give up.”

“I’ve never had a girlfriend before. How the hell would you know how I’d react to one dumping me?”

“If it were anyone but Morgan, I’d assume you wouldn’t even care.”

“Yeah. I think that’s true.”

I straightened in my seat. Austin was right. I couldn’t sit here and do nothing. Sure, I’d fucked up. I should have told Morgan what had happened with Bailey. I should have been more up-front about the fact that the contract was even being handled in my office. But I hadn’t maliciously suggested the other companies. There was no way that I could let her think that I didn’t care about her or that I wanted to purposely hurt her.

“I need to make things right.”

“Yeah, you do,” Austin said. “Like I had to with Julia. Because, let’s face it, there’s no way that we weren’t going to fuck something up with women as amazing as ours. We just have to man up when the time comes.”

“I’m going to call her.”

“Knock yourself out. I’ll be here, eating all your pizza.”

I rolled my eyes. “Leave me a slice.”

Austin gave me a middle-finger salute as I disappeared into the bedroom and called Morgan’s number. After three rings, it went to voice mail. I tried again. Same thing. The third call, it immediately went to voice mail, which meant she was seeing my calls and deliberately avoiding them.

This time, I let the voice mail go through to the end. I listened for the beep, and then I began to speak, “Morgan, I understand that you’re angry with me right now. I get that you feel hurt and used and betrayed. I don’t blame you for feeling that way when I didn’t confide in you. But I never meant to betray you. I know you need time to deal with the ramifications of this contract and that you’ll be busy with work. But I’m not going to just disappear. I’ll be here for you through everything. I’ll be at your side, trying to make things right, no matter what is thrown your way. No matter what, full stop. If you want to talk, I’m here for you. I’m never going to stop fighting. Never. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me. Love doesn’t halt in hard times. That’s when you need it the most.”