I probably owed Serena another apology. Not just her, in fact. Hell, after my behavior at Serena’s house the night before, I felt compelled to apologize to myself.

‘I’m sorry, brain. I shouldn’t have fucked with you. You too, heart. And you, you loyal, handsome nine-inch dick—you shouldn’t have been dragged to the party. I blame my pride and ego for… well, everything.’

I definitely owed Serena an apology for my speedy getaway.

After I’d come in my pants like a fucking teenager, I’d rolled onto my back beside her. My mind raced.

What should I do now? What should I say?

I stared at the ceiling, cognitive dissonance overwhelming me. I felt like a teenager in a man’s body—as opposed to the last time I was in this house, when I thought of myself as a man in a teenager’s body.

It didn’t startle me when she wriggled close to me on the floor and snuggled her head into my arm. It did startle me that I liked it. We must have fallen asleep, because I suddenly became aware that our limbs were all tangled, like we’d fallen down the stairs together.

My phone was ringing in my jacket pocket. With Serena’s bare chest rising and falling beside me, I was fully prepared to ignore it. Until it rang again. And again.

Serena rolled onto her stomach and propped herself up on her elbows. Her tits swayed before me; above them, her neck and cheeks were pink and blotchy. A furrow appeared between her eyebrows.

“It might be the home,” she pointed out.

Shit. Mom had definitely seen better days. My frustration and despair after my visit earlier was what led me here to Serena in the first place. With a grimace I zipped my pants back up and went to retrieve my phone.

A few minutes later I was getting into a nearby Uber, to hitch a ride back to my car. I hadn’t even given her an explanation—partly because I wasn’t exactly sure what to tell her, and what I did know infuriated and embarrassed me.

Now I sat in my car in the middle of the night, with a crotch full of dried jizz, wanting to pound my head on the steering wheel.

Waiting for Silas fucking Warner in Atlantic City.

Fuck my life.

My phone dinged. I looked at it, sighing, then thumbed in my location. I tilted my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes.

Things with Serena had gone from mostly cordial to complicated in just a few hours. I didn’t regret it, but now I was more confused than ever, and afraid I was halfway to letting her break my heart again.

I hadn’t realized I’d dozed off until the sound of the door opening woke me.

Silas Warner, temperamental celebrity chef and compulsive gambler, sunk into the leather seat beside me. He was the one who’d started our little Billionaire Book Club, but these days I suspected his ex-wife, Maggie, was currently sitting on more cash.

Case in point: I just drove across New Jersey to pick him up at a casino because he was tapped out.

“Hey, man.” For such a tall man, he looked surprisingly small and sheepish.

My already dark mood soured more when I smelt the smoke clinging to his sweater and jeans.

I glared at him. “The fuck? You smoking again?” I’d never understood how so many chefs smoked—you’d think they’d have more professional respect for their own palates.

His snort smelled more like scotch than cigarettes. “Nah, it’s from the casino.”

My hand clenched into a fist as I threw the car into gear. I was going to have to get my car detailed after this. At least he wasn’t puking in it or something, though. I’d made the mistake of taking him home after one wine-filled book club meeting... a long evening, submarined by the way he watched his ex-wife manage the restaurant that he gave her in the settlement.

“Roll down the window,” I told him.

He looked at me. “It’s cold.”

“You want to take the bus back to the city?”

His sigh was unnecessarily dramatic. “Fine, drop me at the station.”

“You’re gonna have to spot me for the ticket, though.”

“Are you telling me that you don’t even have twenty bucks?”

“I don’t even have my wallet, Marcus. Why the fuck do you think I called you?”

I pulled over again, my patience stretched to the limit. It had been a long, long day. Breakfast with Serena felt like a week ago, instead of less than twenty-four hours.

“What the hell is wrong with you, Warner? Where is your wallet?”

“I hocked it. I didn’t care about that fancy designer crap anyhow.”

Sigh. “Let me get this straight. You lost all your money at the tables, hocked your wallet in order to lose more money, but you still have your phone. Why didn’t you just pawn that, too?”

He looked at me with horror. “My phone? What would I do without my phone?”

Well, he wouldn’t have been able to call me, for one. He would have had to rescue himself. When I grumbled as much to him, he looked affronted.

“Damn, Marcus. Did I take you away from your monthly hooker?”

“She’s not a—” I bit my lip. “At least I can afford a hooker, asshole.”

“Whatever.”

Not responding, I began driving again—heading for the turnpike instead of the bus station. I wasn’t actually going to make him take the bus. I might be a hard-ass sometimes, but I didn’t let friends down.

Besides, Silas was down enough, already.

As I drove, the concrete whirred under the tires. The wiper blades swept across my vision like a metronome. I blinked. Goddamn. “You’re going to have to talk to me,” I told him, “or I’m going to fall asleep.”

“So who is she?”

“You know, I think I’d rather fall asleep.”

“You can tell me if it’s a hooker. I won’t judge. Because you smell like sex.”

My head whipped around. “What?”

He looked out the front windshield, a smirk playing with his lips. “I’ve got a keen sense of smell. Part of being a chef. And unless you’ve been jerking off in your car, I’d say you got some pussy this evening.”

There was nowhere for me to pull over. Nowhere for me to throw him out of my car. Nowhere for me to back up over him. I seethed, my fingers tightening like claws around the steering wheel.

“You’re disgusting.”

“But honest.” I saw him shrug in my peripheral vision. His smugness infuriated me.

“Honestly, Silas, you are fucked up. You won’t judge? That’s because you live in a glass fucking house. You’ve got a problem, and you know it. You lost your wife over it. You almost lost your business over it. Shit, you lost your wallet over it. Now you want to lose friends over it, too?”

He was silent.

“Do you ever think about how your actions affect other people?”

“This coming from Mister ‘use or be used?’ How’s that working out for you, Marcus? You’re more alone than I am.”

My teeth ground together until my jaw ached. Within a few tense minutes I passed a toll plaza, and I pulled over in the merge lane at the far right and stopped the car. Ignoring the angry bleats of other drivers leaning on their horns, I ripped off my seatbelt and stormed out of the car. I needed some air, even if it was New Jersey air.

It was full on raining now, beading on my leather jacket and trickling down my neck. I wanted to scream. I wanted to punch something, somebody. Trucks rumbled past in the EZ Pass lane, throwing muck up in their wake. The rain did nothing to freshen the air and the choking smell of exhaust.

Suddenly, Serena’s face swam before my eyes. “It’s for you,” she’d said about the mercy of forgiveness. Maybe I was seeking it from the wrong person.

The passenger door opened and Silas stood to face me. “I’m sorry, man.” His rangy height meant that he could lean across and rest his elbows on the wet roof of the car. “I’m an asshole.”

“Ungrateful asshole.”

“I’m an ungrateful asshole,” he repeated. His toothy grin only flashed for a moment, like a brake light on a crowded freeway. He ran a hand over the bristle of his close-cut hair. “Thanks for coming to get me. I, uh, didn’t want to call Maggie.”

Fair enough—she may not even have shown up.

They’d been high school sweethearts. She’d supported him through culinary school, manned the front of house of his first restaurant; helped him with his first cookbook and TV show. He must have done something really heinous for her to leave him. I’d never asked, and I wasn’t about to now. But I was curious about something.

“Did you take Maggie to prom?”

His forehead creased and rain darkened his eyelashes as he blinked at me. “That was random.”

I waited.

“Yeah, we went together.” He looked off into the distance. “Shit, that was almost twenty years and I still remember what she wore. What I took off of her in a hotel room afterwards. We were a cliché, doing the deed on prom night.” His chuckle sounded anything but amused. “Why’re you asking me about that?”

“The woman.”

He looked at me blankly.

“The not-a-hooker.”

“Ah.”

“She was my prom date. That was probably the worst night of my life.”

“What, she didn’t put out?” Another toothy grin.

“No, she did.” I shuddered as rain sluiced inside the collar of my jacket.

His smile faded. “But it was the worst night of your life.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “And you fucked her again. Recently. Sounds like there’s a story there. You saving it for the hot seat?”

At our “billionaire’s book club,” we passed around a giant bottle of hot sauce like a talking stick. Silas called it “the hot seat.” I didn’t usually take a turn unless I had something important to say, which wasn’t often.

Despite making a living out of doling out advice, I preferred to be an observer of most human foibles. Yeah, I’d made good money at a young age by having important things to say—but only to strangers. Probably because they didn’t really matter, I figured. With “friends,” however, I turned to stone.

“Getting wet,” Silas pointed out when I didn’t respond. He slapped the roof before folding himself back into the car.

So much time I’d spent in my life telling people to help themselves. Nobody else could live your life for you, I’d lectured. But I’d shut myself off by taking that accountability too far.

After we got going again, Silas was uncharacteristically silent. The only sound was the swish of the wipers and the rain whooshing through the wheel wells with every rotation of the tires. Maybe he wasn’t doing it on purpose, but his quiet patience was what compelled me to speak.

“I had such a crush on her,” I began, my gaze firmly on the road ahead. “Had a couple of classes with her. My mom was our English teacher.”

He made a surprised noise. “Your mom’s a teacher? So was my dad.”

Huh. “Was. She’s… retired.” That wasn’t part of this story, in my opinion. “Anyway, we got to be friends. Good friends.”

“Naked friends?”

“Sort of. Sometimes. She was a cheerleader, though.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

His serious tone brought a sharp bark of laughter out of me. “Yeah, well… I can’t remember how it happened, exactly, but we planned to go to prom together.”

He patiently waited for me to continue—for about thirty seconds. “And? Don’t leave me hanging, man.”

I pretended to focus on the road as we wound our way through the approach to the Lincoln Tunnel. “It was special.” I snorted. “A teenage movie come to life, losing it to the popular girl.”

My stomach twisted at the memory of the acute pleasure I’d experienced that night. It wasn’t the sex—though, at seventeen, any sex was good sex. It was like pizza. Even when it was bad, it was still pizza.

“And then what? She ignored you the next day?”

If only. I decided to just spit it out. “Her friends posted a video of us to Facebook.”

Silas made a choking sound, like he was shocked but also trying not to laugh at me. Fucker. “You mean a… video?”

The lights of the tunnel whipped across the dashboard like a strobe light. Maybe he could see my nod, but he didn’t really need to. He was a smart guy, if not a smart gambler.

“Holy shit,” he breathed.

“Yep.”

“And you hooked up with her again, now? What, for revenge?”

I nearly swerved into a cab. “Fuck!” Revenge? Was that was it was? I shook my head.

“That’s cold, Marcus. But it sounds like she deserves it.”

Did she? “Where am I dropping you?” I asked, changing the subject.

He gave me a mercifully close address in the West Village. Silence filled the car again. Or, as much silence as driving in the city allowed, even in the middle of the night.

“You still like her,” he finally said as I pulled up to the curb on his block.

I ignored him. My mind was reeling. I was done talking about this. And I was done with Atlantic City rescues. “Can you get inside?”

Silas dug in his pants for his keys. “Yeah.”

“Then get out.” It was the closest I was going to come to telling him to fuck off. I shouldn’t have opened up to him. All it did was confuse me more. Make me doubt myself.

“Okay, okay, I’m going. Thanks for the ride.” He opened the door, careful not to let it scrape against the old, bumpy sidewalk.

“Yeah,” I grunted.

“Revenge is rarely worth it, Marcus. Trust me, I know. But if you like her—really like this chick—don’t hold a grudge.”

My hand flexed around the gearshift, but before I could escape he leaned down into the open door for a parting shot.

“Unless you think she’s playing you again. Then go ahead and fuck her. Fuck her up, fuck her over.” With that advice, he shut the door.