By the time Christmasbirthdaynewyearpalooza ended, I was mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausted. Too many forced smiles, sixteen-hour days, and concerned looks from my other brothers when they thought I wasn’t looking.
I tried to sleep on my flight back to New York, but my mind was plagued with indecision over my next steps.
I wanted to finish my book, but if I hadn’t done it by now, I probably wouldn’t ever do it. I should just give up instead of wasting my time chasing something I’d never catch.
I enjoyed working with Alessandra, and I was decent at my job. Maybe I’d become a full-time assistant instead. It was easier to follow instructions than to create something from scratch for myself, and I’d rather work for her than Gabriel.
You have no accountability in New York.
It’s your choice. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
My chest tightened as I unlocked the door to my apartment and flipped on the lights.
I already knew what Gabriel would say. He’d berate me for being a flake, pressure me to work for the hotel, and insist I move home instead of wasting my time in New York, all in that irritatingly calm, I-know-better-than you tone of his.
Sometimes, his unflappable demeanor reminded me of Kai, except Kai was infinitely less annoying and more encouraging.
My heart gave another wrench at the thought of Kai and what I had to do, but I pushed it aside.
Don’t worry about that until you have to.
I showered, unpacked, and said hi to Monty. I’d fed him right before I left, so he was good for another week.
“Hey, bud. Did you miss me?” I stroked his cool skin with one hand as he twined around my other arm and flicked his tongue in greeting. Reptiles couldn’t feel emotions the way humans did, but I could’ve sworn his eyes glinted with concern when he looked at me. Or maybe that was my exhaustion talking.
I gave Monty one last pat before I released him back into his tank.
I fished the new Ruby Leigh thriller I bought at the airport out of my bag and was preparing to sink into an evening of sex, murder, and self-soothing when the doorbell rang.
I groaned. “It always has to ring after I get comfortable.”
I threw off my faux fur blanket and padded, barefoot, to the door. I looked through the peephole, expecting to see the old lady in 4B who was always asking me to fix her Wi-Fi.
Black hair. Glasses. Cheekbones that could cut glass. Kai.
My heart dropped several inches.
“I picked up Juliana’s on my way here,” he said when I opened the door. “White pie, your favorite.”
He stepped inside, looking even more impossibly handsome than usual in a pale-blue button-down and charcoal suit. He must’ve come straight from work.
“Thank you.” I mustered a weak smile, trying to ignore the greasy knots of tension forming in my stomach. “You have perfect timing. I was just about to order delivery.”
Kai gave me a quick kiss. We didn’t get a chance to talk over the weekend since I was so busy with my family, but his movements were easy and relaxed as we settled at my coffee slash dining table and dug into the pizza. I hadn’t seen him so serene since before the CEO vote.
“You look happy,” I ventured. “Did something happen at work?”
A grin flashed across his face. “You could say that.”
I listened, mouth open, while he relayed what had happened over the past few days. When he finished, my jaw was practically scraping the ground.
“Wait. Russell was spying on the candidates and blackmailing board members into voting for him? How does that even work?”
My head spun. I couldn’t grasp this level of corporate subterfuge; it sounded like something out of a TV show, not real life.
“He focused on taking Tobias and me down since we were his biggest competition,” Kai said. “He couldn’t blackmail me into withdrawing since it’s my family’s company and people would never believe I dropped out willingly, so he attacked in a different way. He left most of the board members alone. The only ones he pressured into voting for him were the ones who were already on the fence.”
“Including Richard?”
Kai’s features hardened. “No. Richard reportedly voted for Paxton.”
So his last-minute outreach to Richard hadn’t worked. Knowing Kai, it must gall him to no end, considering how he’d swallowed his pride to ask for the other man’s support.
“I thought you said Russell didn’t want to be CEO,” I said. Russell had worked at the Young Corporation for over a decade. According to Kai, he hated dealing with external affairs, so why would he go to such lengths to be the public face of the company?
Kai’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “I misjudged him.”
Coming from someone who was used to being right all the time, it was a huge admission.
The knots in my stomach tightened as he described his plan for exposing Russell and forcing a new CEO vote, which he was bound to win if the first part of his plan succeeded.
I didn’t doubt for a second that it would succeed. This was Kai. When he set his mind on something, he always got it done.
Besides Russell, the only reason he’d lost was because I distracted him. If it weren’t for me, he might’ve caught on to Russell sooner, and he wouldn’t have to deal with all this.
“Enough about work. What about you?” Kai asked. “How was Christmasbirthdaynewyearpalooza?”
For some reason, hearing him utter Christmasbirthdaynewyearpalooza in that posh voice made my throat close.
He’d done so many ridiculous, reckless things because of me, and I wasn’t worth it.
“It was good.” I picked at my pizza crust, unable to look him in the eye.
“That’s the same way you said good when I asked if you enjoyed James Joyce,” he said dryly.
I winced at the reminder. Reading Ulysses had cemented my opinion that one, classics weren’t for me, and two, stream-of-consciousness writing made me want to gouge my eyes out.
“It was nice seeing my family again.” Except Gabriel. “But I…” I shredded another piece of crust. “I, um, didn’t finish my manuscript on time.”
Given the craziness surrounding the CEO vote, we hadn’t discussed my book’s progress before I left. I felt even shittier admitting my failure to Kai than I had to my family. He’d tried to help so much, with the typewriters and the writer’s block suggestions, and I’d still let him down.
“That’s okay,” he said gently. “You will. It wasn’t a hard deadline.”
Once upon a time, his unwavering faith had bolstered me. Now, it only made me feel worse because I didn’t deserve it.
“Maybe not with a publisher, but it was to my family.” I gave him a brief overview of what happened on my mom’s birthday. Anxiety hummed, high-pitched and tight like I was sitting in the living room shriveling beneath my family’s scrutiny again.
When I finally looked up, my stomach pitched at the darkness cloaking Kai’s face.
“Your brother,” he said, “is an asshole.”
The sentiment was so blunt and unlike him that it startled a quick burst of laughter out of me.
“Yeah, he prides himself on it.” My smile melted as easily as it formed. “But he wasn’t wrong. Neither…” I forced oxygen into my lungs. Just say it. “Neither was your mom. About us.”
Just like that, the air shifted. Levity vanished, giving way to a thick, creeping tension that strangled me like a thorny vine.
Kai fell eerily still. “Meaning?”
My heart wobbled. “Meaning we’re not a good match,” I said, forcing the words past the hard lump in my throat. “And we should…we should see other people.”
I stumbled on the last half of my sentence. It came out jagged and broken, like it’d been dragged through barbed wire on its way up my throat.
I didn’t know where the sentiment came from because the last thing I wanted was to see someone else or see Kai with someone else, but talking was the only way to keep my emotions at bay.
Kai’s eyes were flat, fathomless plains of granite. “See other people.”
“You have so much going on with the company and work, and I have a lot of life stuff I need to figure out.” I rushed the excuses out before I lost my nerve. “We would be distractions to each other. I mean, it was fun while it lasted, but we never had a future. We’re too different. You know that.” My words tasted like cyanide—bitter and poisonous enough to stop my heart from beating.
“Is that what we have?” Kai asked quietly. He still hadn’t moved. “Fun?”
Misery closed my throat. I was drowning again, weighed down by self-loathing and helplessness. If I were someone else watching me do what I was doing, I would scream at me to stop being an idiot. I had this gorgeous, brilliant, amazing man—a man who supported and encouraged me, who kissed me like I was his oxygen and made me feel seen for the first time in my life—and I was pushing him away.
Not because I didn’t care about him, but because I cared about him too much to hold him back or have him resent me down the road. One day, he would wake up and realize I was so much less than who he thought I was, and it would crush me. I was saving us both from inevitable heartbreak before we got too deep.
You’re already in too deep, a voice whispered before I pushed it aside.
“Yes.” I forced my response past stiff lips. “The holidays, the secret room, the private island…they were incredible experiences, and I don’t regret them. But they’re not sustainable. They were—” The sentence broke, flooded with tears. “They were never meant to be forever.”
Something hot and wet slipped down my cheek, but I didn’t bother brushing it off. My eyes were too full, my chest too tight. I couldn’t breathe fast or deep enough, and I was certain I was going to die here, at this table, with my soul empty and my heart in pieces.
A muscle jerked in Kai’s cheek, his first visible reaction since I broached the subject. “Don’t do this, Isabella.”
Steel hands crushed my lungs at the raw, aching sound of name.
“You’re better off with someone like Clarissa,” I continued, hating myself more with each passing second. My voice was so thick and watery it sounded unrecognizable to my own ears. “She’s what you need. Not me.”
Another tear dripped off my chin and into my lap. Then another, and another, until there were too many to account and they blended into one ceaseless, unending river of grief.
“Stop.” Kai’s fingers curled into white-knuckled fists. “If I wanted someone like Clarissa, I would be with Clarissa, but I’m not. I want you. Your laugh, your sarcasm, your inappropriate jokes and strange love for dinosaur erotica…”
A tiny laugh bloomed in the desert of my grief. Only Kai could make me laugh at a time like this. To think I once said he was boring.
His fleeting smile matched mine before it slipped. “We’re so close, Isa. Valhalla, the National Star, the CEO vote…there’s nothing stopping us from being together. Don’t give up on us. Not now. Not like this.”
My brief moment of lightness died.
The pain in his voice matched the one consuming me. It was worse than the times I broke my arm or accidentally sliced my hand because it wasn’t physical. It was emotional, and it stole so deep into my soul that I was sure I could never dig it out.
Gut-wrenching, soul-stealing, breath-defying pain.
I wanted to believe Kai. I wanted to sink into his confidence and let it carry me away because I did understand the irony of breaking up when the things that’d kept us apart were no longer applicable. But this wasn’t about external obstacles. It was about who were as people, and we were fundamentally incompatible.
An invisible band cinched around my torso, crushing my chest.
He was successful and driven; I was flaky and unreliable.
He achieved every goal he set his mind to; I couldn’t keep a job for more than a year and change.
Our lives had intertwined for a brief, glorious moment, but we were ultimately on different paths. Eventually, we would stray too far apart to stay together without one or both of us breaking.
I hugged my arms around my waist, trying to hold myself together when I was slowly shattering to pieces. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
My love.
I’m sorry.
Two pairs of words. Two settings. Both devastating in entirely different ways.
I felt more than I heard the latter’s impact on Kai. A shock-wave rippled through the air and outlined his face with bright, blazing agony. It was gut-wrenching in its silence and all-consuming in its potency, its effects clearly etched in the ragged rise of his chest and the glossy brightness of his eyes.
He reached for me, but I hugged myself tighter and shook my head. “Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.” Tears scalded my skin. “Please, Kai. Please just leave.”
My sobs broke free. Waves of pain unfurled inside me, slamming against my defenses and dragging me beneath their terrible, ferocious fury until I drowned in anguish.
Kai wasn’t the type to stay when he wasn’t wanted. He was too proud, too well bred. Nevertheless, he lingered, his anguish a tangible mirror of my own, before he finally left and the air grew cold.
I didn’t hear the door shut. I didn’t feel the hard wood bruising my skin when I sank to the floor or hear the hiccupping gasps of my breaths.
The only thing that existed in Kai’s absence was nothing.
