Page 120 of Not in Love

“In my environmentally conscious, non-shower conversations, I was going to tell her how incredibly shitty my life had been after what she did. About my parents, and Maya. How I had to take two minimum-wage jobs literally three days after it all went down, and the absolute mortification of failing at the one thing I cared about. I was going to take every single moment of misery and anger and desperation the three of us had in the past ten years and throw them in her face and ask her . . .”

“‘Are you not entertained?’”

He laughed. “Something like that. Hark and I talked about this several times, mostly drunk. He always said that he wanted to make her pay. Make her feel like a fool for what she’d done to us. And part of me gets it, but the bigger part just . . .”

“You just wanted her to understand the hurt she caused. Maybe get a nice apology.”

“How did you know?”

“I just know you. A disgustingly unpetty person.” She rolled her eyes theatrically. “I swear you need classes.”

“I don’t know about that. Because when I was there, with Florence . . . I just pitied her. More than a little.” He looked at Minami’s dark eyes. Her familiar, beloved round face. The expectant tilt of her chin. “She’s alone in this mess she’s made for herself. She has always been her own personal endgame. Played shady games, won shady prizes. If I hadn’t been negotiating for Rue’s patent, we could have kicked her out of Kline altogether. No five percent, no CEO. But I’m not even sure that matters, because everything she owns was built on top of lies, and she hasn’t changed. We have, though. And we’ve stood by each other.”

“Well, Hark is probably going to need a couple of weeks of cooling down before any more consensual by-standing occurs.”

“Up to a month. But the point is, everything she has can be taken from her. While we have built something that—”

“Please don’t say that the real equity in the biofuel tech was the friends we made along the way.”

He set his beer on the small glass table and locked eyes with her. “Minami, I’m going to ask you to get off my porch and go fuck right off.”

She let out a sound that Eli could only describe as a cackle. “Sul says I’m funny.”

“Sul’s more whipped than a bowl of mashed potatoes.”

“Don’t you whisk those?”

“Maybe?”

“McKenzie would know.”

“She would.”

“I’ll text her. Also, he’s only whipped because I’m funny.”

“I’ve never once seen him laugh.”

“And that’s the reason he’s in love with me and not with you. I make him laugh. In the privacy of our home.”

Eli shook his head. Rue made him laugh, too. She made him eager to do unspeakable things for just one more minute with her. She made him crave that comfortable, expansive silence between them. Rue made him stop and think, and above all she made him yearn like he’d not thought himself capable of, and he wanted to spend the rest of his life cataloging the ways she shouldn’t have been right for him, and yet still managed to be perfect.

Rue eviscerated him and made him anew. And if she didn’t want the product of that . . .

Well. That was for him to accept.

“If you had asked me two weeks ago, I’d have told you that the only happy ending to our story was with Florence out of Kline. But now . . .” Minami’s lips curved in a small smile, her profile as familiar to him as his sister’s. “We control the board—and the tech. I think the way things turned out might be for the best.”

“Yeah?”

“We started Harkness out of revenge, and we let spite fuel us. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret our multi-presidential-term revenge plot. But we have accomplished so much more and—”

“Gained friends along the way?”

She punched his arm. “We make really good money. We get to work with amazing scientists and help them develop amazing shit. And fine, yes, we have each other. Maybe it’s not what we’d envisioned, but it’s good.” Her eyes gleamed suspiciously. “And now you have Rue.”

Eli glanced at the sun sinking into the sycamore trees. “If Rue is ever ready or willing to be had.”

“We all have shit to work through. It’s just a matter of time.”

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