Page 73 of The Game

“Don’t make this about me. If you want to finish things, fine, but this is not about me.”

“I know she turned on you, I …”

He clenches his fists. “Who told you that? Janus? Did he tell you what happened?”

When I shake my head, he says, “Yes, she turned on me, much like you’re doing right now.” And the barb is like a stab to the heart.You lose people, Anna, and it always hurts.

I shake my head at him. “I messed up my practice today,” I blurt out.

His head tips back and he closes his eyes, and I watch his throat move as he swallows. When his eyes come back to meet mine, they’re wounded and dark like bottomless pools. I wince.

“I’m sorry, Anna, I’m really sorry to hear that,” he says, clearing his throat. “I’d never want to be a distraction to you.”

As I open my mouth to say that it wasn’t him, that it was all my fault, that I’m being a brat, he turns on his heel and heads down the street like he can’t bear to be in my presence a moment longer. Pepper’s tail droops, and she lets out a soft whine.

Watching him go, still looking as sexy as he did when he was heading toward me, makes my heart somersault in my chest. Well, I fucked that up but good. I want to run after him and tell him he’s everything I need, that I’ve been happy, not lonely, perhaps for the first time ever. That I messed up my practice only because I knew I had to have this conversation, and I’ve screwed up practices many, many times before and he’s made me feel strong, powerful, able to do anything.Put my bad relationship history behind me.He’d laugh at that in his cute, self-deprecating way and tell me I was strong and powerful before I met him and it wasn’t anything to do with him.

How could I be so unkind to such an amazing guy?

But I have no right to keep him close. It’d be like cursing the best, most loyal person I know. I can’t do that. He doesn’t deserve to get on their radar. He doesn’t deserve Arty and all these other scumbags in his life, being exposed to Russia through association with me. Hiding and dodging the press while his business slowly implodes.

If I was any kind of decent person at all, I would stay well away from Adam Miller. So why does it feel like the worst decision in the world?

28

ADAM

As I walk away from Anna, my hand flaps by my side, heat burning through my body like someone took a torch to my skin. I don’t get angry. I don’t let it bubble over. I flap my hand as I try and suck in a couple of deep breaths. Did I misread the signs? This seemed good. Thiswasgood. I want to march back and shake her. But what the hell, that would make me just like Maroz with his violent outbursts.

There was no warning, right?

I’m an idiot. I put myself through this again. I started to open up. I started tohope.

Jesus Christ.

What thefuckam I going to do now?

Just at the point I thought I was getting over whatever the hell’s been wrong with me for the last ten years, fear most probably, another woman pulls the rug out from under my feet.

I just … Fuck. I wanted more. For the first time in a very long time, maybe ever. I shouldn’t have compared her to Celine; she’s nothing like her. Celine hung on tome. I’ve never been in a situation where a woman has been interested and then said, thanks but no thanks, and God … A sharp pain constricts my chest. What do you even do or say, when someone says something like that?

To me, she didn’t seem like she wasn’t ready for a relationship. I huff out a laugh. I’m so out of my depth. I understand nothing about relationships or the pressures she’s under to perform, to win. Maybe I wasn’t what she wanted anymore, was too much of a distraction.Anna Talanova. It’s like a dream in time, the kind of thing you look back on when you’re older and congratulate yourself on being wise enough to have had the experience, to go with something for once. I don’t want it to be only that, though. I want to wake up every day into the life I had for three days in Janus’s apartment. Curled up in a big bed with Anna and Pepper. My eyes start to tighten.

Restless energy seethes under the surface of my skin, and I want to do something, anything. Like burn the whole house down, and for the first time maybe I understand Fabian’s desire to take stupid risks. A sort of jittery, suicidal feeling. I laugh to myself. I was never a risk-taker: I’m way too much of a coward for that. So, I’m going to have to do what I always do, what I did ten years ago, button it up, push it down, pretend I didn’t fuck up, didn’t miss all the signs.

I tip my head back toward the blue sky between the buildings towering overhead. The thing is, I didn’t miss the signs. I knew. Right from the get-go and even recently, I knew that Anna Talanova would never settle for me. I told Janus as much but walked right into it anyway. I let my heart become involved. And the thought makes my chest clench.

Over the next few days, I don’t understand what comes over me. Something is raging through me, turning me into a man possessed. It’s like anger, at myself, at her, but somehow far worse, and it spills into everything I do.

I ask Keith to have ten more designs of different animals ready by the end of the week and tell Susie to produce marketing campaigns for all of them. I go on long runs up the west side of Manhattan, pushing harder and harder until I can’t breathe and exhaustion takes hold of me, and then, only then, does the restless feeling stop because my body is too tired to sustain it.

I wake in the middle of the night and pace around my small living room. Ithink about getting a dog. I miss Anna, but I miss Pepper, too: her silky ears, her wet snuffly nose, her unbounded joy.

The last ten years have been a retreat into electronics, but that doesn’t help anymore. I can’t concentrate on the details. I can’t work through schemas of boards and understand what all the components are doing.

How do I get over this? The ache in my body is deep and never-ending. And as the days roll by and I don’t hear from Anna, the hyped-up restless feeling morphs into white-hot anger looking for release.

29

---