Page 8 of Hate Notes

"I don't have time to date," I said. "It's pretty simple. Women take time, and I don't have time to give them. Ask Goblin."

"You mean ask Goblin how sweet and loving you are when you get over your stupid, stubborn belief that you can't care about anything except work?"

"Orion cares about his girls," my mom said, hugging my side and smiling. "Me and you, Remmy. At least we get to see how sweet he can be."

"See?" I said.

Remmy shook her head. "Doesn't count. He's going to die alone if we don't push him, Mom."

"Oh, I know," she said.

"Hey," I said indignantly.

She looked up from her hug, smiling. "She is right, honey. I think you would date your company if you could. Not that it isn't a beautiful company. I just don't think you can make grandbabies with it for your sweet, patient, loving momma."

"Babies?" I laughed, though something in my chest tightened at the thought. "They're worse than interns. At least interns canperform some tasks with a degree of competence. What can a baby do?"

My mom closed her eyes in the long-suffering way of a mother who has failed her son. Remmy shook her head.

"Do you see, Mom? He's hopeless. He thinks babies don't make sense because he can't understand how they would benefit the company. How do you salvage a man like that?"

"He just needs to find the right woman," Mom said, patting my cheek. "Once you find the special someone, your body has a way of making the illogical seem logical and the crazy seem sane. Trust me, honey. He'll come around."

I thought about Dad, about how he'd worked himself to death trying to provide for us. About how I'd sworn I'd never let that happen to the people I cared about. But sometimes, late at night when even Goblin was asleep, I wondered if I was missing something—if there was more to life than…this.

But those thoughts were dangerous. They led to chaos. To weakness.

"If we're done with the intervention," I said, "I would like to get these people out of my house so I can get some rest. I have meetings in the morning."

And I needed time to restore order to my apartment. To erase all traces of this invasion and return to my carefully controlled routine.

It was safer that way. Simpler.

Even if sometimes, in moments like this with my family, I wondered if simple was really what I wanted after all.

4

EMBER

Kora sat cross-legged on my couch with her phone in her lap. My cat, "Catman," was lurking behind her, plotting her demise. Catman was going for the world record as the oldest living cat, though he seemed to be approaching it through spite and stubbornness alone. He had been my parents' cat, and legend says he was their parents' cat before that. Some even claimed he existed before time itself began.

The only thing we knew for sure was that nobody remembered buying or finding Catman. They all just said he had been living in the house as long as they could remember, like some sort of ancient evil that came with the property deed.

Kora gave Catman a mistrustful look. "Stop looking at me like that, Catman. I know you're judging me."

He meowed in response, managing to sound both ancient and condescending at once. No matter how much I tried, he was always kind of greasy-looking. He was missing half of one ear and had stopped using one of his eyes a few years ago. I was pretty sure it still worked, but he just... closed it and neveropened it again. The vet had been perplexed, and her official diagnosis was that he was "dramatically depressed." When I asked what that meant, she just shrugged and said "he's doing it for attention."

Wonderful. My cat was a drama queen.

"Focus," I said. "We were talking about what the hell I should do."

"Well," Kora said, setting her phone down to take a heaping spoonful of ice cream. She swallowed, then handed me the tub.

Kora would probably aggressively exercise these ice cream calories off. And me? Well… Calories were just energy, right? Some might say I could lose a few pounds, but me? I liked to see it as having an emergency storage supply of energy.

"I see a few options,” Kora said. “You could always do what he's asking. Infiltrate this dude's company. Sabotage him. Do such a good job that Cole realizes he made a mistake letting you go. You two have a dreamy reunion in the rain. Maybe you're wearing white, so he can totally see your nipples. They are hard enough to cut diamonds. His eyes fall to them, and he bites his lip, then you bite yours. You get on your knees, and then?—"

"No," I said, voice flat. "First of all, I've told you this before. I have camo nips. Same color as my skin. It's ridiculous, and nobody wants to see that."

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