Page 13 of Age Gap Bear's Enemies-to-Lovers Mate

“Enlightened people?”

She smiles. “I mean even people who are gung ho for women’s rights or whatever. Even women. Women CEOs and entrepreneurs. I’m too successful and so they think I must be sucking dicks to get the deals I get or batting my eyes or wiggling my ass. They think that now. That probably started when I was fifteen. Before that, people assumed my parents were rich or that I was just a big talker. Or cute.”

“Cute?”

“Just a cute kid who thought she was a real estate investor.” She gets that same faraway look on her face. “My whole life nobody just sees me. They see this… well, they either resent me or they see my accomplishments, you know. And so, nobody knows me and all I can do is make sure the accomplishments are still happening. All I can do is keep winning.”

I feel like I should say something but I don’t know what. I take a sip of my coffee mostly because it’s something to do that precludes speaking. She says, “I have to keep winning because that’s what people value. Nothing else. They don’t know anything else about me.”

“I know that you bought a piece of land when you were fourteen or fifteen and you turned it into an RV park. You sold it for a million dollars. I don’t know what kind of pressure that puts on someone.”

“How did you know that?”

“It was in the newspaper. I found the article online.”

“That was my first deal. It made me seven-hundred thousand.”

“And everyone looking at you differently.”

She nods. “Yeah, exactly.”

“They see a version of you but not the real you. So, you think you can’t let them in to see the real you and even if you did, there’s no guarantee they’ll accept the real you.”

She nods. “Yeah. That’s it. You think I’m stupid but that’s it.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” I say.

“Sure, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You don’t have to bullshit me, Clint. You already get to stick your dick in me whenever you want to. You don’t have to act like you understand me. It’d be easier to deal with things if you were just an asshole to me, actually.” She sighs and says, “a lot less complicated, actually.”

“I’m not bullshitting. It’s not pretend. I don’t think you’re stupid and I know exactly how it feels to hide the real me.”

She scoffs. “Now I know you’re full of shit. You’re a he-man fireman. The real you isn’t fucking complicated. You’re as predictable and normal as a man can be. You don’t know a fucking thing about how I feel.”

That makes me angry but I fight down the emotion. “Get dressed. I’m going to show you why I didn’t sell you my land.”

Chapter Ten

Olivia

“I don’t know why the hell you’re doing this,” I say.

He replies, “You said I can’t understand what it means to be different, for people not to understand a huge part of my life. I think I’ll change your mind.”

Yeah right.

I’m so angry! I’ve spent months now trying so hard to keep this place and this aspect of things out of my head. I’ve done everything I can to keep this out of my head so that I can… I don’t know. So, I can…

Wow.

So, I can keep screwing Clint.

What a damned crazy thing. I want to keep this land out of my head so I can keep screwing Clint with as little cognitive dissonance as possible. Of course, there’s cognitive dissonance involved even when this situation isn’t in the front of my mind. I sigh and say finally, “Let’s get this over with, then.”

We walk deeper into the project. No. Not the project. It would have been the project if this very particular strip ofland hadn’t been taken out of consideration regardless of the premium I was willing to pay. The worst part about it is that the land has no value to him outside of the other part. It only worked to create open space for the whole development. It’s not developable on its own.

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