Page 96 of Love Around the Corner
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“Jesus, what a fucking mess.” Nick’s eyes were burning and bloodshot from another sleepless night and unrelenting hours of staring at a glowing blue screen full of coding.
“You said that twenty minutes ago. And twenty minutes before that.” Luke’s voice rose up, disembodied, from behind a wall of monitors on the other side of the table. He and Nick had been hunched here behind their respective phalanx of screens for days, unpicking this knot of coding.
“Because I still can’t believe these guys were this inept.”
“Well, you get what you pay for. They paid for shit and they got shit. I think we’re almost there, though. When you’re finished backing up to the server, we should give it another test run.”
“I still have to sort out the security back door and a hundred other things.”
This whole fucking website was a nightmare, so badly conceived and executed that starting from scratch would have been easier than fixing what was already here. He hated this kind of mind-numbing work, scanning thousands of lines of coding looking for tiny mistakes that needed correcting. There was nothing new or interesting about it, nothing to be learned, no creativity he could bring to bear to solve a problem. Nothing but tedium and sleep-deprivation. Why exactly had he said yes to this project? He’d been asking himself that all week.
Twelve hours of sleep in four days, never more than an hour at a stretch, on the hard, scratchy couch in the corner, shitty takeout food, enough coffee to make his nerves vibrate. And for the privilege of enjoying this miserable experience, he’d blown up everything with—
He couldn’t even think of Livie’s name without feeling like he’d been punched in the gut.
It had been days and he wasn’t getting any better. Every time he thought about her—and she was in his head constantly, despite the never-ending lines of code—he couldn’t breathe.
When she’d ended things between them on her front porch, he’d been too stunned to fight her on it, or even respond much. How had a quick job in California turned into a fight that vicious? How had they ended up saying such ugly, hurtful things to each other? While he’d been standing there trying to figure out a way to back down off that cliff, she’d ended everything between them with a few brief, brutal, dismissive words.
It was undoubtedly all his fault. He’d gotten angry and said things he shouldn’t have said. Sure Livie was hiding out at home because she was scared, but who was she hurting, outside of herself? If that’s what she wanted from her life, who was he to judge her?
Before his plane had even landed in San Jose, he’d figured out she’d been right about his motivations. Yes, Luke was a friend in a bind, but he doubted he’d have acquiesced so quickly if he wasn’t standing in the midst of his newly recovered family, feeling shaky and volatile, conflicted and still a little angry, when he’d called.
Emotionally stunted moron that he’d always been, he’d jumped at the first opportunity to escape, no matter who it hurt. His family, looking at him with wounded eyes as he made his excuses and split—Livie, hurling her fury at him as he picked up and left her for some crummy job. He’d left a lot of carnage behind him when he’d boarded that plane at JFK.
Livie had said things in anger, too, but she hadn’t bolted for the airport like he had. When he’d lashed out, he’d hurt everyone around him, starting with her. Maybe they’d never spelled out what they were to each other, but he owed her better than this. Unfortunately, it seemed he might never get the chance to make it up to her. And the thought of that was beginning to make him feel a whole new kind of panic. Ending a casual fling wasn’t supposed to feel this way. He wasn’t supposed to feel this lost. Confused. Devastated.
“Hey, man.” Luke’s voice startled him out of the hazy fog of exhaustion and guilt he’d been sinking into. “Since you’re back, I got a million gigs I could use your help on.”
“I’m not back, Luke. I still live in Brooklyn.”
Luke scoffed. “You only moved there for that chick, the model. And you told me you guys broke up.”
“But I’m still not moving back to California.”
“Why not? All the work is here.”
“I pick up plenty of work in New York.”
“All the bigmoneyis here.”
“I have plenty of money.”
“But, Brooklyn, man. What the hell is keeping youthere?”
“I’m with someone. It’s important.” That first part was a lie, since Livie had just chucked him out of her life. But the second part was the absolute truth, he suddenly realized. Livie was important. She was fucking vital.Thatwas the reason for this feeling he couldn’t shake. That’s why he felt panicky at the thought of never seeing her again. He hadn’t just left Livie behind on her front stoop, he’d left a big, important part of himself behind, too. The better part of himself that Livie seemed to bring out—the unselfish part, the dependable part, the part of him who won over her family, who forgave his own.
And no matter what he did, no matter how far he ran, he wasn’t ever going to feel whole again until he got them both back—Livie and that better version of himself.
“She’s important?” Luke echoed.
Nick jerked, like he’d been scalded, and blinked at the monitors in front of him. What the hell was he doing here again?
“I’m in love with her.” He heard the words from a distance, like somebody else had spoken them.In love with her?Where had that come from? Was he in love with her?
“You said that a year ago, when you met the flower chick.”
