Page 20 of Second Quarter Comeback
How to Keep Your Cool Under Pressure
As soon as the elevator doors close, I pull out my phone and automatically hit my twin’s number. He answers before the second ring.
“Killion, we were just talking about you.” My brother’s tone is smug and it grateson my nerves. I can already hear Valentina, his live-in girlfriend, saying something I can’t make up in the background.
“Who’s thisweyou’re talking about?” I ask, pressing the button for my floor.
Maybe Scottie is visiting him and they’re roasting me because I’m an easy target. Or . . . I can’t think much because my encounter with Camille has numbed me.
“Val and I, of course. Who else?” he replies. “We were discussing your love life—or, you know, the tragic lack of one.”
I scoff, leaning against the steel wall of the elevator. “And what about my love life, asshole?”
“Val thinks you need one,” Kaden says casually. “She was talking about setting you up?—”
“I don’t need blind dates,” I cut in.
“Don’t start interrupting, asshole,” he snaps back. “I already told her you’re too jaded to date anyone. No way I’m letting her subject any of her friends to an idiot like you.”
“I wouldn’t call myself jaded,” I protest, even though we both know I’m lying through my teeth.
“Right. All these women who date you use you for your fame and money, and you pretend not to give two fucks until, surprise, you do. That’s the literal definition of jaded. Look it up.”
“It’s called being realistic,” I counter. “And you don’t see me meddling in your love life.”
“Because I’m forever attached to the most beautiful,brilliant woman in the world. No need for anyone else,” Kaden says, his voice dripping with the kind of lovesick devotion that makes me want to gag.
Listen, I’m happy that he found someone like Valentina to love him the way she does. No one can stand his insufferable ass better than her. However, it is sickening to see them all smooshing and cuddling when you visit them. Am I bitter because I don’t have that? Let’s not talk about it, shall we? I have to focus on what really matters.
“I saw her,” I say, hoping to move on from his perfect relationship. I don’t hate it—I hope it lasts forever—but I’m not in the mood to listen to him get all poetic and lovesick right now.
“Who?” he asks, and for once, there’s no teasing in his tone.
“Camille.”
The silence on the other end stretches just long enough for regret to settle in my chest.
“She didn’t recognize me at first,” I add quickly, sounding like it doesn’t feel like a fucking dagger to the heart that the woman I’ve thought about more than anyone else looked at me like I was just another guy in the way. “How could she not recognize me? After everything . . .”
“Everything?” Kaden repeats, his voice skeptical. “You mean the three or four months you dated, like, twenty years ago?”
“It was fourteen years,” I correct, cringing at howpathetic it sounds. But it’s not like I can help it. “That’s not a long time to forget what we had.”
“No shit. That’s more than a long time, Kill. That’s another life ago.”
I hear him muttering to Val, something like, ‘Yeah, I told you. He loved once, broke her heart—and his.’
“You don’t have to give her the fucking SparkNotes on my love life,” I snap. “The point is, I saw her. And she looked at me like I was nobody.”
Kaden sighs, and I can practically picture him rubbing his temple, like I’m a recurring problem he’s too tired to solve. “Maybe she meant more to you than you meant to her. People at that age are too impressionable. You’ve heard that the human brain doesn’t develop until you’re in your mid to late twenties. She probably started fucking the next guy who crossed her path and moved on, Killion. It’s what people do. Maybe you should try it too.”
I bristle at the implication, stepping off the elevator as the doors slide open to my floor. “I moved on. I’ve had plenty of relationships since her.” Okay, I sound defensive. Like, way too defensive. I might as well have shouted, “I’m fine,” while ugly-crying into a pint of ice cream. Have I dated after her?
Sure, casual shit because no one has ever come close to Camille. No one.
“Right,” Kaden says, his tone so unimpressed it might as well come with a slow clap. “And how many of those relationships have ended with you dramaticallysighing and saying, ‘I knew she wasn’t the one’?”
I push open the door to my penthouse, tossing my gym bag onto the couch. The space feels bigger tonight, emptier somehow, like even the walls are mocking me because I’m fucking lonely. I pace to the kitchen, yanking open the fridge for no real reason. “This isn’t about me being stuck in the past. It’s just . . . weird, seeing her after all this time. And her not—fuck, what am I going to do?”
