Page 13 of Hard to Forgive

“I can’t help you with any of your computer nerd shit.”

“No, but you can help me with a coworker part of the computer nerd shit?” She let out a hum of interest. I had her hooked. Mariah had always been a gossip. It worked in my favor tonight. “Jonas Koetter.”

“What about him?” Her voice had suddenly turned cold enough to send chills down my spine. What the hell?

“Who the fuck is he?”

“Are you serious right now?”

“Yeah?”

“Fuck you.”

I blinked at the phone. “Excuse me?”

“I’m going to send you a picture of him. Maybe then you’ll remember, and then you can call me back and grovel and hope that I forgive you for askingmeof all people who Jonas Koetter is.”

I didn’t get a chance to say anything else before the line went dead. She’d hung up on me. I’d clearly stepped on some kind of landmine. It took a lot to get Mariah heated that way. I’d only experienced it once, my senior year.

Oh.

Oh, fuck.

I suddenly remembered Jonas Koetter, and the picture she sent to my phone moments later confirmed the memory. He no longer looked like the boy in the picture, and I still didn’t fullyunderstand why he hated me, but I knew him. I knew why his name itched my memory.

Jonas Koetter was one of my biggest mistakes.

5

“I’m Silas Morgan. Ijust started this morning, but I’ve worked in tech since graduating MIT two years ago.”

His voice kept playing in my mind. I couldn’t breathe. For the rest of the day, I was on the edge of an anxiety attack. How the hell had I slept with Silas Morgan? He’d fucked me up junior year. It had taken me too long to recover from one moment with him. He’d been a defining moment in my life, but I hadn’t recognized him.

How could I not recognize him?

The anxiety spiral continued all day. I barely absorbed a single word of the spec doc we’d been tasked to read. Yvette may as well have been speaking Bulgarian when she went over everything after lunch. My brain was garbled. My palms had half-moon indents from my nails so deep that I doubted they’d ever go away.

I had never been more grateful to see the end of the day.

I practically ran from the building, choosing to take the ten flights of stairs to the bottom floor than risk sharing an elevatorwith Silas. At least it gave me a reason for not being able to breathe, something tangible that I could explain to myself.

I didn’t remember driving away from work. I didn’t remember making it to Seb’s apartment. It was like I blinked, and I was there, never having made the conscious decision to go there in the first place. I blinked again, and I was on Seb’s couch. He stared at me with a look of unfiltered concern in his dark brown eyes.

“Jonas?”

His voice echoed and reverberated in my ears. It sounded like it was coming from under water. His lips moved, and the words hit my ears after his lips had stopped moving, like a badly dubbed foreign film. I couldn’t explain it. I felt disconnected from my body, from myself.

“Jonas, where’s your pills?”

I blinked. My pills? Why would I need — Right. Okay. His question suddenly made sense. The tightness in my chest, the way his words were coming long after his mouth stopped moving, all of it made sense. It wasn’t a panic attack, not completely. Those were worse, but it was close. I pulled out the small pill case I kept in my pocket.

My hands shook when I handed it to Sebastian. He disappeared for a moment and in another, he was back in front of me, holding a white pill and a bottle of water out to me. My hand was still shaking as I took the pill and swallowed it, washing it down with a large gulp of water.

“Tell me five things you see,” Sebastian instructed as he took the water bottle from me. I watched his hands screw the lid back on the bottle while the words went through the waves in my brain and reformed into something I could understand.

“Matt’s rubber duck. Your laptop. The ugly pillows Holden and Eli got you as a housewarming present. Your dying plant.”

“Five,” he prodded.

---