Broken: A Billionaire Love Story (12 page)

How had he gotten in here, anyway? Was he still on her visitor’s list? She thought she had put paperwork in to fix that...but maybe not, with her mother and all the rest...

“You gotta quit this fucking restraining shit on me.” He wagged his finger at her. “People can look it up when I apply to jobs.”

Good!
she wanted to cry out.
I hope you have to live in a car for a year, you prick.

She took a breath, measuring her response. Be diplomatic. Just get rid of him.

What she actually said was, “That’s too bad. I hope you don’t have to live in a car for a year because of it.”

Okay, that wasn’t much of a diplomatic improvement.

The restraining order had been necessary after their break-up. It was still in a sort of temporary status, awaiting confirmation from the courts—but it would be finalized in the next few weeks. With all the phone calls and letters and unwanted attention she had gotten, it would not be too much of a stretch to have it confirmed.

“Listen,” said Roderick, approaching her, “come on. This ain’t reasonable, baby. I ain’t done nothing to you except show you I love you.”

Olivia really, really didn’t want to get into this at her office. Other workers in the office were starting to get up, sensing the commotion. With Shane here, she was even more loathe to start a scene.

Roderick’s face, though, filled with so much false-gallantness, was driving her into a rage. This picture of innocence he presented to the world...it had almost convinced the judge until she showed him picture after picture of her destroyed property and bruised body, and even that had needed eyewitnesses to corroborate her statements.

So screw it, if that’s the way it was going to be, that’s the way it was going to be.

“I changed my address, I sold my car, I’ve gotten
four
new email addresses, and I used burners for over a year trying to get away from you. I want
nothing
to do with you. And I’ve done all that for reasons far,
far
more extreme than just ‘showing that you loved me.’”

Still, somehow, he managed to look incredulous. “Why, huh? You never told me why?”

“I have told you why every single time you show up! Because you pushed me around, because demeaned me constantly, because you hit me—in the face—and if all of that wasn’t enough—which it fucking is, each little bit on its own—it’s because I do. Not. Love. You.”

Roderick shook his head. “You’re just talking crazy, baby. None of that ever happened, are you kidding?” He looked at Shane now. “You know she's got anxiety, right? Depression? It makes her act fucking crazy. Good luck dealing with that.”

Shane said nothing, flexing and reflexing in the corner, staring silently at Roderick.

“All those fucking issues she's got, and she's calling me out on shit?” Roderick shook his head. “Who do I think I am, some kind of woman beater? I don’t fucking push no one around—”

Shane stepped past Olivia, then. She could see the wiry muscles of his neck throbbing with tension.

“You have to get out of here, man.”

“What, you’re on her side? Is she giving you the nice stuff, huh? Giving you that good business? She gave it to me
first
, man. Live with that.”

“You’ve got to get out of here,” Shane said again. His voice was very quiet, but quite clear in the office. “You’ve got to leave, and you can’t say anything else.”

Roderick started to speak once more, and Shane shushed him.

“No, you can’t say anything else, man,” said Shane. “Because if you do? If you say one more word to me, or her, if you say one more word? Oh man. Bad news, guy.”

He grabbed the chair—the patient’s chair he had sat in before—and tapped it hard into the floor.

“They got a rule in here about addicts,” said Shane. “They know we’re all screwed up, so when we break something—like say, if I broke a chair over some guy’s head? Oh man, they don’t even care. They just add some time onto my time. Five days, ten days. Maybe I give someone stitches. Twenty days, I guess. But I can’t help it, you know. I’m mentally unstable. They can’t really find me accountable. It must be a terrible thing for you, finding yourself in this place on the opposite side of somebody with nothing to lose. I wouldn’t do it, personally. I would step out of here without saying anything else, and I’d slink off to whatever hole I came out of to badger a woman who’s got better shit to do then to listen to one more stream of bullshit sliding out of my mouth. That’s what I’d do.”

Olivia wanted to cheer, wanted to punctuate everything Shane said with excessive profanity.

Roderick, eyes wide, did in fact do just as Shane said, and slipped out of the room without saying another word, shutting the door behind him.

Olivia looked at Shane with a peculiar sort of fire in her eyes. Her breasts heaved, her cheeks flushed with energy.

“I’m sorry,” Shane said to her. “I shouldn’t have done that. You’re an adult, and you know how to handle your business. I just get really put off by guys—”

Wrapping her arms around his neck, she pulled him in for a smoldering hot kiss.

It was stupid and set her and entirety of females everywhere back probably three hundred years, she knew. But it was
hot
to be fought over, to have a man stand up for her and be willing to go to war for her. Her jaw moved against his, their lips practically glued, her body pulsing and grinding onto him with same hot, shame-and-lust fueled energy. She lost herself in the kiss, forgetting everything, everyone. Shane had been perfect, defending her like that.

Her face slid down his, and she nipped up onto that perfect, hot spot where his jaw met his neck. For several seconds, she kissed and buried herself there, loving how he returned the favor to the same spot on the opposite side. It was so perfect to be held the way he held her—his strong hands gripping her tight, his arms making her feel so safe and secure. Her intuition wobbled furiously, promising her that he would never hurt her. In that moment, for whatever reason, she felt like she couldn’t be touched ever again.

Chapter 17:

One morning a couple of years ago, shortly after the Paulette fallout, Shane woke up slowly inside of a warehouse. What came to him first were sensations—the feel of concrete and rubble, the smell of something burning, the pincer of broken glass and torn wood into his side. He twitched his hands in the wreckage, his gaze following the inked tribal pattern there. Those tattoos—one on each hand—matched the one on his neck. The insurance policy to keep him out of the business world.

So, he surmised, he’d had another blackout. Certainly not his first, of course. Not his last, either. Perhaps a bit of a milestone, though, in that he had absolutely no recollection of every making the decision to be in this place. He didn't know where he had been the day before, or the day before that, or the day before that, and so on. He didn't know what day it was, or why it was so cold, or where his shoes were, or why he was dressed in mud-covered rags.

Directly after the fiasco with Paulette, Shane needed some alone time. Some very, very alone time. He dedicated himself entirely to it—to cutting off ties and burning through the bridges of his life with gusto.

He had been deeply saddened to learn of her accusations of abuse. None of it was true. What was true was that Shane had come home from the bar early one day on a whim, and found Paulette making out with her drug dealer. Drunk and enraged, Shane immediately jumped the dealer. The ensuing battle wrecked the apartment, and left the dealer’s blood all over the floor. Paulette had hit him in the back of the head with a stack of books, knocking him down, and the dealer roughly dragged Paulette away and out of Shane’s life.

That was all. She had gone to the cops and all of that for...he didn’t know. It wasn’t as if he had been some terrific person to live with. She had plenty of reasons to want attention, to throw blame around.

Ever since then, though, all he had focused on was being more and more alone, and more and more drunk.

He hadn't been strictly aware of it, but it was a sort of suicide. He wasn't going to pull a trigger or jump off a building, but he wanted everyone to get very used to the idea of him not caring about them one way or another—he wanted everyone to wish him dead. And then it wouldn't be any kind of a tragedy if one day, he just didn't wake up.

There was a fire burning. Shane turned in the dim light of the warehouse—and realized the fire had been right next to him the whole time. Not a fire anymore at all, really, just a pile of embers and ash with a bit of smoke rising out. In it, having fueled the flames, he could recognize the shape of his notebooks. All the poetry he had ever written, locked there in those pages. He rarely used a computer for back-ups—it was all by hand.

And it was all burning.

He scuttled away, cutting his hands on concrete rubble. Blood ran through the black tendrils on his hands. Fright ran through him—what had happened? How had he decided to do this?

Every movement broken and jagged, he staggered upwards, arms and legs swinging.  His first instinct was to try and save the books—but then he stopped.

Writing had never done him a solid ounce of good in his whole life. He was glad it was all burning.

And if he didn’t have to worry about poetry, then that was one less thing to live for. That suited him fine.

“Good,” he said to the pile of ash. “You hear me? Good!”

In a rage, he kicked the ash. One book, still half-formed, flew across the room, dissolving along the way, and exploded in ash when it hit the ground.

Hours later, he made his way out of the warehouse. Once again, filled with shame, he wired for money, cleaned himself up, and restocked on enough liquor to put him under.

Then, he searched out the tattoo parlor. He had an idea already in mind.

The flames on his one arm, to him, signified the start of this whole mess. Certainly all that tragedy with Hunter had encouraged him to write the way he did. Burning up his memories, burning up his life.

So it was fitting then for another group of flames on his other arm. Ending his words—ending his art, his poetry. Why not. End it all. Toss it down the drain. Everything he cared about was gone anyway.

He shouldn't be around anyone, anyway. Look at what he had done to Hunter, to Paulette. Everyone he got close to, he ruined. It was better just to waste away in obscurity. It was better to burn himself up.

Chapter 18:

In the rec room, sitting across from Rawls with his paper in front of him, Shane found it hard to focus on the planned topic of conversation—improving the work Rawls had accomplished so far. It was late in the afternoon now, just a few hours after that business with Roderick, and all Shane really wanted to think about was Olivia—holding her, kissing her, feeling her lovely body pressed against his.

He did not know, exactly, how he hadn't punched Roderick. He wished he had, in many ways. But some measure of control was operating in his life that he couldn't explain. He had known Roderick was a coward just from looking at him. You didn't beat a coward. You just scared him.

It drove him a little nuts, though, knowing what Roderick had done to Olivia. Certainly, Shane believed everything she had revealed about their mess of a relationship. After they had kissed for those few beautiful minutes in the office, again, he asked her about it—but she stayed quiet, mostly.

She just asked, “That was never one of your problems, right?”

And of course he told her it wasn't, not that kind of abuse. He had been mean and hell to live with, but never, ever had he hit a woman. That was the truth. That seemed to be enough for her at the time.

Shane and Olivia broke off prematurely, once more, both agreeing it was not the best time. People would be asking questions, looking for them, all that sort of thing. Shane left more hot and bothered than he had felt before.

Rawls broke him from the recollection.

“So how is it, man? How are the sentences? Do they make sense?”

Taking a moment to re-examine the paper, Shane collected his opinions.

“Well...it looks like...” Shane didn’t quite know how to put it. “I think you’re spending a lot of time trying to sound academic or intelligent, and what you need to focus on is being clear. But anyway, you have some bigger issues to work with as you progress with it.”

He looked up from the paper at Rawls, hoping that this hadn’t offended him too much. But Rawls was frowning a bit, looking past him.

“What is it?” asked Shane. “I’m sorry. Was I being too direct?”

“I think you got a visitor, man.”

“What?”

Shane turned and saw his Uncle Arthur bearing down on him. A little weight dropped to the bottom of his heart, dense and discomfiting. For all the time he had spent in rehab so far, Shane had been able to forget about his family. It was easy to do; it was nice.

Now, seeing his uncle, he had to come face-to-face with the fact that there were people out there waiting for him, one way or the other. No matter how completely he burned the bridges, no matter how well he told them to fuck off, there would always be some part of them waiting for him to come around in their lives again. He knew this was true, because it was true for him as well—he did not think he could ever fully accept the notion of them not being in his life anymore unless he knew for certain they were dead.

Maybe he just had that kind of family. Maybe that’s all family really was. A group of people you knew you’d see again—a group of people that you couldn’t unlearn how to act around.

His uncle approached like he owned the place—probably he did. He had enough money for it. Over his frame was a well-tailored suit. Blue, pin-striped. On anybody else, it would have made them look good, professional.  On Arthur, it looked like a suit of armor. This was his battle-gear.

“Hey, Arthur.”

Shane did not stand up.

“Hello, Shane.” Arthur took a long look at Rawls, raising an eyebrow. “Do you mind? My nephew and I would like to have a conversation.”

Rawls chuckled a bit and stood up, walking off. He began to whistle on his way. Probably Arthur was not the first rich man to tell Rawls he was out of his place.