If he put his face any closer to her, her features would blur, melting together. “That could never happen. As long as you’re smart about everything, of course. Don’t make any bad judgment calls.” He gave her a sheepish grin. But she didn’t reciprocate.

“So what are you really afraid of?” she asked again, more forcefully this time, louder, like their heads weren’t mere inches apart.

He sat back, put his arms behind his head on the pillow, her face meeting his armpit. “I guess in some ways I’m the same as you. I need power. And if that’s usurped, then I’m all gone. I’m not sure who I would be.”

And in a moment, he felt her lips on his.

When he got the text from her ending things, he couldn’t process it at first. He felt his body weaken as he stood at the entranceway of the Core Club, ready to join a meeting about the new acquisition. He felt on the verge of collapse, his heart dropping to his knees and plummeting to his feet. It wasn’t until he read it a second, a third time that he understood it, that he could comprehend the words.

He knew it was coming. He wasn’t an idiot. She’d been avoiding him, dodging every message, every abject apology. The other evening he had taken his anger about the situation out on his home office door, twisting the knob so roughly that the handle’s mechanism broke, requiring him to use its wobbly bar lock when shutting himself in there.

But to actually receive the text, this rejection. It hurt. A sharp jab in the stomach, a foreign flutter of a feeling that he wasn’t sure he’d felt since he was a boy, since he was thrown around by those other kids, his name scrawled in chalk on the playground calling him the f word, the note penned in red ink by a girl in seventh grade telling him she would rather die than go to the school dance with him, would rather see her mother die, too. Since his brother had taken up all the space at family dinners, talked over him, his parents’ eyes glowing in Brandon’s direction as Tom sat there, small and scrawny hunched over his meatloaf, making lines in his mashed potatoes with the tines of his fork.

When he walked into the meeting, Darren Bennington looked up. “You look like the devil visited,” he chuckled, igniting a rise of laughter from the rest of the group. Tom mechanically smiled back, forcing his lips into a rigid smile. He was frustrated with Darren. The board wanted Tom back at HQ full-time. With the addition of the D2C marketplace, they needed him around the other employees. They would be moving his home office equipment, with all its software and data, to HQ as soon as possible.