Page 56 of Broken Brothers

My phone buzzed. Briefly, I looked down at it and saw that Morgan had messaged me. I couldn’t say what else he said, but I knew it wasn’t about grabbing pizza later.

“But in any case, you might have done me a favor,” I said, starting to feel a little smug. “You set me free from Burnson Investments.”

“You got fired?!?”

“And because of that, I’m now in a position to succeed even more than before,” I said, putting on a cocky smile and ignoring her question. “Hope your uncle takes care of you.”

“Chance!”

I had started to turn away in disgust and ready to move on. But when she said my name with as much of a reaction as she had… I hesitated, considered turning back to her, but then kept walking away. I couldn’t take seeing the girl I had once loved like this any longer.

I don’t know what I had said that had caused her to react so strongly, but it was obviously something that went beyond myknowledge of her. No one reacted that strongly without there being a very good reason, and I didn’t know what that good reason was. I suspected, though, that she was not as close to her uncle Craig as I had suspected.

I also began to believe that Craig Taylor might be a horrible human being. Who else would whore out their niece and call them their daughter for the sake of information—not even money, information? Who did that who wasn’t a piece of shit?

And with family, no less.

No wonder Layla had it rough, if I was right. If I was wrong, and Layla knew full well what was going on and went along with it, then she was a true sociopathic piece of shit.

But I saw soul in her eyes. I saw her cry when we had sex after I told her I loved her. I saw how she reacted when she figured out I got fired. She couldn’t have faked those reactions. Through and through, she was a human being with soul—a young girl, and someone perhaps easily controlled by family and others, but a human being nevertheless.

I couldn’t stay angry at her for much longer, although I could still try and stay the hell away from her. Even if Layla was innocent in everything that had happened over the last few months, even if she just was a sex-crazed woman who was innocent in business and easily controlled, even if she had played no part in suggesting that the Taylors use me… it was a field of landmines not worth going into.

Layla could very well be the perfect person for me, but with that family, with our history, and with the world of business at play, it was never going to happen. And I still had not completely ruled out Layla making all of this up and using me even now.

It was a stark contrast to Claire, her professionalism, her independent nature, her girl-next-door look… I swear I wasn’t trying to put Claire and Layla side by side. I looked at Claire as abusiness associate, Layla as a former romantic interest, and the only thing they shared was their gender.

Still, to some extent, with Layla so fresh on my mind, I knew I was prone to flirting with just about anything that moved. I knew that I had sworn not to make the same mistakes as before.

But with Claire…

No, no, no. I would not. I would be a good boy, focus on business, and help Claire strictly in business settings.

I swore to it.

25

With a dozen contradictory thoughts swirling in my mind, my brain activity feeling like a tempest at sea, I got to my apartment and sprawled out on my couch.

I took my phone and slid it to the other side of my apartment. I left my laptop on my coffee table, still in its casing, refusing to allow it to come out. I just needed a moment to decompress, to right my mind, and to not think about Layla… or, apparently now, Claire.

Funny thing about that, though. The longer I lay on my couch, the more I thought about the two of them. It was like the cliche about chasing the girl opposite of the one that had wronged you. I was beginning to realize I had an intellectual attraction to Claire, if not a physical one, in large part because Layla had given me a zealous physical attraction. Layla wasn’t dumb—quite the opposite, in fact—but our romance never came from a place of matching wits, but of bodies coming together. That relationship might have eventually moved to the intellectual, but not for some time.

As I put my arm over my head, stretched my toes out, and controlled my breathing, I accepted that this turmoil of the mind would just be with me for some time. Eventually, I would get over it and move forward. Eventually, I would forget about Layla, at least emotionally, and Claire would settle back into a professional relationship. The funny thing was, I didn’t really think Claire even had a reason to see me as anything but. She had given precisely zero indication of physical attraction to me.

It was all a world in my head that did not exist in the actual world. In the actual world, Claire was a person we had invested in, and Layla was a former lover—not devoted girlfriend—who was trying to make amends but doing so poorly.

Put so harshly true, it hurt a little, but the honesty was a start.

It also felt like a weight had been lifted off of my shoulders, albeit not one that was ever that heavy to begin with. With the energy, I grabbed my laptop, opened it up, and read in further detail what Morgan had told me about.

The company was in San Francisco and named Virtual Realty, having something to do with the retail industry’s ability to offer virtual tours of a house without prospective buyers ever having to set foot inside. Given that real estate wasn’t going away anytime soon and in fact seemed to be garnering interest by the day, this was likely to be a billion dollar investment if Morgan’s contact at the company was hard working and diligent.

The owner, a man about five years older by the name of Andrew Patel, had graduated from Stanford and worked at AirBnB for a few years before taking off to form the company. The company had exploded in its first two years and now sought to work its way up into the rarified “unicorn” air that AirBnB, Uber, and other companies of the last decade had had.

To say that I was getting excited at the prospect of investing in this company was an understatement. I couldn’t tell how Morgan had convinced Andrew to give us an investment shot,but whatever he was doing, it was working. So far, we had batted 100 percent on the companies we had interest in investing in.

Granted, I did wonder why a company like Virtual Realty was interested in us investing versus larger companies or more well-known venture capitalists, but I just saw it as a chance to grow even more. If I spent anytime asking why us, I would soon be asking why it wasn’t us.