Page 39 of The CEO I Hate (The Lockhart Brothers #1)

MIA

I walked through the door of my apartment—well, more like kicked it open—dragging my exhausted ass through it.

After that disastrous conversation with Liam where we’d apparently broken up, I’d somehow managed to stick it out for two more hours in the writers’ room with Lyle so we could finish getting the episode written.

I honestly think I’d been in shock, still too angry and confused to process the fact Liam had let me walk out that door. But from the moment I’d gotten to my car, it was all I could do to keep from crying the entire drive home.

Now though…I froze, the weight of tears behind my eyes, as a panicked shiver ran through me. Why were the lights on? Who the hell was in the apartment?

Sophie was supposed to be at work. I’d texted her before I left the studio to tell her what happened. She said she’d take the night off and come home to support me through my many ice cream binges, but I’d told her not to bother. So who the fuck was this ?

Shuffle . Thump .

A cupboard door. Oh my God, someone was in the kitchen!

Schlurp .

Oh my God, they were in the fridge! Stealing our food! Food was expensive, dammit!

What was I supposed to do here? Emotionally, I was fried. All I wanted was to dive into bed. I didn’t want to have to beat up a burglar. That thought alone made me want to cry.

I fished my phone out of my pocket, trying to decide between fleeing back into the hall or dialing 9-1-1 first, but then a familiar creak caught my attention, and a wheel poked around the kitchen doorway. It was followed by the rest of Jake’s wheelchair.

“God, Jake!” I cried. “What the hell are you doing in here? You scared the crap out of me!”

He had a plate on his lap with a sad-looking sandwich. He took a bite. “Sorry,” he muttered. “There’s no sandwich meat at my place. We cleared it out before we left.”

“I thought you were a burglar!”

“Making a sandwich?”

“I didn’t know that’s what you were doing!” I huffed. Now that the panicked adrenaline rush was fading, the frustration and sadness and exhaustion returned. I just wanted to be alone. I pinched the bridge of my nose, sucking in a settling breath. “What are you even doing home already?”

He’d only left for his cruise two days ago. How had he gotten back? What was going on? I’d never been so confused .

“Yeah, the cruise was a disaster,” Jake said, rolling past me to the living room.

I really, really wasn’t in the mood for company. “Jake?—”

“Gabrielle and I had a huge, blow-out fight,” he said, taking another bite of his sandwich.

He set the plate down on the coffee table, then dragged himself out of his chair onto the couch, using his upper-body strength to get himself positioned.

“It was so bad we chose to get off at one of the ports and fly back rather than sticking it out for two more days.”

I clasped my hands together, willing myself to hold onto my emotions when it was so very tempting to just break down and cry. For me. For Jake. For Gabrielle. For the whole rotten mess this day had turned into.

“Where is Gabrielle now?” I asked.

Jake gestured with his head. “In the apartment, getting her things. Figured I’d hang out here for a while so I wouldn’t get in the way.”

Oh, Jake . This was it for him too, huh? “I’m sorry it all went south.”

He shrugged. “It had been coming for a while. The cruise just made everything clear. And there’s nowhere to escape when you’re on a boat. Even a big boat.”

So Liam’s plan to fix everything had backfired? I snorted. Of-fucking-course it had. I drew closer and looked at Jake— really looked at him. Honestly, even in the dim living room light, he looked awful.

Pale, tired, unshaven.

He’d probably been in transit for hours, stuck in airports and on planes that couldn’t have been easy to navigate with his chair.

He was likely as exhausted as I was. Worse than that, his monotone answers told me he’d given up.

That look of defeat as he stared down at his sandwich made something inside me snap, and I couldn’t hold back anymore.

I burst into tears so uncontrollable I was nearly choking on them.

“Mia?” Jake said, alarmed. He shifted like he meant to jump off the couch before remembering he couldn’t.

I covered my face with my hands, shaking my head. I couldn’t tell him what happened with Liam. Not while he was facing the end of his own relationship.

“Mia, come here,” he said, using his big brother voice on me. He patted the couch next to him, coaxing me closer. I stumbled toward him, slumping onto the couch cushions, and he pulled me into a hug so tight I could barely breathe.

It was exactly what I needed.

The tears fell, soaking his shirt, and I sobbed harder.

He didn’t try to stop me, didn’t try to ask what was wrong. He just held me as I processed the stress of the writers’ room and shitty Damien and the end of things with Liam.

My eyes felt like they’d been glued shut overnight.

I rubbed at the gross, crusty tears that had dried along my eyelids and down my cheeks, blinking a couple times to free my eyelashes. Ugh, I was probably a mess.

I scanned the room. Where had I put my phone? What time was it?

Judging by the sun pouring in through the living room window, it was definitely morning, but I couldn’t tell if it was seven a.m. or going on lunch time. Either way, I needed to get up and shower and be presentable for…What exactly?

I shifted on my end of the couch. Jake was on his, still passed out by the looks of things. We’d both spent all night out here, and judging from the stiffness in my neck and back, I was going to be paying for that for a while.

“You alive?” Jake croaked, lifting his head and opening one eye.

“Unfortunately,” I muttered. “I feel horrible.” In every sense of the word.

I felt horrible inside and out. I felt horrible for making Jake sleep out here like this.

I felt horrible that my relationship had gone up in smoke and that Jake’s had crashed and burned during the anniversary of his accident.

They said things often looked better in the light of day, but so far, this looked much, much worse.

“You look horrible,” Jake shot back. “Like some sort of swamp creature.”

Despite everything, that made me laugh. I reached out with my foot to prod him in the arm. “Hey, shut up.”

He scrubbed his hand over his face and through his hair, yawning before shaking his head.

“You ready to go face your apartment?” I asked.

“Eh, not quite,” he said. “Are you ready to tell me what’s wrong? Or is there another bout of tears I should brace for? Maybe get myself a little canoe to weather the flood.”

“Har-har,” I said, my voice croaking.

Jake’s smile thinned, but it was there, doing its best to support me—it was always there when I needed it. “Seriously, Mia.” His voice was so soft my tears welled up again. “What happened?”

I cleared my throat, looking down at my hands. “I was sort of…seeing someone, and they just ended things yesterday.”

Jake scowled. “That asshole! Liam broke up with you?” He sat up straighter, looking around, searching for something .

“What are you doing?” I asked, my voice cracking.

“Where’s my phone? I’m gonna call him.” He shoved his hand down the side of the couch, digging it out from between the couch cushions. “I’m gonna fucking call him and tell him he can go to?—”

“No,” I said, knocking the phone out of his hand before he could press the call button. It thumped to the floor. “Please don’t.”

“He doesn’t get to treat you like this. Hell no. I’m your brother?—”

“I know that. And I appreciate that. And…Wait, what?” I said, realization finally dawning. “You already knew about me and Liam?”

“That the two of you had gotten together behind my back?” Jake said sarcastically. “Oh, yeah, I knew.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “How? We’ve been trying so hard to keep it quiet. Liam didn’t want us to interrupt your recovery or anything.”

Jake rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, sneaking off to hook up at my birthday wasn’t very discreet.”

“Right.” I bit my lip, embarrassment seeping into the pool of despair that already swirled in my gut. I couldn’t believe he knew! Anger flared inside me. We’d wasted all this time sneaking around, and for what?

The fact that we’d gotten together didn’t seem to bother Jake at all—his only problem was how it ended. Everything could have been so different if Liam had been willing to have one little conversation with Jake.

I shoved those thoughts aside. What did it matter now? We were done. “Guess this is just another entry to add to my list of hilariously bad dating history.”

“I didn’t want you to have to add Liam to that list,” Jake muttered. “I’ll kill him the next time I see him. ”

“Jake,” I said softly. “I appreciate the protective big brother routine, but I don’t need you to fight my battles for me. I’m a big girl capable of making my own choices.”

“It’s my job to look out for you. Always.”

I swallowed hard, suddenly missing being a little girl who knew that her big brother could always make everything right. But I was an adult now, and while Jake was just as amazing and wonderful as he’d always been, I knew there were problems he couldn’t solve.

“I get that you want to protect me, Jake,” I said softly, my voice quieter now. “But you can’t fix this. Not for me. Not this time. Plus, I don’t want to make things harder between you and Liam. I don’t want to ruin your friendship.”

“Think that ship has already sailed,” Jake muttered.

“I can’t sit here and pretend like this is okay.

Liam wasn’t just some guy that broke your heart.

He was my best friend. I trusted him. I mean, yeah, it was gross to think of my best friend with my baby sister, but at least I knew he was a good guy who’d appreciate you like you deserve.

Except he didn’t. If he was going to break your heart like a moron, he should have kept his damn hands to himself in the first place. ”

“To Liam’s credit, he did push me away multiple times,” I said.

“Obviously not hard enough,” Jake growled.

“You know how persistent I can be when I want something. And when we finally agreed to give things a try, it was really good between us at first,” I admitted. “I actually thought I’d finally found the right one, you know?”

“So what went wrong?”

I sighed, trying to figure out how to explain it. That was one advantage of my asshole boyfriends in the past. When your boyfriend gets caught with his pants down with another girl at prom, it’s super quick to explain why you broke up. With Liam, things were more complicated.

“I just…felt less and less like I really mattered to him. When we were together and it was just the two of us, things were good. But then something else would come up, and he’d be out the door without even looking back.

If something happened with the show, he’d be on it right away.

If something happened with you , he’d be on it right away.

But if something happened with me…Well, when something did happen with me, it took him weeks to even notice. ”

I explained what had happened with Damien—and then had to talk Jake down from finding Damien and punching him in the nose.

“But anyway,” I finished, “when we were finally alone in his office, the first thing he did was go after me .”

Jake looked appalled. “He blamed you for that asshole being an asshole?”

“He blamed me for not telling him. Here I was, trying so hard not to rock the boat and make anything harder for him, and he got mad at me for it. But the truth is, at some point Liam started to take that for granted and stopped focusing on me and what I needed. Everything else took priority. The show, the studio, you, his family…anything except me. It just felt like I’d never come first. Ever. ”

He’d confirmed that to me yesterday when he’d pointed me toward the door.

All the while, I was praying he’d stop me, tell me not to go, that he was willing to put in the work to make things better between us.

I wanted him to fight for us, but it looked like I was the only one who thought what we had might be worth fighting for.

Jake’s jaw tensed. “I didn’t mean to be an added stress on your relationship.”

“God, no, Jake! It’s not your fault,” I hurried to assure him .

“But the fact that Liam was more worried about upsetting me than making you feel valued in the relationship?—”

“Look, Liam’s choices aren’t your fault.”

“He screwed up,” Jake said. “Big time. And I’m gonna make sure he knows that.”

“I just want to forget he exists. Not that that’ll be easy to do when I still work for him. Wish I could go back in time and give my past self a heads-up.”

Jake let out a harsh laugh. “If you find a time machine, let me know and I’ll hitch a ride. Maybe I could go back to a time when life still made sense to me.”

I scooted over next to him and rested my head on his shoulder. “Does it still feel that way?” I asked. It was a question I usually wasn’t brave enough to ask. I never wanted to bring up Jake’s depression for fear of making him sink further into it, but maybe it was time for hard truths all around.

“It scares me, you know. I have these dreams where we’re at the beach, like when we used to go as kids, remember? And we’re out in the water…but you’re floating away from me. And no matter what I do, I can’t seem to get to you,” I told him.

Jake swallowed hard. “That’s how it feels, sometimes.

Like I’m just adrift. For the past year, I’ve been in a holding pattern, waiting to reach the point where I was healed enough to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

Now I’m finally getting to that point, and I have no idea what comes next. ”

“What do you want?” I asked. “More than anything?”

He opened his mouth, closed it. He laid his head back against the couch.

“Honestly,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“Well, maybe it’s time to figure that out.”

He turned his head toward me. “Maybe.”