AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Great,” I said. “Anyway… I’d better get going. I have a meeting with my Japanese investor in seven minutes.”
“Man on the go, huh?”
“Always.”
“More power to you, bro,” he laughed. “Talk soon.”
After I hung up, I turned back to my perfect view. I tried to suppress my feelings, but it was impossible to deny how much I was hoping Molly would accept my offer to stay at the resort. I wondered if I was being a complete fool, opening up a can of worms best left in the past.
Chapter Two
Molly
I scrolled down to find a grainy picture of Martin Lithgow getting into his car, besieged by a storm of reporters. He was wearing dark sunglasses, and the collar of his coat had been turned up so I couldn’t really see his face, but I hoped he was feeling the burn of his latest mistake.
All the papers basically printed different versions of the same story. None of them gave me any sense of satisfaction. I couldn’t help feeling depressed when I thought about my next move. Starting all over again in a new company was never easy, and all I had was a stock recommendation letter that was probably handed out to every single other employee who was given the boot.
I sighed and looked around my childhood room. Three of the walls were white, and the fourth was a soft ocean blue. The white walls had been covered over with a plethora of posters. Over my bed, there were two framed posters, one depicted Thirty Seconds to Mars, and the other was a poster of Clockwork Orange.
Mom had kept my room like a shrine, and while it was always comforting to be back in the room where I had done my most profound maturing, today it made me a little sad. For the first time since I’d graduated, I was unemployed and floundering. It made me feel like a complete failure, especially compared to my brother’s meteoric rise to the top.
That was only part of the reason for my deflated mood, however. I kept thinking of all the people I had worked with who had been laid off, too. I knew their families and their problems, and I couldn’t help but feel for them.
I was interrupted from my haze of self-pity by a knock on the door. “Come in,” I called. A second later the door opened, and Jason walked in. “Think of the devil,” I smiled.
“You were thinking about me?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.
“I was brooding, to be honest,” I admitted. “And feeling very inadequate.”
“Come on now,” he said, ruffling my hair with his hand. “You’re far from inadequate.”
I pushed his hand away and ducked out of his reach. “Maybe not in comparison to the average twenty-something-year-old. But in this family, I am decidedly inadequate.”
“You want to explain that to me?” Jason asked, humoring me as he sat on the edge of my bed.
“Mom is the president of several charities that make a ton of cash for foundations all over the world. Dad was running, like, a dozen companies before he hit fifty, and then you came along and surpassed his track record in next to no time. Oh yeah…and you’re not even thirty yet. Which was something Forbes mentioned about thirty fucking times in five paragraphs.”
Jason let me vent. The moment I finished, his face broke out into a huge smile.
“Mom showed you the article, huh?”
I rolled my eyes. “It was a bit heavy-handed if you ask me.”
“The interviewer was fantastic,” he laughed. “Did you check out Tristan? He was number thirty-four.”
“I saw,” I nodded.
Tristan had been Jason’s best friend since college, and for the ten years that I’d known him, I had been head over heels in love with him. Not that he’d ever really noticed. My mind flew back to the family Christmas party six years ago, but I forced the memory away.
“Fucker beat me,” Jason was saying. “I was number thirty-eight.”
“You made the list,” I reminded him.
“Still,” he replied, as though that were a valid answer.
I couldn’t help bu
t smile. “Did I ever tell you how proud I was when I saw the article?”
