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Maybe if I repeated the thoughts enough times, they’d start to feel more true.
32
DARCY
Iheaded down to the hotel lobby in the early hours of the morning. I couldn’t sleep, anyway. My brain was buzzing with energy and I still felt like I was ready to get in a fist fight at a moment’s notice. Hell, I would’ve punched a pigeon if it looked at me wrong right about then.
But I settled for making myself a cup of coffee, even though they didn’t have the yellow packets of sugar I liked. Two women were working the desk, but it looked like they were more worried about whatever was on their phones than anything else.
I shuffled to a sofa by the window with my coffee. Fittingly, it was raining. The sound was usually comforting to me, like little tapping fingers on the glass. I stared out through the drops of water at the blurry landscape outside. The night temporarily went white and I saw the outline of trees a moment before I heard the boom of lightning.
I sighed. Was it too much to ask for one of those bolts to fire right up Dominic’s ass? I wasn’t a praying woman, but I thought that would be a good reason to start.Dear God, could you please smite Dominic Lockwood? But if you do, I’d just really like to know you got him through his asshole, because anything else would feel too dignified.
I jumped in surprise when Marcus Fitzroy came in from outside. The sounds of rain temporarily grew louder and another rumble of thunder rolled through before the doors closed. He shook the rain off his coat and ran a hand through wet hair, looking good as always, even when he was soaked.
He spotted me and smiled. “Oh, hey. Little c, big c.”
I gave a sheepish wave.
“Uh oh.” Marcus took off his coat, gave it a shake, and set it down beside the chair across from me. He sat down and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Want to talk about it?”
“About what?”
“Whatever is on your mind.”
The words I meant to say were “no thank you.” After all, Dominic was one of his best friends, and anything I said to Marcus had a high probability of leaking back to him. Instead, I found my mouth running and words pouring out.
“Asshole,” I said.“He’s a fucking asshole of epic proportions. And the worst part? I had no reason to be so surprised. His assholery had been on proud display since the first moment I met him. He’d been a total dick to the people at the coffee shop. He was a dick when he came in and fired everybody who didn’t meet his standards. He was a dick when he admitted he just wanted an excuse to fire me because he was attracted to me.”
“So we’re talking about Dominic,” Marcus said, looking a little like he wasn’t sure what else to say.
“It was allright there,” I continued. “Right in front of my face. Did I stop and read the writing on the wall? No. I went and grabbed some white-out, a few erasers, and rolled up my sleeves. I thought I could fix him like millions of dumb women have thought before me.”
“I wouldn’t saymillionsof women have tried to fix Dominic. More like half a dozen.”
“I mean in general, Marcus. And if you want me to vent, you need to shut up and listen.”
He leaned back in the chair, eyebrows raised, but said nothing more.
“So I thought I could fix him or tease out the ‘real’ him. You know the problem with that? People don’t hide the real them deep inside somewhere. They wear it on their sleeves. But you know what they do? They hide the real them when they want to get in your pants. Once they start getting bored or when you become inconvenient, the real them suddenly rears its ugly head again.” I snapped my fingers. “Just like that.”
I felt out of breath and suddenly out of things to say. I sat back, folding my arms. “Talk now,” I snapped. Distantly, I felt bad being so mean to Marcus. He had never been anything but sweet to me. I was also running on no sleep and I felt like my life was falling apart at the seams, so he’d have to forgive me.
“Well,” he said slowly, almost like he was worried I’d bite his head off if he didn’t say the right thing. “I will have to agree with you that Dominic can be a real asshole. But he’s also my friend, and I wouldn’t be friends with an irredeemable asshole. You want to guess what he was like back in school when we were kids?”
“Probably popular and a bully.”
“The girls always liked him, yeah. But he hardly dated. He was hyper focused on his grades because he didn’t want to be the kid who coasted by on his daddy’s dime. He knew how people would look at him. So he tried his ass off, but he still struggled.”
I frowned. “He seems so good at what he does, though.” I almost added “for an asshole,” but managed to hold that part back.
“He’s smart. He just wasn’t ever good in school. He has dyslexia. It used to be really bad. He’d get these terrible headaches if he tried to read for more than a few minutes at a time. He told his dad about it, but Gregor always told him to stop being a bitch and work it out on his own. So Dominic tried, but it was always hard. A lot of guys picked on him before high school, too. By junior year he’d hit his growth spurt and filled out, so they left him alone. But I don’t think that chip ever left his shoulder. It was like he thought he had to bark the loudest to keep them off his back. And he was always the first to jump in and defend us if someone crossed me or Tristan.”
I frowned. I couldn’t really picture the Dominic Lockwood I knew ever being anything but completely in power. Then my stomach twisted at the memory of the piece I’d written on him back at Columbia. I’d put his grades on display for everyone at school like some sort of proof that he didn’t give a shit and goofed off. In my hunger for the story, it never even occurred to me to wonder if there might be another reason for his poor grades before Columbia.
“Well, that’s great,” I said. “But none of it changes the fact that he’s done with me now.”
“So you twoweretogether? I could never get a straight answer out of him.”
