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It wasn’t hard to move out of Axel’s penthouse and back to the condo. The past few months had prepared me for a life of vagabonding. I had unlimited resources at my disposal, but I required very few of them. Multiple walk-in closets? Unnecessary, now that I’d gotten use to using one corner of someone else’s dresser. Shoe racks for days? I’d adjusted to switching between three pairs of footwear. Endless designer clothing options? I switched the tops and bottoms of four different outfits and had eight days of fashion programming to be used on repeat.
I could start my own billionaire-on-a-shoestring-budget reality TV show.
Hell, if I lost my job at Margulis Realty and Axel really ended things, I could contact a TV producer to pitch the idea.
The only hard part about moving out of his house was the sense of failure. I’d failed the most important man in my life for a second time. And this time, it had happened while I was actively trying to not fail him ever again.
Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.
There wasn’t a truer idiom. I planned to tattoo it somewhere on my body, once I truly hit rock bottom.
A knock on the condo door made me jump. For the past few days, I’d pretended that I was working from home, but really, I was plotting. Scheming. Arranging the pieces of a puzzle I’d spent too long avoiding putting together. The work accomplished for Margulis Realty was negligible. Instead, I had a whole cockamamie scheme brewing.
I didn’t want more. I wanted something else. And I was preparing to fucking grab it.
At eleven a.m. on a weekday morning, I should have been presentable, but I wasn’t. I wore my lone T-shirt, stolen from Axel’s closet with no intention of ever returning it, paired with exercise shorts that I’d used for Jazz’s private Pilates classes, once upon a time. Those classes felt like another lifetime. But however scant my wardrobe, this outfit was intentional. No, I wasn’t just lounging. The shirt was a reminder as much as the shorts were.
I had places to go. Things to leave behind. Fires to fucking stoke.
I approached the door silently, peering through the peephole lest I needed to pretend to be gone. A deliveryman waited outside. I pulled the door open just enough to peer at him like any seasoned New Yorker would—half crazed, fully suspicious.
“Yes?” I asked.
“Delivery for Cora Margulis.” He presented an obscenely large bouquet of flowers. Pink lilies and white roses spilled out of the round glass vase. I received them, thanked him quickly, and shut myself back into the condo.
The note stuck into the flowers was simple, in a clean handwriting that I could only imagine some floral shop attendant wrote out while wondering who the fuck these crazies were:Are you ready to cooperate?
It didn’t need a signature to tell me whothatsweet nothing came from. The best part about it was that the bouquet design was titledSmells Like Forever, according to the delivery slip.
Smelled more like a lifetime of regret.
I set the vase on the kitchen island, frowning at the white roses. I wondered if Eli had any inkling by now how much I detested them. They reminded me of too many decades strung together by anxiety and foreboding. And maybe his goal had always been to remind me of my thorough training inbending overandletting it happen.But I was done with that.
Done with white roses. Done with the submission. Done withhim.
I huffed, starting a slow prowl around the kitchen island.
“What a fucking bastard you are,” I told the roses. Yes, rock bottom couldn’t be far away. Part of me hoped these roses were mic’d. Maybe Eli had bugged the condo. I hoped he could fuckingseeme right now.
“A disgusting, pitiful, condescending, idiotic douchebag,” I shouted at the roses. God, this felt good. It was therapeutic in a way I couldn’t quite articulate. Wearing Axel’s clothes, parading around in shorts that I’d bought for Pilates classes taught by a woman my husband had been fucking for at least eight months, according to the text history. Yes, this was what cracking open felt like. For the first time in years, the energy of the unknown buzzed through me.
“I don’t even like white roses!” I screamed at the vase. “I don’t even fucking likeyou!”
I picked up the gorgeous arrangement by the neck of the vase, and I hurled it at the slate-and-white feature wall in the kitchen. Glass shattered, sending shards everywhere. The water splashed and sloshed against the wall; lilies and roses and baby’s breath scattered across the wet floor. My chest heaved, though I hadn’t really exerted myself.
I wanted to do it again. I looked around for more arrangements to destroy. More beauty to disassemble. For more cooperation to shred. But there was none.
I was locked inside my cooperative palace.
One inch from rock bottom.
I’d done exactly what my parents wanted: moved my few items and my small life back to the condo near Central Park. And now that I was here, living outside Axel’s orbit, my insides rioted. This didn’t feel right. I wanted to slither out of my own skin with how badly I wanted to resume the direction I’d been going at Axel’s side. That, at least, felt like forward motion.
But now? Here? This felt like putting on soiled clothes. Reusing underwear that was long past needing washed. Every part of me felt icky.
What are you fucking doing, Cora?
No matter how stilted it seemed, I knew what I was doing. I was charting new territory.
