She’d started the teasing, goddammit. I’d continued. She was supposed to return the banter so we could go back and forth until I’d gotten my fill.
Something was seriously wrong with me. Was I actually getting worked up over a client not replying in a timely fashion on a fucking Saturday?
On the other hand, she had to be playing a damn game with me.
I brushed my thumb over the screen and couldn’t help but scowl. She’d read my last message. I saw the read label. Half an hour had passed since she’d read it, for chrissakes. What was her problem? What wasmyproblem?
“Who pissed in your low-calorie, organic beer, little brother?” Darius asked, loading food onto the grill.
I fired off my scowl at him instead, and I couldn’t help but get irritated. More so than before. It was his fucking beer, and it sure as hell wasn’t organic. Or low-calorie.
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” I told him. Unfortunately, I might need it. Because I sure as shit wasn’t going to figure Natalie out on my own.
Avery snorted, and Darius gave me a no-doubt unhelpful wisecrack. I missed the exact words, because the pressure had officially built up enough for me to let it all out there.
“It’s just…” I sighed heavily and scrubbed a hand over my face. Goddammit. Was it so wise to come to these two for advice? “I have a new client at work. She’s…” Fucking infuriating. “She gets on my nerves. She doesn’t react the way other women do, and she’s sitting on a high fucking horse if she has the balls to tell me I’m pretentious.”
There we go.Thatwas my problem. It still bothered me that she’d called me pretentious. Arrogant, I could get behind.
Avery stared at me. “Youarepretentious, Ethan.”
What the hell?
Darius evidently agreed. “Yeah. You’re without a doubt the most pretentious guy I know. You’re the one sitting on a high horse, for chrissakes. Can you even breathe up there?”
“Fuck you, fuck you both,” I told them. I couldn’t believe them. Did they understand the definition of pretentious at all? “I’m not going to apologize for having standards. Some of us strive for perfection.” Just because I didn’t believe perfection existed or should be attained didn’t mean we couldn’t try to get closer.
You don’t even want what you’re striving for, jackass.
I clenched my jaw as Avery and my brother merely found me funny.
“Thanks, buddy. I needed that laugh,” Avery chuckled and clapped me on the shoulder. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna check in with the wife and tell her she’s not perfect, according to her own brother.”
He was joking, I hoped. That wasn’t what I’d meant at all, and I prayed he fucking knew it. This was the culmination of years’ worth of semi-good-natured mockery. They saw me as a gym bro. I saw someone who constantly wanted to improve himself.
Yet you’ve called yourself a god who walks among men since you turned thirty.
It was called being funny. Kind of.
“Be very clear about which brother,” Darius told Avery as the guy headed off.
Wait, he was serious? Goddammit. He was gonna tell Elise some shit, and then I’d have to explain to her and give her context. We weren’t bitching about others’ ideas of perfection. It was mine. Or the one I’d claimed to be mine for years. Fuck me, the internal voices could suck my balls. I’d come too far to change everything.
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it!” I called after Avery.
Asshole.
I blew out a breath and felt pressure rising in my chest, and it pissed me off. Teasing among brothers and buddies was one thing—I could handle that, and I gave as good as I got—but the doubts that’d started piling up lately put me on edge.
I was doing everything I could to compete against guys almost half my age. My business was cutthroat, both on and off the internet, and I’d witnessed fitness empires with twice the following I had fall from grace. Granted, most people eventually sold out and began pushing supplements and shakes, anything to make a buck. I hadn’t done any of that. I’d never accepted a sponsorship deal or a collab on Instagram. I wasn’t a goddamn influencer. I was there to preach what I believed in—but I still needed those followers. They spread the word. They signed up for online coaching.
But it was rough out there, even when you didn’t sell out. When everyone was on the same platform, the men and women with decades of training and degrees trying to tell people health offered no shortcuts…well, they eventually faded away, because trying that twenty-two-year-old’s magic pills was much easier, and he had the eight-pack and a million followers to show for it.
When it was his turn to crash and burn over some kind of controversy, two new influencers were ready to take his place and shoot for the stars. Meanwhile, the rest of us, those of us relying on education and science, competed for scraps.
“Are you all right, man?” Darius asked, studying me. “I know I give you a lot of shit, but it’s because I don’t get all these changes. The guy I grew up with didn’t give a flying fuck about…well, pretty much everything you claim to care about today.”
I wasn’t getting into it with him. He wouldn’t understand. But ironically, I wasn’t changing at all. I was trying to cling to apast I’d outgrown. Because while I didn’t sell out and try to make millions off gullible people, I had to look like someone who could sell anything.
