I waited, sensing there was more beneath the surface. After a moment, he glanced up at me briefly before looking back down, his posture rigid. “My mom…” His voice was low and uncertain, like he wasn’t sure if he should be saying anything at all. “When she was raising me, she did everything she could, you know? Worked multiple jobs and always made sure I had something to eat, even when she didn’t. But it wasn’t enough. We were poor. ‘Electricity-getting-shut-off’ poor. ‘Not-knowing-where-you’re-going-to-sleep’ poor.”
His words hung in the air, and their weight hit hard as the tension built in his face. “It all started after my dad left. He completely disappeared. And then it was just the two of us, struggling every single day. We lost our house.”
“That must have been hard for both of you.” I kept my tone gentle, letting him know it was safe to keep talking.
He sighed, running a hand through his hair. “It was. We stayed in cheap motels, sometimes in the car. My mom tried to make it seem like an adventure, but I knew, even as a kid, I knew how close we were to losing everything. I had to drop out of school for a while to help her make ends meet.”
“You dropped out of school?” I tried to keep the shock out of my voice, but my heart ached at the thought of him, a kid, giving up his education to survive. “How old were you?”
“Twelve,” he replied, his eyes distant, as if he were looking back at a version of himself he hadn’t thought about in a long time.
“That’s such a young age to go through something so painful.”
He nodded, clearing his throat. “Yeah. I lied about my age and worked whatever jobs I could. I bagged groceries and delivered papers. It was hard. But we made it. Eventually, we scraped enough together to get a tiny apartment. I went back to school, and I got a scholarship to pay for it. And my mom saved every penny. That’s why she’s so proud of her little house. She bought it herself.”
He nodded, his face tightening. “There was no one. No friends offering money. No family swooping in to save the day. We had to help ourselves.”
“That must have felt isolating,” I said softly. “Like you had no choice but to grow up faster than anyone should have to.”
“Yeah. And I promised myself I’d never be that powerless again. Never let her, or myself, go through that again.”
As his words settled between us, my heart twisted. Even as a kid, he’d been so resilient, so strong. “You were carrying so much, even at twelve. That must have been incredibly difficult. And now you’ve built so much.”
He gave a small, humorless laugh, but I could see a hint of pride beneath the pain. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“And now you’re working like you can never stop because you’re still trying to make sure you never lose everything again.”
He looked up at me, his eyes filled with something unspoken, as if he hadn’t fully realized that himself. “Yeah,” he admitted after a pause. “I can’t stop. It’s like... if I stop, if I let go for even a second, everything could fall apart. No matter how many houses I own or how many deals I close, it’s always there. The fear. The pressure.”
Topher’s face changed. The tough exterior he’d been holding onto slipped, just a little. Worry flickered in his eyes. “What if... what if I lose her?”
Without thinking, I reached out and took his hand. No one was around to see it. There was no audience, so there was no reason to pretend. But in that moment, I didn’t let go.
His grip tightened around my hand, and we sat there for a while, just like that.
Eventually, he shifted closer to me, his hand still in mine. He glanced up, and there was something softer in his gaze. He studied me for a moment. “You really are something.” His voice was low, sincere. “You talk to people. You make them feel better. You should do that for a living.”
I blinked, caught off guard. No one had ever said something like that to me, and for a moment, I didn’t know how to respond. “Idoneed to get a real job. I was thinking, I don’t know, maybe I’ll work at a movie theater or something.”
He raised an eyebrow. “A movie theater? Come on, you should be doing something that lets you connect with people, something that matters. Like being a therapist.”
“A therapist?” I scoffed. “I can’t afford a decade of school. I haven’t even finished college.”
I had so much debt, so many reasons why this wasn’t possible. Yet, looking at him, I saw how open and sincere he was, and I felt something inside me soften. Maybe he wasn’t as far removed from my struggles as I’d thought.
Sure, he was a billionaire, living in a world of luxury I could hardly imagine, but he hadn’t always been that way. He’d known the weight of poverty, the gnawing uncertainty of whether tomorrow would be any better than today.
I could see it now, the way his workaholism wasn’t about the need to pay bills anymore; it was deeper than that. It was the trauma of knowing what it felt like to have nothing and the fear that it could all slip away again. He wasn’t just driven by ambition; he was driven by the same fear that haunted me, the same insecurity that gnawed at the back of my mind. But while I was still stuck in the fight to survive, he was on the other side of it, clinging to what he had built as if it could vanish any second.
We weren’t as far apart as I’d thought. We were both shaped by the same fear, though his manifested in relentless work and mine in constant worry. Maybe, just maybe, we understood each other more than I’d ever imagined.
He looked deep in my eyes, and for a moment, I forgot how to breathe. My heart pounded so loudly in my ears that I was sure he could hear it, too. There was something in his eyes, something warm and steady that made me feel like the whole world had narrowed down to just the two of us.
Topher’s gaze lingered, his face inches from mine, and I swore he was about to lean in. My pulse quickened, and heat rose in my cheeks. Was this really about to happen? Were we going to cross the line between what was real and what was pretend?
I could almost feel the kiss before it even happened, the tension hanging in the air so thick it was hard to swallow. And, for a split second, I let myself imagine what it would feel like to have his lips on mine, the world falling away, and everything shifting between us.
But then, right at the edge of that moment, the door to the waiting room swung open, and the sound snapped us both out of it.
