There was no way to be diplomatic and not screw up Jason’s future, his family’s future.To someone like this, she didn’t have an opinion.She didn’t really exist.
This man had the same views of the world as Ida did.
Which meant there was a bad choice and a worse one.
Jason would hate her for both choices, but one would save him in front of the patriarch who controlled his future.She nodded, committing herself to the decision that would cost her everything.“Yes,” she said before pausing.“Of course.He and I can figure that out together.”
And as the older gentleman nodded, the smirk switching to an expression that was full of what seemed like pride in Jason, the man she loved dropped her hand.
*
Carefully and easily,Jason left the meeting room.
The last thing he wanted was to show his rage in front of the man whose every other word was now ‘my boy.’
How?
How the hell could she have done this?
He hoped Naomi…he could barely think her name…followed him; he had no goddamned clue how he’d manage going back in that room when she was there.
She was, thankfully, when he turned around, standing, waiting.He could barely look at her.
And she knew she’d fucked up.There was no other way to describe it.
“He put me between a rock and a hard place,” she said, and he didn’t have time to see the signs of emotional breakdown.
She didn’t deserve his sympathy or his direction or his cues or his help.
“I didn’t want to say anything that would put you or anything you were doing in jeopardy,” she continued, swallowing, the words falling out of her mouth in ways that usually would have him holding her.
Not now.Not this time.
“Which meant no flippant, remarks, nothing wholly contradictory…”
“Nothing contradictory?”He shook his head and walked away.He was in public; he wasn’t going to yell.“You made it look like you were going to officially act as my keeper, which made their absolutely asinine purposes for this meeting feel completely and utterly correct, and me look like a jackass.”
He paused.
He was yelling; he could feel the scratch in his throat.
He needed to calm down.
“And,” he said, pulling his temper in, “that absolutely ridiculous cherry on top of it, was the implication that you were going to use some personal, physical means to keep control over me.”
“Dammit,” she said.“I told you.People like that don’t ever listen to reason.Not him and not anybody else from that generation.How could I tell him to go to Hades when he has your family’s entire future in his hands?Your dreams, your brother’s…”
He wasn’t going to listen to any arguments she made.All she was doing was making him angrier.Listening to the woman who professed to know him best, who he’d thought knew him best, justify words that had sounded like she’d never heard him at all, was more than he could bear.
“I don’t have time for this,” he said, moving his hand as if he was breaking any invisible string that tied them together.“But whatever conversations we were having, whatever agreements we had, they’re over.Business, emotional, whatever.Except for the fact I won’t fuck up my best friend’s wedding because the woman who’s planning it thinks she’s my keeper.”
And then he paused, the thoughts of her in his apartment, at Jimmy’s and in other spaces that he found…home, made him nauseous.
“I trust you can find your own way home.I’ll mail you the things you left at my place.”
“Fine,” she said, the business mask on her face reminding him what a coward she was.“I’ll do the same.”
And then, he turned and walked away, back toward his brother and his father.At least for as long it would take her to leave.
