“She’s not going to take it.” I shoved my hands in my pockets. “Why would she? She can’t stand to be in the same room as me.”
“Can you blame her?”
“No.”
We walked another block. I watched people hurrying past, wrapped in their own lives with their own problems. A couple walked by holding hands and laughing about something. I felt a sharp pang of envy that made my chest ache.
“You love her?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah. I really do.”
We ended up at a dive bar that Lucas apparently knew well. It was the kind of place where the beer was cheap and the lighting was dim and nobody cared if you looked like you were having an existential crisis.
Which I was.
I was most definitely having some kind of crisis.
We sat in a corner booth with two pints. For a long time, Lucas didn’t say anything. Just let me sit there with my thoughts, which were spiraling in increasingly destructive directions.
“How long have we known each other?” Lucas asked.
I looked up. “What?”
“How long? Ballpark.”
“Twenty-five years. Why?”
“Because in those twenty-five years, I’ve watched you do some pretty incredible things. Teach yourself to hide your accent so well that people forget you weren’t born here. Graduate top of your class. Build a company from nothing. Become a billionaire before you were thirty-five.” He took a sip of his beer. “You’ve spent your entire life trying to prove yourself. To prove you belonged here, that you deserved your success, that you were more than just an immigrant kid from a working-class family.”
“Lucas, I don’t need my biography laid out. I lived it.”
“You’ve proven yourself. Over and over again. You can stop now.”
I frowned. “Stop what?”
“Stop pushing people away. Stop treating every relationship like it’s going to be taken from you if you’re not perfect enough. Or not good enough.” He leaned forward. “You’ve spent so long building walls to protect yourself that you forgot how to let people in. And when someone finally broke through, you panicked and pushed her away before she could leave first.”
I wanted to argue and tell him he was wrong.
But maybe.
A guy gets burned enough times, he starts to pick up on a few things, like how to protect himself. I took a sip of the beer and tried to ignore the fact it was a tad warm.
“I’m not trying to make you feel worse than you already do,” Lucas continued. “I’m trying to make you see that you have a choice here. You can keep doing what you’ve always done—stay safe, control the situation and stay alone. Or you can take a risk.”
“I did take a risk. And look where it got me.”
“You took half a risk. You let yourself fall for her, but you kept one foot out the door the whole time. You told Keith it was all fake to protect yourself. You kept looking for proof that it wouldwork out instead of just trusting that it would.” He fixed me with a look that said he was not going to tolerate my usual bull shit. He knew me too well.
I grunted something incoherent. He was throwing a lot at me and it was going to take me a few seconds to catch up.
“So let me ask you something,” Lucas said, leaning back and tilting his head to the side. I suddenly felt like I was sitting on a couch in a therapist’s office. “What do you want?”
I didn’t even have to think about it. “Ina.”
“Then what are you doing sitting here with me?”
“She won’t talk to me. She quit. She told me she’s done.” I shrugged. “I have to respect that.”
