The expression on her face reads sad, and the way her fingers twiddle with the fabric of the pillow makes me feel anxious. I feel almost immediately like I shouldn't have asked. No good can come from us going anywhere near that particular past right now.
"He's the only one who ever came close. But we didn't — we never actually—" She shakes her head. "I came from sheer friction and loving him. And I've never felt anything even close to that since." She throws her shot back and sets the bottle down quietly. "Ten years and nothing has come close to a make-out session with a boy who told me I had a pretty collarbone. How sad and embarrassing is that baggage."
The air leaves my body completely.
I pick up a bottle. I need a minute.
"That's three for one," I say finally, and my voice only barely holds. "Sad, baggage, and—"
"Devastating," she says. "That one's just devastating."
"Yeah," I say. "It is."
***
"What have your girlfriends thought about the no sex thing?" Blaire asks, dipping a fry in ranch.
Our shots game is taking a much needed intermission while we get some food in our systems. I ordered tacos, wings, fries,jalapeño poppers — a laundry list of things Blaire mentioned she'd never tried, which came out in pieces over the last hour.
Growing up without a lot of resources, which I didn't know until today, and then years of Colt's monitored diet that stripped all the good things out of her life one by one. So, I ordered everything I could think of, and we pushed the coffee table to the fireplace so we could lay it all out on the floor between us with Cokes and slushies. We've been sitting here like two people who have nowhere better to be and have decided that's fine.
"I've never had an actual girlfriend," I say, picking up a wing. "The women I've dated have mostly been for show. Part of it was genuinely not having time for a relationship, though. What I built in six years, most companies don't achieve in a lifetime, and that's partly because I gave every waking moment to it. The past four years have just been the icing on a very successful cake.”
She looks at me over her ranch cup. "Every waking moment."
"Every one."
"That's lonely, Bennet."
I look at my food for a moment. "Yeah," I say. "It is."
"How did you even get the capital to launch something like this? Being a billionaire before thirty is unheard of unless you're born into it."
"In college, I built a platform that did pattern modeling and property analytics. I used it to track distressed assets, ownership changes, anything that hinted at undervaluation before it became obvious to everyone else." I pick up another wing. "My parents passed when I was younger, and I gained access to my portion of their insurance policy when I turned nineteen. I used that to round up properties, then sold the app for seventy-five million in a sealed contract. Didn't want the information public. I kept the core model, turned it into a licensing platform. Firmspay to use it. Bigger firms pay more. And when they act on something that it flags, and it performs well, I get a percentage."
"A percentage of every deal?"
"Not every deal," I correct. "Just the ones I'm tied to. But they've been extremely lucrative. Globally."
She lets out a quiet breath, shaking her head slightly. "So, you don't even need to buy the properties anymore."
"I can," I say. "I just don't have to."
“You’ve had a good part of your life sealed off, even your earlier years.” She says quietly after a few beats.
My chest tightens.
"Yeah. I've always been a private person." I take a long chug of my Coke. "I have a pretty personal question, so feel free to tell me to fuck off."
She pauses, weighing it. "Go for it."
"Why have you protected Colt all this time? Going along with the stories instead of leaving him?"
She's quiet for a long moment, turning a jalapeño popper in her fingers without eating it.
"Because leaving felt impossible for a long time." Her voice is even, like she's thought about how to say this before and has landed on the version that doesn't break her open. "When your entire life — your parents' stability, your social standing, your career, your identity — is built inside someone else's orbit, leaving feels like detonating all of it at once. And Colt was very good at reminding me of that whenever I got close to the edge." She sets the popper down. "The protecting was just survival. If I controlled the story, at least I knew what it said. The moment I stopped controlling it, it became his."
"What changed? Why now?"
