The sensation is physical and specific. A fist closing around the organ in my chest and tightening. I know what this is. It’s jealousy, and it’s eating me alive.
But what right do I have?
I’m a bodyguard. I earn in a year what she spends on a weekend. The watch on my wrist is worth more than every possession I’ve ever owned combined. She bought it the way she buys coffee.
We are not on the same level. She is the penthouse and I am the parking garage, and the elevator between us doesn’t have a button I can press.
“Kai.”
I look up. Diana is watching me. Michael is watching me. Both of them.
“Can you go downstairs for me? The convenience store on the ground floor. Cigarettes. My usual brand.”
She doesn’t smoke. She fucking doesn’t smoke, and she’s not even trying to sell the lie.
My feet don’t move.
They’re cemented to the floor of her office, and I know exactly why they won’t cooperate with the rest of my body. Because I know what’s going to happen in this room the moment I leave. The second that door closes behind me, Michael Gordon is going to restructure his way right into her, and she’ll be moaning and screaming. Those moans belong to me. And he’s going to hear them instead.
She’s sending the fish out of the room. The fish she keeps in a tank by the window because it’s nice to look at and nice to feed when she’s not busy. But when the tank is out of her sight, does she remember she even has one? What happens to the fish then?
“Kai?”
Her voice again. Patient, but with a period at the end.
We help each other. Stress relief. As long as you remember who I am, and who you are.The conversation comes back, and it drills itself into the front of my skull all over again, in case I’d been foolish enough to let it slip.
Remember who you are.
A bodyguard. A man who could not afford a Rolex.
I stand. My legs feel disconnected from my body, moving on instructions my brain has issued over the screaming objection of everything else inside me. I button my jacket. I don’t look at Michael. I look at Diana, and she holds my gaze for one second, and there is nothing in her eyes that apologizes.
I walk out. The door clicks shut behind me. Then the lock. The sound of the bolt sliding into place is a blade between my ribs.
I don’t go to the convenience store. I walk down the corridor, past the glass-walled offices and the burgundy carpet with its thin gold pattern, past the reception desk, and I push open the door to the men’s.
I stand in front of the middle sink, and I look at myself.
The suit is expensive. The watch is expensive. The haircut is regulation-short, and the jaw is set.
But the man in the mirror, his eyes are wet. His hands are shaking.
I grip the edge of the sink. I stare at the man in the mirror, and his face is crumbling. This man, who has lived all his life breathing and feeling only one thing, is so far out of his depth right now that he can’t see the surface anymore.
My eyes burn. My throat is closing. There is a hand inside my chest and it’s ripping. Not squeezing.Ripping. Gutting me. Tearing out every fiber of the organ that keeps me standing, keeps me breathing.
And the pain is so real that I double over and grip the sink harder.
I don’t care about revenge.
I don’t care about Jack fucking Rutherford.
I don’t care that Diana is cheating on Jack Rutherford.
The only thing I know, the only thought my brain can hold, is that I am in love with Diana Jensen.
I am in love with her, and it is the most useless, devastating, one-directional thing I have ever felt. Because she is not in love with me. She is not going to be in love with me. I am a body she uses for stress relief. A service she employs the way she employs the barrister or whoever the hell else walks through that door with the right look.
