Page 74 of Scandalous Lover

I can’t help but smile as I shake my head, still processing this information. “What’s your username?”

He looks to Reina who just rolls her eyes. “It’s whatever they gave me. User 6537 or something. Reina wanted to help me upload a photo of our sunset as my profile picture, but we never got around to it.”

“You’re a bot,” I joke, even though I feel more like crying.

Dom shrugs. “I guess so.”

“Well, then you know more about what I’ve been up to than I do about you, I guess.”

He sits forward, elbows resting on knees and pins me with those intense eyes once more. But again, the longer I hold his gaze, the more welcoming and human it becomes. Is it possible I missed the real person in there for all these years?

“I thought you were doing pretty good. Your pictures and the things you type really make it seem like you’re on top of the world.”

My eyes fall down to rest on my hands where they cradle my mug. “Well, that’s the idea.”

“If things were going badly, you should have said something. Should have reached out.”

My defenses fly up to greet him. “Everything was going pretty well. Until it wasn’t. It happened so suddenly. I’ll get back on track.”

He sits back in his chair, arms crossed. “I thought a lot about what you said at the bar the other night. About how your job works and how everything went wrong. Then I compared that with the image of you I had from watching your Instagram for all these years. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all fake, and I should be worried about you.”

I sit up straighter as anger rises from my belly to my lips. “You have not contacted me in years.” The last word comes out as a hiss.

Dom refuses to back down. “I told you already. I thought you were doing okay.”

The audacity. “And the only reason you would ever need to call your little sister would be if she was not living up to your standards? What about just to say hi?”

“The phone works both ways.”

I nod, holding back the tears that threaten to brim in my eyes as emotion overtakes me. “I suppose that’s true enough. I just chose to use mine to call people who support me. People who give a shit about my life enough to be there for me.”

“Oh, you mean your internet friends who won’t be associated with you now because it might hurt their follower count?”

I drop my head to stare directly into my lap as the first tear falls. Because yeah, I did mean those people. Those were the only people I had. And he’s right, I have no one now.

Even when this whole thing eventually blows over, I’ll never be able to go back to the way it was. I’ll never be able to trust that community or feel like I’m a valued friend.

It hits me right now for the first time. It’s really over.I have nothing.

Even if I get my channel back, it was always about way more than the channel. It was my life.

And now it’s over.

“Yeah. You’re right.” I nod, still not looking up to see whatever smug look is on his face at having so successfully taken me down a peg. “I put my trust in people, and they betrayed me. Sorry to be such a disappointment.”

“Naomi, what Dom’s trying to say is that he’s—we’re—concerned for you. We want to help in any way we can.”

I look up then, straight into the earnest, eager eyes of my brother’s twenty-something fiancé. What the hell does this woman know about me and what’s going on with my life? The only reason she’s sitting here right now, in a position to beoffering comfort and advice is because she snagged herself a rich boyfriend.

Would they still be so worried about me if I was hooked up with a multimillionaire?

I sit up straighter as the thought hits me.

I am the fucking multimillionaire.

I don’t get to skewer her with my cutting new insight, however, because Dom jumps in first, doing the thing Dom always does.

“I wouldn’t be so worried if you were in some kind of a relationship. You’re thirty-two years old. Have you thought about trying to settle down? Get married?”

---