Page 108 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

Everything feels so real suddenly, and so far from fuck buddies. His face on my personal Mount Rushmore is getting huger by the second.

“I should go,” I say.

He closes his hand around mine. My heart pounds. For a moment, I think he might not let me. But then he does.

Thirty

Lizzie

I keepthe wake-up calls going.

Every morning at 4:30 we talk on the phone while the rest of the world sleeps. Sometimes it’s super sexy. Sometimes we talk like friends.

I keep Theo updated on my search for the perfect subletter to take my place living with Mia, and we discuss my worries about my current top contender. I tell him about my walks with Mia up along Ninth, sometimes Tenth, to her delivery job. I’m spending as much time as I can with her. I’ll miss her like crazy.

I tell him things I’m afraid to tell Mia. Like my worries that Mia will find a new friend, or that she and I will grow apart. Eighteen months is a long time.

On one of the calls, Theo tells me that he has a long-distance friend from college he texts with all the time. He thinks their friendship has stayed strong because they keep up with each other’s everyday minutia. He reads me a few texts he sent. One is about running-shoe laces, and I give him shit about that, but it makes me feel better.

Theo tells me about his struggles with the formula, using super layperson’s terms.

He’s just so intensely driven, almost like he’s racing time. It’s noble, but I still don’t like the grim, hard-ass pace of it.

One of the articles that’s out there about him suggests he could’ve cashed out way bigger if he’d gone with big pharma, but he decided not to, because he didn’t want to lose control over the pricing, and he couldn’t get a guarantee that it wouldn’t be inflated.

I ask him if that part’s true, too. He lowers his voice, like he’s making this big confession, and tells me that it was more that they wouldn’t meet his demands that microwave popcorn would be banned on the premises where Vossameer is produced.

I laugh and tell him to screw off.

He goes on about something else, but I’m lying there, phone in hand, thinking that’s a little bit heroic, too, to not want the price high. He’d admire it if it were anybody else, but Theo lives in a different world where the bar for goodness is harshly high.

Sometimes he pushes it, though. Like when he presses me on whether I really, really have to go. And I have to explain my reasons all over again. A free place to live and cater out of while I renegotiate the debt and save money. The fact that I can’t start making money without a bakery space, and I can’t get a bakery space without repairing my finances. Especially not while living in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

The decision is hard enough without him questioning it.

One time, he texts me a rental listing of a space that would be perfect for me. His message says, “Let’s figure this out. We can make this work.”

I grit my teeth. Is this not what I asked him not to do? Like a masochist, I click through it, looking at each and every picture, wanting just to cry. I call him up. “Don’t do that. Don’t send me these.”

“It’s the perfect space.”

“The perfect space they’d never rent to me. And I couldn’t afford it even if they did say yes.”

“You could afford it if I invested. Cosigned.”

“You mean if I let you be my sugar daddy and rent it for me? And then you’d be able to take it away on a whim?”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Theo—”

“It’s ridiculous to move away when you don’t have to.”

“It’s not ridiculous to me,” I say. “Do you not understand why I need to do this on my own? However you dress it up, this plan would give you power over my existence. I know it seems unreasonable to you, but I want you to respect it’s a thing with me. Okay?”

He sighs.

“Don’t show me any more real estate.”

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