Page 35 of Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire)
“No,” I said again. “I told you, I’m not that man anymore. You don’t have anything I want.”
Her perfectly cut nostrils were flaring with rage now. She was rangatira, descended from Maori nobility, and it had never showed more.
She said I wanted the power? I knew the truth.
“I have exactly what you want,” she said. “And you’re afraid to take it.”
“No,” I told her. “You’ve never wanted the same things I did. I wanted domination, and you wanted pain. I wanted control, and you wanted humiliation. I don’t want to hurt anybody anymore. I don’t need to.” I didn’t say that it had always made me sick, afterwards, because I hadn’t wanted to feel cruel, and I’d known I had been. She’d always wanted to push me past my limits, and I’d always gone. But not anymore.
Maybe it was what Hope had said. That there was something wrong in that dance, something dark and destructive from our pasts that we’d carried into our present. But it wasn’t Hope’s and my dance that was wrong.
Anika’s eyes were darker now, deep pools of fury and scorn. “Be a man, Hemi. Tell the truth. That you’re too soft, underneath. That I had to practically make you do it every time. In the end, for all that power you try to show me, that you try to show everybody, you’re nothing like the man you’re pretending to be. You’re weak, and you’re soft. So go back to your little girl, because I’ll bet sheisa little girl, and that she thinks you’re big and strong and hard, when we both know the truth about that. We both know what you really are.”
“I don’t know if you know,” I said, still holding her away from me, wanting only to be gone, “but I do. I know that I’m not interested in being with somebody who doesn’t want the man I am. And I know that I don’t want you. I said you wanted humiliation? Your dirty secret is—youdowant that, but you want me to be the one feeling it. You want a man crawling to you, and I’m not interested in crawling. I walked, and I’ve been walking ever since. I’m standing upright here, and I’m going to keep standing.”
“Don’t you remember? I leftyou.”
“No. You didn’t turn up. There’s a difference. Andnowyou want me? It’s been fifteen years. Where have you been all this time?”
“I wrote to you,” she said. “I knew I’d made a mistake. Where haveIbeen? Where haveyoubeen? I wanted to start again. More fool me, because you never even answered.”
“Yeh, right.” She still looked beautiful, but she was about as seductive as a black widow spider, and I didn’t like spiders anymore. I preferred butterflies. “I know when you wrote to me, and I know why. When I bought my first company, wasn’t it? When you started to hear the drums beating for me? When you started to think that maybe, just maybe, you’d made a mistake? And that maybe you could get me back that same way you always had, the same way you’re trying now? You say you want me. Tell me, what exactly do you want?”
“Nothing.” She practically spat the word, the spider showing its venom. “I don’t want any part of you.”
“You sure about that? You’re the one who wants the win. You want to know you still have the power, and if that doesn’t work? You’ll take the money instead. Or you’ll take both. But you won’t get either, not from me. There’s nothing here for you. You had your chance, and you lost it.”
“No?” she said. “I think you’re wrong.”
I stood and breathed, and when I went on, my voice was measured. Controlled. Sure. “You try it,” I said. “Try it and see. You say I’m soft? You don’t know me. You don’t know how hard I’m willing to play. You have no idea how rough I can be. You get in my way, though, and I’ll show you. That’s what you’re going to have to take, and it won’t be pretty.”
I walked out knowing that there’d be a price to pay. There was always a price to pay. The question was whether you were willing to pay it.
Hope
I didn’t know what to do with myself.
During the first couple hours after Hemi left, I had dinner with Karen at a restaurant near the high-end holiday house he’d rented near the lake and tried to talk about other things. Until I couldn’t.
“Are you worried?” Karen asked me over her salmon. “Isn’t it weird to have Hemi be visiting his wife after they’ve been separated for, like, twenty years? Are you scared they’ll get back together? They fell in love in college and got married when they were only four years older than me. I kind of can’t imagine that. Not gettingmarried.”
“Of course I’m not worried.” I took another bite of a white fish that should have been delicious, but somehow tasted dry as bone. I would have looked out at the lake, but the window next to me showed only my own reflection, and that was nothing I wanted to see. I didn’t know how to arrange my face, so I looked down at my plate instead. “It’s fifteen years, not twenty. And just think about all the women whose husbands were married before, men who have children with their ex-wives. Are those women worrying every time their husbands have contact with their exes?”
“I bet they are if she’s still hot. I hope she isn’t. Did Hemi say what she looks like?”
“He doesn’t know, remember? He hasn’t seen her. I know she’s Maori, and that’s all.”
“Maybe she’s, like, really ugly now,” Karen said. “She’s old, right? So maybe she is.”
She wasn’t. I knew, because I’d looked her up online, and had found her, too, in words and pictures. A fiercely beautiful face, golden skin, and lots of thick, dark hair. And a body.
Most people smiled in those pictures, and so did she. Barely. Her smile said,Happy to see you, my dear. I know your secrets, and I’m going to use them to chew you up and spit you out.
All right, so I was projecting. Back in the real world, she was a buyer for a textile design firm, which sounded like a glamour position for a glamorous person, and that’s how she looked. In fact, she looked more than that. In a sleek black dress that showed both the richness of her curves and the slimness of her waist, she looked dark, predatory, and mysterious. In other words, Hemi’s match, and my polar opposite. I was about as mysterious and predatory as a puppy. I’d have been willing to bet big money that she had at least four inches on me, too. In heightandbust size.
I switched the subject with an effort, and by the time Karen and I finally headed back to the house, it was starting to rain. We had to run, and that helped. After that, we watched a movie, and Karen went to bed with her book, and I didn’t.
I’d hoped Hemi would text me when he was done, but nine o’clock came and went, and I’d still heard nothing. I took a shower, thought about putting on something sexy, and didn’t do it. I’d never wanted more to push, and I’d never been more sure that pushing would be wrong. So instead, I dressed in something else from Shades of V: a pair of silky-soft white cotton pajama pants and a pale-pink camisole embroidered with flowers at the neckline.
