Page 112 of Hate Me Like You Mean It
“I just don’t want to keep secrets anymore,” I whispered. “This was… this whole day was pretty fucking horrible, and I never want to go through it again, so I’m just going to tell you everything.”
I’d already lost him once by keeping all these stupid, inconsequential secrets as a means of protecting my own ego, and like hell I was going to make the same mistake twice.
He scratched at his jaw. “I know you don’t think you’re in shock?—”
“I’m not in shock.”
“Right. But just so you’re aware, a lack of self-censorship can be a symptom of someone whois.”
I studied him in the soft moonlight, my fingers twiddling over my stomach. “And how is it that you know so much about potential symptoms of shock?”
His gaze fell to the floor as he palmed the back of his neck. “It’s late, so I should probably… I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave you alone, so I’ll just take one of the guest beds or the couch again if you’re…”
“Which ones did you have? Which symptoms, I mean?”
His lips pressed together for a moment. He dropped his hand. “Denial was the big one. But it, uh, it started before her diagnosis and lingered for… longer than I care to admit. The shock just really exacerbated it.”
I waited for a bit, then, “You wanna talk about it?”
He gave a harsh, self-deprecating laugh. “I don’t think you want to hear about it.”
“Try me.”
It took a few minutes, but he eventually caved and slowly moved to sit beside me on the bed. “I didn’t believe the first specialist. She was only forty-three; it didn’t make sense. So we got a second opinion. And then a third. A fourth, and… I dropped out of college so I could do my own research because I was convinced that every doctor in the country was either a brainwashed idiot who couldn’t differentiate their head from their own ass or straight up lying to us. It became an obsession. I stopped sleeping, dragged her to a bunch of unregulated memory clinics all over the world, made her go through testing she didn’t want, and wasted all her savings trying to find a cure that wasn’t there instead of just… being with her, talking to her while she was still herself.”
A sharp ache squeezed my chest when his chin dipped lower. I was sitting up before I even knew my body had moved, resting my head on his shoulder and looping my arms around his waist.
“All that money could have… the least I could have done was let her enjoy her fucking life. But I wouldn’t listen. She tried, and I wouldn’t… then it got so bad that I couldn’t hide behind the denial anymore. I got out of the shower one morning, and my keys were gone. We’d already sold her car to fund another bullshit trial that I can’t… I don’t even remember what it was anymore. But anyways, she… my dad’s Toyota was wrapped around a pole. I’m not sure how she managed to walk away fromthat with a broken arm and nothing else, to be honest. We were really fucking lucky.”
He stopped for a minute to regather his thoughts. “She’d left the house without her shoes or glasses. When I got to the hospital, she was arguing with the nurse, insisting that she was going to miss her flight. She kept repeating over and over that her husband was waiting for her, that they were supposed to be going on their honeymoon that day, and when I finally managed to get her attention, she just… looked right through me. No matter how much decline we’d seen up to that point, she’d always been able to recognize me. And until that moment, a part of me had honestly believed she always would. That I was somehow immune to…” He trailed off. Cleared his throat. “Anyways, that’s what finally made me snap out of it. I was told she needed full-time care, but I’d already blown all her money on the trials… I swear I almost called Robert. We still had enough to pay for five- or six-months’ worth of food and rent, but I couldn’t leave her alone, which meant I couldn’t go out and find a job. So I unblocked his number, rehearsed what I was going to say, and… nothing. I couldn’t bring myself to press the button. Instead, I opted to do the stupidest, most reckless, idiotic thing I could have possibly done, especially at that age—I taught myself to trade options.”
He smiled, but I couldn’t bring myself to match it. A nineteen-year-old kid had no business shouldering that much stress and responsibility. The poor thing must have been terrified.
“I started small, learned the basics, made a bit of money. But then I got cocky, attributed beginner’s luck to skill. Two bad calls—that’s all it took to lose 70 percent of her remaining savings.”
“Let me guess,” I said, “you still kept going.”
He chuckled lightly, then leaned back until he was lying on the bed, one arm tucked under his head. “I had to—couldn’t let it beat me.”
My mouth twitched. I lay down beside him, flipping to my side so I could stare at his profile to my heart’s insatiable content.
“It worked out,” he continued. “Eventually. I threw myself into it, made it another obsession, learned, and…”
“And becameThe Midas Touch Kid,” I finished. His face had been all over the internet, headline after headline talking about the twenty-one-year-old college dropout who’d used the small fortune he’d made trading to buy the failing media company no one else wanted to touch with a ten-foot pole. Rumor had it he was self-made, albeit too ambitious for his own good. He’d gutted the company so ruthlessly during his first week that a former employee had been caught on camera egging his car. By the end of week two, he’d liquidated most of their assets and informed what few employees he’d decided to retain that they were going to wipe the entire engine, as well as the underlying algorithm, and rebuild it all from scratch.
Two of them had walked out.
Everyone else said he was in over his head.
But he did it. He restructured, rebranded, and made the company profitable by doing something no one else had thought of yet.
Dominic found a way to gamify gossip.
Suddenly, users weren’t limited to consuming whatever the rage-thirsty algorithms and bots wanted to force-feed them that day. They were active participants in the narrative, provided with the ability to boost or suppress stories depending on what they believed, or knew, to be the truth. The platform allowed them to trade in Whispers, debunk false rumors, short false andtoxic narratives, and go long on anything they felt needed to be seen by the masses or was simply too juicy to resist.
Then he’d branched off, buying more companies, gutting them, and restructuring from the ground up. Every time, they said he was biting off more than he could chew. And every time he proved them wrong.
“You did a really great job,” I said quietly, “just in case no one’s told you that yet. It couldn’t have been easy, carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders like that.”
