Page 3 of Built to Hate You

I sigh. I get where she’s coming from. She has every right to be bitter toward me. But I’m no longer the guy I was in high school. I’m fucking ashamed of who I was then. “Mia, if you would just—”

“I don’tjustneed to do anything.” She sets her jaw. “Do you know how cruel you were to me? Do you know how awful you made every day for me? I don’t want anything to do with you. And I don’t want you coming even close to anyone in my family. I might not have had the nerve to stand up to you in high school. But I do now. You’re a world-class asshole, Axel.” She gestures around my office. “You don’t deserve any of this. And I hope it all comes crashing down around you.”

Jesus. I know I’ve wronged her. But to walk into my office and rip me a new one like this? She didn’t even give me the decency of closing my office door. All of my employees can probably hear her. Fucking hell.

“I think you should leave,” I growl.

“Trust me,” she spits back, “I was on my way out.”

She turns on her heels and disappears out the door, pulling the door closed with such force that I feel the vibration under my feet. Anger bubbles up in my chest. It’s a complicated anger, though. It’s half aimed at her, half aimed at myself. Running my hands through my hair, I let out a long, hard breath. Fuck.

I sit back down in my chair and try to return to reviewing the construction plans I was looking at before Mia came in. But I’m too worked up to concentrate—it’s all just a mess of lines and gibberish to me now. And I’m too restless to sit here acting like nothing happened.

I get up and pace the room. What the hell do I even do? I’m not about to rip up the contract I have with her parents. She has the right to be pissed, but she doesn’t have the right to ask me to do something like that. Every contract I sign is a promise to do my best work for the client. And I’m a man of my word.

I’m not going to make excuses for the way I treated Mia back in high school—there’s no excusing what I did. But in hindsight, it’s pretty clear why I was the way I was.

I had an older brother when I was growing up. Sam. I admired him like nobody's business. He was generous and funny. He was equally smart and athletic. He always had girlfriends. He always knew what to say.

Then, when I was a freshman in high school, Sam was driving his girlfriend home from a party and crashed the car. His girlfriend survived; he didn’t.

After he died, his group of friends took me under their wing. They gave me something to hold onto when I felt like I was drowning in grief. They’d known Sam so well that being around them felt like being around my brother again. And hanging out with them was a whole lot better than hanging out with my old friends, who didn’t know how to act around me anymore.

Sam’s friends continued to be there for me for the rest of the year. But then, of course, they all graduated and moved on with their lives. And so I walked into school my first day of sophomore year without any friends. My brother’s friends were gone. My old friends felt like I’d abandoned them, rightly so.

Suddenly, I was a loner.

Not just a loner, though. I was anangryloner. And I didn’t think about it so clearly then, but in hindsight, I understand that I did the things I did because I wanted others to feel pain, too. Everyone else’s lives seemed so perfect. They all seemed so goddamnhappy. And I tried to spread my pain in an effort to ease it.

I picked on a lot of people. Many of them fought back, though, and I backed off. But then Mia had the unfortunate luck of being one of my targets. And when I saw a flash of weakness in her, I pounced.

Now, years later, I feel sick to my stomach when I think back on everything I did. All the times I slammed her into the lockers. All the times I badmouthed her to other people. All the awful things I said to her face.

It shocks me how unrelentingly cruel a person can be.

Fortunately, though, I had a wake-up call. Near the end of my senior year, after coming back from three days of suspension, a teacher finally sat me down and gave me a serious talking to. And thanks to her, I got my act together after graduation. I went to community college, then transferred to a university, where I got a degree in construction management. I’d stepped onto that university campus without a clue about what I wanted to study, but after I thought about it a while, picking construction management just seemed fitting: I wanted to rebuild things.

I wanted to make up in some way for everything I’d torn down.

* * *

I stop pacing the room.I’m standing in front of my office’s single big window now, looking out across the water. I stare into the distance for a long time. Then I turn around, walk back over to my desk, and start to search for a way to contact Mia.

Chapter Three

Mia

Idon’t even want to open the email that pops up in my inbox from Axel. I just want to delete it, to purge him from my life again. But I know I have to open it. I know I have to deal with this if I want to keep him from moving forward with my parents’ renovation.

Can I talk to you again? Can we meet somewhere? How about a coffee shop—neutral ground?

Shit. I really don’t want to have to face Axel in person again. It was hard enough being in his office with him. I couldn’t even bring myself to close the door behind me, that’s how awful it felt to be around him. And I can’t imagine anything he could say to me that would make me change my mind about this.

We don’t need to meet again. Please just cancel the job. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

Within half an hour, he’s written me back.

I’ll cancel the job. But only if you meet with me in person first.

---