Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 112

Chapter 101: Jealousy Is A Terrible Thing

Cameron’s POV

Durian was quiet beside me, not saying anything as I continued speaking, explaining what that meant.

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“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. “I would have thought of it eventually. But he thought of it first and put it in the margin.”

“Cameron-”

“I know.” I exhaled, running a hand through my hair already thinking of how to make it up to my P.A. “I know. I made the wrong call.”

“You made a call,” Durian said carefully, “that you made from a position of—”

“Jealousy,” I said. The word tasted specific and accurate, the way words did when you’d been avoiding them and then finally said them because there was no use denying them even to yourself and I was tired of running round the issue, I had done that for 18 months and just became someone who abused their powers and authority for fun, or to be just petty and cruel.

“I made a jealous decision. Which I have never done in my professional life. In twenty years of running things, I have never made a decision out of-” I stopped. “I don’t do that.”

“You did it tonight.”

“I did it tonight.” I looked at the wet pavement, at the city lights scattered across the puddles. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Durian said, with the patience of someone who’d been waiting for this conversation for eight months, “that eighteen months of managing something very carefully has limits, and you found yours tonight.” He gestured toward the car idling at the curb.

“It means you’re a person with feelings, not just a function or & button that can do what it has been doing without opinions. And people make jealous decisions occasionally, particularly when they’ve been sitting on something for eighteen months without letting themselves feel it.” He opened the car door. “Get in, Cameron.”

I got in.

My phone was in my pocket. Lucian’s contact was in my phone-his personal number, which I had because assistants gave their personal numbers to the people they worked for, which meant I had it and which meant I could call him, which I wasn’t going to do at eleven PM after the amount I’d had to drink.

In the morning. If I still thought it was the wrong call in the morning. But calling him now was not the right thing to do, considering that I had a lot to drink and I might say something that might leave him uncomfortable. Liking him was my choice, him not reciprocating it was something I needed to accept.

I closed my eyes and let Seattle move past the windows and thought about eighteen months of someone asking himself whether more information would actually change the decision or whether collecting information was easier than committing.

13

Jealousy Afenible Feeling

Maybe some decisions, I thought, had been waiting long enough.

Maybe the morning would clarify that.

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Or maybe it wouldn’t, and I’d be in Durian’s guest room sober and thinking clearly and I’d conclude that everything that had happened tonight was the correct outcome and I did not need Lucian back in my life because I could not keep torturing myself to something like this. Having him but not having him.

Maybe.

The car pulled into Durian’s neighborhood, the quiet streets of it, the houses set back behind mature gardens.

“Thank you,” I said. “For coming.”

“You called me,” he said simply.

“I called you because you’re the only one I could call.”

“I know.” He looked at me from his side of the car. “That’s something you should think about, too. When you’re sober. The fact that I’m the only one you could call.” A pause. “That’s a lonely position, Cameron. For someone who manages as much as you do.”

The car stopped.

I sat for a moment.

Sedona had said: *you need to find someone and settle down and direct all of this energy toward your own life.*

She’d said it lightly, the redirect of a sister deflecting a conversation about herself. She hadn’t known what she was landing on. She never did. She just said things and they landed, and you carried them until you’d figured out what to do with them.

I got out of the car.

Durian’s housekeeper had left soup in the refrigerator, which Durian reheated without asking whether I wanted it and set in front of me at the kitchen counter with water and the particular silence of someone providing what was needed without making it a discussion.

I ate the soup, without thinking too much about it, as I tried not to think about things that I could not control and just focus on the here and now.

The soup was good. I ate all of it.

“Guest room’s ready,” Durian said, collecting the bowl from me and disposing it in the dishwasher.

“I know where it is.”

“You do.” He turned from the counter, leaned against it, looked at me with the expression he’d had since the broken glass-the one that understood more than I’d given him and wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “the fact that it’s been eighteen months, and you’ve done nothing about it, and you still broke a glass over a cheek-kiss-that’s not nothing, Cameron. That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t go away because you manage it professionally.”

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