Page 79 of Do It With Me

After I got home, I poured myself a drink before I even took off my jacket. I tossed that one back, poured another, and tossed it back too. Because the first two hadn’t done a damn thing except make me aware of how spectacularly I’d torched my life, I poured another and carried the whiskey with me to the couch.

Half a bottle later, Jimmy showed up uninvited, took one look at me slumped on the couch with my sleeves unbuttoned and my jacket at my feet on the floor, and reached for the whiskey. “Well, shit. You look like the ghost of bad decisions present.”

A humorless laugh escaped me. “That’s generous. I feel more like the corpse of poor planning. Are you going to grab a glass?”

He did just that and helped himself to a tumbler filled to the brim. When he saw me notice, I shrugged. “It looks like I need to catch up.”

After refilling my glass too, he sat down across from me and looked right into my eyes. “I take it she didn’t welcome you back with open arms when she found out you were trying to do the impossible for her.”

“She told me to go to hell. More or less.” I rubbed the side of my neck and looked away from him, my gaze skipping across the city lights outside. “Honestly, she’s right to. I should’ve seen this coming. I’m supposed to be the guy who notices the details and somehow I missed her store.”

Jimmy whistled low. “Yeah, that’s, uh, that’s a big one, man.”

“A big one?” I laughed, but it came out more like a cough mixed with some kind of disbelieving gurgle. “It’s a goddamned catastrophe. I fell in love with someone whose livelihood I’m actively destroying. How’s that for irony?”

He shrugged. “I’d call it karma, but sure.”

I glared at him, but all he did was raise his glass. “Too soon?”

“Way too soon.” I slumped back into the couch again, watching the city lights blur through the glass. “The board won’t budge and neither will she. She doesn’t believe that I didn’t know, and even if I could somehow prove it to her, I still didn’t tell her the truth when I realized. All of which is in addition to the fact that I’m about to take the one thing she and her mother built together and literally tear it down.”

“It’s not a great day to be you.” He took a big gulp of his drink before he looked at me again. “What are you going to do?”

My head shook slowly from one side to the other. For the first time in an exceptionally long time, I was at a loss. “I don’t have a plan.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“Yeah, I’m aware,” I said flatly. “I’m going to have to go to war with my own company, Jimmy. I’m going to have to rip up contracts and stall construction, and that’s just for a start. It’s a clusterfuck of historic proportions.”

He swirled the liquid in his glass. “You fucked up. There’s no question about that, but crying and feeling sorry for yourself won’t fix it. You need to figure out how to make the board see this your way.”

“Yeah, well, unless I can magically turn corporate greed into empathy, I’m screwed.”

He smirked. “Then get creative. You’re good at that when you’re not being a lovesick idiot.”

I let out a long breath, staring at the condensation sliding down the side of my glass. “Thanks, but I thought you were of the opinion that I was just being an all-round idiot today. Lovesick or not. Weren’t you the one who warned me earlier about this being a billion-dollar deal and that I was in too deep to get out?”

“Now that you mention it, that does sound like me,” he said cheerfully. “On the other hand, back when things were going well between you and Shannon, you were a lot more pleasant to work with, and now this student of yours makes you a fucking joy. It’s in my best interest to support you.”

“Ellora,” I stressed. “Her name is Ellora.”

“Either way, somehow, I fucked up too and you became one of my best friends.” He ran a hand through his hair and shrugged when I arched an eyebrow at him. “Yeah, man. Don’t ask. I honestly don’t know how that happened, but the point is that I’m in a position where I care about your happiness. She made you happy.”

Somewhere between guilt and exhaustion, the faintest spark of an idea started forming at the back of my mind. It was just out of reach though, like a word on the tip of my tongue.

Maybe there was a way to make everyone happy. Or at least less miserable. I knew there was something, but I just couldn’t quite get there. Eventually, I sighed and shook my head. “I’m not giving up. Not on her. Not on this.”

Jimmy raised his glass again. “In that case, it might be time to stop drinking and start plotting, Romeo.”

I clinked my glass against his. “Here’s to miracles.”

“You might not need one.” Jimmy leaned back, resting his elbow on the armrest of the couch. “The project can keep going forward. Just change what the project is. Come up with something that’ll make those greedy ghouls happy and that doesn’t fuck over your girlfriend.”

“Well? Any ideas as to what that might look like?”

He casually lifted a single shoulder, acting like he hadn’t just dropped a grenade in my lap. “That’s what you’re going to have to figure out.”

“Gee, thanks.” That was what I’d been trying to do, but in the silence of my penthouse before he’d arrived, none of the possibilities I’d been able to come up with had been good.

Now he was here, but the problem remained.

Change the project. Make everyone happy. Don’t destroy the woman I love in the process.

Easy.

Except it wasn’t.

As the night stretched on and the whiskey burned down to the last drop before Jimmy finally left, I knew one thing for sure. Ellora deserved better than the mess I’d made and I was damn well going to find a way to fix it.