Chapter 34 Marcus

I ended the call with Dr. Jensen and walked to my bedroom, where Sammy was fast asleep. Frank followed me, trailing my heels as usual with his toenails clacking on the hardwood floor. I rolled onto my bed and stared up at the high ceilings. The nausea persisted. I wondered if it would ever go away.

My phone lit up with a text message from Cass: Two minutes away . My heart surged at the sight. She had rushed out of the Libra offices this morning just a few minutes after I told her the truth about the data sale. She didn't even say goodbye. She just called an Uber on her phone as she burst out of Alex's office, and ignored the desperate call I made to her just a few minutes later.

My assumption was that she was furious with me—maybe unforgivably so. If I had just told her what I knew on Friday when I was at her apartment, it never would have come to this. Alex would have never taken that picture of us, and her job would have been safe.

She probably hated me. She probably rued the day she ever gave my sorry ass a shot. I wouldn't have blamed her. I would never forgive myself for letting this happen to her.

I rolled off my bed to the sound of the buzzer at my apartment door. As soon as I opened it, Cass threw herself into my arms. I actually staggered back from the force of her colliding with me and embracing me so tightly.

Fuck, I needed her .

"Did I do something right?" I asked as I ran my hand over her long blond hair. I inhaled the smell of her shampoo, savoring it like it was the last time I would ever have a chance. "Because it feels like I've done everything wrong lately."

She separated from me so she could bend down and greet Frank, who was standing on his hind legs and clawing at her thighs. "Hello, my baby," she cooed at him. "I missed you."

I shut the door behind her and leaned against it, exhaling as I watched her scratch Frank's belly. The mere sight of her was enough to turn one of the worst days of my life into a brighter one. Fucking hell. If I lost her over this, I was going to kill Alex before the Federal Trade Commission could even figure out they needed to prosecute him.

"Look, I know you're furious and you probably hate me and never want to see me again. I get all of that, but I just want to say—"

"I'm not mad," she cut in. She stood up to face me, furrowing her brow as she fixed her gaze on me.

I paused until her words finally started to make sense. It took several seconds. "You're not?"

Cass shook her head. "I could be, you're right. This is one of the rare times when being angry is more rational than being calm. But I also know I like you, and you seem to like me."

The weight slid off me like snow on a spring roof. "Like? That's an understatement."

I loved her.

"Why would I distance myself from you when I know you're going to need me for the next few months?" Cass walked over and took my hand. Her grip was delicate, but so certain. "I have enough drama in my life. No, I think I'll just hang on to you."

I loved her so much.

"I don't know what to say," I admitted. "I thought you were going to murder me."

Cass smiled at me, and it was one of those smiles that was so magnificent, I forgot we were clutching each other for balance on a boat about to capsize. "Still not a serial killer, handsome."

"But I fucked up your life, Cass. I got you…did you get fired?"

"I did."

"Shit," I muttered, bringing my hands up to the top of my head. "I'm so sorry."

"Don't be. You know me, and you know I would never cut someone out of my life just for making a mistake." She shook her head as she said that. "That's not who I am."

"I'm so grateful for that."

I loved her more than anything.

"Just…" she trailed off as she raised her hands and rested them on my cheeks. "Just look at me and tell me you like me exactly as I am."

I watched as she waited for my response. I wondered what she saw in me. I wondered who she saw.

"Cass, I like you exactly as you are. I love you exactly as you are," I told her.

The words escaped me before I had time to gauge if this was the right time to say that. But once those words dangled between me and her, I wondered if there ever would have been a right time for Cass and me to fall in love. If we had done this when we were eighteen—if I had asked out the beautiful and downright powerful class president like I had wanted to, I probably wouldn't have dropped out of Princeton when I was a freshman. If I had waited until after the due diligence process was over, she wouldn't be standing in front of me now, right when I needed her the most.

And falling in love right now—right at this moment? The timing couldn't have been worse. She just got fired, and my house of cards was about to topple. So yeah, maybe there would never be a right time for Cass Pierson and me to fall in love.

So fuck it: I wanted to break the rules. I just wanted to love her, right now, and for as long as she would let me.

I loved her with everything I had.

Cass's lips parted as she let the gravity of my words set in. But she kept her eyes locked on mine and after a few excruciatingly long seconds, she smiled. And it wasn't one of those perfect, fake smiles she used to give me when we first started working together. No—it was real. It was an imperfect little smirk on the corner of her lips that slowly unfolded into a full grin that reached all the way up to her deep brown eyes. "I love you too."

It was so much more than just four words. It was pure poetry.

***

We didn't sleep that night. We didn't even have sex. Instead, we put on Cujo (which Frank did not appreciate at all) and talked out every scenario for what could happen next.

If I hadn't already been in love with Cass, I would have fallen madly in love with her that night. Her mind just worked in ways mine never could. She could extrapolate scenarios and think five moves ahead. She could take a single path of actions and track countless branches of possibilities, all without so much as lifting a finger.

And she didn't have to lift a finger because that was where I came in. She would describe potential plans to handle the ramifications, and I would add them to a decision tree I mocked up on my laptop. Within a few hours, we had scripted every next step possible—from me reporting it to the FTC directly, to working with our PR firm to get ahead of it, to even moving off the grid. We also plotted outcomes onto the tree, where we assigned scores based on how I fared with each possibility.

The only positive thing to come out of this experience: She and I made a fucking unstoppable team.

On Thursday morning, Alex finally got the call from Davenport-Ridgeway telling him the deal was off. He called me twenty-two times after that. I ignored every single one. He also sent no less than thirty-two furious text messages to me, which I didn't answer until that night when he told me he booked a meeting with Lilac and he needed me to be there on Friday morning. My response: Okay .

On Friday morning, I arrived three minutes late for the meeting with Lilac—a first. Little did anyone know, I had forced myself to stand in the lobby of the building where their office was located until I was late—but that was beside the point.

I took a seat at the conference table, where Beverly and Rachel were waiting for me. I hated Beverly and Rachel—and that was saying a lot because I didn't even hate Alex at that moment. But Beverly and Rachel were the ones who came up with the brilliant idea for that contract of mine. Sometimes, I wondered if they were just agents of chaos, whose sole objective was to trick stupid tech guys like Alex and me into paying them ten thousand dollars a month to ruin our lives.

Alex glared at me while I settled into my seat. Fine. He could glare all he wanted; it didn't change the fact that whatever was coming to him would be ten times worse than whatever was coming to me.

"How are you?" Rachel asked. She rested one hand on mine and stared at me seriously in a remarkably well-executed imitation of empathy. It wasn't real though. Rachel didn't care about me—she made that abundantly clear when she told me it was imperative for me to never drink more than two alcoholic beverages in public—for the survival of Libra and our stock price.

"I feel like shit, Rachel. How are you?" I responded, frowning at her as if to say, Why the fuck would I feel any better than shit ?

She widened her eyes at my response, probably hoping for an apology. She wouldn't get one. "Okay then. Let's just get started."

Beverly was either twenty-nine or forty-seven. I frankly had no idea. She had the perky bubbliness and the wardrobe of a twenty-something, but the cunning of someone much older.

She clasped her hands together and rested them on the table. "Well, gentlemen, this is obviously a very upsetting scenario. By the end of the day, I anticipate Davenport-Ridgeway is going to release a statement that the deal is off. Shortly thereafter, there's going to be a breaking news story about the data sale in The Verge that I tried to get a handle on, but couldn't do it."

"Who the fuck told The Verge ?" Alex snapped. He turned to look at me and narrowed his eyes even further—as if he thought I was the one who leaked it.

Honestly, I kind of wished I had.

"The point is," Beverly went on, "we can try to get ahead of this. So, Rachel has put together a plan…"

"Yes," Rachel cut in. Rachel was definitely thirty-six. I knew this because one time, she coyly told Alex he should try dating someone experienced, like a thirty-six-year-old, rather than one of the twenty-three-year-olds that he tended to pursue.

Real smooth, Rachel .

She tossed her dark hair over her shoulder and swirled her laptop around. "Here's a statement we've written for Marcus to post on his Twitter account about the data sale, saying that he and Lex are the victims of—"

"I'm not doing that," I interrupted, cutting into Rachel as she continued to point at whatever bullshit statement she had typed up on her rose gold laptop.

The room fell so quiet I could hear the faint sound of the bubbles popping inside Alex's can of La Croix. Beverly, Rachel, and Alex glanced at each other several times—like they weren't sure if I was being serious or not.

Unfortunately for them, I was so serious I could have been a Windsor.

"Are you kidding?" Alex questioned. "Then how do you expect to get ahead of this?"

"I don't care," I replied, shrugging for effect. "I don't care if the entire world finds out you sold our user data. I don't care if the entire world finds out I had sex with our due diligence analyst so many times that my cardio fitness has actually improved over the past month. I don't even care if you send that video of me and Cass making out in the office to my mothers. I just want to get away from this absolute shit show of a company. In fact, I should probably go ahead and kick off what promises to be a long bout of therapy—therapy I'll need to come to terms with the fact that I wasted a decade of my life on you."

As soon as I finished speaking, I stood. Alex remained in his seat, brow tight, and one hand gripping his phone.

"Not sure who you're going to call," I continued, nodding at his hand. At this point, it was salt in an open wound, but I didn't care. It felt good . It was the best catharsis I had ever had, next to being with Cass. "You don't even know where our lawyer works. It's Skadden, by the way. You should probably learn that because I'm officially done doing anything for you."

"Marcus, what the hell are you talking about?" Alex asked as he, too, stood. I took that as my cue to leave.

He was calling my name as I headed towards the elevator. When he caught me at the elevator bay, he slammed his fist against the wall by the button panel.

"Are you kidding me right now?" he demanded, his face tinged with pink.

Six-second reset.

"Alex, I'm officially resigning as the Chief Operating Officer of Libra, effective as soon as humanly possible," I told him, refusing to break eye contact or back down. Once the words left me, I could literally feel my chest loosen in a way that it hadn't in years.

"You can't just leave," he insisted. He started shaking his head and he didn't stop. "You're a majority shareholder and the second highest standing person in the company. You can't just quit."

I watched his gaze tick with desperation. "The fact that you still think I'm the second highest standing person in the company is ridiculous. I bet you couldn't even tell me the last names of anyone outside of the executive team."

He didn't object, but he didn't prove me wrong either. He simply let out an exhale and asked, "And why does that even matter?"

"It matters because you fucked over sixty-five people because you were greedy. Our shares are going to tank . We're all going to be out of a job unless some kind of corporate miracle shines upon us. We're completely screwed. And you can go sit at home on the comfortable little nest egg that you built, but a lot of people are going to see their financial stability crumble in the next month. The least you could do is pretend that you care about any of them."

He pulled his head back and took a step away from me. He kept one hand on his belt and the other went up to his mouth, like maybe I finally elucidated something that had evaded him throughout the last few years.

When he looked up at me again, his blue eyes were pained. Those blue eyes used to grace the covers of magazines and webpages, spurring comments from people all over the world about how Alex—Lex Larson—was the whole package. He was brilliant, ambitious, striking, and unafraid to strike his position in an industry dominated by storied titans.

When he looked at me now, his eyes were weary.

"How can you even think I don't care about you? Marcus, you're my best friend. We've been side by side since we were eighteen years old, and you think I don't want the best for you?"

"We aren't who we were when we were eighteen," I responded gravely. "And Libra isn't the company it was when we were eighteen either. I've changed. So have you. But we've both fucked up and now we have to live with that. No matter how you spin it, we're not kids anymore."

He let out another extended exhale and looked away from me, like he was maybe on the verge of tears. After a beat, he shrugged his shoulder. "The lawyer is at Skadden?" he confirmed. His voice wavered at first, but steadied as he spoke.

I nodded.

"And your contract says you have to transition out over six months. Can you still do that?"

"I can do that."

Alex swallowed hard. "Okay than," he said, nodding again. "And can you ever forgive me?"

That one hit me. It pierced right through the softest part of my stomach and came out the other side, leaving me wanting for air. Somehow, I steeled myself. I kept staring at him, looking for my best friend in this person.

Six-seconds.

Twelve seconds.

Eighteen.

"I don't know," I admitted.

It was an honest response, but it wasn't the one either of us wanted to hear me say.

The elevator finally arrived and its presence signaled a crossroads of sorts. I would be at the office on Monday and so would Alex. We would have to come clean to the rest of the team. And then we would have to let them know the next few months and the reactions of the market would determine if Libra could survive.

I couldn't think about that now. The only thing I could think about was how I was walking away from my best friend—the guy who was there the first time I got drunk (on Four Loko—and vomited outside the campus center), who high-fived me the morning after I lost my virginity at a tech conference in Las Vegas, and who sat with me on my couch while I cried from embarrassment and shame after my moms read that Vanity Fair article about us.

I wanted to hate him. I wanted to believe he was a villain and a monster, and that could be so simple if that was what I chose to do. But just like I was so much more than business plans and shareholder meetings and financial forecasts, Alex was more than one malfeasance.

Sometimes, it could take us a while to remember who we were and how to reconcile that with the things we had done. Before I could forgive him, I needed Alex to do that.

Just like I had.