Page 39 of Yours to Keep
He squints thoughtfully.
“Definitely traumatized.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “Excuse me?”
“But nice.”
I stare at him.
He stares back.
The entire conversation is so completely ridiculous that it finally catches up with me.
I laugh. A real laugh. The kind that throws your head back before you can stop it. It isn’t polite or forced. It just happens. It rolls out of me, and it feels good. My chest loosens. The sound feels like something I haven’t heard from myself in years. The realization catches me off guard as the laughter fades into a grin and I hold out my hand.
“Eli.”
He shakes it enthusiastically.
“Finn.”
Then he beams, “Oh, we’re definitely going to be friends.”
“We are? Don’t I get a vote?”
“Nope.” He releases my hand. “I’ve already decided.”
I laugh again.
Friends.
Outside of Ree and Marge, I can’t remember the last time I had one. Adrian had made sure of that. It was always his friends.His restaurants. His plans. Somewhere along the way, my world became so small that I stopped noticing the walls closing in around it.
Until now.
Standing in the middle of this noisy office, with Finn already claiming me as a friend and CJ quietly watching us, I finally see it for what it is.
Adrian never let me have friends without inspecting them first. In five minutes, Finn gave me a choice Adrian took three years to strip away. My breath comes easier, clearer.
He didn’t just steal my time or decide where I went. He took my choices.
My voice.
Piece by piece, he took parts of me until I no longer recognized the man staring back in the mirror.
And for the first time since I walked away, I wanted every damn piece of myself back.
9
CJ
I sit through the finance call, listening to the guy on the other end drone on about budgets and projections. A dull pressure builds behind my eyes. My patience thins with every word he drags out, and I have to unclench my jaw before it locks.
Finance is Deck’s territory, but he’s grabbing coffee. Not that he’d be much help. He’d probably be sitting there drawing whatever the fuck ends up in that notebook of his.
Birds. Planes. Random circles. It drives me absolutely insane.
I’d deliberately throw questions at him during meetings, convinced he wasn’t paying attention. Every single time, that bastard answered with more detail than anyone else in the room and usually offered two or three solutions while he was at it. A reluctant smile pulls at my mouth. Deck drives me insane, but he’s the only person I trust to catch what I miss.
