Page 85 of Twisted Knight

We move on, leaving the discussion about work behind. She tells me about summers spent in the Outer Banks. I give her snippets—benign and generic—of my time in California. We talk about random things, sports teams, favorite vacation spots, the best local places in town to eat—but the whole time I fixate on the notion that none of it matters.

That her caring about the waitress and her sick son and wanting to overcompensate shouldn’t affect my opinion of her—but it does.

The Westmore elite don’t care about anybody else or their struggles. They never have.

And yet Rowan’s frequent glances over to our waitress and the sympathetic smiles she gives her say the exact fucking opposite.

She’s surprising me at every turn tonight and if she keeps it up, I’ll have no choice but to face my own suppositions about her.

“Yes?” she asks with raised eyebrows, pulling me back from thoughts about her.

“I’m sorry. What was that?”

“Ignoring me already, Knight? That’s not a good start.” She laughs. “All I said was, so computer software, huh?”

I nod. “Yep.”

“That’s all you’re going to give me?”

“What do you want to know?” I ask, my stomach twisting.

You wouldn’t like me if you knew.

“Where did you go to college? How did you come up with the software? Why did you sell?” She lifts her eyebrows when I don’t respond. “That shouldn’t be hard to talk about.”

But it is. Every piece of myself that I give her leaves me vulnerable. Opens who I am and what I’m here for up to discovery. That can’t be known.

I have a plan. A sequence of events that must occur in my head.

When I want more known about me, there’ll be no mistake about it.

And yet, I find myself wanting to tell her some of it. The view of myself from space versus ten feet away.

“College wasn’t for me.” Besides the fact it was loaded with pretentious pricks like the ones I left behind in Westmore, I couldn’t burden my mom with more debt. We were drowning in medical bills, funeral expenses, and our move across the country so we could try to breathe without being reminded every single day of what had happened. And I sure as fuck wasn’t in the headspace for any of it.

“No?”

I shake my head. “Taught myself computer science. Enjoyed coding and the software aspect.” Loved breaking into servers behind the scenes even more. “I had a brief stint as a bank teller and was sick of listening to my boss complain to higher-ups about data security every time it was breached. So I solved the problem for them. It took me years to perfect my original software but when I did, it took off. Won an award at the Consumer Electronics Show. Things went from there. Ran the company for several years before I received an offer I couldn’t refuse. Then sold it.”

“And that translates to buying other companies, including mine—”

“You mean mine?” I say.

“—how?” she finishes, completely ignoring me.

“I’m an angel investor in many companies. For some reason, I wanted to be hands-on with this one.”

“Why?” she asks.

“Why not?” I shrug and don’t back down from her stare. “All of that could have been found out with a simple Google search.”

“I’m aware,” she murmurs, scrutinizing me with her look. “And yet that’s still all you’ll give me.”

“It’s all you need. Life is black. It’s white. It’s gray. I live in the gray.”

She chuckles. “The gray?”

I nod. “A little mystery never hurt anyone.”