I waited for a response, but none came. Not even the speech bubble icon that told me he was typing. And not even the tiny indicator that told me my message had been delivered.
“Where are you?” just hung in space, as lost as my friend, as lost as I was. It was as if he had his phone off—something I’d never known him to do.
But if I really thought about it, there were lots of things he was doing right now that I never knew him to do—or thought him capable of.
I didn’t think he was in love with me, first of all, even with all the signs ostensibly there, including a professor pointing it out to me casually, as if it were obvious.
And I didn’t think he could be so angry at Patrick and me. Or capable of maintaining radio silence with both of us for a solid week.
I’d texted Patrick after I hadn’t gotten a bite from reaching out to Shawn.
“Have you heard from Shawn?” I asked.
The response was almost immediate. “No. Why? Have you heard anything? Is everything all right?”
My heart ached for Patrick. I was mourning the absence of a friend, but he was a father worried about the whereabouts, mental state, and physical health of his son.
“No, didn’t mean to worry you,” I sent back swiftly. “Just curious.”
“You didn’t worry me,” was his answer. “He hasn’t been back to the house. Let me know if you hear from him. I’m thinking about contacting the police.”
The police? “I think that may be overreacting,” I sent back. “Give him time. Don’t send the cops after him.”
“If you think so,” he replied. “I need him to be okay.”
It was a sentiment I firmly shared. Where was Shawn staying if he wasn’t at the house? I was puzzled. Was he crashing with one of his fellow fine art majors? I didn’t think he was that close with any of them, but maybe desperate times called for desperate measures. I started asking around but didn’t have much luck.
Then, one day, after nearly two weeks of nothingness and an increasingly worried Patrick, I saw him. It was Shawn, looking ragged and exhausted, but Shawn all the same, shuffling across a sidewalk just off campus. I could’ve wept with joy, and I pulled my cell phone out to text Patrick the good news.
“Shawn spotting near campus,” I sent, before calling out Shawn’s name. My voice was loud enough to startle some pigeons, but he didn’t give any sign he heard it.
“Shawn? Shawn!” It was usually me walking around in a daze—more often than not behind a camera lens—and Shawn chasing me down across campus. This time, though, the tables had turned. Shawn was the one in his own world, and I was the one pursuing him.
It made me wonder if I’d ever willfully ignored him, but I quickly shook the thought from my head. Things were so topsy-turvy right now that I was second-guessing myself at every turn.
“What are you doing?” I panted when I finally caught up with him.
He looked at me as if I were an apparition and tried to walk away.
“Stop!” I cried, seizing him by his elbow. “Talk to me!”
He turned to me, and I fought the urge to recoil. If I hadn’t known him well, I would’ve doubted that the person in front of me was Shawn at all. It looked like he’d lost weight since I’d last seen him—the kind of weight that made people worry about you—and that he hadn’t slept in days.
“Are you okay?” I asked, aghast. My horror at the state he was in was quickly outweighing the joy I felt at seeing him at all.
“I’m whatever,” he said, his eyes glazed as if he’d pulled a couple of all-nighters. If I didn’t know him better, I would’ve guessed he was on some kind of drug I’d never tried before, but I knew he didn’t like them just as much as I didn’t.
“Where have you been?” I demanded. “Shawn, I’ve been trying to get ahold of you. So has your dad. Both of us are worried sick.”
He shrugged himself out of my grip and stepped away. “I’ve been here and there. Everywhere.”
He was so vacant and lost I wasn’t even sure if it was registering in his brain who he was talking to or where he even was. It broke my heart to see him like this.
“I’m sorry about everything,” I said, unsure that he would understand what I was even talking about. “We’ve been really, really worried about you. Scared for you. Where’s your phone?”
“Threw it away,” he said, waving his hand in a vague mimic of a throw. “Didn’t have anyone to call.”
Jesus. My heart was already in pieces. I could do nothing to stop the single tear that coursed down my cheek. I’d done this to him. Loving me had done this to him, and I needed to make this right.
“Do you need some help, Shawn?” I asked, trying to wipe my wet face before he realized I was crying. “Can I take you somewhere or get you something? I think I know a really good person you can talk to, right down this sidewalk, not too far away.” I was aiming to lead him to the institute’s health services center, which kept a couple of counselors on hand to help solve crises usually brought on by heavy academic workloads and stress. Shawn would be something different for them, I’d bet.
“I don’t want to go anywhere with you,” he said without a trace of anger. “We’re not friends anymore. You’re a bad friend, and I have new friends now.”
With that, he ambled off, and I was painfully aware that at least some of those new friends were either drugs or people who could easily connect him with drugs. A ball formed inside of my stomach and swelled painfully. Shawn had access to an awful lot of money. I cringed to think of just how far he could take a binge. What was I going to do? What was there to be done?
“Shawn!” I called after him. There had to be something. “Shawn! We care so much about you. Take care of yourself!”
He whirled around at that, his face frozen in a snarl. “Leave me the fuck alone!” The anger was a thing that was alive, biting and snapping, until he turned back and continued his journey to nowhere.
My phone vibrated in my pocket, and I realized, belatedly, that I’d missed no less than six texts from Patrick after my initial triumphant message of making contact. There wasn’t anything to be triumphant about now. There was something broken inside of Shawn, and I didn’t know the first thing about how to fix it.
The insistent vibrations told me that Patrick had given up on the art of texting and had decided to call me for a status update.
“I just ran into him,” I said by way of “hello.”
“And how is he? How did he seem? Is he upset? Is he taking care of himself? Did he say where he was staying? How classes were going? If he’s going to come home any time soon?” Patrick’s questions were rapid fire and overwhelming given that I was already flummoxed by the state Shawn had been in. What hurt even worse was knowing just how painful it would be for Patrick to hear about how out of character Shawn had acted.
I seesawed between honesty and wanting to spare the man I loved that knowledge, and kindness won.
“You know, he seemed like he was going to be okay,” I lied, feeling like I was going to throw up. “He’s obviously still a little miffed, which is why he’s been staying away. But he’s crashing with a friend of a friend, someone in the theater department, I think, and classes are going well.”
Patrick let out a long breath that he must have been holding since the moment he’d run out of questions. “Thank God,” he murmured. “Thank God he’s okay.”
Why didn’t I feel good that I’d saved Patrick from suffering? My own suffering seemed to grow tenfold at the understanding that I’d denied Patrick vital knowledge about his son. I just didn’t want Patrick to know what Shawn was doing to himself. I wouldn’t want my own foster parents to know if I was hell bent on destroying the life they’d worked so hard to give me. I couldn’t imagine that Patrick would be pleased with Shawn.
It didn’t matter. Shawn was going to be okay. He had to be okay. He was just going through a weird phase…of taking drugs and wandering around. That was something he’d grow out of, right? Everythin
g would work itself out.
“Did you tell him I want him to come home?” Patrick asked. “He hasn’t even come back for any of his clothes or things.”
“He’s doing just fine with his clothes and things,” I said. With each lie I spouted, my own pain became even more unbearable. I could take it, though, if it meant Patrick didn’t have to. “I think he just needs a little more time. It was all such a shock to him, the way everything went down.”
“A shock to everyone involved,” Patrick muttered before brightening a little. “Thank you so much, Loren, for keeping your eyes peeled for him. I think this calls for a celebration, don’t you?”
There wasn’t anything to celebrate. I wanted to tell him that, but I couldn’t. Not now. Not with how happy it had made him to believe that Shawn was doing okay.
“Sure thing.” It was the worst lie yet.
“Why don’t I send a car over for you and you come have a beer with me at the house?” Patrick said. “Maybe Shawn won’t be here, but it’ll kind of be like old days.”
“That sounds good,” I fibbed.
***
The weight of my lie was heavy on my chest as I rode in the backseat of the car, out to Patrick, whom I was trying to save from all the pain that Shawn was in. Would I be able to save the both of them? One of them? Myself?
“You look like you need a drink,” Patrick declared upon seeing me, wrapping his arms around me and tilting my chin up so he could kiss me on my lips. It was quieter than usual in the mansion without Shawn, who liked to have music or televisions providing background noise for whatever socializing was going on. Even the air felt different. I guessed it was just going to take some getting used to.
“A beer would be nice,” I admitted, following him to the refrigerator behind the bar.
“I think there’s going to be a really nice sunset,” he said, upbeat, moving with practically a bounce in his step. “It’s getting kind of cool out, but there’s a nice view from the kitchen, if you want to watch.”
“That sounds good,” I said, smiling a little at just how happy he was. Wasn’t that worth the lies I’d told? Patrick was positive and hopeful and relieved. I could handle my own crushing guilt if it meant the man I loved could be happy.
We watched vermillion and caramel melt into bronze and gold as the sun sank down below the horizon, sitting in perfectly comfortable silence for the entire time. I hadn’t been able to help myself while we were bathed in the magic light of the sunset and had taken dozens of photos of the spectacle.
The light grew velvet and deepened, and evening rolled into night.
“I know things have been stressful lately,” Patrick said, breaking the silence and studying his bottle of beer. “Stressful and a lot less than ideal.”
The elephant in the room was Shawn’s palpable anger and the influence it wielded in our relationship. We were helpless to its sway. It was our persistent and terrible third wheel…with us at all times. Of course, it was less than ideal to have the son of the man I loved coming between us without even trying that hard. It wasn’t as if Shawn was actively conducting a campaign against our relationship. Yet, his rage was a living thing, worming its way around Patrick and I. That rage had transformed into something desperate and ugly and dangerous, and I was afraid that it was going to swallow Shawn whole.
“Loren?”
“I was thinking that less than ideal was probably an understatement,” I said, taking a swig from my beer. I was nursing it so much that it had started to turn warm.
“If you want out, now’s the time,” Patrick said, his words clipped and formal. “We don’t have to do this. You’re too young to be stuck in a miserable relationship.”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” I argued. “It’s not the relationship that’s miserable. It’s the situation. I wish that Shawn would come to his senses. I miss him.”
“I miss him, too.”
“That’s the thing that’s less than ideal.” I covered Patrick’s hand with my own. “You’re not less than ideal. I love you. How could you think that?”
“You brood sometimes.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Brood?”
“That’s right, brood.” He laughed. “It’s the mark of a deep thinker, Loren. It’s nothing bad.”
“Well, I have a lot to brood about right now,” I said, arching my eyebrows at him. “But not our relationship.”
Patrick heaved a sigh, downing the rest of the beer in his bottle. “I have to explore the fact, however, that if we weren’t together, Shawn might be here, enjoying a bottle of beer with us. That things would be normal.”
“If normal was you and me pining away secretly for each other, maybe,” I scoffed, laughing. “And Shawn was secretly pining away for me at the same time. Is that the normal you’re looking for? That doesn’t sound very fun to me.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Let’s let Shawn brood on it for a while,” I suggested. “He’ll come around, won’t he?”
“He’s a stubborn man.”
“I wonder who he gets that from,” I teased.
“He didn’t get help from either of his parents,” Patrick said. “His mother’s as stubborn as a mule, just like me.”
“Poor Shawn.”
“Poor Shawn,” he agreed, toasting to me before remembering he’d downed his beer. “Damn.”
“I’ll get you another,” I told him, patting his hand in consolation.
I slipped my own beer back into the fridge to get cold again for the next round and pulled out a fresh pair of bottles. I’d never been picky about beer, but I was getting spoiled by having this kind of access to nice craft labels. I was developing a discerning taste for all things hops and pine, and I delighted in seasonal ales. I always drank whatever I pulled from the fridge. It helped me hone my likes and dislikes.
“Thanks.” Patrick took the beer I held out to him and cracked it open against the edge of the table.
“Careful!” I exclaimed.
“I am careful.”
“This is a nice table.” I stroked the wood. “And you need to be nice to it.”
He eyed me in a way that made me blush. “I could think of several nice things I’d like to do on it.”
“No, I didn’t say be nice on it,” I sassed, shaking my head. “I said be nice to it.”
I don’t know what triggered him, but Patrick grabbed me and pushed me down on the table, covering my body with his, arranging my limbs to his liking until I was sprawled, spread eagle, across the cold wood, staring at the ceiling. The only reason I wasn’t drenched in beer was because I hadn’t opened my bottle yet, which was still clenched in my fist.
“I think this is nice, don’t you?” Patrick asked innocently, smiling down at me.
“I could think of some things that would be even nicer.” Two could play this sudden game.
“Hm.” He traced one finger down my clothed torso, drawing a line that divided me exactly in half vertically, separating the twin swells of my breast, and ending at the juncture where my body split itself naturally. I willed him to push harder there, but he only trailed away, distracted, tapping his fingernails against the surface of the table.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the things you said to me,” he said, his eyes far away.
I sat up, concerned. “Which things?”
“That you thought I was looking to hide our relationship.” He looked troubled, his brow furrowed.
“I thought we were past that. The love is there, Patrick, and that’s what matters right now.”
“I know that, and I love you for that.” He paused and weighed his words. “I want to prove to you that I want to show our love to the world.”
“A skywriter will do just fine,” I joked, giggling at Patrick’s stern look.
“I’m serious, Loren. I’m not ashamed of what we share. We both know it’s real, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.”
“That’s right,” I said, tracing his j
aw line with the palm of my hand, still clutching my beer in the other. He realized it belatedly and opened it for me. I took a small sip, waiting for him to complete whatever thought he was still forming.
“I want you at my side at the benefit this year.”
I blinked at him. “The benefit? You mean your company’s benefit?”
“That’s the one. It’ll be perfect. We’re holding it at the modern art museum. You’ll fit right in.”
I had to fight to imagine it. The company that Patrick owned threw a lavish benefit every year, earning so much money that it was eager to throw handfuls of it back to those less fortunate. It helped that the very fortunate were getting wined and dined and encouraged to loosen their purse strings for the greater good. Patrick had gushed about the event every year since I’d met him, talking about how it was a Who’s Who of the Bay area. It always sounded to me like Cinderella’s ball.
I would’ve never in my wildest dreams expected to attend one, and certainly not on the arm of Patrick Paulson. It was an imagining so farfetched that it actually made me anxious. What in God’s sweet name would I even wear?
“When…um…when is the benefit again?”
“You’ve got several weeks to think about it,” he said. “I completely understand if you don’t want to go. If you think it might be boring, we can go somewhere else. Skip the whole damn thing. I don’t care.”
“Stop.” I put my beer down and hugged him. “Of course I want to go with you. It sounds like a dream. It’s just…I’m worried about what people will think.”
He took me by the chin and looked me in the eyes, his green gaze sharp. “I thought we weren’t in the business of caring what other people think.”
“Well, you know what they’re going to say.”
“That I’m too old for you.”
I shook my head. “That I’m not good enough for you. That I’m after your money.”
He took my hand and turned it upward before kissing my palm so tenderly that it made me ache. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” he said sweetly.
Crushing On The Billionaire (Part 2) Page 3