Make You Mine

by Katy Kaylee

  Reluctantly, to pass the time and because it felt like something I had to do, I opened the file and started looking. I didn’t want to admit that I was at least a little bit curious about the credentials Oliver was talking about when he mentioned her work experience.

  But I didn’t get to any credentials.

  I didn’t get past the first page in the file, my heart pounding in my chest and stopping me from moving a muscle.

  Torryn Williams.

  It was at that moment that the door to the conference room opened and one of the assistants to Oliver opened the door, peeking his head inside.

  “Mr. Simmons? Ms. Williams is ready to see you now.”

  I couldn’t do anything as I looked up, meeting green eyes I hadn’t seen in far too long. My body was paralyzed as I watched her realize who I was, as I watched her eyes move disdainfully over my body, taking me in.

  I couldn’t stop my heart from jumping in my chest at the sight of her - so filled out now, even more beautiful than she had been, if that was possible.

  “Mr. Simmons,” she said, sticking her hand out with malice.

  I stood, taking her hand over the table and desperately trying to ignore the electric shock that shot through my forearm when I did.

  “Ms. Williams,” I said, the name strange on my tongue, “it is so nice to see you again.”

  Chapter 3

  Torryn

  When he shook my hand, my heart fluttered in my chest. I stifled it, grabbing each butterfly from my stomach and stuffing it into a sack, shaking it up for good measure, and smashing it. I hated that my body still reacted to him, that no matter how much crying I had done over the bastard, my stomach still pooled with heat and my chest still flushed, longing for his touch.

  He was too handsome. He didn’t deserve to be so good-looking, and I started to wonder what his life was like. Did he have women falling all over him in the city? Did he break hearts whenever he felt like it? Were there other women like me out there, wishing they had never given him a chance?

  Or maybe he’d settled down. Maybe he was married after all, to someone who didn’t know anything about what had happened in his past. I thought about him in high school, and how dorky he had been. I was the only one who had seen past his incessant arguing and his obsession with math and statistics. I’d loved him for who he really was, and he’d hurt me more than anyone else had.

  And it might have been the mature thing to let it go - to chalk it up to an immaturity that came from us being so young and being in high school, but there was some part of me that refused to make excuses for him. I would not allow him to forget about me so easily.

  Just because I was young didn’t mean my heart wasn’t broken, and it didn’t mean it hurt any less.

  “Ms. Williams,” he said, and it was so strange to hear him call me anything other than nicknames and pet names. “It is so nice to see you again.”

  I almost returned the sentiment, saying it was so nice to see him again as well, but the words died in my throat. One of the many things I had promised myself was that I would not lie in any of my interviews. I would not pretend to be someone I wasn’t. And though my heart and other, more sensitive parts of me were screaming that I was happy to see his face, my brain was distanced, her arms crossed, not believing I could fall so low as to be pleased by his appearance.

  He looked good. And he smelled the same as he always had, like orange peels and pine. I’d learned in high school that he smelled like that because of his soap and because he had an orange for breakfast every morning. As a kid, learning about pirates, he had been terrified he was going to get scurvy. It was a very cute story.

  My eyes trailed from his and down, to his Adam's apple and the bit of his chest that peeked out from over his shirt. Even after all these years, his jawline was still as strong as it had been, and now he had a spattering of neatly trimmed facial hair, making him look older and commanding. His hair was tamer as well, less wild and shorter.

  I clenched my fingers into fists to suppress the urge I had to run my hands through it, to tangle them in and pull him closer to me, to feel his lips and tongue hot and wet against my neck…

  I pushed the thoughts away, chalking it up to the amount of time it had been since I had been with a man. Now that I was faced with a viable target my body was running the bases, launching into a sexual fantasy at the worst possible time.

  I shook the thoughts out of my head as I took a seat, suddenly regretting my wardrobe decisions. I evaluated my strategy, changing it, telling myself this was just a test - if I truly wanted to work for the best company in the city, I had to face my biggest fear, the thing I most dreaded in life.

  Seeing Lucas again.

  Charlie was not like me. She longed for the day that she crossed paths with him so she could rip him limb from limb and make him regret the day he hurt me. She wanted to torture him with the strange and unusual punishments they showed in horror films. I knew all of this because she told me any time he was brought up.

  “So,” Lucas asked, bringing his eyes up to mine, something in them I hadn’t seen before. Was it guilt? “I’m not going to go through the process of asking you questions you’ve already answered in your resume, so we’ll just skip to the questions HR gave me…”

  He fumbled around with the file, looking for a paper, and when he found it he pulled it out, his cheeks paling a bit as his eyes scanned over it. He cleared his throat and flicked his eyes up to me briefly before he began. “What experiences in your life would you say have made you stronger?

  “Oh,” I said, putting the tips of my fingers together and restraining from cackling with glee. He was carefully avoiding my eyes, making as though he was searching for a pen. “There are a few experiences to draw from but I would have to say the most vivid in my mind is the time when I lost someone very dear to me. I was young, so the experience placed me in a position where I had to grow up fast.”

  He looked up at me with concern, and I could already see the questions racing through his mind as he tried to analyze the situation and figure out what or who I was talking about. Had my mom passed? Was Charlie okay? I waited for the follow-up question, willing him to say what I thought he was going to.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, clearing his throat and meeting my eyes, that same imploring look there as had always been. I couldn’t stop my eyes from roaming his face, carefully noting all the things that had changed and every detail about him that had stayed exactly the same. “Do you mean that someone close to you passed on? Is that what you mean by lost?”

  “Oh,” I said, waving my hand, “not by definition, but he’s dead to me now, so I still count it.”

  I watched the reality of what I was saying register on his face and had to bite my cheek to keep from laughing. I thought that I might feel sorry for him, seeing the terror on his face at having to sit down with me, but all I felt was sweet relief that I finally had him cornered, and I could make him feel even a fraction of the pain that he caused me.

  When he left, I not only lost the love of my life, I lost my best friend, and I didn’t know how to function for the longest time. I almost failed out of my first semester of college because my self-worth had plummeted so hard, and now I was getting a chance to make him feel what I felt. And it felt good.

  “Oh,” he said, clearing his throat and shaking his head, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  I played with him for the rest of the interview, twisting his words and hinting at what he had done to me so many years ago again and again. At some point during the interview, I forgot what my goal was - my entire mind had morphed into a machine with only one purpose: to cause him pain.

  Thirty painstaking minutes later we made it the entire way through the list of questions he had, and he stood abruptly, not angry but uncomfortable and dare I say, extremely guilty, sticking his hand out and not quite meeting my eyes as I took it and shook it, marveling in the fact that I had just scored some small victory.

  When I walked
out into the New York sunshine, I realized I might have just blown my shot at working for KGOLD. Of course, the second I realized Lucas was working there and that he was in charge of interviewing me, I had the suspicion that it didn’t matter what I said. I probably wasn’t going to be hired there, and I was going to have to accept a position at a different company.

  If not because Lucas didn’t want to deal with the guilt of what he had done to me, then because of whatever had convinced him to leave me without a word so many years ago. Whatever it was about me that made him drop me so quickly surely hadn’t changed, and if it was bad enough for him to leave without a trace and make me wonder for several weeks if he might have died, it was certainly bad enough for him not to want to work at the same company as me.

  The thought was infuriating- the same man was going to hold the power to ruin my life twice. The first time, by breaking my heart and making me believe I wasn’t worth loving, and the second time by getting in my way of working at my dream company. Lucas would make the final decision - if he said yes, all my years at business school, all the time I invested dragging companies out of the red and far into the black, all the achievements and accomplishments would be for nothing.

  I stopped and looked at my reflection in the glass of one of the expensive shops on my way home, my eyes wandering over my profile and admiring the strength there. I turned and kept walking home, and as I did, an idea began to blossom, opening up and putting down roots.

  I tried to shake it away, knowing it was immature, something only a high-schooler would dream of doing to another person. I thought of all the catty women in reality television that I despised, knowing that harboring the idea was making me just like them.

  But it continued to flourish anyway.

  If I got the job, I would change my disposition toward him. I would go back to being the sweet, kind person I had been in high school, and I might even get him to believe he might be able to walk all over me again. I would lure him in, tactfully, baiting him like the fool he was, then, when he least expected it, I would drop him as he dropped me.

  Except I would make it much worse. I would break his heart so intensely he would never be able to love another person again. I would make him as terrified of love as I was. I would make him regret ever messing with me in the first place.

  I thought about earlier that day, when I had thought about calling my mother and telling her about landing my dream job, when I had thought about calling Charlie and telling her all about the experience.

  Though I had hardened a lot since the day Lucas left and never looked back, I still wasn’t the monster Charlie could be, so I fished through my purse, looking for my phone, knowing that if I was going to break his heart and get the revenge I deserved, I was going to need to consult with an expert.

  “Yo.”

  “Charlie,” I said, unbothered by her usual curt answer, “you are not going to believe what happened today…”

  Chapter 4

  Lucas

  “Lucas, darling,” my mother said, causing me to lift my head and meet her eyes. “What’s on your mind?”

  My eyes wandered over her frail body, my stomach turning at how much weight she had lost just since the last time I had seen her. She was shaking even under the blankets - she was always cold, and though I was sitting with my jacket off, roasting in the heat of her room, she was asking me to point the fan away from her and fetch her extra blankets.

  I thought about everything that had happened that day. I could barely handle dealing with all the stressful things I had gone through, and looking at my mother, I was starting to think telling her about it would be a bad idea. I didn’t want her to be too worried about me. I didn’t want to make her health any worse than it already was.

  “It’s nothing,” I said, dismissively, looking down at the take-out in my lap. I could hardly work up an appetite - all I could think about was the disdainful way she had looked at me, and how it had seemed like she wanted nothing more than to hurt me. Which I deserved.

  “It’s not nothing,” my mother said, her soft, rough voice pulling me out of my own thoughts again. I met her gray eyes and swallowed through the lump in my throat as she licked her lips and spoke again. “It’s not nothing because you haven’t touched your dumplings, and I know those are your favorites.”

  “Oh,” I said, picking up my chopstick and trying to convince myself to eat them. When my stomach turned violently, vetoing the idea, I sighed and dropped the chopsticks, looking back at my mother.

  “You can tell me, you know,” she said, “I’m an old lady. I love to talk.”

  I laughed and shook my head, wondering if I had gotten my sense of humor from her. I certainly hadn’t gotten it from my father. She was kinder, funnier, and more understanding than he had ever been, and we had only known each other for a little while.

  “Okay,” I said, sighing, “but you have to promise me you won’t have a heart attack when I tell you, okay?”

  “Oh dear,” she said, putting her hand to her chest, “you didn’t rob a bank did you? To pay for my medical bills?” She laughed at her own joke. “I’m an old lady, but I’m not going to have a heart attack. Believe it or not, I’ve been through a lot. Now, lay it on me.”

  “Okay,” I said, “so, I was in love with this girl in high school. For a long time. I think, actually, that I was in love with her from the moment I saw her, though I know that might seem kind of irrational or naive, but I think it’s the truth. We were little, and I saw her, and from that moment forward I knew I wanted to be around her.

  “So we became best friends. I did everything I could to make her happy. I tried to do all the things she liked doing, and I tried to get good at all the things she needed help with. I watched her go through boyfriends, none of which treated her right, but I was always too afraid to say or do anything. I didn’t want to risk being around her and seeing her smile. I didn’t want to risk everything I’d built with her just to tell her how I felt.

  “I was so sure she was going to reject me. Then… the night of our senior prom - she wasn’t going with me, she was going with her boyfriend at the time - she needed me. He bailed on her, and I was there. I had even… I know this is stupid, but I had even bought a bow tie that matched her dress. I already rented a tux. I had been thinking about going out on a limb and asking her to go with me, but I didn’t have the guts.

  “And then I had the perfect opening. She needed a date. I went with her, though I had told her countless times how stupid I thought the whole thing was… and I had a great time. We had so much fun together, and then, after…”

  “Oh,” my mother said, shaking her head and smiling, “you don’t have to say it. I know what happens on prom night.”

  I felt my cheeks heat up, even though we were talking about something that had happened a long time ago, I was still embarrassed about the subject matter. I didn’t want my mother to think about me like that, but she just laughed and waved it off, urging me to continue the story.

  “But then, after…” I swallowed, knowing we were getting to the part of the story that was going to show my mother my shady past. For a long time after leaving, I had convinced myself I had done the right thing, but now, I knew I hadn't. I hated knowing that I had hurt Torryn enough that even now she was willing to throw an interview to get to me. “We dated for the whole summer. It was amazing. We went swimming, went walking along the beach, explored the city… it was like something out of a romance movie, and I didn’t even mind. It was great. But then, as the summer was coming to an end, I got a phone call.

  “I answered it, and I thought it was a joke. It was a man, telling me that he was from a special branch in the military and that they were interested in recruiting me. He told me that it wasn’t infantry and that I would never have to shoot at someone. They just wanted me for my ability to see patterns in numbers. But as I said, I thought it was a joke.”

  My mother was nodding slowly, a thoughtful look on her face. I wondered if she kn
ew where I was going with the story - at the time, I had no idea what was going to happen. I thought the whole thing was a joke or a scam.

  “And then… they showed up at my house. I was just sitting at the table, eating lunch, and there was a knock at the door. Some official looking military people. My father was suspicious right away, started arguing with them and telling them to go away… but then, after a moment, he just stepped to the side and let them in.

  “They sat me down and talked to me about a lot of things. About my plans for the future, about my interest in numbers and patterns. The testing I had done in high school and how I had lit up on their tracking system because of my exceptionally high scores.

  “They thought I could become a really good code-breaker. They said all I had to do was bootcamp and four years in the service like anyone else. I would never have to point a gun, I would just sit in an office somewhere and look through codes. I would get good pay, free housing, and after I was done, I would have my college education paid for and a pension.”

  I took a deep breath and found my mother’s eyes again. They were wide and interested, and I realized I had never told her I was in the military. Though I had been trained on how to fight just in case, and because it was protocol, I didn’t like to talk about my time serving because I didn’t really feel like I had done much.

  I shook my head, dread building in my chest at the thought of what happened next.

  “But… the catch was that I had to leave right away. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone where I was going or even that I was leaving. It was all very super secret and I guess most of the people they pick for the job don’t really have friends to say goodbye to anyway. They warned me it was a matter of national security. So I did what they said and I left without a word.”