Hard As Stone Page 6

  “You’re lucky you’re cute,” I joked, tossing the sopping wet paper towels into the garbage before I ripped off another few to finish the job.

  Ethan crouched down and kissed me on the lips. “I also rock your world in bed. Don’t forget that. I like to think you consider that one of my saving graces at times like this.”

  I finished cleaning the floor and rolled my eyes. “My landlord should be thanking you. This floor has been the cleanest it’s ever been since I began seeing you. I don’t think I did a thing with it all last year.”

  “You send him to me if he gives you any problems. I’ll explain I’m the klutz with soda, not you. Now you better get some pizza into you,” he said as he stood and held out his hand to help me up.

  In all the sticky commotion, I’d forgotten about eating, but now that he mentioned it, I felt lightheaded as I stood. “Yeah, I better. That whole passing out thing wasn’t just a threat.”

  We sat down on the couch with our plates of pizza and two glasses of root beer that were quickly going flat and ate like we did every night. I thought about bringing up the strange text I’d gotten, but before I could, Ethan suddenly stood up and tossed his paper plate in the garbage.

  “Hey, I just remembered I have to deal with something back at my apartment. Give me a couple hours and I’ll be back. If I’m not back by eight-thirty, just start the movie without me, but I promise I’ll be back before you fall asleep.”

  Nothing in his voice sounded different than any other time, but every cell in my body immediately went on red alert. He was lying. But why?

  “What do you mean? What do you have to do?” I asked, staring up at him as I watched his expression carefully in the hopes that my gut feeling was wrong.

  “Just apartment stuff. I had a problem with my lock, and the owner of the building is coming over.”

  Nothing about that sounded right. What was he lying about?

  “At seven o’clock at night?”

  He looked down at the floor and sheepishly answered, “Yeah. You know how busy everyone is.”

  Never before had Ethan sounded so distant when he spoke to me. If anything, he always chose details over vagueness.

  I reached for my phone and found the text he’d sent me a short while ago. Reading it, I said, “While you were gone, I got this strange message. It came from your phone, Ethan. It says, ‘I’ll be there. Don’t worry. It’s okay. I miss you too.’ What’s that mean?”

  Looking up, I saw guilt written all over his face and knew right then and there. He was lying about another woman. He shook his head and shrugged like he didn’t know what I was talking about, but he knew. I saw it in his eyes.

  He knew and he was lying to me.

  My chest began to hurt like I was suffocating and I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs. My heartbeat pounded in my ears as my emotions began to spin out of control.

  I jumped up off the couch and marched over to him. Holding my phone up in front of his face, I struggled to hold back the tears as I said, “You didn’t mean to send this message to me. You meant for it to go to someone else, didn’t you?”

  “Summer, texts and things get mixed up all the time. The world is full of about half a billion cell phones, so it’s not surprising. It’s not a big deal. I’ll be back from my apartment in a couple hours. I promise. Just wait for me. I’ll be back.”

  “Why are you lying to me, Ethan? I can see it written all over your face. The guilt is filling your eyes. You’re lying because you’re going to see someone else. That’s what that message was about. You’re going to some other woman’s place, someone you miss, right?”

  He shook his head and forced himself to smile. “No. I just have to go back to my apartment for a little while. That’s it.”

  I didn’t believe him. Reaching around his back, I grabbed his phone out of his pants pocket and began to search through his messages. I’d never done anything like that before with anyone else in my life, but being told such a bald-faced lie made thinking rationally next to impossible. Seeing became difficult as tears filled my eyes, so I couldn’t read the names of all the people he’d sent texts to.

  “Summer, don’t do this. I swear I’m not with anyone else. I swear. You just have to believe me. Now give me back my phone.”

  Before I could turn away to try to read more names, he snatched it from my hold and stuffed the phone back into his pocket. Humiliated and hurt, I couldn’t stop myself from crying.

  Tears ran down my cheeks, and I sobbed, “Why would you do this? Was I always just a fool you toyed with? There’s been other women the whole time, hasn’t there?”

  Once more, he shook his head, but this time he tried to reach out to me. I pushed him away as he said, “No! Summer, there’s only you. When the hell would I have time to spend with anyone else? I’m here or we’re at my place every night. We spend every single night together.”

  The pleading sound of his words confused me as much as the truth in what he said. We did spend every night together. I didn’t know how he fit in the other women, or maybe it was just this one other woman who missed him and whom he missed too. I didn’t know. All I knew was he was lying to me, and it hurt so much I didn’t know what to do.

  “I don’t believe you. You sent that text thinking you were sending it to someone else. Someone you miss. And now you’re lying to get the chance to go to her. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  Ethan hung his head and quietly answered. “Summer, I’m not with anyone else. I swear.”

  “You can’t even look at me when you say that! And don’t think I didn’t notice that you didn’t say I was wrong that you’re going to see whoever this person is.”

  Lifting his head, he looked at me with sadness in his eyes. “I wouldn’t do that to you. There’s no one else, but I don’t see how I can make you believe me.”

  “Then just go. Go and don’t come back!” I sobbed, practically screaming the last few words.

  For a long moment, it felt like time stood still as the two of us didn’t move. All I wanted him to do was tell me the truth, and all he wanted me to do was believe him. But neither of those things happened.

  Before he turned to leave, he sighed and quietly said, “I’m sorry, Summer.”

  And then he was gone.

  Chapter Nine

  Ethan

  The conference room had the largest windows I’d ever seen in my life. Unfortunately, they didn’t look out on much. The view of the building next to us wasn’t very good since it was just a basic skyscraper like any other, but it teased of life going on that I was missing. Even seated on the side of the table away from the windows, I thought about how easy it would be for someone to push their chair back too hard and crash into the glass. Would it break and send the person and the chair falling fifteen floors to the ground? I had no idea, but at least that person would be free of this never-ending meeting.

  As some guy talked about a quarterly this or projection that, I scanned the people in the room. I saw nothing but an array of dark business suits and a rainbow of dress shirts with the singular job of making those suits look like they didn’t belong on pall bearers. My eyes fixed on Limmon’s red and black geometric tie as he spoke at the other end of the table. It wasn’t attractive, per se, but it had the effect of mesmerizing me for at least a few seconds so I could forget where I was for the briefest of time.

  He didn’t look like he had enough style to pick that. His wife probably bought it for him. Fuck, she probably laid out his clothes every morning.

  The booming sound of a hand slamming onto the cherry wood table snapped me out of my daydream about Limmon’s frumpy wife carefully putting out his clothes on their bed, and I looked to see my sister Tressa staring down the table at me. I had no idea what had made her so upset, but at the moment, I sensed it was my lack of interest in her underling’s presentation.

  “Thank you, Ken. Does anyone have any questions?” she asked, looking directly at me.

  I had no questions. At leas
t I had none that involved whatever Ken Limmon spent his time doing at Stone Worldwide.

  Actually, I did have a question. What the hell did any of these people do before working at my father’s company to actually be here? Did they go to college and dream of someday working at a job like this, happy to spend their days in steel buildings with enormous windows that look out on other steel buildings talking about quarterly and yearly projections or did they just find themselves here after a series of unfortunate mistakes like I did?

  As the people around me began to talk amongst themselves, my mind wandered back to how it all went wrong and I ended up dressed in a dark grey suit looking like my father did nearly every day I’d been alive. I had a life people envied, and because of a few horrible choices, it all vanished.

  The men and women around me stood up out of their chairs, rousing me from my fantasy of being on that beach in Australia living the kind of life I wanted. I saw one of Tressa’s assistants shoot me a nasty look as she and my sister’s other minions filed out of the conference room, leaving me sitting there staring out those huge windows at the world outside them.

  “I’m impressed with how good you are at sleeping with your eyes open, Ethan.”

  My sister stood with her arms folded at the end of the table next to my father, the two of them staring down at me with far different looks in their eyes. Tressa’s said that she hated how little I thought of her meetings, but my father’s had a softer, almost hopeful look in them. He wanted me to succeed here at Stone Worldwide more than he could put into words, and I hated that I would disappoint him. Again.

  Tressa looked every bit like the kind of person he wanted me to be. She wore that black business suit like a champ. The red blouse underneath exuded power and success, and with her gorgeous black hair and dark eyes, she looked like a million bucks. I’d never tell her, but she was the epitome of what this company needed after our father decided to leave it.

  Why he’d want me to be anywhere near it still remained a mystery.

  Before I could answer her jab, she turned on her four inch black heels with the red soles and marched out of the room, leaving my father and me alone. For a long moment, we stared at each other like neither one of us knew what to say. We’d known each other for over twenty-five years, and yet there seemed times when we felt more like strangers than father and son.

  “How are you getting along with the ad division?” he asked with the clearest sense of hope in his voice. That hope only made how I truly felt even worse.

  I hated the ad division. I wasn’t an advertising guy. None of them possessed an ounce of creativity, and they only thought of money. But I didn’t have a choice, so I nodded and forced a smile. “Great. They’re a great group of people. I’m sure we’ll be running like a well-oiled machine in no time.”

  My father’s expression darkened just enough to let me know he was worried. “It’s only been a month, Ethan. Give them a chance. They’re good people. Some of them have been with this company nearly as long as you’ve been alive.”

  I hoped that the abject desperation that last sentence made me feel didn’t show all over my face. Over a quarter century in this job? I’d kill myself before I made it a tenth of the way through that.

  “Sure, Dad,” I said, tugging at my tie that had felt like a noose around my neck from the moment I put it on this morning.

  “Your mother wanted me to ask you if you’d like to come to the house for dinner this Friday.”

  I didn’t know if I could spend any time around my mother, especially since she was about to have a show of her sculpture pieces. I wasn’t sure I could handle being around art now.

  “I don’t know. I’ll give her a call and talk to her,” I said as I moved to leave the conference room. The place felt like a prison, as I always thought it would.

  “She loves when you come out to the house. This show coming up means a lot to her, and I know she’d love to talk to you about it. I think she’s got some nerves about the whole thing. You know how she is.”

  That only made things worse. I wanted to support my mother in everything she did. She was the entire reason I ever explored anything artistic. When my father wanted me to play sports in school, she stood at his side explaining that she believed art was just as important as other extracurricular activities. I ended up going out for the football team, and I loved it, just like he said I would. But I loved the art classes she found for me too, so it tore me up not being able to share her joy about this upcoming show because of what happened.

  As I headed toward the door, my father said, “Son, it’s for the best. This company was always going to be my legacy for you and your sisters.”

  Angry at the thought of spending the rest of my life in a suit stuck inside a ten by ten office, I spun around and asked, “And how does Diana feel about that, Dad? Because we know how Tressa feels, and unless you’re blind, you know how I feel about it. But what about Diana? Do you think she’ll ever be able to fit in here at Stone Worldwide? How is it possible that you married someone like Mom and you can’t imagine us ever being anything like her?”

  He opened his mouth to speak but closed it and sighed like he did whenever he wanted to say something that would only result in an argument. “There are people in this world who would kill to have the opportunities you’ve had. I swore when you were born that I would do everything in my power to make sure you had the best life possible, and I’ve kept that promise year after year without fail.”

  His ability to compartmentalize how he felt about Diana and me never ceased to amaze me. “We don’t fit in here, Dad. Tressa does because she loves it, but we don’t. Has how Diana and I feel ever figured into your plans for the future?”

  For a moment, he remained silent and merely frowned before saying what he hadn’t since everything happened with me. “You’re here now because as much as I didn’t think it was a good idea, I agreed with your mother that you should have a chance to prove yourself with your talent. It’s not my fault what happened, Ethan. For that, you need to look in the mirror. Don’t punish your mother and me and everyone here for your mistakes.”

  And that, right there, hurt the most. My father knew that. I didn’t deny I’d made mistakes. I’d made a metric shit ton of them, much to his disappointment. What hurt was that he didn’t understand that I didn’t belong there.

  “You can’t even talk about her, can you?” I asked, knowing I was way out of line and not giving a damn.

  He looked at me and the hurt in my father’s brown eyes hit me like knives stabbing my chest. In a low, sad voice, he said, “Let me know if you need anything, Ethan.”

  I walked out of the conference room and marched back to my office two floors down, careful to avoid Tressa and her office at the other end of the hall. The last thing I wanted was to deal with her, a younger and prettier version of Tristan Stone.

  Staring out my office window, I loosened my tie and tossed it across my desk onto a chair. I couldn’t spend the rest of my days in this building. It would kill me.

  Lost in thought, I didn’t hear Tressa come into my office. Looking up, I was disgusted to see her standing there in her power suit and deep red lipstick that made her look like she’d just devoured one of my co-workers. “What do you want? Don’t you have some minion to torture or someone’s dreams to crush?”

  She rewarded me with her usual sneer. “Still wallowing in self-pity, I see. If there’s one thing I appreciate about you, Ethan, it’s that you can always be counted on to be so self-involved that you don’t notice something, even if it’s right under your nose.”

  I hated my sister’s way of speaking in riddles. “Christ, Tressa. Do you do this to your employees? They must hate you.”

  She looked down at me with an expression of pure smugness. “In fact, my employees love me just like they love our father because we clearly want this company to succeed and everyone to benefit, not just ourselves. If you weren’t so self-absorbed, you’d see that. But as much fun as it is
talking with you about your problems, I didn’t come in here for this. I want to talk to you about something serious.”

  Right there was the main problem I had with Tressa. Everything was serious, and everything was about business. Talk about people being complete opposites.

  “And what would that be? Did Stone Worldwide stock take a tumble this morning at the opening bell?” I asked as I leaned back in my chair to stare up at the ceiling.

  “No, you jackass. And where the hell did you get the idea that it’s polite or even civil to not look people in the eye when they’re speaking to you?”

  Startled by her anger, I directed my focus toward her. She really did come in here to talk about something serious. Or at least it appeared serious to her, if the way her dark eyes flashing was any indication.

  “Fine. What do you want to talk about?”

  Tressa folded her arms across her chest and began pacing in front of my desk. “I think you know that I was no supporter of Daddy’s bringing you here to work. Stone Worldwide means the world to me, Ethan, and it means nothing to you. Can we at least agree on that?”

  Suddenly, I felt like a piece of shit. Maybe my father was right. Maybe I was the one to blame. “That feels a bit harsh. It doesn’t mean nothing to me. I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing this. I doubt you can understand that since you’re all business, but some of us like me and Diana want different things out of life.”

  Tressa’s head snapped around so she faced me. “Don’t bring Diana into this. She has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.”

  “Well, she never wanted to be a part—” I began to say, trying to explain that our other sister didn’t want to spend her life running the family business either, but Tressa cut me off.

  “Don’t you think you’ve done enough when it comes to Diana’s life, Ethan? Suffice it to say, she’ll never have to worry about money or anything she could ever want. I’ll make sure of that. But you, on the other hand, I have no interest in carrying for the rest of my days. You don’t belong here, no matter how much our father wants to believe you do simply because you’re his son. So I intend on making sure you don’t stay here long.”