Coast, but no! You decided to move all the way across the country, just to get away from me. I loved you and you left! That’s w—”
“You what?!” I exclaim. My heart feels like it’s about to jump out of my chest, beating with such vigorous strength that I can feel the beat in my throat. Am I about to throw up? Did he really just say that?
“You… loved me?” I repeat in disbelief.
Gabe takes a sudden step back, as if I’d just hit him. He runs his hand through his brown hair and exhales audibly. The expression on his face is not hard to read this time: He looks utterly shocked—and scared.
“You never told me that,” I say in a whisper. “I never knew that you—”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?” he cuts me off briskly. “Don’t act as if that makes a difference!”
He points an accusing finger at me, and suddenly it’s all I can see. His pain, his anger, his failure to be honest with me—all the same flaws that drove me crazy back then. He may think those words would not have made a difference. And he assumes it was easy for me to leave.
Well, he can believe whatever he wants. I can’t deal with this. Not again.
“I have to go,” I say and divert my attention to the chain of my bike, nervously fumbling with the stupid little key that’s refusing to cooperate. An angry hiss escapes my lips as I struggle to unlock the damn thing. I have to get away from him before the tears start.
Gabe doesn’t move or say another word, but just watches me with that resentful look on his face. I can feel his eyes on me, but choose to ignore him. Instead, I make it my priority to jump on the bike as quickly as possible as soon as it’s unchained, almost falling to the side when I miss the pedal with my foot—and turn my back to drive away.
Whatever he may still have to say will no longer be heard by me.
It takes all my strength to not look back at him as I race across the parking lot, the cold wind pushing against my face as if to hold me back. Gabe may still be standing where I left him, he might even still be looking at me, he might have said something that got lost in the distance. I don’t know, and I don’t care.
Thank God it’s over—and I will never have to see him again.
Chapter 6
Gabe
The crackling fire between us is the only sound pervading the silence that cloaked me and my old college friends after the topic of Ella came up. We're sitting in the backyard of Aston's lavish townhouse in Backbay, Boston. It's his 30th birthday, a day we've all been anticipating for a long time. He is the first of us to mark that milestone, and for the past seven years, no matter where life would take us, no matter how far we might have grown apart—we always knew that we would commemorate this day together.
We had to. Because of our pact.
A pact sealed between four college friends who shared the insane ambition to become billionaires by the time we're 30 years old. The Plutus Society, we called ourselves, inspired by Aston's admiration for J.R.R. Tolkien, who—according to Aston—had a similar thing going on with his group of college friends. However, unlike Tolkien and his buddies, we were not joined by a shared love for literature and culture, but by a deep seeded desire to rise to the financial top.
We chose Plutus as our patron, the god of wealth and prosperity. He is often depicted as a little boy holding a bunch of ears of wheat—a symbol that now graces the skin of all of us, even Aston, who opposed the idea at first. Just like me, he has a single ear of wheat tattooed on his shoulder blade, while Chase chose his upper arm and Logan has his on the right lower forearm. He was the only one among us who didn’t care about the possibility of hiding the tattoo in formal situations.
He’s also the one who has been giving me the darkest stare ever since Ella’s name came up. I'm angry at myself for not keeping my mouth shut, but it was impossible to keep a secret like that in front of the boys. They knew something was up and probed until I spilled the beans.