Broken: A Billionaire Love Story by Heather Chase Page B

awful to begin with? What a relief that would be, the complete denial of emotions. Instead, his emotions lunged upwards from the abyss he cast them down into, like monstrous leeches, sucking away at his brain and steering him into more piles of shit to try and forget.
    “Anyway,” he said after a minute. “I don’t want to join AA. I don’t like all that religious nutjob bullshit.”
    “That’s fine.” She set her clipboard to one side, crossing those beautiful legs again. “I don’t know that AA has quite the make-up you’re imagining, at least not meetings I’ve sat in on, but you don’t have to join AA. But probably you should do something different. Some kind of community. You’re not alone in your suffering.”
    This bitch, he thought. She doesn’t know the first thing about suffering if she thinks I’m not alone in doing it.
    That thought was so vitriolic, so vehement, that it shocked Shane. She was just there to help, part of him said. You don’t have to bring name-calling into the equation.
    “All I ask,” she continued, “before we meet next time, is that you go to the meetings we have here and see if you can recognize any commonalities between the people you meet and yourself. That’s all.”
    “And don’t drink.”
    “Well,” she shrugged. “That’s not really a problem so long as you’re here, is it?”
    As far as Shane went, the jury was still out on that.
    They talked a little more after that—what his overall life goals were. What he wanted to be, whether he had any aspirations as a child. He told her about his poetry, and she seemed pleasantly surprised, asking him how much he wrote.
    “Not very much at all, lately.”
    This was an understatement. Ever since the fire, there had only been snippets, all lost whenever his pants rotted away and shed from his body. But still, lost in those books at school, with all those words in his head—that was the last time he had ever felt truly happy.
    He told her a little bit about how he wanted to be a fireman for a while when he was much younger until his family nixed the idea. When he was a teenager, his mother and uncle wanted him to join the family business, but Shane despised them and the business, and wanted nothing but to get out of it and away from them. He chose a school nine hundred miles away from his mother, deep in the Northeast.
    She asked him how he had found his way back here, to where his family was from.
    Shane didn't have an answer for that. Was he trying to reconnect with them, perhaps...?
    No. No way. Not them.
    She didn't press the issue.
    It was easy to talk to this woman. Nice. She would offer small thoughts, small insights as he went, but mostly she just let him speak. Shane found himself feeling eloquent—smart, even—for the first time in a long time.
    That was something a poet missed—making words work. He had forgotten how much he missed that.
    The more he talked to her, the more he regretted calling her—even in his thoughts—the name that he had. He didn’t even want to think it again. It was easy to feel affection for this woman, natural. Her demeanor, over time, began to break down, and it seemed almost as if she had wanted to show him this side of her the whole time—but had been afraid for some reason.
    More than their dialogue, he noticed just the way she made him feel —accepted, understood, welcome. His breaths caught every time she turned her face and he got to view the beauty of her profile in a different way. Her eyes, so dark and liquid, seemed like they could soak up every part of him. He could feel something of him—his soul? His mind?—drifting into her as they spoke.
    Almost he had started to talk more about the things he liked about St. Louis, but, with a friendly smile, she cut him off.
    “I’d like to get into it more with you,” she said, “But your time’s up.”
    They stood up at the same time. Shane walked over to shake her hand, coming quite close—and saw her tense,