Trade Me (Cyclone #1)(37)

I know, I say. I’m sorry. That was out of line.

It’s bad for me. For him? He didn’t just lose his CFO. He didn’t just lose his best friend, someone he spent every day with for seventeen years.

Peter had a violent heart attack when they were both working late—and Dad was there at the office with him. He watched him die while they waited for the paramedics.

Dad never flinched. He never let a hint of his distress show. He did the f*cking product launch without shedding a single tear. The only outward sign of his grief that anyone saw was that he installed AEDs on every floor in every Cyclone building with a single-minded intensity. He gave over two million bucks to a local emergency room to make sure that they had exactly the equipment they needed if this ever happened again. And every day since then, he’s become just a little harder, just a little more brittle. As if he knows now that his mortality is showing, as if he expects with every product we put out that he’ll lose someone he cares about again.

The only time I’ve ever seen him break down was two months after the funeral. I had come downstairs late one night to get a glass of water. I saw him in the living room with a stack of papers. He wasn’t looking at them. He just held them in his hands, crumpling them. And then, while I watched from the stairs, he broke down, curling over and sobbing quietly.

My dad doesn’t break. He doesn’t. I have never seen anything so terrifying in my life.

We’ve never talked about it, but it’s always there.

Slowly, I type my next sentence. I can’t take Peter’s place, I tell him. And you have to stop trying to put me there.

A long wait. And then… Fuck the whole idea. It was stupid anyway. Everyone will know it’s a fake beach—there’s nowhere in range that would work—and so that violates the true construct rule.

I type the words: Dad. I have a problem. I don’t hit enter. I watch the screen, watch the black letters against the cream background. They are everything I want to say to him, and nothing that I can admit. I don’t hit send. I’ve typed the words, but I’m still completely silent. Finally, I delete them.

We’ll figure it out, I write instead.

Fine. We have six weeks.

I’ll figure it out, is what I mean. But when I shut the laptop, my entire body itches. I know I shouldn’t. I know I can’t. But between class and my new shifts washing dishes, I haven’t had time to run this week. My body feels weird; a combination of restlessness and exhaustion compounded by the fact that I’ve had nothing this morning but two cups of coffee. I change into running gear and take off. Easier than trying to navigate my way through the unspoken morass of my emotions.

The road, at first, goes straight up the hills and so do I. My heart rate rises; my stride length falls. There’s nothing but the hill, nothing to me but my quads pushing further, faster, my lungs burning for air.

Running takes everything away. My anger and confusion all dissipate in sweat, leaving nothing but a pool of inchoate sadness. I’m stuck, stuck because I love my dad and I can’t tell him no forever. I’m stuck because I know that it’s turning into a war of determination, and he’s the one that can dismantle the fiercest business competitors. I pose no real threat to him. I can’t fight him, not really, and I don’t want to.

I can fight this hill.

Harder. Faster. When I run, I disappear. There’s nothing but the pain, and the longer I run, the less I remember.

I hit the entrance to the park behind the hills an hour into the run. Concrete sidewalks give way to dirt paths covered by leaves and sloughed-off eucalyptus bark. I keep going. It takes two hours to find the summit. From here, I can see a wide green valley fringed by mansions. Beyond the hill to the west, there’s the gray waters of the Bay, the Bridge, stretching in the distance against the sky. But the entirety of the East Bay has disappeared, hidden by the hill. It’s almost like my worries have vanished.

My hair is plastered to my head with sweat, and now that I’ve stopped running, the wind is cold. I take a moment to have some water and a terrible-tasting energy gel. And then—because I can never run far enough—I go back.

It’s another two hours before I turn onto the street where I’m staying, and by that point, I’m so low on blood sugar that I’m about to bonk.

And that’s when I remember that I had an appointment—that Tina was coming over to go over the first week of our arrangement. I’m forty-five minutes late. She’s sitting outside in the car.

Fuck. I slow to a walk. She looks up from whatever she’s reading and sees me. My chest hurts—and this time, it’s not just from the run.

God, I want this to be real. I want to be just a guy with a job, someone whose biggest problem is that he’s late for a meeting. I want to just be able to flirt. To want. I inhale and pretend that I’m that person. That I’m not being erased from the world and turned into someone else.

She gets out of the car.

“Sorry,” I say with a smooth smile. “I was out for a run and lost track of time.”

I’m not sure if she believes me. But that’s okay. I don’t believe me either.

10.

TINA

Blake is messing with me. I’m convinced of it. He lets me in and disappears into the shower. I can hear the water running in bursts, can imagine him under the stream of the showerhead all too well. Glistening muscles come to mind: pecs, firm and rounded; water sliding down a well-formed chest to brush against abs…