Upside Down(60)

Rob looked as though he was about to snarl at me, but he bit it back. Maybe he could tell I wasn’t in the fucking mood. “Sorry my home being robbed, my privacy being violated, is such an inconvenience to you,” he said. His tone was neutral, but his smirk gave his intent away. “Did I interrupt a date or something?”

“Okay,” Michael said flatly. “One, what Hennessy does in his private time is none of your business. Two, this incident, while unforeseen and out of all our control, undermines weeks of work that Hennessy has done.” Michael looked at me and asked a question he already knew the answer to. “Can you fix this before the relaunch next week?”

I gave him a grateful smile. “Of course I can. I’ll let you two sort out the legal details. I’ll be in my office where I will, no doubt, be for every hour of the next six days.”

I left them to it, went into my office, and pulled up the dozen files that would need new passwords throughout, new firewalls, new encryption patches, and coding rewrites. I didn’t have to redo anything from scratch. I just needed to run scans and patches, check ports, and I’d probably spend more time amending the final reports and data for his IT team. It wasn’t a total loss. It was just a huge pain in my arse.

It was also a great distraction from my sore heart. Yes, I had to speak to Jordan. I just needed to deal with this mess first.

Three hours later, I’d confirmed there’d been no immediate breach and had started on the long and tedious path to fixing this whole mess. Michael had gone home an hour ago—there was no point in us both being zombies tomorrow—so I shut everything down and went home, not even feeling the bite of cold as I left the building and slipped into a cab.

My alarm went off a few hours later, and the first thing I did was check to see if Jordan had replied.

He hadn’t.

He hadn’t replied when I trudged my sorry arse back to the office, and he hadn’t replied when Michael passed a fresh coffee to me just before nine. “Still no reply?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Did you try calling him?”

I nodded. “Five times. It just went to voicemail. Any more and I’ll look like a crazy man. It’s now up to him.”

“I’m sorry,” he offered. “I know how much you liked him.”

Liked him? I think it had well exceeded that. I didn’t admit that though. Not out loud. I just nodded and went back to work, hoping to get lost in codes and data files. Until my phone rang and Jordan’s name flashed on the screen.

I fumbled with my phone, almost dropped it, then almost hit the ignore button by mistake.

“Jordan?”

“No, it’s Merry.”

My heart sank like a stone, then panic set in. “Oh my God, is he okay?”

“Yeah, he’s fine. Well, not really. He’s a freaking mess.”

The ache in my chest burned. “Oh.”

“God, Hennessy, what happened last night?”

“He freaked out. He shot off the couch and bolted. I don’t know what happened.”

“Oh dear.”

“Oh dear, what? What does that mean?”

She sighed. “You care for him, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes. I do. He’s… everything I could ever want. And I have no idea how to fix this. He won’t even speak to me.”

She was silent a moment. “And he’ll kill me if he finds out I’m talking to you. You have the ace support group meeting tonight, yes?”

Oh fuck. I’d forgotten about that. And it was supposed to be at the library. Where Jordan worked. Fuck! I rubbed my temples trying to stave off the headache that threatened to split my skull. “Yes.”

“Good. So here’s what’s going to happen.”





Chapter Fifteen





Jordan





As I was getting my coat and scarf, Merry handed me back my phone and gave me a hug. “Call me if you want to talk,” she said, her hands on my shoulders.

I nodded sadly, dreading catching this bus. I even considered waiting for the next one, or even walking home, but I knew I had to be an adult about this. I’d told Hennessy I’d talk to him today, and even though it was a conversation I didn’t want to have, it wasn’t fair on him to put it off.

But he wasn’t on the bus.

And that was so, so much worse.

I fell into a seat and clutched at my messenger bag on my lap, mentally telling my heart not to squeeze so damn tight.

A hand patted my shoulder. “No Mr Hennessy today,” Mrs Petrovski said. I couldn’t bear to meet her gaze.

“Uh, no. I um… I don’t…”

Don’t cry, Jordan. Don’t cry.

Just make up some random bullshit story about how he was really an art insurance broker who was caught up in some multi-million dollar heist with international thieves and how it read like Oceans Eleven meets Thomas Crown and, and… and… motherfucking fuck.

“He’s probably avoiding me and I wouldn’t say I blamed him because I fucked it up, and let’s be honest here, we all knew I was going to be the one to fuck it up. I mean, he’s completely perfect and sweet and lovely, and I’m not what he thought I was. And I’m not what I thought I was, so I can’t be what he needs and it totally sucks because I’m pretty sure he’s the guy who was designed and made just for me, like he’s so ridiculously perfect, and it’s worse than Me Before You. I mean, being left behind because of assisted suicide must be awful because, you know, death and all, but that’s fiction and this is real life and it hurts so much worse in real life than it ever does in books. I wish I could turn to the last page and see how it ends, and even though I normally call people who do that, absolute monsters, I would totally do that if this were a book. But he was reading Flowers for Algernon and that…” My voice fell quiet. “Well we all know how that ends.”