The Boy Who Has No Hope (Soulless 6)

I had a powerful memory, so I knew exactly what she was referring to. We sat together at the dining table while I worked on my book. She’d broached the subject, and I said I never wanted to have a family, that I didn’t like kids, hated them, in fact. I remembered her unusual reaction, and now I understood what sparked it.

She watched me, as if she expected me to say something.

I had nothing to say. I felt foolish for developing feelings for this woman when I didn’t really know her. This was why I stuck to my bachelor ways, never felt anything real for anybody, because every time I tried to have a real relationship with a woman, it always bit me in the ass.

She stared at my face, fidgeting with her fingertips. “Derek, I’m sorry…”

I dropped my eyes and looked at my laptop.

“I’m sure I would’ve told you the truth at some point. But I never thought anything would happen between us…”

I lifted my gaze and stared at her again, the pain thudding in my chest because there was a new scar on my heart. “This conversation is finished. I don’t want to talk about it again. Let’s just go back to work and pretend nothing happened…like you wanted.”ElevenEmersonDerek took the news a million times worse than I’d imagined. I understood it was a lot to take in at once, probably shocking, but his rage still surprised me. He viewed my secret as a betrayal. I wished I could go back in time and do things differently, at least sit him down and tell him the news myself, but I’d waited too long. I wondered if things would be different if he’d heard it from me, and the more I thought about it, I realized his reaction would have been different. He probably never would’ve developed feelings for me in the first place. That made me sad, even though we would never be together anyway.

I expected things to be tense for a couple weeks, and in time, things would calm down once again.

But I was wrong.

Derek wasn’t just hostile toward me, but indifferent. He didn’t speak to me at all, acknowledge my presence, or make me feel human. It was like his super brain had scratched me from his existence and made me invisible so he didn’t even know I was there.

It hurt…badly.

Every time we drove to work, he ignored me. Whenever I brought lunch, he never said thank you. When I told him about a new project, he wouldn’t even address me. He completely disappeared from my life, and that was when I understood how big a component he’d been of it before. There were no more text messages, no more deep talks when he stayed at work late, no more anything.

We were right back where we started.

It was my first day on the job all over again. But in this case, I was doomed to repeat it for eternity.

I walked into his lab with a stack of paperwork that I’d found in his corporate office. I’d turned the place upside down and made it into a well-organized space. Now that I was keeping track of his paperwork, I knew what to bring him that required his attention. But getting him to look at anything I brought was challenging. His anger made my job a million times harder to complete. “Derek?”

He sat at the table and wrote something out with a pencil, his hand moving across the page quickly like he was trying to get something down.

I waited a minute, let him finish up his final thoughts.

But he just kept going.

“Derek?”

He continued to ignore me.

Jerome stood a few feet behind him, and when he looked at me, he shook his head, as if he were telling me to run for it.

I approached his table and set the paperwork down. “Derek, I just wanted to bring this to you because it was supposed to be filed—”

He snapped, like a volcano that switched from dormant to active instantaneously. “You think I give a fuck about this?” He lifted his gaze from his paper full of equations and shoved my papers off the surface and onto the floor. “What I’m doing actually matters. This is just a bunch of bullshit. Your job is to handle this bullshit. Don’t fucking bother me again.” He turned back to his work like he hadn’t just screamed at me and ripped me to pieces in front of his colleagues.

I stilled for a moment, so much rage and hurt packed inside me that I didn’t know what to do with it. My hand shook slightly at the pain his outburst caused me, and my body didn’t know how to react to the cruel way he’d just treated me. I wanted to scream in retaliation, but I also wanted to cry…and I never cried. I bent over and gathered the papers before I walked out of the lab. I entered his office and set everything on his desk before I grabbed my purse and left. I was able to keep my composure until I got outside and let the tears fall.