Page 83 of Faking it with my Bad Boy Crush

Twenty Years

Maya

Ifound Ethan sitting on the seawall outside the community center, staring at the dark water like it owed him money. Everyone else had cleared out—Richard had driven Tessa home, promising to call in the morning with next steps—but Ethan had stayed behind, saying he needed a minute.

That minute had apparently turned into twenty.

"Hey," I said, sitting beside him. "You disappeared on me."

"Sorry. Needed air. Needed to not be a spectacle for a few minutes." He gave me a tired smile. "Turns out publicly confessing to multiple ethics violations in front of two hundred people is emotionally exhausting. Who knew?"

"You did great. You were honest and brave and slightly unhinged in a way that somehow worked in your favor." I bumped his shoulder. "Ten out of ten, would recommend for your next TED Talk."

"Please never let me do that again."

"No promises. You're apparently very good at self-destructive honesty. It might become your brand."

He laughed, but it faded quickly, replaced by something more serious.

"Can I ask you something?" I said finally.

"Should I be worried? Because I've had approximately enough surprise revelations for one lifetime, and it's only been six weeks."

"It's not a lawsuit. Or an ethics violation. Or anything that requires a lawyer. It’s about the first night we actually met. Why did you do it? Why did you want to destroy our bakery?”

“It wasn’t about the bakery. And it wasn’t about either of you. My father had just left. I had just gotten accepted into another college we couldn’t hope to afford. My mother was barely keeping things together with two jobs. I was angry, and I smashed the front window, the display case, your grandmother's picture frame, the tiles he brought over from Portugal. I climbed through broken glass and just—kept going, like something in me needed everything in that room to be as wrecked as I felt."

"I remember," I said softly. "I was fourteen. I woke up to the sound of glass breaking and crept halfway down the stairs before Vovô caught me and sent me back up. But not before I saw you standing in the middle of it, bleeding, with a chair still in your hands."

"I saw you, too. For about half a second, right before I wished the floor would swallow me whole."

“When you came back, I remembered that. Thought that you were going to try and destroy my bakery twice. I almost brought it up in that first town meeting.”

“You should have. It would have made an excellent weapon. 'This man tried to destroy my family's bakery once already, don't trust him now either.' Would have been a pretty effective opening move in a negotiation."

"Believe me, there were moments in that first week where I wanted to throw it in your face just to watch you flinch. But every time I almost did, I'd hear Vovô's voice instead. 'He worked for the better part of a year to earn it back. He never missed a day, even when I gave him every reason to quit.' He didn't tell that story to make you look like a monster. He told it to make a point about grace. About how nobody has to stay the worst thing they ever did."

"Noted. I'll try to live up to the legacy of being fixed correctly." He took my hand again, quieter now.

“I learned my lesson.”

"Building is better than destroying,” we said in unison.

My throat tightened. "I think some part of you has been trying to prove that choice was real ever since."

"It has." His voice was rough. "Every time I made partner, every time I closed some deal that made the firm richer and me feel emptier, some part of me knew I was failing a promise I'd made to a man in his pajamas holding a broken tile at two in the morning. Easier to bury it than face how far I'd drifted from who he thought I could be."

"And now?"

"Now I stood in a community center and told two hundred people the truth about my worst professional decisions, because Manuel Romano taught me twenty years ago that hiding from what you've broken never actually fixes it." He reached for my hand. "I owe him everything, Maya. Not just the chance he gaveme that night, but the chance you gave me by never using it against me. You could have. You'd have been justified. Instead you just... watched. Waited. Let me prove it myself."

"I wanted you to earn it," I said simply. "Not because I doubted you specifically, but because that's what he taught me too. Trust isn't given because someone deserves a second chance in theory. It's given because you watch them actually take it."

"Did I? Earn it?"

"You destroyed your career defending my bakery from the exact kind of destruction you once caused it yourself. I think that's about as thorough a redemption arc as anyone could ask for." I laughed a little, wiping my eyes. "Vovô kept the fixed picture frame, you know. In the back office, for years. Never matched the others on the shelf. I used to ask him why, and he'd just say, 'A good repair is worth remembering.'"

Ethan made a sound that was almost a laugh, almost something else entirely. "I had no idea."