Her Billionaire Toy Boy

“So, Mira,” began Sam, each word obviously costing him a great effort. “We—Damien and I—when we were in college—we decided to invent an—ah—social construct.”

Behind him, Damien snorted. Sam threw him a look of utmost loathing. He turned back to look at Mira, and his gaze turned more conciliatory.

“Well,” said Sam. “It kind of evolved from there, especially as we became more successful businessmen and moved to New York….we call it the game, now.”

“The game?”

“Yep, the game,” said Damien. “And as of right now, Sam is winning.”

“Unhelpful, Damien,” said Sam through gritted teeth.

“You’re welcome,” said Damien shamelessly. He continued to goggle at Mira. Mira carefully turned away from him—a pointed gesture—and smiled frostily at Sam. “Sam? If you’d care to explain?”
Sam looked at her as if he was one hundred years old, and then said, heavily, “So—the game. It’s horrible, Mira—but—it’s a sort of—ah—metric? I suppose? By which we gamify our relationships, the ups, and the downs, you know…”

Mira set her jaw.

Damien cut in. “It’s a ranking system, Sam, be honest,” he said. And then he turned to leer at Mira. “And I could instantly see that he’d made a huge power play when he picked you up, I mean, black cougar, come on, I’ll be working for weeks to best that—”

“Shut up, Damien,” said Mira quietly.

She was rocked to her core. She had known—had thought—had hoped that there wasn’t anything to ‘explain’ the attraction Sam had inexplicably shown for her. But the very fact that she was so hoping, of course, showed that she was aware that there could have been something up in the first place. To be shown so definitively, so embarrassingly, and in such a denigrating way that the relationship she had grown—in a very short time, to be sure, but nonetheless—to be quite fond of was based upon something which would cause it to die, to suddenly learn that the man upon whose shoulder she had now slept multiple times and whom she was coming to think of as a companion she enjoyed choosing, over and over—it was too much.

Mira very much considered walking out of the cabin and just walking until she found a car or a city or anything to take her away from the very tile upon which she stood. However, she decided that that would likely be unsafe and overdramatic.

She was a lawyer. She dealt with these touchy situations all of the time. She could handle this.

One other thing from her extensive law training was now floating to the top of her head. She had to give Sam a chance to belie Damien’s story, to convince Mira that what he said was not true, to try and salvage the mess he had put the two of them inside.

Mira looked at Sam mutely and shrugged in his general direction. “Sam,” she said, and was devastated when her voice broke. “Sam,” she said again, fighting hard to keep control of herself. “Sam. What—tell me what’s going on.”

Sam blinked, and Mira realized that he was batting away tears. Her eyes were suddenly hot and wet as well.

“Well, Mira,” Sam said, straightening his shoulders and looking her straight in the eye, “He’s—he’s right. He’s correct. That—that all happened.”

Mira was struck dumb.

“But—but that was just in the beginning,” Sam said, walking close to Mira, grabbing her hand. Mira turned her face away. “I forgot all about all of that once we’d met and you and I really clicked, and we started to build something. Mira, don’t listen to him, we—we have something great here, you know it and I know it, and it shouldn’t matter that Damien’s clearly trying to mess everything up—“

“Damien didn’t have to mess anything up,” Mira said, slowly, quietly and clearly. “He didn’t have to, Sam, because you already did. Or,” she realized and raised a finger to clarify, “I take that back. There was never anything good to mess up because we never had anything good in the first place. Everything that we had was built upon a lie.”

It killed her to start using the past tense, and she saw a gray pallor cross Sam’s face which meant that it was likely killing him as well.

Mira slowly shook her head, and then looked up at the three of them, staring back at her. “I’ve got to leave,” she said, simply. “I’m going to go get my things, and then I’m going to call an Uber and get out of here.”

She turned to leave. Sam stepped after her. “Mira,” he said. “Wait—“

Mira turned around and looked him up and down with a slow, cold stare. “I’m not waiting for you,” she said. “I’m not waiting for anyone. What you did is despicable; but, then, if you only ever cared about scoring points for a game, you might not care about despicability. I therefore wish you the best, although I hope that no future women are hurt by being unknowingly complicit in adding to your wall of trophies—or whatever is the point of your game. Good luck, Sam.”

And with that Mira turned on her heel and went upstairs to pack her suitcase. One hour later, with no more words at all exchanged with Sam, Damien, or Lisa, she was in a hired car whizzing her back to Manhattan. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. As the gray city flew by, she looked out the window and tried to sift her way through myriad thoughts which pounced on her, screaming at her, berating her for not seeing the obvious: that her relationship with Sam had obviously been too good to be true. Clearly, something had to have been up—and the fact that she had not seen it earlier meant that she hadn’t been looking hard enough, had been caught up in the whirlwind of her fantasy flirtation as goonily as a schoolgirl might have. She hadn’t acted with the experience and wisdom of her years at all. She’d been taken in; hoodwinked. And, as much as that was mostly the fault of the man who had played her, she was more angry at herself for not figuring it out sooner.

She’d been such an idiot—that was her mantra. She paid the cab and swung her suitcase out of the back, then let herself into her musty-smelling studio.

She longed to throw herself on the bed and cry, but she knew that if she did so she would lay prone until her alarm went off the next morning and—with mascara matted to her eyelids, with sleep still in the corners of her eyes—she’d have to go to work. So she set herself to the music of her routine, hoping that her rituals would bring her some comfort. She made herself a breakfast for the next morning. She set out the clothes that she would need to wear. She cleaned up her apartment and carefully unpacked her suitcase, willing herself not to think of how she’d carefully chosen each piece, imagining how happy she would be to use each one while having the beautiful weekend with Sam she’d ended up emphatically not having.

When that was done she ordered herself in some food and self-medicated with a Friends binge. She needed to not think for a while, and then she needed to get back to what she realized was her normal, everyday life—which did not have Sam in it, not even a little bit, not at all.