Free Crushing On The Billionaire (Part 2) by Lola Silverman

be a while until Patrick heard from him. But if he was cash poor at the moment and tried to withdraw money to feed whatever habits he’d developed to cope with the reality of his situation—that his best friend was sleeping with his dad—we would hear from him much sooner.
    It was as much a relief as a worry that we heard from him sooner than later.
    I was on campus, still going through the motions of attending school even if I didn’t feel the least bit engaged, when my phone vibrated in my hip pocket. It was Patrick. He began speaking without so much as a preamble.
    “How soon can you be at your apartment?”
    “I’m on campus right now, so no more than ten minutes,” I said. “Why?”
    “I’ve sent a car to pick you up there,” he explained. “Shawn is on his way over.”
    I felt a stab of trepidation that I hadn’t expected. This was what we’d wanted, wasn’t it? We wanted him to get in contact with us so we could tell him that he was in danger of ruining everything he’d worked so hard for in this life. So why did I wish he’d just disappear and never come back to bother us? I chalked it up to just being nervous. There wasn’t a delicate way to tell someone that they were screwing everything up. I fully expected the encounter to be nasty.
    “Loren?”
    “I’m here,” I said.
    “I really need you to be here for this.”
    Patrick was a billionaire. He had unpleasant conversations and made difficult decisions every day of his life. But somehow, I knew that everything regarding his own son was much different. The fact that he wanted my support on this—needed it, even—made me quicken my pace across campus to a jog.
    “I’ll be there,” I assured him.
    It was perfect timing; the car screeched to a halt in front of the apartment complex just as I ran up to it, and I flung open the back door before the driver could get out and open it for me.
    “Just go,” I said, hoping we could make it to the house before Shawn. I wanted to be there for Patrick, whom I loved, but I also wanted to be there for my best friend—even if he didn’t consider me his best friend anymore. That couldn’t make any difference to me. I just had to support him.
    The ride seemed longer than usual. It was probably my impatience to get there, or perhaps the lunch break traffic clogging the roadways. But I was relieved to find that Shawn’s car wasn’t in the driveway yet. I’d beaten him here.
    I jumped out of the car—again before the driver could hold my door open for me—and ran into the house, opening my mouth to call for Patrick to let him know I was here.
    Instead, I was greeted to the sight of both Shawn and Patrick standing awkwardly in the foyer, almost just like the confrontation the three of us had already had, when Shawn first found out about the relationship I shared with his father. I furrowed my brow, a question on my lips.
    “I didn’t see your car outside, Shawn,” I said. It wasn’t a question, or what I’d wanted to ask, but it would have to do.
    “I took a car, but I don’t see why you care,” he said, sounding like his voice was coming out of the bottom of a well. He didn’t look good—a scruffy beard covering the bottom half of his face, his eyes deeply shadowed and far away. Had he really shown up here drunk or on drugs? Maybe this little intervention was happening far too late.
    “He sold his car,” Patrick clarified, crossing his arms over his chest, clearly disgusted.
    I blinked in surprise as Shawn laughed. “We live in San Francisco,” he said. “I don’t need a car. Plenty of people get by without cars, right, Loren? I just need to find a rich idiot to glom onto so I can get all the car services I need.”
    Shawn was angry, but I tried not to let his barbs pierce me. He’d come here only because he was desperate, and this would be the best time to try and get him to admit that he needed help turning his life around.
    “Don’t disrespect Loren,” Patrick boomed, his voice