He Was Never Shy, Just Not With Me Chapter 09
I hadn’t seen him in a few days, and Logan Reynolds looked significantly more weathered.
The wrinkles on his shirt were noticeably deeper too.
He invited me to sit down at a coffee shop.
I took a step back, my tone freezing cold.
“I don’t think you and I have that kind of relationship anymore.”
The forced smile on his face vanished instantly.
Letting out a bitter laugh, he cut straight to the chase.
“Chloe Sterling is your friend, right? Don’t you want to know what she did to me?”
A sudden wave of confusion hit me.
I never expected that the very first time Logan proactively brought up one of my friends would actually be after our breakup.
But then I remembered the fiercely protective, murderous look on Chloe’s face the day she found out he had cheated on me.
I figured I probably knew exactly what had happened.
I couldn’t help but let out a soft laugh.
“Actually, I do.”
Logan’s face contorted in an instant.
“Do you really hate me that much? You know exactly how much that company means to me!”
“It’s precisely because she knows that she did it!”
Hearing the voice echoing from behind him, Logan took a deep breath and turned around.
Just as he opened his mouth to bark a response, he froze, completely stunned when he recognized the person standing there.
“What are you doing here?!”
Smiling, I linked my arm through Chloe’s.
“I came to pick you up for dinner. Everyone else is already there; you’re the only one we’re waiting
for.”
“I just didn’t expect we’d run into something so stomach-churning.”
The color drained entirely from Logan’s face, leaving him deathly pale.
“I was wrong in the past, and I’m deeply sorry to both of you. I promise I’ll treat Nora with nothing but kindness from now on. Could you please just let my company go?”
Chloe’s family ran a major corporation, and they happened to share extensive business connections with Logan’s industry.
Back when I had casually mentioned his line of work, Chloe had quietly selected Logan’s firm from
her pool of potential vendors.
She had looked incredibly proud of herself back then: “This way, he won’t have any excuse to turn you down.”
Chloe had genuinely thought that as long as Logan’s company secured a stable streams of corporate accounts, he would finally have enough free time to come join our gatherings.
She had been just as naive as I was.
Only now did Logan realize that the “social butterfly who loved tracking celebrity gossip” I always talked about was actually the heiress to the Sterling Group.
He had been kept completely in the dark like a clown the entire time.
Logan glared at me with pure venom in his eyes.
“Why did you never tell me who she actually was? Did you find it funny watching me look like an
absolute idiot?”
I was completely shocked.
Even now, at this exact stage, he was still trying to turn it around and blame me.
“If I had told you her status, would you have actually shown up to our gatherings? Would you have attended because of her title as an heiress, or because she is my best friend?”
“I never realized you were such a deeply mercenary and opportunistic person.”
Having his shallow calculations laid bare, the frantic shifting of expressions on his face was almost
comical.
Yet at the same time, the realization of how much network capital he had completely thrown away filled him with agonizing regret.
Because the wedding farce and his cheating scandal had turned into a massive trending topic
online, several of his smaller accounts had already chosen to non-renew their contracts.
Chloe’s sudden, aggressive termination of their primary agreement was the final blow that shattered his business completely.
Logan dropped his head, softening his voice as he pleaded and apologized, begging that he was
consumed by regret.
He desperately begged me to give him just one more chance.
My heart, however, remained entirely flat.
“But I gave you countless chances, Logan. You were the one who failed to grasp a single one of
them.”
Logan’s posture deflated instantly, his spirit entirely broken.
“What monumental crime did I actually commit? All I ever wanted was a quiet world with just the
two of us. But you were always wasting so much time on your friends. You readily abandoned me for them-do you honestly think I wasn’t in agony too?”
“I only wanted you to spend more time with me. I wanted to be the only person in your eyes!”
“Everything I did was only because I love you!”
He wanted to consume my entire existence and become my whole world.
How could that ever be possible?
A human being cannot completely derive their entire life from another person.
“You didn’t want me to spend more time with you, Logan. You wanted me to cater to your every need. You wanted to strip away my entire social life so that I would spend every ounce of my free time trapped inside the house, acting as your unpaid maid.”
“Logan, you are incredibly selfish.”
“The thing you call ‘love’ makes me feel entirely nauseous.”
That was the ugly, underlying truth buried deep in his mind.
Logan stood frozen, unable to offer a response for a long time.
I stepped into Chloe’s car, and we drove away, leaving him behind.
After that day, I never spotted Logan’s silhouette waiting down by my office building again.
Chloe later mentioned that she had successfully poached the top sales rep from Logan’s team.
I actually recognized that girl; I had spotted her handle flooding the comment section on Hailey Brooks’s profile before.
I learned that she had been severely isolated and subjected to toxic workplace bullying led by Hailey
and her clique.
However, because her actual sales metrics were too stellar to lose, Logan hadn’t enabled Hailey’s
behavior in that specific instance.
As for Hailey, after deleting her social media profile, she moved to a completely different city. Yet she remained entirely unwilling to work hard, constantly looking for shortcuts to get ahead.
Ultimately, she ended up crawling back to her small hometown.
Logan’s firm managed to scrape by for about six months before officially filing for bankruptcy.
I heard the overwhelming stress even triggered a severe medical illness that left him hospitalized.
His parents now weep to anyone who will listen, desperately lamenting about how brilliant and glorious their son used to be.
How he used to be the high-flying CEO of a major company!
When my friends shared these updates with me over drinks, I felt a faint wave of bittersweet
reflection.
Life truly is incredibly unpredictable.
But it’s okay. I still have my best friends right by my side.
