The Billionaire's Dating Coach

By the time the night had curdled into whatever miserable mess it had become, I'd stopped pretending otherwise, because there was no way to salvage any of this. I'd known that for a while now, somewhere between the mockery disguised as conversation and the silence that followed every attempt I made to be civil. The man across from me hadn't wanted company tonight. He'd clearly wanted a target, and apparently, I'd been convenient enough to serve that purpose. I couldn't even say I was surprised anymore. Disappointed, maybe. Irritated, definitely. But surprised? No. Not after the way he'd turned the name I introduced myself with into something unrecognisable the moment I stated it, as if even that small courtesy was beneath his notice, and not after the ice in every word he'd made no effort to soften. So when the martini came back for a second time, I didn't hesitate before draining it, deciding I'd had enough of the evening to care about anything else. ‘Screw it.’ The night was already ruined, so what difference would one more bad decision make when it was piled on top of everything else that had gone wrong? [Lina, slow down,] Viola's voice rang out in my ear, soft and worried in that familiar way she got whenever she thought I couldn't hear the fear beneath her words. [Seriously. You're drinking too much.] I didn't answer her. Not with him sitting right there and watching me like I was something mildly distasteful he'd ordered by mistake, so I let her voice fade into background noise, just as I'd let everything else about this evening fade away, from the ruined plans and pointless performance to the growing certainty that nothing about tonight could be fixed by trying harder. My head had started swimming a little by the time I set the glass down, and some distant, more sensible part of me recognised that as a problem, but I chose to ignore it because sensible decisions hadn't gotten me anywhere good tonight. I reached for my phone, intending to check the time and maybe find some excuse to finally put an end to this farce, but that was when my own carelessness caught up with me. Reaching for the phone with the same hand that held my glass caused it to tip over, spilling its cold contents across my lap and onto the stone beneath my feet. The sharp, sour smell of alcohol spread around me, clinging to a dress I'd actually liked wearing before tonight. That was it. That was my limit. I grabbed my things and pushed myself upright too quickly, my balance already compromised by everything I'd poured into myself over the last who knew how many minutes. The world tilted for a second before levelling out, and I welcomed the small, petty satisfaction of simply walking away from this. "You—" Whatever he meant to say, I didn't wait to hear it. When he reached for me, some old, stubborn instinct made me flinch back, away from his grip, beyond his reach, and away from anything that might pull me back into this disaster for even one more second. My heel landed on the wet stone at exactly the wrong angle. There wasn't time to process the fall, only the sickening lurch as the ground vanished from beneath me and the horrible weightlessness of a body with nothing left to catch it. And then the water took me. Not gently, and most certainly not like something that could be eased into, but like a slap, cold enough to steal the air straight out of my lungs before I even understood what was happening. I went under still gasping, and the gasp became a mouthful of chlorine and panic. Everything after that dissolved into chaos. My limbs wouldn't cooperate, flailing uselessly against water that seemed determined to hold me exactly where I was. My dress, once elegant and now nothing but dead weight, dragged at me every time I tried to kick upward, soaking in more water than fabric had any right to hold, pulling me down each time I fought my way an inch higher. I couldn't tell anymore which direction was air and which was the bottom of the pool. My eyes burned so fiercely I could barely force them open, and what little I could see dissolved into meaningless blurred light, refracted and distorted into something that made no sense. My chest had become a single point of screaming pressure, lungs begging for something I couldn't give them. ‘Oh God, I’m actually going to drown.’ That thought appeared in my mind with a strange, detached sort of clarity that felt entirely separate from the panic consuming the rest of me. ‘I shouldn’t have let myself get talked into this whole stupid mess in the first place.’ As the burning in my chest sharpened into something unbearable, as the edges of my vision folded inward into a darkness that had nothing to do with the water around me, I felt everything that had led me here come rushing back all at once—Viola's guilty face on that video call. Ruth's knowing smile over dinner. The wig cap pressed against my scalp. The handshake he'd refused to take. The shrimp I'd eaten out of pure spite. Every insult, every clipped, cold word, every choice that had somehow, impossibly, brought me to the exact moment where my body stopped fighting and simply began, quietly, to sink.