“Excuse me?”
Andre’s eyes bore into hers. The goal was to make her uncomfortable and when she was feeling all sorts of heat on her, she would run out of the room and get him that coffee. Even though he didn’t really want it.
Watching Colleen Caddell squirm was fast becoming a box office act to him.
But just as he was wrong on the whole room, workspace thing, he was also wrong on this one. Colleen stood her ground and said the word he least expected, not wavering in the slightest.
“No.”
“No?” he repeated.
“Yes, Mr. Lourdes. Go get your own coffee.”
Well, that went in the opposite direction he had planned. But he didn’t push it. He simply left the room and after a few minutes, he was back with two cups of coffee. One for himself and one for her, completely oblivious of the third party in the room.
When he realized Tobias was, in fact, a person, he turned unapologetically to him and said, “Oh, did you want one?”
He chuckled, waving it off. “It’s alright. I don’t drink coffee anyway.”
Andre spread his thin lips in a weird smile. “Good. Now you two get to work. I’ll just be over there, minding my business while you do your thing.”
Then to Colleen, he winked. “Carry on, darling.”
For the next half hour Tobias went on and on about a business idea, Andre sat on the sofa in the room, doing just as he had said; minding his business. While Colleen, completely distracted with the task at hand, kept stealing glances at the man. There was just something so magnetic about him in that black t-shirt and black jeans that made her unable to keep her eyes off him for more than two seconds. You wouldn’t blame her. Andre Lourdes was truly a work of art.
Then his phone rang. She watched as he answered it and in less than five seconds, his expression hardened. After the call ended, wordlessly, he left the room.
ANDRE was surprised his brother called. As far as he was concerned, showing up at the Meet and Greet didn’t exactly put them on terms enough for him to come to visit two days later. Plus, he hadn’t actually shown any good. He was throwing lies to his partner, Colleen, two seconds into an introduction. So why the hell was he at his resort?
Gaten was waiting in the lobby when he arrived. They simply acknowledged each other’s presence with a curt nod before Andre gestured to him to follow him up to his penthouse.
When in the apartment, he made himself comfortable while Andre fixed them a drink. He handed one to his brother who eyed it with skepticism.
“If I wanted to poison you, I would have done it last week Saturday,” said Andre, easing himself into the chair across from him. “Unlike you, Gaten, I do not hold onto the silly mistakes we made as children. I have grown out of that phase. Can’t say the same for you.”
For the longest while, Gaten remained silent. Then, he sipped from his glass and let the drink sit in before gulping the entire thing at a go.
With his face scrunched up, he responded. “If I was holding onto a grudge, would I be here?”
“That’s the thing, brother. I don’t know you anymore. As do you. So I can’t tell if you’re sitting in my chair right now contemplating how you will silence me without anybody knowing.”
He laughed. “Now come on, Andre. That’s a bit too much, don’t you think? Of what use will you be to me dead?”
“Of what use am I to you alive?”
He smirked, bobbing his head slowly. “Touche.”
“So, to what do I owe this surprising visit?” Andre leaned into his chair, pulling up one leg over his thigh.
“I came to talk.”
“Talk? That’s rich.”
“Mmmhmm. We didn’t get the chance to have an actual conversation at the party, Saturday.”
“I wonder whose fault that is. . .” He wavered, looking heavenward.
“I was just telling the lady a must-know when dealing with a Lourdes. Especially the infamous Andre Lourdes.”
“So that is why you lied to Colleen?”
“Oh is that her name?” Gaten smiled, muttering the name to himself. “It’s a beautiful name for a beautiful woman, yeah? You know, I have had quite the history with redheaded women like her.”
He watched as Andre’s gaze grew darker than usual and he clenched his fists around the glass.
You could hear the anger in Andre’s voice as he asked again, “Why are you here, Gaten?”
That tone in which he spoke just now was intimidating to everybody he had met. That is, everyone except Gaten. It was something he possessed as well, so guess you can say it did not affect either of them. It was the law of the negation of negation all over again.
Replying, Gaten said, “You were always the better one at English. So, what does it mean when they say I want to bury the hatchet?”
Andre’s gaze lowered to his brother. Bury the hatchet? What a joke! There wasn’t even any hatchet, to begin with. On his end anyway.
“I would rather you, precisely, state your intentions than throw around idioms like it’s some sort of wordplay battle. Besides, we were both terrible at English, so I wouldn’t know the kind of hatchet you are talking about.”
“You can choose to play dumb all you want, Dre, but you know what I mean. We have spent the last fifteen years hating each other for what-when I think of it now-makes zero sense.”
“Correction,” Andre held up his hand. “You and you alone have spent the last fifteen years and more hating me. There was a time when all I wanted was my brother. Our mother was never there for me. Hell, she even forgot she birth a boy named Andre Jacques Lourdes. No matter how much I hoped that she would come for me one day, attend my high school graduation, or show up to my college graduation, she never came. And I made my peace with that. Camilla was always too busy for her sons. Especially the one that’s not sucking up to her.”
“That’s not true-”
“No? Which part isn’t true? Your beloved mother being too busy for us or you sucking up to her.”
“You misunderstand me, brother.”
“I misunderstand you?” He uncrossed his legs, leaning forward. “So you didn’t tell her about me taking Principal Wellington’s monocle knowing well that she would scold me and you will get the bicycle she promised one of us for the summer?”
“I only wanted her to caution you. You were getting out of hand.”
Andre scoffed derisively. “Is that what you tell yourself? It was a prank for heaven’s sake, Gaten, and you were in on it! Yet you reported me, deliberately leaving out your name in the whole story just because you wanted to be the golden son.”
“No–”
“No what, Gaten?” His voice was beginning to break and his eyes glistened with unshed tears. “Aside from the whole bicycle thing, you knew that was strike three for me. And while she dragged me onto that plane, you watched on. Smiling. You were fucking smiling as they shipped off your eight-year-old twin brother to a country where he knew not a single soul!”
He didn’t know when the tears spilled from his eyes. It was as if he was reliving that day all over again. The worst day of his life: twenty-one years ago.
“Four years later, you would go on to call me, to gloat about how she took you to Lourdes Aerospace for the first time,” he continued. “How they all grinned at you, hailing and calling you the next CEO. And then fifteen years ago, you called to say you have no passion for Engineering and I shouldn’t venture into it because what? Then I would be the rejected son eligible to run the company? God, Gaten! You were despicable! Even beyond my imagination. I spent nights wondering why my brother hated me so much, hurting all over again when I remembered the days we used to perpetuate mischief together. And then one day, I stopped caring.”
Coolly, Andre leaned back in his chair and recrossed his legs. “So you see, Gaten, I have no hatchet. And frankly speaking, I don’t care if you’re still hanging yours in the air. I have spent the last twenty-one years of my life knowing I had a mother who’d rather put me up for adoption and a brother who despised me. Nothing you would say could ever make up for those lost years.”
Gaten was silent. For almost five minutes. And it didn’t look like he was planning on saying anything either so Andre stepped in with his final words.
“If that is all you came to say, I have heard you, brother. I am feeling light-headed now so I’ll head into the room. I trust you can see yourself out when you’re done contemplating.”
With that, Andre left him in the living room.
You’d expect that Gaten was feeling a mountain of regret right about now, feeling an enormous amount of remorse inside of him. But what he felt was rage. Rage so dangerous he resisted the urge to go into Andre’s room right now and use that hatchet on him.
Since he couldn’t do that, he channeled that anger towards something else. He pulled out his phone from his pocket when he was on his way out and dialed the number. On the second ring, the receiver answered and Gaten spoke. “I’m at the Resort. Meet me at the beachside in five. I need to put my brother away before the will hearing.”