“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Are you sure?”
Jim wasn’t, but his priority was making sure Shannon was okay. “You really don’t mind that I spilled your situation?”
“My situation is something I talk about all the time. I see a therapist and a support group. You could benefit from those things, too, you know. Say the word and I will call Dr. Pryce and ask for recommendations.”
Jim sighed. “The word.” Grant had asked how to move forward. This had to be a start.
Chapter Eight
GRANT DIDN’T care that it was 11:00 p.m. when he burst through Tanya’s door into her office. The club was almost dead, and the few couples he’d stormed past had been too preoccupied with each other to notice him in their presence.
“Why didn’t you tell me Jim wanted someone to beat him because he needed absolution over his friend’s attempted suicide?”
Tonya hadn’t flinched when he almost threw the door off its hinges. She was undoubtedly accustomed to histrionics, but now she lowered her coffee mug and stared at him. “I didn’t know.”
“You knew he was guilty over something.”
“Sit down.” Her office was back to normal order—one chair and one pillow in front of the desk.
“I’m not going to sit. I’ve whipped him three times now, and every time I thought, ‘Wow, he reacts like he’s got a lot to deal with,’ but I never had any idea—”
“Grant. Do you want me to make it more difficult for you to take a seat?” Tanya’s clipped tone cleaved into his fury. He stopped and considered. If he let her do it, would it help? Had it helped Jim?
Grant prayed it had. If not, what the fuck had he been doing except hurting him? Sure, he’d initiated the agreement with his own motivations, but if Jim didn’t get what he needed out of it, Grant couldn’t justify doing it. Tanya picked up the small crop on her desk.
Grant sank into the chair. “That won’t be necessary.”
“Truffle?”
Grant extended his hand, expecting to encounter the box he’d given her. He pulled back when he saw it wasn’t. “Who else is bringing you chocolates?”
“A lady never tells.”
He sniffed. “I can’t believe you’re chocolate-cheating on me.”
“Eat it anyway.”
“Fine. But you can’t make me like it.”
He chewed sullenly. “You really didn’t know?”
“I had no idea.”
“Would you have stopped him if you did?”
“No. People come for all different reasons.”
“Would you have told me?”
Tanya contemplated. “I don’t know. I think I would have been more adamant about convincing him to tell you. Does this change things?”
Grant took another truffle. “I don’t think I can give him what he wants anymore.” He looked at Tanya, aware that his anguish played unfettered on his face. “How am I supposed to whip him when all I want to do is hold him? He doesn’t deserve any of his guilt. You should have seen how his roommate reacted. He was so upset. And I just ran out. I shouldn’t have….” He regained control. “I came straight here.”
“Grant, would you like me to pair you with someone for tonight? Someone to take your mind off this? Perhaps that’s why you came instead of picking up the phone?”
“I don’t want to take my mind off it. I want to know what to do.”
Tanya pushed her mug toward him. “Good.”
“I THINK we should stop,” Grant said. For a split second, Jim didn’t see the generous, gallant Grant he’d come to know, but rather the pragmatic, efficient businessman he’d first met.
“What?” Jim stopped with one foot in Grant’s front room and the other starting down the hallway into the kitchen. He’d already undone his belt.
“I spoke with Tanya and asked her advice. She agrees with me. A man has a right to know when he’s being someone’s alternative to therapy. Haven’t I been clear, open, and honest about my reasons for wanting to do this?” Grant asked.
Jim opted not to answer. He examined Grant instead, who stood with a half-filled glass tumbler in front of his Chagall, giving off the vibe of someone who’d spent some time deciding on a pose and was now doing his best to enact it. Jim sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. Shit. Figured Grant would take what he’d heard yesterday too far and overreact. Further than you have? His conscience chose a fine time to butt in.
“Goddammit,” Grant continued, “Tanya should have said something. I could have caused legitimate psychological harm to you because I was unaware that your reasons for joining into our arrangement are intricately linked to a deep-set and apparently long-held guilt—” Even his tone had returned to that rote sense.
“No,” Jim snapped, Grant’s words waking him up. “No, no, no. You do not get to do that. Do not act like you cared what my reasons were when you sent Rory to scout me. Miss Wyatt thought we’d be a good fit. It’s on you that you didn’t press for details.”
“I did ask. Several times.”
“Sure, after we were already into it, and I was afraid if you knew, you’d stop. Looks like I was right. In the beginning, I was desperate enough that I’d have given them if you put any effort into it. You just assumed I had a kink for it.” His belt buckle jiggled from his movements. Jim did it up with furious fingers.
That seemed to shake Grant. “Plenty of people have discipline kinks without your kind of baggage. You kept it from me. You used me.”
“Let’s talk about using people, Grant.” His gut lurched to say Grant’s long awaited first name with this anger, so recently earned with yesterday’s joys and too soon used like this. “Tell me that’s not what you did with me yesterday. I thought, great, here’s a guy who understands my needs. He’s not touching me, and I’m getting off even though he’s in the room. I thought it was hot. Then you fucking bolted and now you’re ending our arrangement?”
“Jim, that has nothing to do with—”
“Fuck. You.” Jim blinked away two sharp tears of rage. Nothing to do with…? It was everything. He’d finally found someone who understood him, and now Grant was standing here blaming him. Jim couldn’t remember when he’d last read someone so wrong. All the other guys he’d dated—You aren’t dating him—hadn’t even pretended to care about Jim’s needs. Jim had changed himself to grab a chance at reciprocated love. Look how that had turned out. He’d given up. Then Miss Wyatt had matched him and Grant and… now this.
Grant thumbed two small pills out of a wooden box in his pocket and swallowed them with a sip from the glass. Jim tried not to be alarmed as he watched Grant take medication with alcohol. “Can we calm down, please? For the sake of my health, if nothing else.”
“What’s wrong with your health?” Jim asked.
“It’s nothing for you to worry over.” He glanced at Jim. “I wasn’t using you, yesterday. I promise. I wanted to feel close to you. I… got the impression that you did too. We talked about it! Tell me if I’m wrong. Jim?” Grant sounded cautious.
“You’re not wrong.”
“Good. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I thought you were paying me so you could hurt me.”
“I was paying you so you’d allow me to relieve some of my stress, but I don’t know that it’s working anymore. You’ve become too important to me.”
“What are you saying?” He just wanted Grant to come out and say it. Send him away, say adios, won’t see you later, nice knowing you, but—
Grant took a breath, but Jim steadied himself. “I’ve thought a great deal about this. I care deeply about you, and I am disturbed that I may have hurt you more than physically by engaging in actions that you intended, without informing me, to have a smothering effect on your psyche.”
Weirdest breakup of a nonrelationship ever. “Did your lawyer help you with that?”
“All me, I’m afraid. Jim, if I’m harming you, this cannot continue.”
“You aren’t harming me.”<
br />
Now Grant looked angry. “I damn well am, if yesterday is anything to go by. Shannon had no idea! Look at how close you two are and he had no idea!”
Jim sighed. “Shannon is furious with me for dealing with my guilt like this. He doesn’t even think I have anything to feel guilty about. I started this to find a reprieve, but it hasn’t done what I hoped for. I think I need something that makes me talk about it, rather than push it out of my mind, like I’ve been trying to do.”
“Would you….” Grant took a step toward him. “I mean, if you’re comfortable, you could talk to me.”
“Shannon already set me up with his therapist.”
“Oh thank God.”
“You—” Jim burst out laughing. “You were sincere, weren’t you?”
“Yes, but I’d be a terrible person to give advice. You’ve seen my life. You’re one of the best things in it right now.”
“I don’t know if that’s good or bad,” Jim said.
Grant chuckled. He emptied his glass.
“Next to Shannon, you’re the best thing in mine,” Jim admitted. “I don’t want to lose you.”
“Why aren’t you two together?”
“As in dating? Shannon deserves someone who is really, really into sex. That person is not me. We’re best as friends. Also, Shannon’s straight.”
“Rory will be glad about that.”
Jim burst out laughing. “You know she likes Shannon too?”
“I was supposed to play matchmaker yesterday.” Grant set his glass down. “Can I ask what happened? If you’re comfortable?”
Jim paused to think how he could tell it without violating Shannon’s privacy. “Well, the short story is, about two years ago Shannon got beat up by a group of guys. I thought he was okay, but I was wrong. One day last year, I came home. I found him in the closet. He was in the hospital for a week, then in the psych ward, and then he had to start seeing a therapist and a support group. He hasn’t gone outside unescorted since.” Jim’s voice shook, but he made it through the story. Shannon could tell it now without wavering. He’d had more practice, or maybe it was different when it was your story.
“I’m so sorry,” Grant said. “I can’t imagine how you must have felt.”
“So what do we do now?” Jim asked quickly, before the look of sympathy on Grant’s face broke him.
“You go home, get some sleep, and I try to figure out how to apologize to you for our first fight.”
“Was this a fight?”
Grant smiled and touched Jim lightly on the shoulder. “I’m sorry.” He moved his hand away so fast the touch was a memory almost before it was reality. Jim bent and kissed Grant on the cheek before stepping back.
“We should probably take a break until I can get my head together. You don’t mind if we skip next week?”
“Take all the time you need.”
“I’ll call.” Jim stepped into the elevator, smiling. He felt like a happy fool; ten minutes ago expecting to be disappointed and instead feeling like he couldn’t have chosen a better day to be in love.
GRANT MARCHED into Melanie’s office—the one Jim had thought existed to house a chair—and pulled the painting of Narcissus off the wall. In it, the youth stood nude among a thatch of cattails on the edge of a pond. Narcissus gazed into the distance, having not yet discovered his reflection, which waited in the water to be found. Although it technically belonged to Melanie, he’d purchased it. In a deception he wasn’t proud of, Grant had bought his wife a portrait of his fantasy. Thankfully she’d liked it, too, but not enough to take with her when she moved. He’d always been a little disappointed that Melanie had hung it in her office rather than in a room where they could both enjoy it.
“Can you deliver this for me?”
“Is this going to Jim?” Rory asked. She’d come over to drop some papers off, and Grant had asked her for one more quick errand. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his chef’s assistant walk past with a load of groceries. Bea and Bennett were coming over for dinner, so the kitchen had been a flurry of activity since breakfast. Usually all this happened while Grant was at work, so he hadn’t actually met the assistant, who was the third or fourth in a string of new hires.
“Yes. Now listen, Shannon is shy. Might be agoraphobic. In any case, he’s jumpy, so I’m guessing he won’t open the door to a regular messenger. So let him know I sent you.” Grant expected a more excited reaction to an assignment that would finally put Rory in the same room as her crush, but Rory glanced with skepticism at the painting. “What?”
“Look, sir, maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, but do you think it’s a good idea to give an expensive painting as a first gift? It’s a little bit… overkill. This is something you want to build up to.”
In the early days, Grant had corrected Rory for addressing him with his first name. It was an impulse he still regretted because now whenever she pulled out the “sir,” while she didn’t outright say he was ridiculous, she had a tone.
“It’s an apology gift as well. I love you and I’m sorry.”
Rory stopped short of rolling her eyes. “Have you heard of flowers?”
Grant regarded the painting. “So you think the painting is too much?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” He handed over his black Amex card. “Go find a florist in Washington Heights and buy them out.”
Rory let the card hang between them as she stared at Grant like he’d lost his mind. From the kitchen, Chef Alejandro screamed in Portuguese. A second later, the assistant scuttled out and raced for the staircase, probably intent on the second kitchen upstairs.
Grant sighed. “Still too much?”
“I just think you need to focus on prepping for your Paris trip right now.”
“I can do both.” A new idea popped into his head, one he’d wait until after Rory Rejection was gone to put into play.
“You trust me?” Rory asked.
“Reluctantly, yes.”
She snatched the card. “I’m on it. Don’t worry about a thing. If I have any problems using the card, I’ll call you.”
“My happiness is in your hands,” Grant said.
“How is that different from any other day? I get a bonus for this, right? Because I’m off the clock right now.”
Grant pulled a hundred out of his wallet and put it in her outstretched hand.
“Plus cab fare,” Rory said. “You know I’ll have to get a gypsy cab coming back from the Heights, and they don’t take cards.”
Sighing, Grant added another sixty. Rory waggled her fingers for more. “Washington Heights to Queens, man.”
Forty more. “That’s for tip too.”
“Thanks. Address?”
Grant told her.
She saluted him and left the portrait leaning against the wall. Alejandro’s assistant bustled back down clutching a soup tureen and pair of tongs.
“What’s your name?” Grant asked.
“Peter, sir! Nice to meet you!” Peter didn’t stop. He didn’t seem aware that Grant was actually his boss. Or maybe, in the face of Alejandro, he didn’t care.
THE CHILDREN had dressed for dinner, following their grandparents’ tradition. At first, Grant had suspected a gag when the elevator opened to reveal Bennett in black tie and Bea in an evening gown.
“I feel underdressed,” he joked.
“We thought it would be fun,” Bea said.
Grant excused himself and went to his closet to change into matching attire. When he returned, Bea and Bennett sat on the couch, nibbling from a tray of aperitifs.
“Dinner will be ready soon. Alejandro just came out to say,” Bennett reported.
“You look well, son.” Dinner was no time to say it was nice to see Bennett not in jail or drunk or fucking someone’s wife, so he let the compliment stand.
“Thank you.” Bennett gestured to the Narcissus painting, still leaning on the wall. “Are you giving that back to Mom?”
“No, I—”
�
�We would love to have it for the gallery,” Bea interjected. “If you’re getting rid of it.”
“You both know it’s my favorite painting, so lay off.”
“So why is it sitting there?” Bennett asked. The painting had been in Melanie’s office his entire life.
“I’m—” Grant considered lying. He could say he was repainting the office. But then he’d actually have to repaint it. And when he did get around to giving Jim the painting, he’d have to explain again. He bolstered his courage and faced his children. “I’ve been seeing someone. The painting has special meaning to us, and I was planning to give it to him. However, Rory said it was too big an overture at this stage of our relationship, so I’m waiting.”
Bea lit up, but Bennett sucked on his lip and flipped his gaze from the painting to Grant. “Oh, Daddy, is it Mr. Sieber?”
Grant nodded, with a smile for his daughter.
Bennett stood. “The stripper? Exactly what stage is your relationship in?”
“We’ve been dating since—yesterday.”
“Jesus.” Bennett turned away. “And you’re already giving him priceless works of art? Thank God for Rory.”
“It’s hardly priceless,” Grant contested. Bennett turned to glare at him.
“I was going to ask how a portrait of a ripped naked guy could have special meaning to you, but I guess I don’t need to anymore.”
“Bennett,” Bea snapped. “If Daddy is happy, that’s all that matters.”
“When Daddy gives the business away to a stripper, it won’t be.”
Grant glanced at the sideboard and opted not to step over for a drink. “We’re dating. I like him. I’m not giving the business away and couldn’t even if I wanted to. The board has to approve anything like that. So calm down. I don’t care if you accept it, but when I bring him around, you will treat him cordially.”
“I don’t understand any of it. How did you even meet?”
“A mutual friend.” He held his breath, praying Bea wouldn’t mention what she knew about Jim. Bea remained demure. Grant sighed. “Look, I know this is difficult, but think of everything I’ve done for you and try to be happy for me.”
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