There was a message from Liu. He’d given Liu his personal email, and the billionaire had used it a few times, to ask questions or request more information. But this one wasn’t like that.
Dear Alexander,
I’ve been thinking about the fact that you and Cary met at summer camp. You Canadians seem very fond of outdoor pursuits. I personally have never seen the appeal of sleeping on the cold, hard ground, but I would like to try this pastime of my adopted country. My daughter has reserved two adjacent sites at Algonquin Park for Friday night and has purchased the necessary equipment. My hope is that both you and Mr. Bell will join us. You can show us a thing or two, I’m sure. And, frankly, I have to say that I relish the idea of getting to know both of you outside the confines of the office. If we are to believe some of the great novelists of your fine nation, there’s nothing like a stint in the wilderness to test a man’s mettle.
Sincerely,
Don Liu
Alexander dropped the phone and let his head fall forward onto the steering wheel.
Fuck.
He was going back to camp.
Chapter Twenty
Cary hadn’t been camping in a couple years. But that wasn’t what was eating at him as he pulled his car into the small lot at the trailhead at Algonquin. It was that he hadn’t been camping with Alex Evangelista in twenty years.
But it was possible that he had been in love with Alex Evangelista for twenty years.
And what a fine fucking time to have figured that out.
His mind had run through endless scenarios since that ill-fated dance at the wedding two weeks ago. What if he had sought Alex out years earlier and apologized? Way before this Liu stuff had brought them together. What if he’d done it right away, that summer after camp?
But he always came to the same conclusion, which was that it wouldn’t have mattered. Alex and his pride and his pursuit of success never would have stood still long enough to listen. It was only when his hand was forced by the competition for Liu that he’d even deigned to make eye contact with Cary. And besides, Alex had told Cary, both outright and via his actions, that there was nothing between them. Nothing but sex. Until there wasn’t that, either.
Well, hell. He’d sat in his car long enough. He could see Don and Linda unloading supplies from the back of theirs. They’d be hiking into the site but not a terribly long distance. Liu had done enough research that he was disdainful of “car camping,” but Cary had talked him down from a remote site that would have required a portage to one that required only a modest hike in.
“Alexander will be joining us in a couple hours,” said Liu, adding a bag to what was already a rather daunting pile of stuff, given that they were only spending one night—and that they had to carry everything in on their backs. “I’ve sent him directions to the site, and he assures me he’ll have no trouble finding it.”
That suited Cary just fine. Two fewer hours spent with Alex was two hours closer to being done with this. And, hell, if he could use those two hours to impress Liu and his daughter without Alex getting in his way, all the better. Because he had pretty much decided that the only way to salvage this whole situation was to win the Liu account. That way, he’d walk away with something in addition to this fucking broken heart. “All right,” he said, watching Linda struggle with an overstuffed backpack that didn’t have a frame. She was going to ruin her shoulders before they reached the site. “Why don’t we do some redistribution before we hike in?”
The redistribution wasn’t enough. “We’re going to have to make two trips,” Cary said several minutes later. “Tell you what, let’s leave the overflow in my car. We’ll hike in, and then I’ll come back for it.”
And so Cary spent the next two hours hiking, first in with Don and Linda, chatting about everything from some of Liu’s business concerns to how the local school system was since Linda’s brother Peter was soon to be arriving with his young family, and then back out, by himself.
And he almost made it back in by himself, too, when that goddamned Ferrari pulled up.
Alex had told Liu that he wasn’t an outdoorsman anymore, but he sure looked the part. Cary realized that he’d never actually seen Alex in anything other than a suit since camp. He’d even worn a casual linen suit to games day. Cary would have said that Alex was the kind of guy who looked his best in suits. Ruling over a boardroom was his natural habitat, or had become so. But, damn, it turned out he could own the casual look, too. Slim-cut, dark-wash jeans sat low on his hips, and he wore a blue and black flannel. He knew how to pack, too. Still not having seen Cary, he pulled a proper camping backpack from his car, hoisted it on his shoulders, and strolled over to the map posted at the trailhead.
Cary gave a momentary thought to turning tail and heading back as fast as he could to the campsite. But he was tired and carrying twice what Alex was, so he’d probably only end up being overtaken anyway. So, time to man the fuck up. He stepped out from the tree cover. “Hi.”
Alex looked up, and for an instant, Cary thought he saw something dark in his eyes, something almost like fear, if that had been possible, but Alex Evangelista wasn’t afraid of anything. Of course not, because after taking in the scene, one corner of Alex’s mouth turned up. “You really take that whole Boy Scout ‘Be prepared’ shit to heart, don’t you?”
Cary rolled his eyes. “This is their stuff. They packed enough for a week. I’ve already been in once, carrying my stuff and some of theirs. This is round two.”
Alex whistled. “Well, then. Shall we?”
Cary gestured for Alex to go ahead of him. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all.
…
This was going to be worse than he had imagined. As Alexander walked the trail and listened to Cary’s footsteps behind him, it all came rushing back. The trail system at camp. Those narrow gravel trails. More specifically, walking those trails with Cary, who, on those cool, quiet mornings, had squeezed in next to Alexander, close enough that Alexander could feel the post-run heat emanating off his skin.
This time, it was Alexander’s skin that was hot, and for no reason. The trail was shaded, and this far north, the mid-June air was cool. But he kept having to use his sleeve to wipe his brow, which was slicked with sweat. With every step Alexander took deeper into the woods, the vice around his chest tightened a little more. He kept trying to shift his backpack, feeling like if he could just take some of the pressure off, he’d be able to get a proper breath in.
Alexander knew what was happening. He could recognize the symptoms of a panic attack, even if it had been sixteen years since he last had one. He’d started having them that summer in college, when his mom was diagnosed with cancer. The jujitsu had helped, but the thing that had made them go away for good was finishing his MBA and getting his first job as a trader. Knowing he had made a decision and followed the path that unfolded from that decision and that it was finally paying off. Knowing that he was doing all that was in his power to create a secure life for himself and his mom. Knowing that if he ever met Brooks Martin III again, the proverbial last laugh he would have would be fucking enormous.
Something moved in the woods, and Alexander flinched. It turned out to be just a squirrel scampering up a tree, but he couldn’t relax. The sensation put him right back to that last year at camp. Brooks had sneaked into the showers and stolen Alexander’s towel and robe, then had lain in wait for him in the woods when he’d tried to dash back to the cabin in the buff. As a rational adult, Alexander could look back at Brooks and see a homophobe who was protesting too much, a guy who was a little too interested in the mechanics of gay sex. But that rational adult was somewhere else now, back in civilization. He was in a bank tower, or a penthouse, watching the markets make him richer and richer. Right now, in the woods, Alexander was a sixteen-year-old kid who had no allies.
Well, that kid had had one—or thought he’d had. He pushed away the image of a sky full of shooting stars. That “ally” had thrown him under the bus at th
e first opportunity.
“Hey,” came a soft voice from behind. “You okay?”
“Yes,” he said quickly, forcing himself to pick up the pace because whatever else happened, Cary Bell could not push up and walk beside him here. He had given up that right twenty years ago.
“Yes,” he said again, quieter this time, like he was trying to convince himself. What had his jujitsu teacher told him back then? “People don’t panic in the present.” That had become his mantra, first for getting over the panic attacks, and then more generally for succeeding in the world of finance. Ruthless concentration on the present followed by rational parceling of the next few steps. He looked at his feet. His boots were new, and he had a blister on one heel. Every step with his right foot caused a short stab of pain. Good. He could use that. Step-pain, step-no pain, step-pain, step-no pain. When his breath slowed, he looked up for something to concentrate on. There was a tree up ahead marking a fork in the road. Get to that tree. That was the next step.
He kept doing it, looking ahead, finding the next marker, and carrying himself to it. And it worked. Eventually the next marker was Linda Liu, who was struggling to light a fire.
“Find something familiar to do,” was what the doctor had told him twenty years ago, when he’d had his first panic attack and rushed to the emergency room thinking he was having a heart attack. “Encourage yourself to slip into a comfortable routine.”
“Alexander!” Linda’s face lit up when she caught sight of him. She was kneeling and blowing on some kindling in the fire pit, but she abandoned her task as he approached and stood to greet him.
He wasn’t blind. He knew Linda was into him. He assumed she had figured out he was gay. As a trusted deputy in her father’s global empire, she was a smart, well-connected woman, and he never hid that part of himself. She seemed like one of those women who was fascinated by gay men, for reasons that always eluded Alexander. But she had to know there was no hope in hell that anything could happen between them.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said with enthusiasm. “I graduated top of my class from Harvard business school, but damned if I know how to survive in the woods. I’ve been trying to get this thing to stay lit for twenty minutes.”
Well, shit. Who cared if Linda knew the score? Charming he could do. Charming was familiar. So he shrugged out of his backpack, shot her a smile, and said, “One fire-making lesson coming up.”
He looked over his shoulder. Cary was deep in conversation with Liu.
Winning was another thing that was familiar. Winning he could do.
“Come on over right here next to me,” he said to Linda as he knelt at the base of the fire pit. He took off his flannel shirt and spread it next to him on the ground, leaving him in only a white tank top. “Here, sit on my shirt so you don’t get dirty.”
…
“I think I just saw a shooting star!” Linda exclaimed, pointing to the sky. They were sitting around a campfire, and everyone else’s gaze followed her arm.
Everyone’s except Alex. Because that was his cue to leave. “I’m just going to take a little hike before the dessert course,” he said, rising.
It was fully dark, so a hike was probably the last thing he should be doing, but he had to get out of there for a bit. The panic had receded, but he was jumping out of his skin. All day long, he’d had to pretend: that he was happy to be here, that he was comfortable with Linda fawning all over him. As he saw it, the only upside to this excursion was that no one had decided it would be fun to play charades.
And Cary, of course. There was something about being back in the woods with Cary that was slowly unraveling the sense of self he’d so meticulously constructed over the past two decades. His mind kept going over and over the many conversations they’d had those mornings on the way to the dining hall. No detail was too small. Remember that time they’d pondered why if Gandalf and Saruman never aged, were they already so old? Or Cary’s detailed sermon on the merits of New Balance running shoes? Or the way water had beaded on his chest as they lay together on the dock in the moonlight?
But then he’d grown disgusted with himself. The past was dead to him. He had burnt it down and rebuilt his life on its ashes. So why the hell couldn’t he stop thinking about it?
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Linda asked him. “It’s getting dark.”
“The trails here are flat and well-marked,” Cary said, not bothering to look up from where he was roasting a marshmallow. “He’ll be fine.”
Alexander was half tempted to announce his intention to stay, after all, if only because Cary so clearly wanted him to go. But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. If he was going to survive the night, he needed to get some breathing room, to get away from these people and remember who he was. So he put on his jacket, grabbed a flashlight, and set off toward a river that ran through the park. Sitting by the rushing water for a while would calm him.
He walked and walked. Using his flashlight to illuminate the trail in front of him, he let the thud of one foot in front of the other on the packed dirt of the trail calm his out of control thoughts. He took slow, measured breaths, counting how many footsteps he could fit into each inhale, each exhale, letting those footsteps lull him.
Until they lulled him so much that he tripped over a tree root that covered the trail, and a pain so intense it made him cry out lanced into his ankle. He fell, cursing himself, cursing his ankle. Cursing Cary because he wasn’t sure where the pain was worse—his ankle or his heart.
Chapter Twenty-One
Cary tried to tell himself that Alex was a grown up. If he wanted to storm off into the woods in the dark by himself, that was his prerogative. His problem.
It was better without him here, anyway. He hadn’t been able to get a word in edgewise while Linda and Alex were huddled together in a confab while Alex was explaining the finer points of chocolate-to-marshmallow ratio and Linda was gazing at him like he held the secrets to cold fusion.
It was too much.
He could take Alex being distant, cold. He could even take Alex on the warpath, sneering and issuing vulgar threats. But he could not take Alex flirting with Linda Liu like he was Don Fucking Juan. Watching the man he loved—the gay man he loved—all but making a pass at a woman, either for shits and giggles or because he saw it as a tactic in his fucking, never-ending “war,” had grown old pretty fast.
And, hey, maybe he could take even that if they hadn’t been in the goddamned woods. It wasn’t like Alex wanted him, so what did Cary care? But the campsite setting was freaking him out a little, taking him back to Camp Blue Lake, and not in a happy-nostalgia kind of way. He kept having to remind himself that he was thirty-five years old. He had, by anyone’s measure, a wildly successful career. He was no longer a fifteen-year-old closet case looking to the actions of others to know how he should feel, how he should act.
So Alex could go fuck himself—that was the basic conclusion he’d come to.
Still. He’d been gone an awfully long time. Two hours and twenty minutes, to be precise. Not that he’d been keeping track. He looked at his watch in the dying embers of the fire. Only eleven p.m., but eleven p.m. in the woods was different than eleven p.m. in the city. It was pitch black, and the forest was alive with the sound of night—cicadas and owls but also unidentified sounds that were probably nothing. But still. And, away from the fire, it was cold. And getting colder.
He stood. “I’m going after him.” He’d spent the past hour and a half assuring Linda and Don that Alex was fine, that there was no reason to worry. That Alex could beat a black bear in a standoff, no problem.
But the truth was Cary didn’t know. Alex hadn’t actually been that great at outdoors stuff. He could tie knots, but that was about it. Cary had always had to help him when they did outdoor survival tests—slip him extra matches, secretly help brace his shelter, that sort of thing. His money was still on Alex over the hypothetical black bear if only because Alex could outthink anything, but… It
was that “but” that was starting to scare him the more time went by. “I’m sure he’s fine. You two hit the hay, and we’ll all see each other in the morning.” He started putting together a pack. Hell, if he was going to give in to his paranoid imaginings, he was going to be prepared to actually encounter his paranoid imaginings. And when he didn’t, when he had hauled himself and his shit into the dark forest only to find Alex sitting by the river skinning a bear, he was going to lose his fucking mind.
Either way, he wasn’t looking forward to his task.
After reassuring Linda and Don again and making sure they were set up in their respective tents for bed, he set off. He walked quickly despite the dark, propelled forward by his growing fear, one that had him methodically stopping every fifty or so yards to shine the flashlight around the inky woods, looking for any sign of Alex. It was fucking freezing out here despite it being mid-June. He’d forgotten that part, how even on warm summer days, the northern Ontario wilderness saw the night-time temperatures plunge. He zipped up his coat, trying to remember if Alex had been wearing one when he’d set off.
After forty or so minutes, he came to a fork in the trail system. A huge tree marked it, and a color-coded sign was nailed to it showing hikers their options. “Shit,” he said aloud, his voice echoing through the night. Short of a trail of breadcrumbs, he had no way of knowing which way Alex had gone. He shone the light on his wristwatch. Nearly three hours since Alex had left the camp. Something was wrong. No matter what was going on with them, no matter the situation with Liu, Alex wouldn’t just disappear for three hours.
He stopped for a moment, listening to the sound of his heavy breathing as he tipped his head back and tried to see some stars. It was impossible; the foliage was too thick this deep in the woods. What the fuck was he going to do if something terrible had happened? He was so angry at Alex for putting him in this position.
His Heart's Revenge (49th Floor Novels) Page 15