“What do you think the identity of the Voice of Reason would be worth to Canaan’s public relations department? Or how about their legal team?”
“That’s different. The thing at the job fair was a competition, a game. That’s not the same as ruining someone’s whole life by selling them out.”
While Javier would never stoop to rubbing himself all over someone to encourage their complicity—like Nelson would—he did allow himself to linger against Tim for just one more moment. To breathe in the scent of him. To feel his skittish tension. It wasn’t with conscious thought that he turned his head so his lips grazed Tim’s neck. Maybe it was simply to fit himself more closely to Tim’s hard contours. Or maybe it was to turn his sighted eye against Tim’s body, rather than his blind one, and effectively shut out the world for just a moment. Whatever the reason, the result was the same. His lips dragged over Tim’s neck, where stubble grew more sparsely. The feel of the whiskers, just long enough that they weren’t stiff, drew a sigh from Javier before he could check it. No doubt it played over Tim’s vulnerable throat just as effectively as if Javier had planned it that way.
Tim’s breath hissed in, and he trapped Javier’s face with both hands and tilted his head for a kiss.
It was sudden and impulsive, and rather than being forceful in its demand, needy. Javier didn’t want to respond…but he couldn’t stop himself. He opened his mouth to Tim, drank in his ragged breaths, and suddenly there were hands everywhere, so desperate it felt more rife with groping than it had the night before, when there were three sets of hands rather than two. They both gasped, attempting to keep quiet, but their bodies strained for each other like they were starving for contact, and their breathing was loud. Javier stroked his hands over Tim’s broad shoulders and down his upper arms. Tim ran his fingers along the place where the eye patch ties cut into Javier’s temple, and then over his jaw, cradling it so his thumbs framed their kiss, as if he needed to feel it with his hands, as evidence to believe it was really happening. Their stomachs brushed. Their hips. And the swell at the front of Javier’s trousers prodded the bulge in Tim’s jeans.
Javier broke the kiss. He felt as dazed as Tim looked, and he wanted nothing more than to fill his lungs with breath and dive in for another, deeper kiss…but he forced himself to say, “We can’t—not now. Nelson’s on the verge of figuring something out, and when he does, he’ll tell them. We need to shut him up.”
Tim processed Javier’s words for a moment, and then said, “I love—”
“Don’t say it.”
Stubbornness flashed in Tim’s eyes, and he looked like he was about to repeat himself.
“Not now,” Javier added, more gently. “Not while all this is happening. If you say it now…it doesn’t count.”
“When will it count?”
Javier wasn’t sure himself, but he said, “Once things get back to normal.” He pulled himself away from Tim’s solidity, his strength, and turned back toward the conference room door.
Behind him, Tim said, “What if they never do?”
***
If something big was going to happen—if Manhattan were to blow up, or maybe a meteor would strike the earth and knock it into the sun—Tim wished it would just happen already, before something inside him crumbled. Because he’d just blurted out the L-word—how stupid was he? Why was he always the first one to say it? And why didn’t anyone say it right back to him the first time? Ever?
Then, just as Tim figured that in his case the L-word might as well stand for loser, Javier claimed that saying those three little words in a time of emergency “didn’t count,” in that sexy accent of his….
And now Tim didn’t know what to think.
Javier stepped out through the door, said, “Nelson,” and gestured for him to come into the office. Marianne had emerged from the bathroom while they were disentangling from that kiss—and her eyes were all red and puffy. Just great. As if Tim didn’t feel like enough of a jackass.
Nelson didn’t take kindly to being summoned—no big shock. He stood and considered Javier’s invitation for a lot longer than he needed to, then he said, “Aye aye, captain,” with an extra helping of sarcasm and a mock salute—just in case anyone there might have thought he wasn’t going simply because it suited his own purposes.
Talk about volatile. While Tim was busy worrying his own awkwardness would cause something fragile inside him to break, the chemistry between those two seemed likely to blow them all to pieces.
Nelson’s shoulder grazed Tim’s chest when he came into the office, and Tim nearly jumped out of his own skin. But how could he react to Nelson like that when he’d just sort-of proclaimed his love for Javier? Baffling. He realized they were two separate people, right? Except…tumbling into his life together like they had, all violence and adrenaline and confusion—maybe his brain saw them as a package deal. And those stirrings he felt when Javier was pressed up against him, talking to him in that low, authoritative voice…he felt that thrill when he looked at Nelson, too.
And now Nelson was making it a point to brush up against Tim whenever he was within range.
Once Tim shut the door, Nelson and Javier faced off, and Tim wondered if that explosion he’d been sensing was about to ignite. He backed against the wall and steeled himself. When he was sixteen and he’d figured out he was gay, he’d done a bunch of research, Kinsey reports and the New England Journal of Medicine, before he’d broken the news to his parents, who’d received it with stalwart resignation. So being attracted to men, Tim had decided long ago, was relatively normal.
This new thing—the one where he was turned on by Javier snarling at Nelson? Yeah, that couldn’t be healthy.
“What have you told them?” Javier demanded.
Nelson perched on the edge of the desk and tossed his hair out of his eyes. “I didn’t tell them anything, Sir.”
“No, you’re just marching around with a printout in your hand asking them what kind of manna they eat after you’ve been reading reports all day.”
Nelson cracked a grin. “True. But they don’t know the extent of Mr. Reason’s technogeekery. C’mon, do you seriously think I’d blow Tim’s cover?”
“I think we can trust them,” Tim said.
Javier started to protest, but Nelson talked over him. “So do I.” He indicated the drifting stacks of printouts with a wave of his hand. “You need help with those, right? Well, I can think of two perfectly intelligent people who are getting way bored with tic-tac-toe.”
“Since you seem to have formed a working theory,” Javier said, “perhaps you’ll let me in on it so I know what I’m looking for help in finding.”
It seemed like Nelson might keep his ideas to himself. He stared at Javier for such a long time that Tim had to clench his jaw from babbling something just to fill in the silence. But finally Nelson relented, and said, “C’mere, come closer, and I’ll tell you.” He glanced over at Tim and met his eyes, too. “Both of you.”
Nelson slid a hand around Tim’s waist and drew him close, so he was straddling Nelson’s knee. He pulled Javier close, too, so they were all in a huddle. “You’re both pretty trim. How often do you eat Canaan Products manna, Tim?”
“I dunno, once or twice a week?”
“If that. I’d say you’ve got ten kinds of manna in your cupboards.”
“You looked through my cupboards?”
“What about you, Javier?”
“Not if I can help it—it’s trash.”
“That’s what I thought,” Nelson said. He pulled them closer still, smiling to himself—and it wasn’t about sex. That’s what Tim was feverishly repeating. They were talking manna, not flirting. Although everything Nelson said or did seemed like flirting…. “You guys were right. Canaan Products did move something off the shelves.”
Nelson slid his hand into Tim’s back pocket, and Tim struggled to make sense of what he was saying. “I made it through the whole top-secret folder. This big project that’s so hush-hush,�
� Nelson said, “this thing Canaan’s hiring for—opening whole new plants, creating a brand new marketing team—they’re rolling out a manna that’s low-calorie, low-fat, and high fiber. Manna-Lean.”
“Are you sure that data is recent?” Tim asked. “What if that document was something out of their archives?” Really old archives—back from the seventies, maybe, when obesity was a more than just a freak condition.
“Randy put on ten pounds over the past six months,” Nelson explained. “A guy with his body type, his height? He’d need to be eating an extra couple hundred calories a day. And he says he even cut back on his drinking when he needed to punch a new hole in his belt. What does he eat? Canaan Products manna.”
“Sorry,” Tim said. “You lost me. I thought you said Manna-Lean was low-calorie and low-fat.”
Nelson smiled a secret smile. “Right. But I didn’t say Manna-Lean was the product they recalled. On the last page of the formula, there’s some metadata. This little gem was called ML Phase 1. I don’t think Manna-Lean is even in stores yet. It’s too new. Canaan doesn’t sell specialty products, and at this point, that’s all Manna-Lean could possibly be. Unless….”
He looked from Tim to Javier and raised his eyebrows.
Javier said, “Unless there was a high enough demand for it.”
Chapter 22
There were so many ways in that office Nelson could think of to get high: a few stiff shots of that tasty scotch in the desk drawer. Another dose of Peritriptan. Or even better, a replay of Javier and Tim going to town on him ’til his toes curled. But as much as Nelson adored sex and drugs and ridiculously expensive booze, what tickled his fancy the most was the sheer, unadulterated joy of discovery.
In the past twenty-four hours, he’d discovered the following: the taste of a genuine Cuban cigar; the way a human iris might fragment if it had been sliced open and chemically burned; the way Tim’s breath caught when he was on the brink of shooting his load; the fact that not only was Canaan Products preparing to roll out a whole new line called Manna-Lean, but that they’d been laying the groundwork for their new product for years by cornering the cheap manna market, and then secretly tweaking their existing formula to create the demand.
Nelson might not have pieced together the significance of the first reformulation (Phase 1) if he’d come across the fattening manna on its own, since it hadn’t actually been engineered to simply be more caloric. Yes, a manna with a greater caloric load, something higher in carbs and fats, would certainly result in some of its consumers gaining weight, but others would find themselves getting fuller, faster—and those consumers would respond with a sort of self-regulation. Simply put, they’d eat less.
Evidently, that was not Canaan’s goal.
Instead of making a richer manna to pave the way for Manna-Lean, Canaan tweaked something deep down in its existing product’s structure. Something that didn’t change the taste, texture or appearance. But something that they’d labored for years to develop and had recently test-marketed in Manhattan.
Something they’d then recalled as quietly as they’d distributed it, all in one fell swoop, rather than letting it rotate out naturally.
Why?
If Randy’s new pants size was anything to go by, Phase 1 yielded results. So there must have been another reason to pull it from the market. But without an understanding of how the mechanism worked, it was anyone’s guess as to how it might have failed badly enough to warrant a recall.
Nelson needed to know more. From where? An email? A marketing strategy? Sales projections? Something…anything. While he didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, he was positive they would find it somewhere. Boy Genius Tim had not only hacked into the research and development databases where all the scandalicious formulas lived, he’d accessed every other bit and byte at Canaan Products, right down to the chain letters, fart jokes and shaved beaver jpgs lurking inside the inboxes of the sales division.
It was a fascinating haystack…which made finding the magic needle in it all the more challenging. Nelson had Tim and Javier straddling him, one on each knee, waiting for him to tell them what he suspected about the recall—and he was bursting with the urge to grab both of them by the hair and jam their faces together for a three-way kiss—with plenty of tongue. But there was no way either of them would read it as the exuberant high-five in which Nelson would have intended it. Sex was about something else, for each of them. Or for everybody, Nelson supposed, if he were to be philosophical about it. Nelson settled for nuzzling Javier’s cheek and giving Tim’s butt a squeeze. Disappointing, since he really wanted more…but he didn’t want to start a whole big thing over what his every last action meant. Not now. Not with Canaan Products’ data to plunder.
“Javier,” he said, “This Phase 1, a ‘gateway manna,’ for lack of a better word…I don’t really get how it works. Not yet. I have a few suspicions, but I need to know more. The mechanism they’ve altered…and the reason they suddenly yanked it all—because the stuff they’re messing with? They’re calling it a fortification—but it’s more like a drug than an additive.” He indicated the huge paper drifts with a tilt of his head. “We can’t do it alone. Randy and Marianne aren’t gonna sell Tim out. Someone put us in physical danger, not only us—them too. Not just with the riot, but by adding things to the food they’ve been eating. When your life is on the line like that, I don’t think money matters.”
Javier stared at Nelson. His uncovered eye was narrowed. Probably, his covered eye was too. “Money always matters.”
He’d said it so gravely, Nelson felt goosebumps race down his arm.
Javier looked at Tim and said, “Estimate, how much more data is left to print?”
Tim looked at the stacks of printouts he’d already run. “That’s probably only half of it.”
“It’s up to you,” Javier told Tim—in a tone that made it perfectly clear he thought it was a gigantic mistake to trust either of them. “Those two might know my name, but they'd never be able to trace me. You? They know exactly where you live. Both of you.”
Poor Tim looked so stricken, Nelson gave his butt another squeeze. Even that didn’t seem to console him. Tim disengaged from the huddle and went to assess the stacks and stacks of printouts, as if he couldn’t tell just by looking at the sheer volume of data it would take days for him and Javier to comb through it alone while Nelson tackled the science-geek stuff. He loaded in a fresh ream of paper, and the printer whirred through a warm-up sequence and began quietly filling its output tray again.
Before the data-explosion, the post-job-fair days and nights seemed long and fraught with the agony of watching and waiting to see which particular shit would hit the fan next. Now, though, with all this work to do, Nelson almost welcomed the reprieve from the world in which to do it. He swung his feet, eager for Tim to make the call so he could get back to the formulas. Tim was so torn between pleasing Javier, and recruiting his new friends like his gut told him to, that it seemed like he’d stare at the sliding piles of printouts for the rest of the night.
“Trust doesn’t only go one way,” Nelson said. Maybe it was merely a half-formed idea as he blurted it out, but why not? He just knew he was itching to get a better idea of what the ramifications of putting the Phase 1 modified manna on the market had been. “How about this? If they want in, they each give you something in return. Trust for trust.”
“They will lie,” Javier said. “Anyone with a brain in their head would.”
No, actually. But now Nelson could extrapolate that Javier certainly would…not that it was any big surprise, given how grim and unflinching he was about everything. “Would they lie,” Nelson suggested, “even if they knew that Tim can hack in anywhere and double-check anything? I don’t think so.”
“Not anywhere,” Tim said. He seemed pleased, though, that Nelson thought so.
Nelson threw his arms in the air. “Hey, man, you do what you need to do. But me? I’ve got my work cut out for me if I’m going to get
a handle on this whole thing with no samples, no lab, nothing but a printout of some formulas.”
Javier crossed his arms and looked first at the rumpled, much-handled printouts Nelson had been worrying all afternoon and evening, and then at the rapidly filling output tray. “If we could locate the emails that belong to the research and development team,” he said, “maybe there would be some indication in plain language of why the formula was altered—what they hoped to achieve, and by what method—rather than just this snapshot of the final product and our speculation about it.”
Nelson slid off the desk and approached Tim, who stiffened nervously as Nelson slipped his arms around his waist and pulled him close enough to nuzzle his neck. “That’s as close to a blessing as you’re gonna get. I suggest you act on it.”
***
It was a childish idea, this thing about trading secrets. Not surprising, considering the source. Javier sat at the conference table and took stock of everyone. Tim nervous, Marianne and Randy eager to know what was going on, and Nelson—while Javier wouldn’t have called him self-satisfied, exactly, it was clear he was accustomed to being right. Not in a smug way either, but in the way of someone who’d mapped out all the possibilities while everyone else was just realizing there was even a situation brewing.
“We need your help,” Tim said. “And I hate to have to do this, but if we let you in on this thing, we’re going to need you to…” he blushed, and faltered.
Nelson chimed in. “You wanna play? It’ll cost you a secret. A big one. A huge one. Something that’ll prove you’re serious, because I guarantee you, kiddies, we are absolutely, one hundred percent dedicated to this cause, and we need the assurance that you’re totally in too, all the way.”
“You really are serious,” Randy said—like he thought Nelson was kidding around, except that he wasn’t.
“We can’t force you,” Nelson said. “If you don’t want in, keep yourself to yourself until it’s safe to leave. But if you do…oh man, it’s some wicked messed-up shit….”
The Starving Years Page 19