He sounded so sad, so disappointed, that I swung my legs off the bench and leant against him, resting my head on his shoulder in a show of solidarity.
‘I wouldn’t make the same decision now,’ he said, speaking more quietly, ‘but, in the wake of the email leak, I was prepared to do whatever I could to save my career. And I . . . ’ He lifted one hand as if searching for the right words, but then dropped it. ‘I was in a state of shock, I think. I’d always thought I was so different from the rest of my family; I’d had a job since I was fifteen, I’d got damn near perfect grades, I’d changed my name – I’d done just about everything I could think of to not rely on being a Leventis. But when it came down to it, it turned out I was still getting ahead because of my name, just not the one I’d expected.’
‘And then you got engaged?’ I realised too late that I sounded too incredulous to be polite, but he just let out a dour little laugh.
‘If two sets of families have been a disappointment, try, try, try again, right? Vanessa was the one thing going right, the only person who’d stuck by me and asking her to marry me seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’ He paused. ‘Things look different after the fact, don’t they?’
I thought of Dec, how seeing him earlier that evening had felt so different from the way it had in the past. ‘Yeah, they do.’
‘When I started with AHC, it was like my first year at Jessop & King all over again. I had something to prove and I spent every waking hour at the company. Vanessa didn’t mind, she was the same.’
He stopped again and, after a few seconds, I lifted my head from his shoulder to look at him.
‘But you didn’t marry her?’
His mouth twisted and any hopes I’d had of a ‘we just grew apart’ finale faded.
‘Ready for another shocking revelation?’
I was fairly sure I wasn’t, but I grimaced back at him in a sort of ‘hit me’ way.
‘A little over a year after I proposed to Vanessa, I was contacted by a woman called Yu-jin, who’d worked in the Jessop & King IT department with Leif, the man who’d leaked King’s emails. She’d moved interstate just before the job cuts had been enacted and, when she asked for a meeting, she told me she’d only just found out that Vanessa and I were engaged. I was tempted not to see her; I’d just begun to feel like I was back on track and I didn’t want to drag up the past, but Ari’s got a good sense about people and he insisted I see her. He was right, of course. Yu-jin was in town on business and I met her at the bar in her hotel. It didn’t take long for her to say what she had to say and I appreciated that she was clearly uncomfortable being the messenger.’
I raised my eyebrows to point out that he was being cryptic again and he sighed.
‘Yu-jin had found out Leif had been accessing King’s emails a month or so before the downsizing was announced. When she’d confronted him about it, he’d told her that the information he’d uncovered made him a whistle-blower, not a criminal. He shared some of the emails he’d found with her, including the ones describing the details of my appointment and, unsure what she should do, Yu-jin sought advice. From Vanessa.’
‘From Vanessa? How did Yu-jin know Vanessa?’
‘It’s Vanessa’s job to know people.’
And, just like that, the lunch I’d had with Vanessa a few weeks ago made sense; she’d even told me herself it was because I’d become a ‘celebrity’ at AHC. She’d wanted to know how I fitted into the issue between Dec and Theo and, once she’d figured out that I had nothing to do with it, she’d not bothered to contact me again. I felt both relieved and a little bit used, but how I felt wasn’t the point, so I brushed my own experience with Vanessa aside to concentrate on Theo’s.
‘So,’ I said slowly, trying to put it together in my mind, ‘if Yu-jin was one of Vanessa’s contacts and told her about the emails, how come they were released a month later? Why didn’t the pair of them stop that Leif guy?’
Theo looked at me, as if expecting me to work it out and, when I looked back blankly, he said gently, ‘Vanessa’s advice was that Yu-jin take a job in another city and forget all about Leif and the emails.’
‘But that would mean . . .’
‘Vanessa had been trying to get me to work for her company for a long time. She knew that, once the industry found out how I’d got my first job at Jessop & King, I’d have little choice other than to take her offer. She’d win.’
I stared at him, trying to find some way for his words not to mean what I thought they did. In the end, however, I could only splutter, ‘But– but that’s insane! You can’t seriously be telling me that Vanessa knew that you were going to be thrown under the bus when the emails were released and deliberately didn’t do anything about it just to make it easier for her to headhunt you.’
He lifted one shoulder dismissively. ‘She’s very good at her job.’
‘She’s very . . .?’ I said faintly, before rallying. ‘I don’t care how good she is at her job, to pull a stunt like that with anyone is nuts, but to do it to her own boyfriend? She must’ve known how hard you’d worked to stand on your own feet, how undermined you’d feel when you found out what your dad had done.’
‘She’s also very good at compartmentalising.’
For the first time, I found his composure not so much soothing as infuriating and I reached out and gave his arm a light punch as I demanded, ‘How are you so calm about this?’
One side of his mouth quirked. ‘It’s not my first time hearing about it.’
‘Okay, so what was your reaction the first time you heard about it?’
His lips returned to a flat line and he barely spoke above a murmur as he replied, ‘When I left Yu-jin, I went back to Vanessa’s and my flat and threw my Aver trophy through a window.’
Finally, a sensible reaction. ‘Fair enough, too,’ I said.
‘The window was closed at the time.’
‘Still fair.’
He chuckled darkly and then leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees and loosely linking his fingers between them. ‘Vanessa regretted what she’d done, I believe that. When I confronted her with Yu-jin’s information, she was genuinely remorseful, but it was obviously too late for us and we broke up.’
Frankly, that didn’t seem like enough punishment to me. Surely what she’d done was illegal in some way? What about criminal charges? What about her becoming a pariah?
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, hearing my voice crack. ‘How come Dec’s story paints you as the bad guy? He was saying all this stuff about how you’d got with Vanessa to get you the job, then dumped her afterwards.’
‘Yeah, that’s the story doing the rounds, but it doesn’t matter. I have no interest in outing Vanessa. I don’t want revenge or vindication, I just want to do my job.’
He didn’t want revenge or vindication? Well, I did! I was practically shaking with how much I wanted it for him.
‘Aren’t you angry?’ I asked, feeling my eyes tear up with the injustice of it all. ‘I’m so angry!’
He shook his head. ‘Don’t be, it doesn’t get you anywhere. Trust me on that. I’ve spent years being angry at Philomena, at Harvey and Lena, McKillop, Lechstein, King, Leif, Vanessa . . . it just goes on and on.’
I didn’t care if it didn’t get me anywhere, I wanted to crush all the people who’d made the smart, proud man beside me so miserable. I wanted to expose them and humiliate them and cover them in all the tar and feathers I could lay my hands on.
But he didn’t. And, after everything he’d just told me, what Theo wanted had to take priority.
I took as deep and as calm a breath as I could and only sounded mid-level furious as I said, ‘Fine, but, knowing the truth about what Vanessa did – or didn’t do, I suppose – why the hell are you still working at her family’s company?’
‘Stubbornness.’
I let out a surprised choke of laughter and he smiled ruefully across at me before adding, ‘I didn’t want to slink off with my tail betwee
n my legs, I wanted to prove that, despite everything, I was an asset worth having.’
‘Those are some past tenses you’re throwing around there,’ I pointed out and he sat up straighter and seemed to be choosing his next words very carefully.
‘It’s been over a year. I think I’ve made my point.’
‘You’re thinking of getting a job somewhere else?’
He nodded, but in such a cautious way that it just about broke my heart. He was clearly so used to having every confidence betrayed that even this fairly innocuous confession had put him on his guard.
‘My lips are sealed,’ I promised him.
‘I wasn’t suggesting–’ he began, but I reached over to squeeze his arm,
‘I’m serious. All this and anything else you tell me that’s clearly your business and nobody else’s, it stays with me. I’m on your side.’
He just looked at me for a moment, and then he reached over and slid his hand around the nape of my neck, pulling me in for a short, fierce kiss.
‘You’re amazing,’ he said as he pulled back, but I shook my head.
‘No, I’m not. I only look good in comparison to the complete psychopaths you seem to be constantly surrounded by.’
He let out a shout of laughter, the loudest, truest laugh I’d heard from him in all the time I’d known him, and, after a moment, I joined in. We laughed in the way you do when the laugh itself becomes the reason you’re laughing and, by the time we’d got ourselves under control again, I could see that the stress lines between his eyebrows had softened and his shoulders relaxed. I, too, felt a million times better, the fury of a few moments before simmering down to a background throb.
‘Are you hungry?’ Theo asked and I grinned.
‘Always.’
‘Good.’ He got to his feet and then held his hand out to me. ‘I made a reservation at Vine Street for us.’
‘Seriously?’ I took his hand and practically bounced to my feet. ‘Vine Street? How did you pull that off?’
‘Well, when I say I made a reservation, what I mean is that Ari made the reservation and it’s a brave maître d’ who turns him down.’
In the midst of my excitement – Vine Street’s confit de canard was rumoured to instantly transport you to a bucolic duck pond in Gascony – I looked down at myself and made a face. My work-crumpled clothes and the barest remnants of the already minimal makeup I’d applied that morning weren’t exactly fit for the occasion.
‘I’m not really dressed for somewhere like Vine Street. Are you sure you won’t be blacklisted for bringing the riffraff in?’
Theo gave me a quick up and down. ‘You’re perfect,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
*
The morning after he’d told Giovanna the circumstances that had led to him working at AHC, Theo had awoken to the sensation of her eyelashes fluttering against his neck. Her body had been perfectly relaxed against his, all the tense agitation from her conversation with Dec and her reaction to Theo’s side of it soothed away in the intervening hours that they’d spent eating and talking and kissing and–
He stopped himself from following that thought. It was hours later, he was at work and it was hardly the time to sport an erection.
‘Come on.’
He looked up to see Ari standing in the doorway. He appeared expectant, but Theo regarded him blankly until Ari crossed his arms.
‘You told me you were going to stop deleting all the invites to work morning teas. It’s Audrey’s birthday, there’s cake in the staff room.’
When Theo still stared at him, thoughts of mandatory workplace demonstrations of affection sitting at odds with the easy intimacy with Giovanna he’d been remembering, Ari sighed impatiently.
‘You like Audrey,’ he said, in the same patient tone a mother might say, ‘Carrots are good for you’. ‘She’s a valued member of your team. And when you like someone and you like the work they do for you, once a year you awkwardly sing a song to them and eat sub-standard cake while making forced small talk with your colleagues, that’s just the way it is. So up you get, and off we go.’
Theo didn’t bother being offended by Ari’s patronising tone. He knew that these banal social occasions were a necessary part of the job, but he doubted he would’ve been able to put himself through them without his assistant’s urging.
By the time Ari had steered him to the kitchen, it was packed. Audrey was popular and it looked like hardly anyone was choosing to use work as an excuse to avoid her birthday celebration.
Ari, of course, immediately bounded off to gossip with someone or other, determined to make up for not knowing that Vanessa was trying to turn Ann into a spy, leaving Theo to nod at the few people who caught his eye. He’d hoped to stay up the back and slip away to his office as soon as the necessary time had elapsed. Unfortunately, more people were coming in behind him and, in the swell of interest elicited by the appearance of a cake box, he found himself shunted into the crowd proper. Even worse, looking to his right he saw he’d ended up next to O’Connor who, perhaps feeling his eyes on him, turned his head.
O’Connor’s expression made it clear he was just as unhappy with this placement as Theo was, but neither of them had time to shuffle away before someone had whistled for silence and begun a short speech congratulating Audrey on making it through another year.
While his attention was ostensibly on the speaker, Theo was more aware of O’Connor beside him than of anything else. This guy had been the reason Giovanna had looked so miserable when he’d found her near The Brother the day before. O’Connor had called her a last resort and then broken his promise to give her thirty days’ peace from him to – what? Tell her that Theo was a bad person? To make up some lie about why the two of them had been so short with each other in front of her?
Theo had told Giovanna that being angry didn’t get you anywhere, but, as the seconds ticked by, he found that his proximity to O’Connor was making his temper rise all the same.
The feeling was presumably mutual as people had only just started applauding the end of the speech when O’Connor leant over and muttered, ‘Leave Gio alone.’
Before Theo could frame any sort of response, or even decide whether he was going to respond, the candles were lit and the people around them broke into a rousing version of ‘Happy Birthday’. Neither Theo nor O’Connor joined in, instead forming a tense island in the midst of the gaiety.
Of course people noticed. Not only because eyes were always on the pair of them, especially when they were together, but also because they no doubt – how had Giovanna’s friend Zoë phrased it? – reeked of testosterone.
As the last of the three cheers and desultory clapping faded away, Theo made a snap decision and, keeping his voice low, ordered, ‘My office. Now.’
He couldn’t let O’Connor just say something like that without follow up and follow up seemed to be just what O’Connor had intended as he turned sharply and pushed his way out of the throng, his usual desire to charm nowhere to be seen. Theo spared a moment to wish Audrey a happy birthday even as his mind had already turned to the unpleasant conversation he was about to have.
O’Connor was staring unseeingly at the wall as Theo joined him in his office but snapped his eyes to him at the sound of the closing door.
Not for the first time wishing that his office wasn’t made totally of glass, Theo tried to arrange his posture so it wouldn’t appear confrontational to anyone looking in and said, ‘You clearly have something to say, but there’s a time and a place.’
He sounded formal and priggish even to his own ears and O’Connor visibly bristled.
‘I’m sorry, you’ve conned my best friend into fucking you without any kind of commitment in return and I’m the one being inappropriate?’
Right, so there weren’t going to be any pleasantries.
‘I’m not going to talk about Giovanna with you.’
O’Connor shook his head, his lips pulled tight. ‘Don’t call her Giovanna, no-one calls her th
at. In fact, don’t call her anything. Leave her alone.’
‘I’m not pursuing her.’ Theo knew he should’ve kept quiet, but, despite usually being so good at turning the other cheek, he couldn’t let O’Connor dictate the terms of his relationship with Giovanna. ‘And if she doesn’t want to see me anymore, she’s free to tell me so herself.’
Perhaps just as aware of how on-show the two of them were, O’Connor swung round to stare out the window before he asked, ‘How much has she told you about what’s going on with us?’
Theo considered this. What Giovanna had specifically told him about the make up and break up of her relationship with O’Connor didn’t actually amount to much, but he’d heard the way O’Connor had spoken to her up on the High-Rise balcony and he’d seen her distraught expression the previous evening and that told him volumes.
‘Enough,’ he said grimly.
‘So then you know she’s taking a few weeks to figure some stuff out, that she’s . . . vulnerable. It’s a pretty sick individual who takes advantage of that.’
From what Theo understood about O’Connor and Giovanna’s years of friendship, O’Connor would be the one who knew all about taking advantage. He could tell by O’Connor’s expression as reflected in the window, however, that he himself regretted his word choice, so he didn’t press the point.
‘My relationship with Giovanna–’ he started to say, but O’Connor snorted loudly and turned around.
‘Your relationship?’ he mocked. ‘You don’t have a relationship, isn’t that supposed to be the point? All of the perk, none of the work? No money wasted on dates or time wasted on getting to know her. That’s how I know this is all bullshit, by the way, because Gio would never just sleep with someone. She’s only had something like three boyfriends in her life, she’s never had a one-night stand – there’s no way she’d suddenly just start something up with someone she barely knows.’
Theo shrugged. ‘I can’t speak to her motives,’ he said calmly, even as he felt something inside him sink. He’d guessed that Giovanna hadn’t exactly run out of room for notches on her bedpost, but it still made him uncomfortable to discover that their no-expectations arrangement was something totally new to her.
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