by Holley Trent
Probably because he didn’t know what he wanted.
“Oh, I’m a bad host. Shit. Never think about the right stuff.” Theo scrambled to his feet and darted into a neighboring room. An attached restroom, perhaps. He returned with wet paper towels.
He handed them to Raleigh and then fixed Raleigh’s pants for him.
“I like these pants,” Theo mused.
Raleigh raised a brow and worked paper towel between his fingers. “Do you?”
“Yeah, they go with the shoes.”
“You like my shoes?”
Theo didn’t respond. He seemed to have drifted into another world again, kneeling on the sofa, staring toward the bathroom.
Curious, Raleigh just watched him and tried to understand.
After a couple of minutes, Theo seemed to snap out of the daze.
“You want a pillow? Blanket? You’re going to spend the night, right? Until the maids come?”
After his brain had churned into overdrive to make sense of the rapid-fire torrent of words, Raleigh laughed. “You want me out by seven, you mean.”
“No. You can stay. Stay forever if you want. I just figured you’d want to be gone.”
Raleigh didn’t try to make sense of the statement. Something wasn’t quite right about it, but he didn’t have the bandwidth to figure it out at the moment. The day had been too long—too eventful. Mostly good, though. Theo was good. Different.
“Let’s just play things by ear, hmm?”
Raleigh wouldn’t have to break any promises if he didn’t make any, but for the moment, he was content to be in the odd stranger’s company.
“Playing by ear,” Theo murmured, taking on that thousand-yard stare again. “Yeah, I’m good at that.”
Chapter Six
Everley was almost always at the office early. She liked to beat the morning public transportation crush, plus, she could think better before the parade of people past her office door began.
Of course she had to leave it open. She couldn’t be the daughter of a VP and close herself away. She needed to be accessible, according to her father.
She scoffed, even thinking it.
Her father rarely ever made it into his office before eleven. “Off-site meetings,” he claimed. “Networking,” he said.
“Bullshit,” she muttered.
Seven fifteen.
She drummed her fingertips on her wrist cushion and stared at the message Raleigh hadn’t responded to. She had plenty to do without doing his work for him, but she could take thirty minutes to organize those packages.
But she wouldn’t overstep. She knew better.
She’d learned that lesson from other coworkers, from the receptionist down on the first floor to the lady in HR who still hadn’t corrected the spelling of Everley’s name on her pay stubs.
They hated her. She got it.
She just wished she could do something to earn that derision for a change.
“It won’t matter, Everley,” she mimed her father as she opened the day’s checklist. “They can hate you all they want to but you’re going to be their boss someday. Hur hur hur.”
She rolled her eyes and pushed back from her desk. Somewhere in that byzantine maze of a building was the box of tree ornament samples she’d ordered for a holiday anthology’s promo. She needed to pick a ball, lock in the tagline, and somehow get that expense signed off on by five or else she was going to miss a placement opportunity at a major convention.
She was experiencing death by a million little bureaucratic paper cuts.
It’d all seem so much less miserable if there was one person in that building she could shoot the shit with. One person who could make her laugh and feel joy without guilt.
One person who’d defend her.
She didn’t care if that made her weak. She was only human.
Chapter Seven
Raleigh wasn’t sleeping.
That was evident to Bruce by his frequent sighs and his restless movements.
Bruce didn’t do anything to alert him to the fact that he knew he was awake, though. He was garnering far too much enjoyment from Raleigh’s idle fondling of his hair and his occasional cock shifts.
He’d shift himself just so beneath Bruce to eliminate some of the pressure, and ever so slowly, Bruce would nestle himself exactly where he had been before. He didn’t mind the squish. Enjoyed it, actually. He didn’t mind being hard half the night. The stimulation was pleasant and so was the company.
He was content to lay there on top of Raleigh indefinitely, if he’d let him, but the sun had come up and Raleigh had given up any pretense of trying to sleep.
His hands roved beneath the blanket Bruce had tugged down from the sofa back.
Bruce was excited at the prospect that he might probe lower, but Raleigh’s touch stopped at the small of his back.
“Theo.”
It was so odd hearing that name coming out of Raleigh’s mouth, but of course, that was the one Bruce had given him. It wasn’t a false name, exactly. Just one that no one used. It was a distancing name—it delineated the man he was from the man the public wanted him to be. “Act like a rock star,” the label had said.
When Bruce hadn’t been able to figure out what that meant, they’d banned him from speaking in public. No interviews. He couldn’t even speak for himself during the VIP backstage shit.
Fans had thought that shit was great. They thought he was mysterious.
He wasn’t mysterious, though. According to his mother, he was “Inscrutable.” That was her “nice” English way of telling him he was off the rails.
“Theo,” Raleigh repeated.
Bruce pushed himself up on his palms and stared down at the rumpled redhead. “Hmm?”
“Fuck, you even look good first thing in the morning.”
“Do I?”
“You really are like a cat. Just roll off your cushion, give yourself a good stretch, and move on with your day.”
Bruce didn’t want to move on with his day. And he liked his human cushion, even the rigid bits.
Or especially the rigid bits.
“I need my phone,” Raleigh said. “It’s on the floor somewhere.”
“You calling a car?”
“I should.”
Bruce grimaced, but he got off and gave Raleigh room to search for his distracting little bauble.
Raleigh got moving after rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “Tell me something.”
“Something.”
Raleigh’s laugh was full of chest sounds. “Cute, but I didn’t just want to hear the sound of your voice.”
“What, then?”
“The accent. Where’s it from?”
Oh.
Bruce frowned.
Raleigh didn’t see. He was patting the floor beside the sofa. There was no way of knowing where he’d lost contact with his phone. Bruce certainly hadn’t been minding it.
“Don’t want to tell me?” Raleigh asked.
“I get asked a lot.”
“So do I, but it’s obvious I’m American, I think. Not so with you.”
Bruce had worked very hard to flatten his accent. His father had said he’d get further in life. After all, he’d managed to drop all of his foreign inflections, and English hadn’t been his first language.
“It’s...complicated,” Bruce said. “I grew up in Scotland. My mother is Scottish, but she fled to London as a teen and stayed. My father was born in South Africa. A bastard, to be honest with you. Mostly ignored by my grandfather until after apartheid ended both for legal reasons and other ones. He’s Dutch and Indian, amongst other things. Definitely some Chinese and Malagasy in there somewhere, not that you could tell from looking at him. Extraordinary impact of colonialism, I suppose.”
Raleigh paused his search and whistled low
. “That’s...quite a mélange.”
“Yes. Quite interesting.” Bruce shrugged. His mother had liked it. That was all he could say about it. He didn’t particularly enjoy talking about things that were beyond his control, and most other people didn’t enjoy him doing so, either. The eureka moment he’d had the day he’d realized that had been an uncomfortable mix of joyous and mortifying. He’d been careful ever since to try to offer silence until his input was requested. Often, he failed.
“And how’d you end up in LA?” Raleigh asked.
Bruce fidgeted with a sofa seam and shifted his gaze toward the curious redhead. “Doesn’t everyone end up in LA at some point?”
“If only that were true. Tell me.”
Bruce sighed. The story was boring for him. He hated telling it. “I ended up in a lot of places. This is one lily pad of many for me. Not my favorite one, but a crucial one, I suppose.”
“Tell me what you mean by that.”
Inscrutable Bruce. Get it together or he’s going to leave.
He twisted the meat of his palms against his temples and tried to sort his thoughts through the series of custom filters in his brain: Needless. Irrelevant. Boring. Useful. “I... I worked here. Or maybe I still do. I don’t know. Haven’t decided. Put out some records...a while back. With a band.”
“Oh? A band I’ve heard of?”
A triple-platinum band whose drum-heavy singles about bullshit were the background anthems for all sorts of commercials. Pickup trucks. Wrestling events. Vampire shows on cable.
Bruce tugged off a bit of string from the chair fabric and cringed at the little hole he’d pulled.
Shit. He didn’t always notice minor things. He should have been minding his hands.
His nan might have hurried over with a little pair of scissors to snip off the line and gently nudge his fingers away. She’d always found him other things to fidget with—to destroy, he’d once thought, but no. To find productiveness in other ways even if they didn’t all last.
His nan was dead, though. Had been dead for years.
“Theo.”
The name didn’t immediately pull him.
That’d been a mistake, giving Raleigh that name.
It’d seemed like a good idea at the time.
“I...” Bruce swallowed. Nodded. “Yeah. Probably. Band called Outward Reaction.”
No one was neutral about the band. They either loved them or hated them, so he was afraid to look at Raleigh’s face, but he needed to.
He needed to have catalogued those subtle changes in his expression and the increased set of perplexity when the statement didn’t quite add up the way he needed it to. “You’re...”
He’d found his phone. He was tapping the screen. Scowling at it.
“That’s not your name. Theo.”
Bruce shrugged jerkily. “It’s mine. Just not what people call me.”
“Who calls you Theo?”
“No one,” he admitted. “It was easier than telling you I’m called Bruce. You didn’t seem to know me. I liked that.”
“Oh.” Raleigh’s expression smoothed. “I can certainly understand that.”
“Because of your father.”
Just that quickly, his expression reverted to that wary one Bruce didn’t like as much. He was moving with purpose, now, fixing his shirt in his waistband. Smoothing his collar. “It seems you have me at a disadvantage.”
“Did I recognize you?” Bruce admitted. “Yes. Pretty much immediately, but not because of the father thing. That memory came a bit later. I matched your name and face to what I saw on the website.”
“What website?”
“Athena’s. It’s Athena, right? I get them all mixed up.”
If Raleigh’s brows had drawn together more slowly, Bruce would have added that sight to his list of things deserving further scrutiny—paint drying, water boiling, grass growing, Raleigh’s scrunch of disapproval.
“You submitted. Widely,” Raleigh said, pounding his fist against his thigh. “Bruce Engle. Three hundred thousand words of, what you described as ‘pre-apocalyptic political horror centered on the individual.’ Did I get that right?”
Not quite, but Bruce didn’t see the point of correcting him. And it’d been four hundred thousand. He’d been in some sort of mania. He wasn’t entirely certain he’d reached the end, either. In fact, he’d closed the book with a comma rather than a period to hint that there was more story to come.
He had so many things to say.
Bruce shrugged. “Postage is a bitch but email is free. I contacted everyone I thought who might be able to send it on up. I think it’s an important book.”
“Is that what you were thinking when you brought me here?”
Jarred, Bruce gaped. Raleigh couldn’t have hurt him more if he’d slapped him. Contrary to what his bandmates thought, he wasn’t so devious as all that. “I assure you, that was entirely at the back of my mind and I don’t appreciate the insinuation.”
“And I don’t appreciate being manipulated for my position. Fuck. I should have known better. I—” Whatever Raleigh was going to append to his statement was snipped, dropped, and abandoned.
Bruce was still waiting for those words when Raleigh disappeared up the stairs.
When he realized he wasn’t coming back, he scrambled to his feet and shouted, “It wasn’t supposed to go like that. We were getting along so nicely. You’re supposed to promise to stay in touch.”
He was at the top of the stairs, peering into the dark kitchen. Raleigh lingered for a moment in an open doorway at the side of the room, lips parted as if to speak, but then another door opened, and there was the familiar chatter of reluctant staff.
They hated starting their day at Bruce’s. They never knew what they were going to see.
Well, he wasn’t going to give them a spectacle. Some other day, maybe.
“I won’t be keeping in touch,” Raleigh said, dangerously soft before departing.
“Fuck.”
Bruce retreated into the basement, closing the door behind him before the cleaners could see that he was piqued and naked and start muttering again about how they didn’t get paid enough for it.
He’d send them away just so he could be alone and they could be happy.
But the truth was that they were paid disgustingly well for their discretion, and he needed the noise.
Silence was such a cruel reminder for what he already knew—that there was no one for him. No one was patient enough. No one waited around for him to get to the point.
He didn’t want to have to accept that, but he didn’t see where he had a choice. Giving up was easier than constantly rebounding from one rejection to the next.
Chapter Eight
“Remind me why I’m here again,” Lisa whispered several weeks later behind the antebellum-style paper fan she’d been recirculating hot air with for much of the past hour.
Everley cleared her throat and raised her own fan to obscure her lips. The fans were part of the party theme of 100 Years of Athena. The publishing house’s first blockbuster had been a rambling Southern saga about a too-stupid-to-live family who were constantly stumbling into good luck. The book was beloved. Everley tended to just smile and nod whenever people found out where she worked and brought up that rank monstrosity.
“You’re here,” she said through gritted teeth, “so I look like less of a social pariah.”
“Oh,” Lisa whispered back. “Aren’t you supposed to be schmoozing?”
Everley blew a raspberry and grabbed a few canapés when a cater waiter strolled past with the tray. “With whom? I’ve got pride. I’m not going to smile in these assholes’ faces and pretend they don’t despise me.”
“They can’t all hate you.”
“You’re right.” Everley nodded sardonically. “My parents are around he
re somewhere. They don’t hate me. They might regret not putting sterner restrictions on my trust fund, but they don’t have any actual avarice of me.”
“I feel bad for you. You know that, right?”
Once upon a time, Everley would have insisted that no one pity her. She was a big girl, after all. She could handle her business just fine.
With Lisa, though, that disingenuousness would be pointless. She recognized Everley’s misery better than anyone.
Unfortunately, Everley was a person who needed people.
“I won’t shame you into leaving this table,” Lisa said.
“Thanks.”
“But I will ask if you knew that you-know-who is seated with his back turned two tables away.”
Everley peered into her wine glass. It was empty. She regretted that pact she’d made with herself to endure the event while sober. Her head had been in the right place, and yet somehow, so wrong.
“Is he?” she murmured.
“Nice suit,” Lisa said. “Very nice.”
Everley studied her nails. Light pink because they were in the gloom of late autumn and she’d wanted to remind herself that seasons changed. “He wears a suit well, I suppose.”
Lisa snorted. “Right. You suppose. Is Stacia with him?”
Lisa leaned back and discreetly peered through the bodies at the table immediately behind them. “Oh. Yeah. I guess she is. Didn’t see her at first. There’s a lady with her. Dark hair. Blushing a lot.”
“Her assistant probably. I don’t think Stacia dates. If she does, she never brings the person to these things. She does a good job of keeping her private life private.”
“Good for her. People need to learn to mind their own business, anyway.”
“So true.”
Someone at the front of the ballroom clinked a crystal glass with a fork. “I promised a surprise for this year’s anniversary, and I always make it a good one, don’t I?” he said into the mic.
“Ugh.” Everley put her forehead down on the table and thumped it softly a few times. When her father started talking, people always started looking at her.