Worth Waiting For

by Wendy Qualls

  Warning? If the photographer could send this to him, they could send it to anyone. Although as a blackmail overture it kind of lost something without any text. Threat, then?

  It suddenly struck him that there was absolutely nobody he could ask about this. His parents didn’t know he was gay, and anyone at St. Ben’s was just as likely to report him as not. Danielle, maybe? But no—she was going to be spending her stateside vacation time with the family, and it wasn’t like she could just leave to take a phone call so her twin brother could have a nice little freak-out. Plus if he told her about this, he’d have to tell her about Brandon, and she’d read way too much into that. Especially now that she was head over heels for Étienne.

  Which only left Brandon himself. Practically a stranger, after all this time, barring their encounter the previous night. Paul wouldn’t have to explain anything, though. Wouldn’t have to come out to anyone to get help. And better yet, Brandon might be able to figure out where the e-mail came from. Paul was moderately tech-savvy, but no more so than most guys under thirty. From the tidbits Brandon had let drop in conversation the night before, he was head and shoulders beyond merely “tech-savvy.” Closer to “tech god.” If nothing else, he could be a sympathetic ear. Paul got up, closed his office door, and dialed.

  Brandon answered on the first ring. “Thinking about me so soon?” There was a definite teasing note in his voice. “Thought you had class today.”

  “I do,” Paul answered automatically. “I mean—I will, in a little while. But there’s a bit of a crisis and I think I need your help.”

  All laughter immediately disappeared from Brandon’s tone. “What’s up?”

  “I don’t… it’s…” Paul stared at his screen helplessly. “Someone sent me a picture this morning. Of us.”

  “Someone you know?”

  “I’m not sure—there’s no words. No sender, no subject line. Just the picture. It’s, um.” Paul forced in a deep breath. “Through my window. Of us together.”

  “Shit.” There was a shuffling sound in the background, then the sound of a door closing and the background noise muffled substantially. Brandon closing himself into an empty room for privacy, presumably. “So. When you say ‘together’…”

  “Exactly what you’re picturing.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  They both fell silent for a long moment.

  “You want me to take a look at it?” Brandon finally asked. “Bring your laptop and meet me for lunch? I mean, you could forward it to me, but…”

  Paul would happily do pretty much anything if it meant Brandon could fix things. “That’s good. Lunch. Not on campus, though. I don’t—”

  “Hey, no, I get it,” Brandon interjected. “You remember the coffee shop we went yesterday morning? I think there was a sandwich place next door—want to meet me there? They had free wifi, according to the sign in the window.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Good—let me know when you’re ready to go and I’ll meet you there. And Paul?” He paused. “Trust me—it’ll be fine.”

  God, I hope so.

  * * * *

  “Let’s see, then.”

  Paul pulled up his university e-mail, opened the photo, and wordlessly turned his laptop around so Brandon could see the screen. They weren’t the only ones getting lunch, but they were the only ones not taking advantage of the beautiful spring weather to sit outdoors—which meant they had the entire small café to themselves. Brandon stared at the picture for several seconds.

  “Too bad it’s such a gorgeous picture of you,” he finally said. “I would have loved a picture like that in other circumstances.”

  Not helping. Paul poked at his Reuben and forced himself not to scowl. “I knew it was a bad idea,” he muttered.

  “I seem to recall you enjoying yourself fine last night,” Brandon countered, typing something rapidly without looking away from the screen. “Don’t let your stalker taint what we both agreed was a fantastic evening.”

  Paul blinked and put down his sandwich. “You think it was a stalker? That sounds so melodramatic. Like a bad horror movie.” Although don’t the guys who have sex at the beginning always end up getting killed off? Or does that only happen to beautiful blond cheerleaders? His own hair was closer to tan than blond, not exactly Hollywood-worthy—

  “I don’t—hmmm?” Brandon glanced up and frowned. “Sorry, was trying to figure out how an e-mail with absolutely no metadata even got through the system. I didn’t mean stalker stalker. Someone knew it was you and knew your home address, right?”

  Paul nodded cautiously.

  “So it’s probably someone who knows you personally. They know you work at St. Benedict’s, at least, because they sent it to your work e-mail. And there’s a good chance it’s either a student or a coworker; an outsider wouldn’t have been able to do this.” He turned the laptop so Paul could see the screen. It was open to an unfamiliar menu that seemed to be written mostly in computer-ese. “It’s pretty easy to spoof the sender’s address—which is why you sometimes get spam saying it’s from PayPal or the FBI or whatnot. Even spoofed, every server the e-mail is routed through should be tacking on a bit of information. Instead, it’s blank.”

  “Meaning the e-mail came from inside the house?”

  Brandon’s lips twitched. “From someone who has access to St. Ben’s primary mail server, possibly. Although even e-mail sent from on campus should have something here.” He tapped the screen. “Verification that it was passed on. Someone went to a lot of work to strip that out—if they wanted to stay truly anonymous, they could have bounced it through half a dozen proxies on the other side of the world and it would have said much less about them.”

  “Meaning they want me to know they’re close by.”

  “You knew that anyway, since someone had to take that picture.” Brandon let out a frustrated huff of breath. “Look, I’ll see what I can uncover this afternoon—believe it or not, this does tangentially relate to what I’m at St. Ben’s to do. There should be a very short list of people with this kind of access to the school-wide mail infrastructure. If this wasn’t someone on that list, I need to know about it.”

  “Preferably before they send this to my boss?”

  Brandon took a sip of his drink. “Right, so hear me out. I know you’re pissed and worried. I am too, on your behalf. But nobody’s come storming into your office threatening to fire you, right?”

  Paul nodded cautiously. Pissed didn’t even begin to cover it, but at the moment the paranoia was more than making up for it. “That’s true,” he admitted.

  “So whoever-it-was probably sent it to you as a warning. Right now, there’s no way to tell whether they’re doing the creepy stalker thing or whether it’s an acquaintance who happened to be walking past your apartment complex and recognized you and… Hell, I don’t know. Wanted to warn you about the evils of being gay, maybe. Or to tell you to be careful about leaving your blinds open. The point is, they didn’t send it to your boss, which means they might not intend to. And we won’t know more until we figure out who they are and how they did it. Like I said, I’ll take a closer look this afternoon. Okay if I forward myself the picture?”

  “As long as it’s not going to end up being seen by anyone else.” It was really tempting to say no, to delete the whole e-mail and hope the problem went away, but Paul had already trusted Brandon with his biggest secret—heck, had trusted him enough to stick his cock in the man’s mouth. And he was the perfect person to get to the bottom of whatever was going on.

  It was a definite relief to know that Brandon was on his side.

  Chapter 6

  Brandon didn’t bother with formalities; he just opened the call with, “So what do you feel like for dinner?”

  “Hi? And I guess I don’t care.” Paul really didn’t feel like eating, to be honest, but
they’d made loose plans and he was dying to see what Brandon had found out about the mysterious e-mail. He was less enthused about the likelihood of Brandon wanting more sex afterward—it was hard to even think about getting off when there was a looming specter of someone watching them while they did it. Whatever “it” might be.

  “Is that Thai place near the mall still open? I went there once freshman year, and I remember the food being pretty good.”

  Thai sounded no better or worse than anything else. “The mall itself is gone, but I do think the restaurant is still around. I don’t remember ever having eaten there before.”

  “Cool.” Brandon was silent for several seconds. “Actually… I’m going to make a wild guess here, but I suspect you’re not feeling all that up to being out in public with me right now.”

  It sounded so bad when he put it like that. Paul scrambled for an answer that wouldn’t be too offensive, but the pause told Brandon everything he needed to hear. “I it to be—”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it. It’s totally understandable.” Brandon didn’t sound surprised. “I was just thinking… What if I stop off and pick up some takeout, and we hang out in my hotel room for the evening? It won’t feel quite so much like someone is watching over our shoulders, and we can just eat and watch whatever’s on TV”.

  Paul could practically feel him sorting through his stock of placating phrases.

  “What I mean is,” he continued once he found a suitable one, “that we don’t have to do anything. Hang out. Chat. I wish I had more to tell you about what I’ve found, but at least I can show you what I’ve got.”

  That sounded perfect. Something in Paul’s chest loosened. “I think I’d like that.”

  * * * *

  Even just going from his car to the lobby of the hotel made Paul feel like he was in some sort of terrible spy movie. What if someone got a picture of him there? Going into a hotel to meet up with another man? Lord, Dr. Kirsner was bad enough when he thought Danielle had been doing something untoward; Paul didn’t even want to think about what the man would do with photographic proof of what he and Brandon had been doing last night. Being fired would be the least of my worries. He slipped through the sliding double doors and ducked into the elevator as quickly as possible.

  Brandon opened the door before Paul had a chance to knock. He’d changed out of his work clothes—instead of the crisp khakis and button-down he’d been wearing at lunch, he now sported a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt proclaiming it provided “+2 to sexiness.” It wasn’t a lie—the shirt was just tight enough to show off the muscles underneath, in a cut a straight man would absolutely never wear. He looked fabulous. It took Paul a moment to realize Brandon was talking.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “Was asking if you wanted anything other than tap water—I’m going to go fill the ice bucket, but the soda machine’s right there. I can grab something.”

  “Oh. No, water’s fine, thanks.” Paul got out of the way so Brandon could get past him to the door. “I’ll just—um, these glasses here?”

  “Yeah—food’s on the desk. Help yourself. I’ll be right back.”

  Brandon had gotten a good selection. Paul wasn’t usually too picky when it came to what he ate, but they hadn’t talked about what to order and it looked like Brandon had opted for a little of everything. It smelled fantastic. By the time Brandon got back with the ice, Paul had the desk set up closer to the bed so he could sit on the duvet and Brandon could sit in the desk chair and they could both reach everything. The arrangement had a sad ring of college life to it, eating takeout off the Styrofoam carton lids with flimsy plastic forks, but presumably nobody knew they were here and that made up for the rest of it.

  “So I’m guessing you want to know what I found,” Brandon announced. “It’s not as much as I hoped, but it’s at least a start.”

  Paul would rather not have thought about the e-mail at all, but ignoring it wasn’t going to make it go away. “I’m assuming you can’t—I don’t know, ‘un-erase’ the sender or something?”

  Brandon shook his head. “Not really, but I can track down the people who are supposed to have that kind of access to the server and work from the other end that way. I spent a fair chunk of this afternoon checking up on you.”

  “Me?” Paul swallowed wrong and ended up trying desperately to suppress a coughing fit. “Sorry. What’d you find?”

  “That you’re not the one responsible for data disappearing from St. Ben’s.” Brandon sat back in his chair and swirled the ice around in his glass, studying Paul carefully. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone here the full truth about what I’m doing, but screw it. I did some digging into your electronic trail today so I could be sure you weren’t the culprit before I let you in on my secret.”

  Paul sucked in an exaggerated gasp of surprise. “Ooh, let me guess—you’re Superman?”

  “Right, I wish.” Brandon rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. “Nothing quite so exciting. St. Ben’s called my security firm because they suspect someone is mucking around with their system. Nobody really seems sure how long it’s been going on, but there’ve been several incidents where someone remembered sending an e-mail that was never received, and when they looked later there were no traces of it ever having existed. Others had files stored on the university network revert to earlier versions, despite the owners swearing they backed everything up. Individually, they’re all little things that could be chalked up to forgetfulness or human error.”

  “Except?”

  Brandon nodded. “Except someone is also changing details within files. We think. And nobody should be able to do that. It’s a potential PR nightmare for St. Ben’s: if whoever-it-is is siphoning off interesting bits of data, they could pick out the most damning things they find and publish them. Or delete just enough to make it look like St. Ben’s is trying, poorly, to cover up some big scandal. Or—hell they could be planting things too, for all I know. It’s potentially really bad.”

  “Wow,” Paul breathed. “I guess—could whoever it is delete the whole thing? Is that possible? Like, erase the student database or whatnot?”

  “I think that’s what the administration is worried about, but no, not really.” Brandon crinkled his nose—and oh, that shouldn’t have been so attractive—and speared another piece of chicken. “There are safeguards against that. Not to mention it would be really obvious if it did happen, which means IT could pretty easily restore everything from the last backup. It would be annoying and disruptive but fixable. No, what’s worse is if something gets changed and nobody notices it and then it’s overwritten on top of the old backups and no one knows how long it’s been there, or whether it’s supposed to be there at all. And—to come back to the original topic—chances are, whoever is mucking around in the mail server is using the same back door to get into the other systems as well. Which means it could be one person, or a group of people, or it could be a mostly-theoretical loophole that nobody else has discovered yet and all the inconsistencies are random. I’ve got to check all the obvious things before I start in on the wild conspiracy theories.”

  “Okay.” Paul was mildly surprised to realize he followed all that, non-technical as it was. “So you came here because someone is poking around where they shouldn’t be able to poke, and now that same person—maybe—sent that picture of us.”

  “Maybe,” Brandon echoed. “Which is good, because it means my guys and I have another avenue to explore. Right now I need to find the overlap between people who would have a reason to send you that photo and people who have the ability to cause this kind of electronic havoc. Which admittedly doesn’t help much yet, since I’ve really only just gotten started investigating, but it might help eliminate some possibilities down the road. Could save me some time.”

  “Or the stalker could escalate. Assuming it is a stalker.”

  Brandon blew out a long breath. “O
r that,” he admitted. “Look, I didn’t mean to come in here and cause you trouble. Once I saw you again, I latched on to the idea of catching up, of finally getting to do some of the stuff we both wanted to do freshman year but didn’t have the chance to, and…shit. If I don’t take some downtime from work, I go crazy, you know? Sex is good for that, and getting you into my bed would be—hell, it would be fantastic. And long overdue.” He flashed a rueful smile. “I get that you’ve worked hard to keep your personal life and your professional life separate, though, and I understand why. I may not agree with how you’re doing it—hiding in the closet really does a number on you after a while, and I’ve got enough friends who’ve lived through that to know what I’m talking about—but that’s your choice and I’m not going to preach. If you want to tell me to fuck off and only want me to deal with you as a fellow professional, I will.”

  “Bit late for that, isn’t it?” Paul couldn’t stop the words coming out of his mouth, and he immediately felt like kicking himself. “Sorry, that was rude. And it’s not your fault. I mean, my first instinct was to call you and cuss you out for ruining my life, but really we should have at least closed the curtains or something.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Brandon drawled. “Could have gone the other way—rented lights and a disco ball and blasted some cheesy porn music. Then any evidence would disappear into the mass of dreck on Redtube and no one would ever find it again.”

  Paul opened his mouth, closed it again, and finally let out a shaky laugh. “I really don’t know how to respond to that.”

  “Don’t take it as a serious suggestion,” Brandon said with a smile.