by A. J. Thomas
“You shouldn’t be working this late either,” Emmitt insisted. He looked between Steven and Cheryl, and shook his head with a quiet smile. “Steven, you certainly know how to keep things interesting.”
Steven held up his beer in a mock salute. “I try.”
Nate chuckled and opened the email, sobering as he took in the details of the settlement offer.
“Given that the ruling yesterday all but assured you a victory, are you surprised they’re reaching out so quickly?” Emmitt asked, a knowing look in his eyes.
“You’re responsible for this?” he asked, holding up his phone. “You and Tillman spent a lot of time chatting with Harrison yesterday.”
“I was trying to save your reputation, Nathan, I was not discussing your case. Harrison said you dragged your client out of your only in-person meeting, just like you stormed out on me. I wish Paul hadn’t been there to confirm that this was a normal pattern of behavior, but he was. At this point, Harrison’s job is to minimize his client’s liability as best he can, but working around your personal issues is making that difficult.”
“I thought we were finished discussing this,” he said. “It was bad enough that you and Tillman have gone out of your way to make sure no one else is willing to partner with me on this, but you showed up at the hearing, then had the audacity to expect me to be grateful. You have no right to talk about the case with Harrison. Unless CPG decides to hire you, you’re not going to insinuate yourself into it now.”
“I told you, Paul recognizes that he made a mistake assessing Wilkinson’s case. Given the abrasive nature of the plaintiff, I can hardly blame him.”
“Sean was still hospitalized at the time. He never met Tillman in person. And he’s not abrasive.”
“He’s a tattoo-covered thug. He’s the son of another tattoo-covered thug. Tillman’s reaction was reasonable.”
“He didn’t know that maritime workers aren’t covered under workers’ comp until the complaint I filed became a matter of public record. You might be uncomfortable blaming him for his own incompetence, but I’m not.”
“Nathan,” his mother cut in. “That’s quite enough. Your father and I have always avoided bringing problems from work to the dinner table, and I expect you to do the same.”
Nathan seethed, but he kept his mouth shut. His father shouldn’t know the details of the settlement offer that had popped into his inbox, but he could have pulled the complaint from the Clerk and Recorder’s Office like anybody else. Since Nate had discovered the extent of CPG’s negligence in Sean’s case, Nate had amended the complaint to request punitive damages too, and settling was the smartest thing they could do.
And they were finally approaching the kind of money he and Sean had discussed. He didn’t want to admit that his father being at the hearing might have had something to do with Harrison and Poole’s eagerness to take the settlement negotiations seriously.
He tapped out a quick email on his phone, asking if the settlement was still conditional on Sean agreeing he wouldn’t contest CPG’s ownership of the patent, and reminding Harrison that this was the one issue Sean refused to yield on.
A tiny, treacherous part of his brain jumped to too many conclusions when he noted the amount. If Sean could live with this amount, if he accepted it, the case could be over in a matter of days. Within a week he could deduct his contingent fee, dump the rest of the money into an account in Sean’s name, and be finished with all of his obligations on Sean’s behalf. Then they could both get on with their lives and leave this whole awkward mess behind them.
A now familiar fantasy of fucking Sean under a black light, of watching the lines of glowing and dark ink on his back and shoulders while Nate filled him, flashed through his thoughts. He did his best to banish the image, but his imagination kept spinning back to it, drawn to the idea even though he knew it couldn’t happen.
He rose from the table and retreated into the living room, where he forced himself to calm down.
It wouldn’t be as simple as signing all the documents and walking away. Even if the settlement went off without a hitch, there would be weeks of paperwork and meetings. And resisting the urge to grovel until Sean smiled at him again. He dialed Sean’s cell phone, but the call went straight to voicemail. He tried the shop’s number, and after several minutes Sean’s groggy voice answered with a curt, “Hawk’s. We close at nine, so unless you’re scheduling something for tomorrow, it ain’t going to happen.”
“Even if I offered you ten million dollars?” Nate asked, the words slurring.
“Nate?”
“Yes.”
Sean was quiet for a moment. “Ten million, huh? Well, I’ve done stupider things for less, but I doubt you’re healed enough to fill in the base shading. I’m going to have to say no.”
“It’s the company’s latest settlement offer. Are you busy? I could come by and we could go over the details?”
“I….” Sean chuckled into the phone, but it sounded more pained than amused. “Will it keep?”
“What?”
“The offer? Do I need to decide tonight?”
“I thought you’d be excited. You don’t even sound surprised.”
“I’ve had a shitty day,” Sean said. “And I’m not surprised. Bruce and Cory told me Harrison got permission to offer a big settlement to get me to sign that waiver, so I figured I’d hear something about it soon enough.”
“Can I come over to talk about it?” he asked, knowing it was a bad idea even as he spoke. Nothing about his plan to distance himself from Sean included another evening of hanging out in the studio with him.
“I had three long appointments today, so I’m too wiped out to deal with anything right now.”
“But you’re in the shop,” he said, wincing at how pathetic he sounded, how close to pleading he actually was.
“Yeah, because I have so many other places to go….”
“No, I mean I tried calling your cell, and you didn’t answer. So I called the shop. This is the number for the front counter, isn’t it?”
“It’s a portable phone. It plugs in to the wall, but it can also be used away from the counter. Seriously, are you drunk or just tired?”
“I may have had a little to drink,” he said. He clung to the light tone in Sean’s voice, letting himself imagine that they were okay—that they could go back to being friends, that he could keep his attraction to himself, and it would all somehow be okay.
“Uh-huh. And by ‘a little’ you mean…”
“Way too much. But I still counted the number of zeros correctly. Let me come over? Just to bring you a copy of the offer for you to read when you’re feeling better?”
“Nate….”
Nate sighed into the phone, biting back all the things he wanted to say. “What’s that you’re listening to?” he asked quietly.
“Music,” the answer came quickly.
“It’s Coldplay, right? I heard that they’re going to be in Dallas—”
“Stop,” Sean said coldly. There was a long moment of silence before Sean continued. “Have you been drunk every time you came over to the shop? Because that would explain a lot.”
How cliché would it be for him to claim being around Sean was intoxicating? But the joking tone had vanished from Sean’s voice. Now there was just a hint of the pain Nate had glimpsed yesterday. “No, I wasn’t drunk. Are you okay?”
“If I accept the offer, what else is there for you to do?”
“Make sure the settlement agreement is legal, fair, and accurate, and that any nondisclosure agreements they require don’t say anything unexpected. And make sure you get your money.”
“But that’s it?”
“The case would be over, yes.”
“And you wouldn’t have to see me again, huh?”
“No, that’s….” The denial died in his throat, because that was the whole point.
Sean huffed. “God, you’d think I’d be used to this by now….”
“Used t
o what?”
“To always being someone else’s mistake. To never being anything except a lapse in judgment.”
The bitter edge to Sean’s voice was sickening. The words burned into Nate, sparking a rush of guilt that left him nauseated.
“And when I think this can’t get more awkward, it turns out you’re willing to walk away from the trial that could prove to your dad that you’re not a fuckup just to avoid interacting with me. You know what? Fine. I’ll accept the settlement. Drop the fucking paperwork off tomorrow so we can be done with this shit.”
“No! No, no, no, no—” His phone beeped as the call ended. “Fuck!” he shouted, flinging his phone across the room. It skidded to a stop near the far wall, where Steven was watching him. “What?” he snapped.
“Honestly?” Steven asked with a goofy smile. “I thought you were mad about me bringing Cheryl home, so now I’m relieved. You want to talk about it?”
“No. I need to go,” he insisted, scooping his phone up as he fumbled with his keys. “I have to fix this.”
Steven snatched them from his hands. “Nope. Wherever you’re going, I think I should drive. You can tell me all about it on the way.”
“I’m not that drunk,” Nate insisted.
Steven grinned and shoved Nate’s keys into his pocket. “Drunk, upset, do we need to look up statistics illustrating how both impact your driving? Because I’m sure Dad’s up for that.”
“I’m not sixteen, Steven.”
“Yeah, stop acting like it, then. I was going to offer to drive you home anyway. Give me two minutes to let Cheryl know, and I’ll meet you out by your car, okay?”
The evening rush had wound down hours ago, so getting across Houston to the tattoo studio didn’t take long. Maybe it was the wine, or just the fact that it was Steven driving, but Nate found that once he started talking about Sean, he couldn’t stop. Nate told his brother everything about him—from his art, to his education, to his adorable wavy hair. He couldn’t talk about Sean’s case, but he talked about watching him work his way back from a disabling injury, watching him fight with everything he had to be strong enough to be considered a candidate for a prosthetic limb.
“So what’s the problem?” Steven asked, taking the highway exit Nate pointed to. “Is it the disability part? Or his job? So what if he’s a tattoo artist? If you like him, you like him.”
“He’s my client.” Nate finally said the truth he’d been skirting. “He asked me out and then he kissed me.”
Steven’s eyes narrowed. “Oh. That’s not okay.”
“I am well aware of that.”
“He just kissed you? Out of the blue?”
“Ah, no. I’ve been spending time at his place for months, going over stuff for his case and watching him work. We were eating dinner, and he asked if I wanted to go get a drink. He meant… well, something else, obviously. But he’s a client, and thanks to Dad I haven’t been able to hire anybody as outside counsel yet to cover my own ass because of the bar’s ethics rules, so I turned him down. I tried to explain at the courthouse yesterday, and it could have gone a bit better. He thought… thinks that I’m not interested and just making up an excuse to avoid him. I feel like an ass. To make things worse, we’ve still got to work together until his case is resolved.”
“Outside counsel? You want another lawyer to step in so you could date your client?” Steven asked.
“I wasn’t planning on handing his case off, just having someone objective involved to make sure the conflict of interest doesn’t impact his case. I looked up the case law when we became friends. He’s my client, I’m his client—it’s weird.”
“And Dad’s stopped you?”
“Yeah. I can’t talk about the specifics of Sean’s case, but it’s huge. Like, if Dad’s firm had it, it’d be ‘assigned to a senior partner with a full staff’ huge. They blew their chance to work on it, and Dad’s been alternating between trying to guilt-trip me into coming back and trying to bribe me for the last few weeks, and—”
Steven turned toward him, apparently shocked. “You quit? When did this happen?”
“A few months ago,” Nate said, as if it didn’t matter. “It was lucky timing, too, because I cleaned out my office the same morning Sean’s….” He still wasn’t quite sure how to refer to Hawk. “Friend? Boss, I suppose. Because he’s not Sean’s dad, but he might as well be. Anyway, it was the same day he came to the firm looking for someone to represent Sean, and the staff attorney I was working under all but kicked him out because he looks like a biker.”
“Is he a biker?” Steven asked, obviously trying not to laugh.
“Yeah, near as I can tell. There’s a great big Harley-Davidson that’s usually outside the tattoo studio. He calls it ‘Rosie,’ so I assume it’s his.”
“So he asked you out and kissed you? And you wanted him to? But you shot him down because you’re an idiot, and now you’re stuck working with him?”
“It’s not that simple. When he was working on my new tattoo Friday night, things got a bit out of hand. Being his friend was fine, having him do my tattoo was pushing it, but actually hooking up with him when I’m all he’s got for representation, in a case that his entire future is riding on…. I need to bring in someone else, but Dad’s determined to fuck me over on this, so I’m stuck.”
“Why not just wait until the case is over?”
“Before he kissed me, that was exactly what I had in mind. I tried to do the right thing and apologize yesterday, but that failed miserably. I told him on the phone that he had a chance to settle within a few days, and then he’d never have to see me again, and….” Nate swallowed against the lump in his throat. “He thinks I don’t want him because he’s disabled, or worse, just because he’s him. He’s hurt, and justifiably pissed off, and I’m not sure what to do.”
“What is he angry about, if you think it’s justified?”
“Yesterday he was angry that I wouldn’t pretend it never happened. And that I called it a mistake. And that I didn’t want him to finish my tattoo. He’s got a hell of an ego when it comes to his work. And he should, he’s amazing, but I can’t sit through another session knowing that he feels the same but not be able to do a damn thing about it.”
“You got a tattoo? Without telling me?”
“I didn’t know I needed your permission to get a tattoo.”
“Okay.” Steven nodded with a grin. “You’ve got to tell me one thing. The accident that left him disabled… how long ago was it?”
Nate cocked his head to the side, surprised. “Almost six months.”
“Has he been with anybody since then?”
“No, and I should have thought about that. He’s still recovering—he still needs medication most days just to function. Hell, he didn’t even want anyone to look at him at first. He did this giant octopus tattoo that covers most of his body, and now he doesn’t seem to mind, but…. He’s got to be scared—he’s not ready for anything like this.”
“Sex, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Shouldn’t that be his decision?”
Nate gaped at his brother. He’d put so much conscious effort into not offering Sean help unless he asked for it, into not assuming that Sean wasn’t capable of doing things on his own, because he knew all too well what it was like to have someone assume you’re incapable and constantly offering help that amounted to being treated like a kid. Granted, his own relationship with his father was nothing like Sean’s situation, but he’d never been as independent as Sean, either. Sean had overcome his fear of people, or at least of Nate, looking at him. He’d dared to try and make a pass at Nate, and Nate had treated him like a child who wasn’t capable of deciding what he wanted.
But that was the precise problem with dating a client. So long as there was no guarantee that Sean would have an easy way out if he decided he didn’t want Nate, or if he didn’t want Nate to represent him, that would always be in doubt. “It doesn’t matter, because he’s my client. It�
��s a bit less murky than a relationship between a boss and employee, but it’s still frowned upon. I was so angry about his… someone who took advantage of him in a similar position before, and it turns out I’m no better.”
“That’s fair. But can you imagine what it’s got to be like? Wanting to have a normal life again, including a normal sex life, but having to struggle to do anything? The odds of finding someone who’d be willing to go out with him are probably grim. Finding someone who’s willing to look past the disability and find him attractive, and be patient with him, probably seems impossible.”
“You haven’t seen him,” Nate said, shaking his head. “He’s beautiful. He’s in way better shape than me, because he’s worked out so much as he’s recovered. His new octopus tattoo is a work of art by itself, and when he focuses on a drawing or he’s listening to music, he gets this little half smile on his face that just… looks perfect. He’s perfect. Someone would have to be blind not to see that.”
“Are you sure he sees himself the way you do? From the sound of it, you’re crazy about him, but even you made it clear that you weren’t willing to engage in that kind of relationship with him—so are you honestly surprised by his reaction? I think I’d feel pretty damn hopeless if I were in his position.”
“What else could I have done?”
Steven gave him a look. “You could have been honest. Do you want to be with him? Like, long-term, real relationship stuff?”
Nate nodded. “Yes.”
“If he didn’t feel the same, he probably wouldn’t be upset, so that’s something. If you want to be with him, you’re going to have to come right out and tell him. Explain why you were worried, what you were doing to deal with the conflict of interest, and see what he says. If he still wants anything to do with you, consider yourself lucky and put a bit of effort into making sure he knows how you feel.”
“But he’s still my client.”
“Yeah, and I’m not suggesting you ignore that. Get him someone else he can turn to for legal stuff and make damn sure he knows he’s not stuck with you—personally or professionally. Or have him hire someone else himself, if Dad’s really being a dick about this. Be honest with whoever else he hires. Get the relationship out in the open from the start, so there’s no question about the fact that their role is to make sure everything’s okay. Then just try not to screw up. Honestly, you’d be an idiot not to give it a shot.”