Better Off

by Tanya Chris

Mac didn’t appreciate the suggestion that Hailey had manipulated him, as though the sex had been an intentional distraction. Hailey had definitely wanted him. That hadn’t just been performance art. But it was true that Mac had failed to really engage him on the issue at hand.

  “I’ve been thinking. Now that I know where he’s coming from, maybe we can find the proper motivation.”

  Hailey wouldn’t be sold on giving up his lease unless Mac could point out the greater good of his doing so. But Mac could point that out. Hailey’s viewpoint wasn’t selfish, but it was narrow, formed by hippie parents and centered on his current neighbors, whereas the reclamation project would benefit not just Ball’s End but the entire city of Ballhaven.

  More livable housing within commuting range of downtown was desperately needed. Buildings like the one Hailey’s Comic occupied were wasted space in their current condition. No one wanted to live in a rat-infested, mold-infested building with leaking plumbing, inadequate power, and no central heating or cooling system. Not to mention the lack of parking or useful services.

  Grocery stores, banks. Being able to walk safely down the street after dark. Taxi service not hampered by drivers’ fears of being robbed or stiffed. Those were the things a neighborhood needed. Hailey was resisting because he didn’t understand the benefits of what they were trying to do. All Mac had to do was explain it better. Hailey would agree to vacate, Mac would help him develop a more workable business model, and they could relax and enjoy each other without being adversaries.

  “But you don’t want me to start digging on him?” Declan asked. “We know how to handle this kind of guy.”

  “Let’s not pull out the big guns yet. Our personal relationship aside—”

  “Relationship?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You want to get back in his pants again.”

  “I really do.” No point lying about it. “He’s something else, Declan. I think I might be in love.” He joked because he was worried it was true.

  Declan’s laugh put it in perspective. Mac had a bad case of lust for the winsome young man and reason to believe Hailey was a pretty good guy, if misguided, but that was it. If they had a chance to get to know each other without 502 Main Street in the way, they actually might form a relationship. He wasn’t opposed to the possibility. Easy access to regular sex saved time and energy, if nothing else.

  “I’ll bring him in for a dog-and-pony show,” he said, his mind made up. He wasn’t going to treat Hailey like an enemy as long as he had another choice. “We’ve got all those materials we put together for the city planning committee. If we walk him through it, I think we can get him on our side. He’s a smart guy.”

  “You are in love,” Declan said with a laugh. “You don’t think anyone’s smart except you.”

  “And you.” Was he fooling himself about Hailey? If Hailey had brains, he hadn’t applied them to running a profitable business, but that was probably his parents’ fault. Given their influence, it was surprising Hailey was willing to dabble in capitalism at all, and he was still young enough not to be set in his ways.

  “All right.” Declan stretched himself out with a giant yawn, then curled back to throw one lanky leg over the arm of the chair he reclined in. “If you can talk your new lover into vacating, you can fuck him over every surface in this office for all I care. But, Mac, be careful about who’s talking who into what.”

  Mac disregarded the warning as ridiculous. He picked up his phone and paged through it to find Hailey’s number. “Oh,” he said before hitting the Call button. “I almost forgot. There’s a church next door to the site that looks about ready to fall down. What would it take to get it down?”

  “We approached the diocese about selling back when we first secured 502 Main Street, and they were willing to entertain an offer, but it was built in the early 1900s. It’s not on the historical registry yet, but only because no one’s bothered to file the paperwork.”

  “So get it taken down before anyone has a chance to raise a stink. You know how to handle these things. It’s more an eyesore than a treasure, and we need the adjacent space.”

  “I do what you pay me to do, boss.”

  Mac turned his back on Declan’s snark and put through the call to Hailey. The store wouldn’t be open yet. Maybe Hailey would still be asleep, curled up like a kitten that needed petting. But Hailey’s voice when it came on the line sounded fully alert. It also sounded both surprised and annoyed.

  “Greg. I wasn’t expecting you to call, seeing as I’ve already heard from your lawyers. A fake eviction notice? Really? Is that how you do business?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The latest piece of mail from C&G. I’m not impressed. But that’s not why you’re calling, I gather.”

  “No, I, uh, don’t know anything about the eviction notice.” He made frantic eyes at Declan, who only made an amused expression back. “I was calling to see if you’d be willing to come in and listen to a presentation on what we’re planning to do with 502 Main Street and why.”

  “I can listen,” Hailey said, “if you’ll give me equal time.”

  “Equal time for what?” Sex? He could make that swap.

  “I’ll try to see Ball’s End through your eyes, and you try to see it through mine. Come by tonight at closing. There are things I’d like to show you.”

  Not sex, but still. Time with Hailey. And maybe sex after. Which would be fine now that he had a plan for how to get Hailey on board. He finalized arrangements with Hailey and hung up to give Declan a hard look. “Did we send Hailey an eviction notice?”

  “Wish we could. He hasn’t done anything to justify eviction. Yet.”

  “So what’s he talking about?”

  “Eh.” Declan waved a hand idly. “Standard communication we send to stubborn tenants. You’ve seen them, I’m sure.” He pulled his tablet onto his lap and tapped a few buttons, then pushed it across the desk.

  Notice of Cause to Evict, the bold heading read. Mac skimmed the text. The letter didn’t explicitly say the tenant was being evicted. It merely detailed the legal process involved and set out a long list of possible causes.

  “It implies eviction. Hailey saw through it, but—”

  “It’s perfectly legal, Mac. I should know.”

  Some of the causes for eviction listed were reasonable. Failure to pay rent, obviously. Maybe even keeping a pet if the behavior persisted after a warning had been issued. But, “Power strips? Christmas tree lights?”

  “Possible fire-code violations.”

  Mac thought about the hot plate on Hailey’s counter. Instead of turning the list he’d made of ways Hailey might be violating his lease over to Declan, he balled it up and tossed it in the trash. “We don’t really evict people for having a live Christmas tree, do we?”

  “How would we even know that? But if someone has a guilty conscience, that’s not our fault. They know what they’ve done. If they choose to leave before we can formally evict them, it saves us all a headache.”

  Mac pushed Declan’s tablet back across the desk at him. “I don’t want those going out with C&G’s name on them anymore. I don’t care if they’re legal. They’re not… ethical.”

  Declan shrugged. “You’re the boss. But morally-grey-and-legally-expedient never bothered you before this dude came along. You just gave me orders to try to sneak destruction of a historical landmark past the planning committee.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Different how?”

  “No one’s going to miss that church, not once they’ve got a parking structure in its place. It’s not the same thing as threatening to evict someone over Christmas tree lights—acting like we’re already in the process of evicting them. I’m not saying you can’t warn people that we might have the legal right to evict them. Just… make the letter more transparent.”

  “Like I said, you’re the boss.” Declan unfurled himself from the chair and rose to his feet like sm
oke floating upward. “Hitting up the gym tonight?”

  “I have to meet my sister for dinner.” If he blew her off twice in a row, he’d need more than the excuse of a date. He’d have to produce an engagement ring. “Come if you like.”

  “Nah, I need the gym more than I need a heavy meal. You may have found your dream man, but I’m still out there hunting.”

  Mac shook his head at the idea of Declan ever having to hunt for a bedmate, then picked up his desk phone to call his community relations manager, Audra. With a little tweaking, he was sure they could put together a spiel that would have Hailey on their side.

  Of course Julia-Louise started with an inquisition into his supposed date the night before, and since Mac was floating between memories of having Hailey naked and anticipation of getting him naked again, it wasn’t hard to give her what she was looking for. Truthfully, it would’ve been hard not to talk about Hailey.

  “He sounds the complete opposite of Lauren,” Julia-Louise observed. She toyed with the stem of her wineglass as she fixed him with a questioning look. The waiter had taken their menus when he’d dropped off their drinks, leaving Mac with nothing to hide behind.

  “Because he’s a man and she was a woman?”

  “Please.” The look she gave him suggested she knew he was ducking.

  “I liked Lauren.”

  “Better than you’ve ever liked anyone else,” she agreed.

  “But it didn’t work out, did it?”

  “And you think things might work out with Hailey?”

  “It’s a bit early to be looking that far ahead.” That was the correct answer. “I’m just saying there’s no point using Lauren as the measuring stick for every relationship I have, given that she came up short.”

  “Oh, it was Lauren who came up short, was it?” Julia-Louise stuck her tongue out at him like the brat she’d once been and sometimes still could be, no matter how elegant she looked with her meticulously highlighted strawberry-blond hair coiled into a twist.

  “You know that’s not what I meant. There was nothing wrong with Lauren. She was perfect, in fact.” Perfectly beautiful, perfectly composed, perfectly independent with her own interests and possessed of an undeniable brilliance. He’d been proud to have her on his arm and continuously impressed by her goals and her success in achieving them.

  “So what happened?”

  “Nothing. Nothing bad, nothing good. Maybe we were too alike, too selfishly absorbed in our own concerns.”

  “So now you’re going to the opposite extreme?”

  The waiter dropped off their salads, and Julia-Louise broke off to smile up at him in acknowledgment. Mac picked up his fork and poked at the collection of spring greens without much enthusiasm.

  “Hailey is also beautiful and smart, so no, he’s not the opposite extreme. And I haven’t gone anywhere. You’re making too much of a single date.”

  “Two dates,” she pointed out. “You’re rushing off tonight to be with him again. Two nights in a row. It’s a new high point in enthusiasm from you.”

  Mac shrugged, unwilling to admit how enthusiastic he was. Declan’s sneering and Julia-Louise’s teasing both implied that he’d gone too deep, too fast, but from where he was sitting, enthusiasm felt like a good thing. When was the last time he’d cared about something beyond a bottom line—just cared about the process of it? College hockey, maybe.

  “So when do I meet him? You could’ve brought him tonight if you couldn’t bear to be away from him.”

  “He’s working. I told you, he owns a bookstore.”

  “You said he owned a bookstore, not that he worked at it. He takes the night shifts himself?”

  “I think he takes all the shifts. It’s a small place. If he’s got a staff, I haven’t seen it.”

  Leaving overhead aside, Hailey would have to sell a dozen books an hour just to pay someone minimum wage, and that was assuming he got his stock by crawling through dumpsters, which wasn’t a bad guess.

  Mac described Hailey’s situation, going into more detail than he’d intended until Julia-Louise jabbed his hand with her fork.

  “Ow. What was that for?” He wiped away the trace of salad dressing she’d left behind.

  “For lying to me. You told me last night was a date.”

  “I wish I had been lying. It was more of a date than I’m comfortable with. There’s something about this guy, Jules. I think he put me under a spell or something. I’m besotted.”

  “Besotted,” Julia-Louise repeated with a laugh. “Are you an eighteenth-century heroine now?”

  “That’s how it feels. From the moment I saw him, it’s like I can’t remember what I’m supposed to be doing when I’m around him. That shouldn’t have been a date last night.”

  “Because it’s safer to stick to people who approve of your capitalistic ways, who’re impressed by your money rather than put off by it. If you ask me, someone who’ll wake you up to the suffering of people not like you is exactly what you need.”

  As if Mac didn’t already have his sister for that. “I know the world is full of suffering, Jules, but I didn’t cause it, and I don’t have the power to end it, so there’s no point in being paralyzed by it.”

  “Don’t pretend you couldn’t help, Gregory. You have more than enough money, but you spend your time making more. Don’t you think there might be better ways to use your privilege?”

  “I’ll let you take care of that for both of us.”

  “We’ll see. This guy’s already got you jumping through hoops for him. Is he going to talk you into letting him stay in the building?”

  “I can’t. I’ve got a responsibility to my investors.” It was one thing for Declan to tease him about his instant infatuation. Declan loved him and would support him even if he made foolish choices as a result. “We can’t afford to let the building sit empty for nine months as if it were Hailey’s personal playpen. Maybe if we hadn’t already gotten everyone else out I could stall the project for a few more months, but what can I do now?” Mac really wanted an answer to that. “It’s not even in Hailey’s best interests to stay. A bookstore needs foot traffic, and an empty building doesn’t bring any. I’m surprised he’s making enough to pay rent, never mind support himself.”

  “Maybe the magic leprechaun has a pot of gold at the end of his rainbow,” Julia-Louise suggested with a smirk. “Or maybe he’s got more than one guy jumping through hoops for him. Don’t give me that look. It was just a joke. I’m not impugning your magic elf. You really are besotted, aren’t you?”

  Mac shook his head. He really was. He’d spent the whole afternoon working with Audra to put together a presentation that would woo his magic elf into compliance.

  “What did you say the name of his bookstore was? I should check it out.”

  “Don’t.” That was all he needed—for Julia-Louise and Hailey to team up against him. He’d find himself doing an Ebenezer Scrooge, dancing down the street in his nightdress, handing out gold doubloons.

  Chapter Five

  The sign said Closed and the door was locked, but there were lights on toward the back. Mac rapped at the glass. When that didn’t produce a result, he texted Hailey, checking his phone impatiently as minutes passed without any response. Hailey had said he’d be ready at nine—though the sign said the store closed at eight—and it was already ten after.

  Finally a body wound its way through the maze of shelving toward the door, but the body didn’t belong to Hailey, rather to a heavyset middle-aged man with sun-worn features. When he caught sight of Mac through the glass, he opened the door and tapped the sign.

  “Closed,” he said, enunciating the word carefully.

  “I’m here for Hailey.”

  The man shrugged and held the door for Mac to pass through. Toward the back where the lights were on Mac heard voices, so he followed them to a nook formed by a restroom on one side and what might be a storage room on the other. The nook held a battered folding table about eight feet long, around wh
ich a dozen metal chairs ranged, most of them empty.

  Hailey stood behind one, and an older Hispanic man speaking to a Hispanic teenager in halting English sat in another. The table was covered in children’s books and magazines with cars on the covers.

  The older man rose and pushed in his chair. “Thank you,” he said to Hailey with a press of his hand.

  “Anytime, amigo. See you next week. Hey, Greg,” Hailey added, noticing him there. He tilted his head as if he expected to be kissed in greeting.

  “I texted.”

  “Sorry. I think I left my phone in the back. We’re pretty much done here. Just give me a minute to lock up.”

  “This the man?” The teenager on the other side of the table had his chair rocked back on two legs with his hands behind his head, giving Mac the once-over with apparent disapproval.

  “This is Greg, yeah. Greg, Miguel.”

  Mac stepped forward to offer his hand across the table, and Miguel let his chair down with a thump. “Mucho gusto,” he said as he took Mac’s hand.

  “Miguel,” Hailey warned.

  “A pleasure,” Miguel translated with a thick accent. He dropped Mac’s hand and held out a fist to Hailey. “My man.”

  “Thanks, Miguel,” Hailey called after the kid as he slouched toward the door. “And tell your mama I said thank you for the enchiladas.” The bell tinkled as the door opened and shut behind him.

  “Men’s book club?” Mac asked as he trailed Hailey around the store. Now that they were alone, he was eager for the kiss Hailey had been offering, but he also wanted to understand why that kid had been assessing Mac with such protective eyes. Did he and Hailey have something going on?

  “English lessons. Not that I’m a qualified ESL teacher. It’s an informal thing.”

  “So what are you thanking Miguel for? Shouldn’t he be thanking you?”

  Hailey chuckled as he did something with the old cash register that made bells ring. “Miguel was born here. His English is perfect, despite that act he just put on. He and I teach the other guys English, and I learn Spanish in exchange.”