by P D Singer
Life was damned well going to reorganize! Ricky’d find some way to pry his lover—his!—away from that baseball-loving, domesticated lump of testosterone. Davis, lying in a pool of blood with crosses for eyes, appeared in the corner of Ricky’s drawing paper.
“Blah, blah, blah,” Edgar mocked. “Just make it pay off. Kate?” He turned to the petite trader sitting on Pramiti’s desk, her attention absorbed in her shoes.
“The strike is still in the air, though Jon and Geoff’s bonds have recovered a couple of points, but if the pilots haven’t struck by now, they won’t. I covered my shorts, went long, and I’m going to be richer before the day is out. To go with the 3.7 million bucks I pocketed on Friday from the shorts.” Kate extended her legs, twisting her feet to admire the reptilian footwear. “Then I’m going shoe-shopping again.”
“Wait until after the bonuses, darling,” Edgar advised. “You could be wrong.”
Ricky knew his recent big score wasn’t going to measure up to the millions Kate and Jon had pulled down on two trades in the last week, and he was starting to doubt his own strategy of going long. The big scores had been short sales. Damn, but Ricky was tired of being in the wrong; Intens’s disaster had put a crimp in his bonus hopes.
“Hah. I’m not.” Kate swung her right foot over to Miranda, who ran a fingertip over the crocodile pumps and admitted with half her attention that she’d bought two different software companies and a credit-card processor. The others rattled off their changes, leaving Edgar nothing to do but admonish them to trade wisely. Watching Jon stiffen, ever so slightly, to brace himself for Edgar’s next request, Ricky knew what he was willing to forfeit. Not to go against Edgar, but to show Jon he could do the right thing.
Edgar announced his choice for the morning. “Vaughn, a moment of your time.”
“He’s busy.” Ricky swung to stark upright, slapping his pad down on the desk. Fixing Edgar with a gimlet eye, he dared the man to make another choice.
“Oh?” Edgar cast about. “Logan?” That young man fidgeted with a pen and started to rise from his perch on the desk.
“He’s busy too.” Ricky pushed Logan back to his seat with a glance. His eyes flipped nervously back and forth between the rivals, but Ricky didn’t linger on him. With a proud lift of his chin, he collected Jon as reinforcement.
“Dwight.” Edgar’s tone said he’d brook no nonsense.
Jon flashed an instant of wide-eyed startlement but came through. “Very busy,” he announced and pinned Dwight to his chair with a hand to his shoulder, ignoring the analyst’s look of gratitude mixed with fear. He took the few steps to Ricky’s side—Yes!—letting Edgar see that close to a third of his firm’s capital was controlled by men willing to stand up to him.
Anger and surprise deepened the furrows on Edgar’s face. “Chloe.”
“Extremely busy,” Jon said, speaking against Ricky’s declaration of, “Much too busy.”
Ricky’d forestall the next request. “Pramiti too.”
“Everyone’s busy?” Edgar demanded. “If everyone’s so busy, I need to speak to you, Ricky.”
“Say what you have to say right here, Edgar.” Ricky rose to stand tall and immovable beside Jon.
All confidence replaced by hemming and hawing, Edgar cleared his throat. “Jon, a word with you.”
“He’s busiest of all.” Ricky cut off Jon’s, “I quit,” with an arm around his shoulder. Ask again and see how many teeth hit the floor, Edgar; he doesn’t do anybody but me. Ricky squeezed, hoping Jon would feel the threat he was making.
“Miranda?” Edgar seemed to shrink within his suit.
“Sure thing,” she agreed. “And your new nickname will be ‘Stubby’.” She grinned with enough teeth to rival the source of Kate’s shoe leather. Liu looked completely confused but scooted one step closer to Corbin, who put an arm around her and looked daggers at Edgar.
“Never mind.” Edgar backed off before Miranda said more. “Trade wisely.” He scuttled out the door, suddenly a small, hunched old man. The etched-glass door that bore his name swung shut behind him, and on an era.
Total silence reigned before pandemonium broke loose. Screams, whoops, kisses, and back-pounding—Ricky swung Jon around for a great big kiss before Geoff pulled him away for a hug, and Kate reached up to plant a smacker on Jon’s cheek.
“You were so brave!” Chloe shrieked, and Logan punched Ricky’s arm. Pulling everyone close for an instant, Ricky even enveloped Dwight in a vertebrae-cracking hug.
“Who the hell knew that it would take so little?” Kate whooped, but Vaughn disagreed, thumping Ricky’s back with each word.
“You risked everything, buddy!” He turned from Ricky to Jon. “Thanks, man!”
“Thank Ricky. He started the revolt.” Jon stepped back into Ricky’s embrace. “You did the right thing,” he breathed into Ricky’s ear.
“Couldn’t have done it without you,” he murmured back, daring to steal a kiss—and Jon let him!
“Edgar is revolting!” Dwight chimed in, clapping both Ricky and Jon on the shoulder, disturbing the moment, damn it! “I don’t ever want to do that again!”
“Do what?” from Liu got lost in the hubbub. Ricky didn’t really want to be the one to explain it to her. He pulled Jon a little closer. He might have to let go soon, but for a moment he could exult and dream.
“The market opens in three minutes, folks,” Geoff announced. “Let’s go make some money, and fuck Edgar!”
There was a man who would not risk his comfort, Ricky thought—the fateful words had not come from this man, whose name was also sandblasted into the doors.
“Actually,” Ricky said, “let’s not fuck Edgar!”
“I TOLD you! I told you!” Kate shrieked. Her vindication was the three o’clock news on the Bloomberg—she turned the volume way up. The newscaster boomed out over the trading floor: “…accommodations have been made by both sides.” Jon stuck his head out of his office to watch the exultations—Kate had a startled Logan capering with her until Geoff emerged from his office, and she quickly abandoned Logan for a two-step with her lover.
“I told you!” she screamed up to a flinching Geoff. “The pilots backed off the strike! GlobalSky bonds are on their way back up already, aren’t they!” She stopped prancing long enough to shake a number out of Pramiti, who couldn’t get the channels switched fast enough. Geoff pulled her back into a bear hug, relief and triumph fighting for position on his face.
“Twenty-five!” Pramiti called. “Twenty-six!”
“Those bonds will be back to 36 in less than a week, and every airline with growth on the mind is going to kick themselves for not buying when the price was so low!” Kate slapped Jon’s arm as she twirled by. “But smart Jonny bought, and I bought! And Geoff didn’t sell—thanks, Ricky and Corbin! We are gonna be rolling in airline money! Whoo!”
Whoo, all right—Geoff and Kate danced to the applause until she set a foot wrong and fell off her new crocodile pumps. Geoff caught her before she’d more than twisted her ankle, but it calmed the festivities. People scattered back to their desks and offices, pretending they weren’t watching Kate lead Geoff away to more personal revelry.
“Close to a 50 percent gain in a week ought to keep them busy for a while.” Ricky spoke softly to Jon. “You made as much as she did; that deserves a reward. Dinner at Marimba’s tonight?” His eyebrow lifted, but not lasciviously, and his shoulders were down, as if he expected rejection, but he still followed Jon back to his office.
So easy to say yes—Jon wanted to say it. Ricky was asking, not announcing, and only for company. Though they could easily end up in bed—that handsome face, with an unusually tentative tilt to his lips, called to Jon more than ever. If Ricky’s confidence was compelling, his uncertainty was sweetly persuasive, and a side of him Jon had never seen.
“Dinner with my parents tonight.” Their expectation that he would arrive as promised kept Jon from buckling. If he closed his office door, it wouldn’t m
atter that someone else had the couch, maybe a bit of cuddling, just a taste…. But it couldn’t be a little. Jon wanted everything or nothing.
“And Davis, right?” Ricky drooped. “I suppose I can’t assume a place at the table.”
“I did tell them we broke up.” Jon took mercy and added, “I didn’t tell them why.” Ricky slumped a little farther.
“I hoped….” Ricky looked up through his lashes, but it wasn’t flirtatious, just defeated. “You hugged and kissed me after we told Edgar off.”
“You did something I should have done a long time ago; you did the right thing, and I….” Jon would not have stood up to Edgar as he had without Ricky’s strength and instigation, and shame burned in his belly for the knowledge that he had not done the right thing until he’d been led into it. “You did the right thing,” he repeated.
“I’m trying to do the right thing in other ways, Jon.” Ricky straightened up and put a tentative hand on Jon’s shoulder. “I haven’t been to the clubs, even to dance, in days.”
“You’re an unattached man, Ricky. Going is just a choice, not right or wrong.” Jon shrugged his hand away. Ricky had always been an unattached man—it was Jon who’d offered the commitment, Jon who’d never looked aside.
“Maybe I’m not so unattached after all.”
Why now, when Jon was trying to heal from the one-sided relationship, did Ricky insist otherwise? The words fell in Jon’s ears much the way his and Ricky’s defiance had sounded to Dwight, Logan, and the other junior staff, and in a way that Jon didn’t think about until much later. The words were welcome, but very, very late.
DAVIS passed the salad on to Chaz and helped himself from the dish of green beans amandine. “I made an offer on that loft,” he told the three Hogenbooms. “But it’s bare rafters and potential, not move-in ready.”
“While you wait to close, you can hunt for an arch—” Jessica stopped herself. “Or will you be able to design it yourself? You’ve been so busy.” She handed Jon the dish of beef tips.
“The project is moving in fits and starts; they scream for some aspect to get done right now and then they calm down to a steadier pace.” Davis spooned rice onto his plate. “It’s annoying, but at least it’s not three weeks’ running of eighteen-hour days. Whatever they got in week three would look like it was designed by Escher.”
“Instead your own place will get all the endless staircases?” Jon teased.
“I’ll be very careful not to draw in any tesseracts—the furniture would be forever disappearing and reappearing.” Everyone laughed and then laughed louder at Jon’s next suggestion.
“If you promise it will never return, I have a couch to offer you.” That might be the only way Jon would be able to stay out of the executive washroom when Ricky beckoned. He’d come very close to caving today, saved only by Kate and Geoff getting there first.
After dinner, Davis pulled out a large pad of paper and roughed in measurements from the list he’d compiled Saturday. Jon watched a floor plan grow under Davis’s pencil. “I have close to three thousand square feet to work with here, so put a mezzanine over the living room because those windows go floor to ceiling.”
“A decent kitchen, enough counter space for more than a blender.” Jon helped him tick off design features. “Lots of closets.”
“Mmm, yes.” Davis added in the locations of the roughed-in plumbing. “And might as well go decadent on the bathrooms, the floors will take it.”
“I don’t remember what the freight elevator looked like in this building.” Such mundane details ran together in Jon’s mind. “Can you even get a tub upstairs, or will you need to swing it through a window?”
“I made sure my piano wouldn’t have to get swung through a window.” Davis shuddered. “It’s the same elevator that they used when the building was industrial; I could probably bring a Volkswagen up.” He added that detail in, relative to the front door.
“Parking and living space!”
They bent over the floor plan, dreaming a home, late into the night.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
EDGAR didn’t reappear on Tuesday, to absolutely no one’s regret. GlobalSky bonds ended the day at 29, bringing a wolfish grin to Jon’s face. Ricky dared offer another dinner invitation.
“Not even to celebrate a 60 percent gain in less than a week?”
“We aren’t seeing each other anymore, Ricky, and I’m going to watch the game.” Jon had changed into casual clothes in his office. “It’s the play-offs.”
“With Davis?” The question escaped before Ricky could squelch it.
“He loves baseball.” Jon left the office alone. Ricky spent the evening in the gym with his personal trainer, working out hard enough to astonish even that stern taskmaster. He managed to sleep that night, but not the next. Doing the right thing, the best thing he knew to do, wouldn’t impress Jon into overlooking everything else Ricky had ever done. Maybe even time and devotion wouldn’t be enough. The thoughts chased through his mind, and Ricky wondered if he should force himself to have sex with someone, just to achieve the oblivion. But he didn’t.
EDGAR turned up again Wednesday, making no demands besides profitable trading, and spent the day in his office with the door shut.
But Thursday….
“Jon.” Dwight dragged him out of his perusal of more paperwork. “It’s starting.”
“What’s starting?” Jon swiveled to the Bloomberg, where a talking head reported financial news.
“Everything we predicted.” Dwight fiddled channels, trying to catch the tidbit again, which finally showed as a scrolling text on the bottom of another screen. The ABX, which had shown a completely flat line for years before they’d begun watching it, had developed a slight but noticeable downward slope in its corner of the monitor. Ninety-nine, said the legend beneath the graph.
“Clagan Homes just announced that reporting for third quarter is going to be delayed.” Dwight left off coaxing the Bloomberg; Jon tapped out a search on the Internet. “And that they won’t make their estimate.”
“Delayed, oh, that’s never good…. How bad do they admit to missing?”
“How much is ‘substantial’?” Dwight pursed his lips, staring at the screen. “They claimed they made $1.68 a share for the second quarter, and the estimates for third were $1.82. And they’re walking away from a big land purchase.”
“They’re trying to expose all the problems at once.” Jon saw the wisdom of that—let all the shocks hammer the stock and get it over with. “Which lenders were they doing most of their business with?” Jon left the computer and began to leaf through a legal pad. “NovaFin and Corax.”
Dwight toggled to the list of lenders they’d targeted for the puts. “Looks like it’s having a trickle-down effect already.” All of the ticker symbols had negative changes for the day.
“We aren’t in the money yet, but soon.” Jon’s savage joy suddenly shifted. “What’s it doing to the other builders?”
“Lasker’s been pulled down too.” Dwight swung the monitor toward Jon. “About a point so far.”
“That’s about 3 percent from yesterday’s close. Ricky’s still in the money, but will he stay there?” Ricky was a big boy, more than able to look after himself, but Jon was up out of his chair all the same. “He’ll be monitoring the entire industry, but….” But he had to go check.
“Seen what happened to Clagan?” Jon leaned in the doorway, watching Ricky sprawl back in his chair, reading the Wall Street Journal.
“Who’s Clagan?” Ricky looked up. “Friend of yours?” Logan smirked behind his copy of a weekly news magazine—did he think Jon was asking as a joke?
“Competitor of Lasker’s; they overlap in six states. They just announced they missed third-quarter earnings estimates, and they’re getting hammered.” Jon quit leaning—Ricky really didn’t know?
“Logan, did we look at them at all?’ Ricky took his feet off the desk and set his newspaper down.
“Don’t thin
k so.” Logan started rummaging in a pile on the desk.
“Anything that happens to Lasker is going to be noise, and it will right itself shortly.” Ricky flipped his Bloomberg’s sound on. “Huh, down a point and a quarter.”
“Sell it while it’s still up, Ricky.” Jon knew they’d make any awful announcements while the heat was on the other company, hoping to be lost in the uproar. “It was only down a point a couple minutes ago.”
“It will be back up in an hour or a day, relax.” Ricky started tapping the Bloomberg’s keyboard, bringing up a news-parameter screen. He filled in keyword blanks as they talked.
“Clagan’s walking away from a huge tract of building sites. They wouldn’t take a multimillion-dollar hit like that if they didn’t think the downside could be worse. Ricky, take the money and run.”
“You fret too much, Jon; Lasker’s fi—” The squawk from the terminal interrupted him; the search function had found something flagged with Ricky’s tags.
“—coming on the heels of the announcements from Clagan Homes and Robart Brothers, the sector is having a very rocky day.”
“What happened?” Ricky punched more terms in.
“Find out later, bail now.” Jon leaned over his shoulder, wanting the ticker price.
Clapping the phone to his ear, Ricky stabbed an autodial number. “Shit, I’m in a queue. Who knows how many are ahead of me?” He swiveled to type into his desktop computer— Logan took over the hunt on the Bloomberg. “Maybe faster online?” Not if he kept hitting two keys at the same time.
“Yeah.” Jon had wanted to assess the situation from talking to the ultimate source of the trading when he’d bought the bonds last week, and now Ricky was on hold. Market-makers worked fast—they had to be nimble and never waste a word in a crunch situation, but it was still one transaction at a time, even if each call meant millions changing hands.