by Rachel Kane
“Supporting you? You’re an equal partner.”
“Whose job is taking pretty pictures and posting blog entries about them! A monkey with an iPhone could do it. No, I’m headed home. I’m going back to Atlanta.”
“What the hell happened out there?” Judah asked, his voice strained.
“We got played, that’s what. Divide and conquer. I thought we were the ones doing the dividing and conquering, but let’s face it, billionaires are better at it than we are. He told me… Well, never mind what he told me.”
He couldn’t even think about it. There was a dark cloud over that memory, a cloud made of shame and rage. He could see Dalton, faintly, trying to make it right, as though that could ever happen. As though he hadn’t just said exactly what was on his mind.
Poor little meek mouse.
I guess that’s how they see us, from up on their lofty perch. They’re the hawks, ready to swoop down and take us in their deadly claws…and we’re just the prey.
“Whatever it was, it doesn’t matter,” said Judah. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying with us. Liam wouldn’t hear of you leaving.”
“I blew it. First at the town council—”
“Are you listening? No one thinks this is your fault. We’ll find some other way.”
“Yes, I’m sure there are many other billionaires with generous historical grants out there.”
In the olden days, this shame and frustration would have an obvious outlet. A bar full of men and alcohol led to one conclusion: Noah must get laid. Turn up the music until the bass shook the walls, until it crumbled his resistance, drown second thoughts in cocktails, and glide in slow motion through the crowd until you found the right one.
Someone who could take care of you.
Someone who could pick you up, who could take over your body, leaving you with no need for an opinion in the matter, no reason to speak or think.
Someone who—
I think the men you end up with are often controlling, and they end up shutting you down. Dalton’s voice was as clear in his head as if he’d been standing right there.
“Goddamn,” he said, and took a long drink.
“What’s up?” asked Judah.
“Get me another of these, will you? This is all watered down. Tell Toby to put less ice in it.”
Judah looked skeptically at the glass. “I don’t even know what that is. How come your drinks are always—”
“For once, could you not do the Judah thing? I love you, but could you just do what I ask without pointing out that I’m illogical or weird or that I like drinks that are too complicated?”
“You’re not the only one who feels bad,” his friend said, and the words were so simple, so there, that they drew Noah back outside of his own thoughts.
He got up from his seat and came around to Judah’s side of the booth, nudging him over with his hip so that they were sitting right next to each other, shoulder to shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m being a little bitchy tonight. Self-centered, too.”
“I think we all are. Everybody’s down. This was such a good idea, and now… Now it’s complicated. Remember when life was simple? Remember when everything made sense?”
Noah looked down into his glass like it was a crystal ball. “I don’t know…my life never seemed very simple or made much sense. That’s one of the reasons I was always hanging out at your house. Everything had its own place and time. Dinner. You guys had dinner every night. You didn’t have to scrounge in the cabinets looking for something to eat.”
It wasn’t like that was a sensitive topic, or a secret. If anyone knew about Noah’s childhood, it was Judah; they’d spent enough of their teen years talking about it. Yet Noah found himself cringing a little, having brought it up, the wounds still too fresh from how badly Dalton had treated him. He’d just die if Judah offered him sympathy for his past. He didn’t want sympathy.
“Why don’t you come home?” Judah said instead.
“Home.”
“Yes, home. Home is where you live, where we live. You don’t want to sit here drinking all night, do you?”
“Kinda, yeah.”
“Nope. I know exactly what you need.”
“I’m glad someone does.”
“Oh my god, Judah. Oh…my…one moment, let me finish this thought…god.”
Noah sank into the water, gasping at the heat, just this side of pain. The big bronze tub engulfed him, the hot mineral water splashing down, the smell of salt in the air.
Judah, in the next tub over, had rolled up a towel to rest the back of his head on. “Let’s not even open the resort,” he said. “Let’s just lie here forever.”
“I am boiling,” gasped Noah. His feet seemed to want to rise on their own, bobbing up out of the water, and he wiggled his toes. The air was so cold compared to the water. The sound of lapping waves echoed off the tiles, and he lay back, staring at the mermaids and dolphins. His body didn’t know how to hold on to its stress in this situation; it melted right out of him, leaving him limp and sleepy and, for the first time today, at ease with himself.
Judah used his toes to turn off the spigot of his tub. “The one thing we need is a jacuzzi.”
“The sparkling water isn’t fizzy enough for you?”
“I need jets caressing my buttocks, Noah. Jets.”
“The less I hear about your ass, the happier I’ll be.”
“Do you think Mason and Liam ever come in here and…like…do it in the tubs?”
Noah laughed, the sound almost submerged beneath the noise of the water. “You are taking a relaxing experience and making it very tense, my friend.”
Holding his breath, he pulled his head down under the water, feeling the warmth on his face, like a hot blush of embarrassment or surprise. All the sound immediately became lower, blunted, strange, like listening to his own heartbeat.
In the dark, he found himself alone with his thoughts, a place he usually did not want to be.
He thought of the bridge.
How closely Dalton had been standing to him.
God, how could I have read that situation so badly? I thought— I thought—
There had been a moment when he thought Dalton might kiss him. Which was ludicrous. Hot billionaires didn’t abduct random twinks from mansions and offer them kisses on footbridges.
What had he seen in those odd green eyes, what emotion? Had he misread Dalton entirely?
Of course you did. You got caught up in a moment. Which was all part of his plan. That’s what men do, they wear you down until your defenses are gone, until you think you’re worthless, and then, once you admit they’re worthless, they don’t want you anymore.
His lungs burned with the need to breathe, but he stayed under. He needed the quiet roar of the water filling the tub, keeping the real world at bay.
Dalton had been so open. He’d listened to Noah’s guesses about him. Noah had been right, that was the thing. They weren’t guesses at all, just things that were obvious to him from watching Dalton closely. Or maybe Noah had been completely wrong. Maybe those guesses had been meaningless, random, wrong, and Dalton was just playing along, toying with him, just so he could come in for the fatal blow, to let Noah know who was really in control, and that Noah’s little plan of getting close to Dalton to convince him to give them the grant money was over. You won’t steal my money, little mouse.
When he couldn’t stand it one more moment, he sat up, head bursting from the surface of the water, gasping for air, clutching the sides of the tub. The air was frigid, expanding inside his sore lungs. It was a moment of carefully controlled terror; a moment where he tricked his body into thinking disaster was on its way. It made the relief of taking a deep breath that much greater, that feeling of having survived something.
If nothing else, I’m a survivor, he thought. I’ll survive this too.
11
Dalton
They were touring the factory floor when he saw it.
No one else noticed it at first. They were all listening to the operations manager, whose hard-hat was fluorescent yellow compared to their white ones, although they all had the same Raines R logo on the front. The man was swelled up with pride, showing off the robotic arms that swung into place, assembling more robotic arms. Arms creating arms. Then those arms will create more arms, which will create more, until the entire world is one agile metallic hand.
Dalton smiled in all the right places, although he’d stopped listening shortly after the tour began. He already knew every inch of this factory; he’d been with the architects, the industrial designers. He could have sketched out the air system in his sleep. The sounds were a symphony he knew perfectly well, the whirring of motors, the high whine of pneumatics, the hiss of the belt.
This was his world. This, not some mansion down in Superbia. Let Colby have all the mergers that made splashy headlines on the business pages; he loved the spotlight. Let Dad have the original business, the sheet metal and construction supplies that had laid the foundation for their empire. This was Dalton’s world, a taste of the future. Well, a taste of the present. Robotic arms weren’t a new thing. No, the new part was in another building, full of clean rooms with Tyvek-suited workers looking like astronauts in space-suits, building the circuitry that would be the brains behind all these arms. A beautiful future, clean, quiet, efficient, under control—
“What is that?” he asked, interrupting the manager.
“What, sir?”
He came to a halt, and all the people who were taking the tour with him suddenly halted too, that natural hesitation against walking in front of the boss.
“Do I have to point it out to you myself? I hired you to notice things.”
The manager looked around to where Dalton was staring. His eyes widened with horror. “Sir, I’m sorry, I had no idea—”
“No idea? How long has this been happening, and you had no idea?”
Dalton didn’t run. That would be unseemly. But his step was fast and certain as he strode over the yellow line, the line of safety, the line behind which all visitors were supposed to stand, until he was next to one of the giant red arms…and the puddle of oil beneath it, staining the floor in an ever-widening black circle.
“Look at that,” he said. Then, with more command in his voice: “Look at it.”
“I’ll get right on it, let me call Maintenance—”
“How did you not know? Don’t you inspect these machines? Isn’t that part of your job? What kind of manager are you, if you can’t manage to notice oil pouring out onto the floor?”
His voice was loud and clear over the noise of the work. There was no mistaking the rage in his words, and over there, the tour group all took another step back from the yellow safety line, as though he were shouting at them.
“It must have just happened, maybe this morning, but with all the double-shifts, trying to get this order ready—”
“Ah,” said Dalton, “so it’s my fault. We have the biggest order in our company’s history, so it’s my fault you couldn’t take a look at the machines?”
The manager looked ready to cry, but had too much dignity to do so. He straightened up. “I take full responsibility, sir. I’ll get Maintenance down here right now. We’ll put together a tighter inspection schedule, we’ll inspect them twice per shift, we’ll—”
Dalton put out his foot, tapped the toe of his shoe against the oil puddle. Some of it had soaked into the concrete floor, but some was new enough to shimmer unearthly colors in the shop lights, pinks and greens and alien yellows, swirling.
For some reason those colors made him think of that meeting on the bridge.
The meeting he’d successfully cast out of his mind for days.
It’s not easy feeling like a fool. Some men, when they realize they’ve overstepped, decide to step even further. You don’t have to take responsibility, if you choose rage instead. Nobody has a chance to blame you then.
He sighed and rubbed the sole of his shoe against a clean spot of concrete. “Damn it. Look, we have to keep up the pace, all right? Hire a couple more guys if you need to.”
The manager looked at him with confusion. “But we were told to keep costs down—”
“Who owns this factory? Oh, that’s right, it’s me. I’m giving you permission. Make sure you have enough people, so that we don’t have a repeat of this mess. It’s not your fault if we double your work and then only give you a skeleton crew to do it with.”
“I— Thank you, sir. We’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Dalton clapped him on the shoulder. “Good man. See that it doesn’t.”
Rather than rejoining the tour, he handed his hard-hat to someone else, and walked back outside to the car.
“I’m not trying to rush you,” said Astrid, “but the foundation needs to know whether we have the go-ahead. Are we writing a check to these guys or not?”
If he buried his face on the table, if he wrapped his arms around his head, would everyone go away and leave him alone? How had he gotten himself into such a complicated situation?
Instead, he leaned back in his chair, swiveling away from his desk toward the window. His view wasn’t as majestic as Dad’s upstairs, and today was gloomy anyway, dirty clouds scudding in from the west. A far cry from the springtime sun of Superbia. Don’t be ridiculous, you’re daydreaming. What, the weather never changes there? It never rains?
“I don’t think we should write a check,” said Marcia. She was obviously still stinging from the Coopers’ refusal to sell.
Not moving from the window, he nodded toward her. Go on, say what you’re going to say.
“Right now, we’ve got leverage. They know it. We know it. We should keep the pressure up. Come back in a week with the offer. By then they’ll be begging us to buy it.”
“Or,” said Astrid, “we could let them restore a historical landmark and make the world a better place, like the original plan.”
Marcia shook her head. “We’re not running a charity here.”
Astrid laughed. “That’s exactly what I’m doing. I run the charity. And I heard from the Coopers first. So let’s give some money away.”
“Dalton, it’s up to you. Do you want this house or not?”
He made a hundred decisions a day. Millions of dollars moved at his command, thousands of employees, all at his bidding. Raines Holdings was a miniature economy of its own, supply chains stretching over six continents, distribution to some of the largest industries in history.
And he couldn’t make up his mind about a damned house. A house he hadn’t even planned on living in. One he wanted to give away.
He thought about that oil spot on the factory floor. Thought about the fear on the manager’s face.
There are two ways, and only two ways, to have this much power. You can use it to build people up, or you can use it to destroy them. There is no other choice.
Shaking his head to try to dislodge any trace of philosophy from his thoughts, he said, “Give me a day to think about it.”
They knew better than to argue. Instead, they gathered their things and left the office. Marcia stopped at the door, turning as if she had some scathing parting shot to make, but instead just stared at him a moment.
“Dalton.”
“I said I’ll make up my mind tomorrow.”
“Dalton.”
“All right, all right, come back in. Shut the door.”
Marcia dropped her case next to the chair, but didn’t take a seat herself. “Do you know how long I’ve been with this company?”
“I know.”
“I was doing real estate deals for your dad back when I had to wear red power-suits with massive shoulder pads. You weren’t there for that. Bright red blush, cans of Aqua-Net. It’s what people wanted to see back then. I’m telling you, I have been here a long time.”
It was hard to picture Marcia as a 1980s businesswoman. She’d been a presence in his life since the moment he’d starte
d working part-time for his dad back in school.
“You’re about to give me a lecture, aren’t you?” he asked.
She smiled. “I know better than that. You Raines men don’t enjoy being lectured. You always prefer to think you’ve made up your own mind, on your own time. It’s a great survival skill in a corporation, to let the boss think he’s made his own decisions.”
Dalton laughed. “All right then, tell me what decision I’m going to make. You want me to buy the damn house, I know.”
“What I want is peace between you, your dad, and Colby.”
“My dad and I are at peace.”
“Really? Is that why you haven’t visited him since all this house business came up? And every time I see you with your brother, you’re at each other’s throats.”
“Brothers fight. You know that.”
“What I know is that you haven’t been the same since you went down to Superbia. Something’s different, although I can’t put my finger on it. Something to do with that meeting with Noah Turnstock.”
Of all the topics he did not want to talk about, Noah was high on the list. He didn’t want to hear Noah’s name, didn’t want to think about him.
“Things are busy right now. My mind is pulled in a few different directions at once. That’s all.”
“Your dad misses you. You’re doing all this to buy him a house, which I guess is nice, if you like big symbolic gifts, but don’t you think he’d rather have time with you instead? We don’t know what’s going to happen—”
“He’s going to be fine!” Dalton said, more sharply than he meant to.
Marcia took a step back. “Of course he is. We all hope that. But he’ll be better, if you actually visit him. And stop fighting with Colby. Your dad doesn’t need that kind of stress hanging in the air.”
“And here I thought you were going to give me real-estate advice.”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing. Forget the house for a minute. Forget me and Astrid. Just go upstairs and sit with your father. It’s lonely up there. You’ve given him every luxury a sick man could possibly enjoy, but there’s no one for him to talk to. The nurses? The doctors? He doesn’t know them. He’s an old man, Dalton. He wants to see familiar faces.”